Skylight Gallery. Throw of the Dice

As its name suggests, the main theme of this exhibition is the relationship between text and image. Broodthaers is a poet, at the age of forty he added the visual arts to his poetry, this relationship was of utmost importance. His first exhibition at Galerie St. Laurent in Brussels was a provocative and ironic gesture. The invitation read, "I also asked myself if I could sell something and achieve success. […] An idea of making something insincere came to my mind, and I immediately got down to work." In reality, however, things were more complicated than that.

As you enter the Skylight Gallery, you will see a row of panels featuring black rectangles to your left. This 1969 work is named after a famous poem by the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance). Why was Mallarmé so important to Broodthaers? And why the Throw of the Dice in particular? This poem, written in 1897 and only published in 1914, consists of twenty pages of free verse presented in a very unusual way: words in different fonts are separated by randomly long spaces and caesurae, lines are not aligned and distance between them varies. The words of a poet acquire a clear and distinct visual form. Broodthaers saw it as example of poetry entering the physical space and becoming part of the visible and tangible reality. This important idea had a huge influence on him and is key to understanding many of his works. The blackout rectangles that obscure the words of Mallarmé and create an elegant black-and-white pattern are a logical development of the French poet’s gesture. Text is fully assimilated by the physical space and becomes a visual work like any other.