Program of workshops: Marcel Broodthaers Moscow Museum of Digital Art (MBMM)

Marcel Broodthaers often and extensively rewrote poems by French authors. This Department will study how Charles Baudelaire’s poem Beauté (Beauty) has been transformed by the Belgian artist.

In Benjamin Buchloh’s view, we should regard the works of Marcel Broodthaers as a critique of contemporary visual culture through the prism of literature. That is why the workshop will begin with a session of rewriting Broodthaers’ own texts, which will help the participants to better understand his aesthetic positions and discover verbal forms of beauty relevant today.

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This workshop is aimed at the widest audience interested in linguistic art, generative and visual poetry. English and French speaking visitors, as well as lovers of French and/or Belgian poetry and literature are welcome to join the class.

The Department is based around exploration of a generative artist book created using Marcel Broodthaers’ poetry texts.

The participants will be offered to compose a generative text of a given form based on Marcel Broodthaers’s poem Ma Rhétorique (My Rhetoric), where the author proclaims himself the master of mussels, or forms, playing ironically with the words la moule (mussel) and le moule (form). During the session, workshop members will invent novel “mussel forms” and will use them as their mediums while creating a special edition of an artist book.

Please note that participants of this workshop will have to bring along a computer with the following programs installed: TextWrangler (for MacOS) or PC Notepad++ (for Windows), Python (for MacOS: www.python.org/downloads/mac-osx; for Windows: www.python.org/downloads).

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This workshop is designed for a wide audience interested in linguistic art, generative and visual poetry. English and French speaking visitors, as well as lovers of French and/or Belgian poetry and literature are welcome to join the class.

This Department’s area of research includes alphabets, typography, fonts, and ciphers. The participants will have to develop an “alphabet of winter” and use it for building a verbal narrative.

This session is inspired by and based on Marcel Broodthaers’ poem Un Jardin d’Hiver (A Winter Garden) which contains a seemingly disrupted, frozen, or spellbound alphabet in the middle. The participants will have to assign a particular word of phrase to each Cyrillic alphabet letter and write poems using this newly-created language. The resulting texts will be included in a tiny artist book that later will be digitalized and exhibited in the collection of Marcel Broodthaers Moscow Museum of Digital Art.

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This workshop is aimed at the widest audience interested in linguistic art and visual poetry, and will also be useful for practicing artists and font designers. English and French speaking visitors, as well as lovers of French and/or Belgian poetry and literature are welcome to join the class.

The work of this Department will concentrate around the theme of memory and Marcel Broodthaers’ collection of poems Pense-Bête (Memory Aid).

In 1964, Marcel Broodthaers encased his poetry book Pense-Bête in plaster and exhibited it as an artefact at Saint Laurent Gallery in Brussels, thus turning himself into an artist instead of a poet. The participants will have to create new installations using books—their versions of and variations on Pense-Bête. 

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This Department’s research will focus on the visual perception of a hurrying person, resulting in an experimental video filmed of a hurrying individual or through the eyes thereof.

Broodthaers’ Museum of Modern Art project was a museum of exhibition forms. An imaginary museum allows the artist to critically reflect on real institutions and the mechanisms of establishing values. In such a museum, all objects and the logic of their arrangement, which creates the feeling of authenticity, are fictional.

This workshop is designed for video artists, poets and philosophers, as well as anyone interested in linguistic art and experimental poetry.

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The Department will examine Marcel Broodthaers’ text Investigating Dreamland.

Investigating Dreamland is a Marcel Broodthaers text written in 1960. It is a contemplation on the potential of immobility and a story of the author who once spent three weeks sitting on a chair. According to Broodthaers, that chair symbolized the infinity of possibilities for him.

The participants will learn and invent different ways to demonstrate and capture on camera this infinity of possibilities.

This workshop is designed for video and sound artists, poets, performers, actors, as well as anyone interested in contemporary (linguistic) art and its historical precedents.

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This department will study Marcel Broodthaers’ open letter to Joseph Beuys.

An open letter to Joseph Beuys is a symbolic argument where Broodthaers claims that artist cannot remain aloof from the political, whereas Beuys sees art as magic.

An open letter is a medium that always speaks with the both the recipient and contemporary society. The participants of the workshop will be offered the opportunity to write their own open letter to present-day representatives of the art milieu that will be published on the Marcel Broodthaers Moscow Museum of Digital Art (MBMM) website.

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Garage welcomes the participation of artists, poets, writers, and art historians along with a wider audience interested in linguistic arts.

Participants of the workshop will suggest diverse interpretations of selected artworks on show at the exhibition Marcel Broodthaers. Poetry and images.

The workshop will open with a guided tour of the exhibition delivered by Natalya Fyodorova, during which the group will learn the story of the show and get acquainted with the works on display, before choosing a particular item which interests them most. Ilmira Bolotyan will explain how to make the selected pieces characters of a play. The resulting projects will take the form of mini plays staged by the participants. Texts of the plays will be published on the Marcel Broodthaers Moscow Museum of Digital Art (MBMM) website.

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Garage welcomes teenagers aged under 18 interested in contemporary art.

This department will explore the visual nature of language in communication via networks.

Marcel Broodthaers makes images and objects discursive, and language representational (Miroir M.B. M.B. M.B…; L'objet écrit (la bouteille de lait); Valise avec alphabet). The workshop focuses on modern language of such visual communication. The instant mode of message transmission requires its translation into the rapid language of emotions. This is why, alongside traditional languages, emoji have become equally important means of communication widely used in messengers. Participants will be asked to develop a chat bot which communicates using stickers.

REGISTRATION

Garage welcomes the participation of artists, poets, writers, and art historians along with a wider audience interested in linguistic arts.