Broodthaers Society of America
Trying Out Positions
Trying Out Positions was a course Scanlan taught at Princeton University in the Spring of 2016. The class shared whatever discoveries it made in regard to Broodthaers' metamorphosis from poet to artist—particularly the role that language played in the staking out of his new occupation.

Here is the course description as it appeared in Princeton's online course offerings:

Artists have long deployed language as a kind of satellite hovering in the vicinity of their artworks, influencing the artworks' reception. The style and method of this language varies greatly and does not always match the accompanying work. This studio seminar will engage students in contemporary art theory and practice by taking up this critical aspect of art-making, that is, the artist producing language that stakes out a position in relation to their visual work. Focus will be on four artists: Marcel Broodthaers, Andrea Fraser, Adrian Piper, and Peter Fischli & David Weiss, two of whom will have a major presence in the vicinity this Spring.

One discovery from the class in relation to Broodthaers is the poem titled L'oiseau de feu, illustrated above, which was published in a modest brochure on the work of Belgian painter R. J. Raine and which appears to be a "B-side" left out of La BĂȘte Noire, Broodthaers' third poetry collection, that was self-published the previous year. The brochure was published in 1962 by Galerie Saint-Laurent, Brussels.

A second discovery was an interview that Broodthaers conducted with Ludo Bekkers, a Flemish public radio journalist, for the museumjournal of The Netherlands in 1971. The interview is somewhat unusual in its candor, as it lacks both a reverent interviewer and an evasive interviewee.

Neither L'oiseau de Feu nor the Bekkers interview were included in Gloria Moure's Marcel Broodthaers, Collected Writings (2013).