Skylight Gallery. Pense-Bête and Books

The book Pense-Bête (Memory aid) is displayed in one of the glass cases. In Broodthaers’ last and self-published book of poetry, which Broodthaers produced for an exhibition at Galerie St. Laurent, poetic text is also obscured by coloured spaces that interrupts reading and activates watching, creating a special visual rhythm.

This book was used in another important work by Broodthaers, which is not included in this exhibition, but which marked the completion of the transformation adding visual arts to his poetry. In this work, he put into plaster unsold copies of Pense-Bête, making it impossible, as Broodthaers himself explained, to "read the book without destroying its sculptural aspect." His main achievement consisted in the fact that no visitor to the gallery in Brussels cared what his book was about and whether it was poetry or prose. They saw it as an artistic gesture or a curiosity. "Until that moment," Broodthaers wrote, "I had lived practically isolated from all communication, since my audience was fictive. Suddenly I had a real audience…" It became real because his poetry itself had seeped into the three-dimensional space and become part of the real, tangible world. Books became events, forms, spaces, a way of transmitting information…