Research in Residence #3: Stefaan Vervoort

Marcel Broodthaers – The Architect is Absent, the third exhibition in CIVA’s Research in Residence program, explores Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers’s (1924–1976) engagements with architecture, design, and the city, between 1957 and 1967. During this decade, Broodthaers took up journalism and photography, made his first artworks, and established the key orientations for his emerging practice as an artist and writer.

The exhibition pivots around Monument Public nº4 (1963), Broodthaers’s earliest exhibited artwork, which is comprised of egg cartons, a busted plastic sphere, egg shells and plaster eggs, a tin can, cutlery, and a box for a toy space helmet, among other elements. Configured in a precarious fashion and added with paint and plaster, this quixotic assemblage marked the dawn of Broodthaers’s career. This exhibition contextualizes this early work, examining its formal and referential proximity to the urban and architectural frameworks of postwar Brussels. Whereas Broodthaers’s burgeoning art practice is typically codified as a transfer from poetry to art making, The Architect is Absent speculates instead on its close relation to architecture and the built environment.

Using newspaper and journal articles, photographs, documents, and publications from CIVA’s collections and others, the exhibition explores Broodthaers’s critique of modern architecture, industrial design, and built heritage, notably in his collaborations with architect Constantin Brodzki (1924–2021), artist-designer Corneille Hannoset (1926–1997), and poet, architect, and critic Pierre Puttemans (1933–2013).

Broodthaers depicted cities and buildings, published in an architectural journal, and worked with architects and designers, yet he opposed the artist’s freedom and capacity to critique society to the architect’s obligation to “make things work” and to serve society. “L’architecte est absent,” (the architect is absent) a quip Broodthaers used in his art circa 1967, is evocative of this contrast. The phrase hints at an architect, real or imagined, whose absence inscribes the artwork with poetry, authenticity, and legitimacy.