The Exciting Space where Art Meets Word

Concrete Material Space. What is that? Object? Form? Real or Reality? The book meets the visual artist and is in ways undone.

Or, from another point of view, it wakes. The book, the writing, the word gets up, takes a walk, goes out into the world and touches it.

After all, is that not what the word wants? To be? Just as all of us do, in our ways, want to be a mark, a word indelible, printed in permanent, immortal ink.

Much has been written about this, and much explored, and as I wind down the final final final final (I swear they are the final) alterations and changes in the PhD (which I have been obsessively revising for a year now!!!) it is such a pleasure to continue discovering more and more visual artists working in the realm of the written word, since I had elected to work on writers who have been in ways (though within the book) working in the realm of the visual. One such artist who I had known existed but who I have been really looking at hard this week as I relook at the book which brought me here to France, the author who led me into this French language (Mallarmé and his Un coup de Dés jamais n'abolira le Hasard), is Marcel Broodthaers (whose images I have included here).

Broodthaers has been working for decades now on the spaces where word and image meet.

As Marie Muracciole wrote in her fabulous article from 2000, « …Une fiction permet de saisir la réalité et en même temps ce qu’elle cache », " [...] en exposant la nature distincte des véhicules de la pensée [...] Broodthaers évoquait plus sûrement la langue instable de l’obscurité, la poésie. Contaminant les arts plastiques, cette poésie s’est transposée dans la matérialité du monde."

As Muracciole also says, "En affirmant qu’il s’agit, non pas d’œuvres d’art, mais d’éléments d’une combinatoire, Broodthaers en fait la métaphore du langage. Le langage entendu comme système d’articulation, dans sa capacité à produire des images ou à établir un discours" This is a great article, available online on Le Portique, so give it a read!!!!

Currently showing through the 25th of May 2009 in the show "THE SPACE OF WORDS" in Luxembourg at Mudam Museum. I am even considering a special trip just for the show!!!!

I also stumbled upon the very exciting blog INTERCHANGEABLE LANDSCAPES, worth peeking at, too, though it seems this person is no longer blogging (so it is a read of what was once being blogged).