Marcel Broodthaers – The Architect is Absent

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 was reflecting on architecture right at a time when its functionalist principles and social and utopian qualities were being widely challenged – a scepticism underscored by a bon mot he shared in 1967: “L’architecte est absent.” Although the sentence is evocative of a flawed society, it is the very absence of architectural organisation and semantic control which opens up the possibility of another life.