BOOK:Marcel’s Broodthaers Book, Siglio Press

Marcel Broodthaers worked as a writer, poet, filmmaker, photographer, journalist and visual artist. As Broodthaers himself said, he would rather have put off the choice of profession until his death. Language as a symbol that conveys meaning is a central theme in his texts, objects, installations, films, photographs, slide projections and print. Broodthaers was a master in unravelling and reconstructing symbolic systems.

By Efi Michalarou

The poetic books of Marcel Broodthaers “Mon livre d’ogre” and “Minuit” served as an archetypal wellspring for his later visual works, he continuously drew from their source, recycled and reworked them into new schemata in his installations, films, sculptures and paintings. Both are wildly cinematic books that perform like a fictional theater set for a dark fable of which we are only dimly aware. Siglio Press Translated and published those two poetry books, both previously unpublished in English, with an 80 image projection work “Shadow Theater” (1973-74) made toward the end of his too brief life. Together these works reveal a dizzyingly prodigious interplay between the images and texts, particularly illuminating Broodthaers’s use of the oblique and dark fairytale framework within (and against) which he plays with reflections and reproductions, inversions and fictions, body and shadow, decor and violence. In this vein “Shadow Theater” is published in full for the first time here, creates a fantastical poetic landscape of semblance and sleights of hand. The silhouettes, isolated cartoon frames, and appropriated illustrations embody an artificial and topical cosmogony, images of images, whose resemblance to “The Real” is twice removed and even caricatured. The three works are published together as “My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight” limited to 1000 copies, to provide the reader with an unprecedented opportunity to read Broodthaers in both language and image.