Bestiary No. III

In The Bestiary of Marcel Broodthaers, a major figure in post-Duchampian art whose centenary will be celebrated in 2024, a secret network of correspondence connects the real or imaginary animals that we come across throughout the pages: the abyss, the lamb, the eagle, the drunkard, the banker, the ox, the oil and the vinegar, the sea, the rhinoceros… Their very enumeration already communicates a joy that comes from childhood, joy of sowing disorder in ordinary categories. Marcel Broodthaers, rereading and diverting the Fables of Jean de la Fontaine, seeks to blurring the line between human and non-human: “everything is entanglement — the "naive figure of the animal and the innocent figure of man," notes Jean Daive, ferryman with Maria Gilissen-Broodthaers of his poetry. To approach these nuances infinite, which work the boundaries between the kingdoms as they work the reigns themselves, the writing of the Belgian artist becomes unstable, woven with drawings and crossings out which interrupt and restart it. Like what he had done with A throw of the dice will never abolish chance by Stéphane Mallarmé, from whom he had blacked out each verse in order to push back the limit between meaning and nonsense, he never ceases in The Bestiary to cross out this that he writes. The poems in this volume are of enthusiastic restlessness, as Jean Daive points out: "say and cross out, say again and cross out, write and to cross out, and to cross out the crossing out, and again the crossing out the crossing out and to explain it differently”… This uneasiness is reflected in the intermingling of a desire to write poetry and a desire to go beyond poetry. One can remember that it is from around fifty unsold copies of the poems from his Pense-Bête that he produced his first plastic work in 1963-1964, in freezing them in a shapeless base of plaster. Later, these are two lines of Bestiary which gave him the idea for his famous imaginary museum, initiated in 1968, the Department of Eagles: “Oh Sadness, flight of wild ducks / Oh Melancholy, sour castle of eagles”… As if his conceptual practice and criticism was always born from the ashes of his poetry.