Thorsten Baensch and Marcel Broodthaers
November 10 - November 15, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION: Sunday, November 10, 4 – 6pm
Broodthaers Society of America
520 West 143rd Street
New York, NY 10031
Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday, noon - 6:00pm or by appointment
The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to present Thorsten Baensch: Bartleby & Co., the fourth in a series of exhibitions pairing visual artists with poets in an immodest attempt to "return the favor" of ekphrasis. Here we turn the tables a bit by pairing Thorsten Baensch, a long-time Brussels-based artist, with Marcel Broodthaers, our namesake, who in this iteration plays the role of the poet.
Thorsten Baensch (born 1964 in Hiede, Germany) is the founder of Bartleby & Co., an artist project dedicated to handmade books. Inspired by the protagonist in Herman Melville's famous short story, "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street," for the past thirty years Bartleby & Co. has reimagined texts by nearly two hundred artisans, artists, philosophers, poets, and scientists on the themes of poetry, nature, community, and bureaucracy, among others. Uniquely scholarly, elegant, and playful, publications by Baensch / Bartleby & Co. are in the permanent collections of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton University libraries as well as the Van Abbemuseum, the Centre Pompidou, and MoMA.
For his stay at the Broodthaers Society, Baensch will present several of his poetry-related publications in addition to an intervention with Marcel Broodthaers. His facsimile of John Milton's Paradise Lost (2015) foregrounds the role that Samuel Simmons played in the epic poem, not only as its first printer but also as author of the "arguments" that introduce each of its twelve books. Another item is Three Early Poems by Gerald Manley Hopkins (2003), including his "For a Picture of St. Dorothea," in which Baensch proposes a speculative serendipity between a 19th century view that Manley Hopkins may have enjoyed from Hampstead Heath and a current, adjacent park bench dedicated "to Dorothy Rather, who fed the birds here."
Statues de Bruxelles Remix: livres trouvé, textes perdus began when Baensch found a copy of a catalogue published by the Musée d'Ixelles, Brussels, pairing photographs of public sculptures by Julien Coulommier with poetry by Marcel Broodthaers. Titled Statues de Bruxelles, the original concept for the book dates to the late 1950s but was only realized a decade after Broodthaers' death. For Baensch, the found book, the extant sculptures, and the "lost" poems it contained presented an opportunity to reimagine all three. He carefully cut up and rearranged the book's contents into a kind of scrapbook / spiral-bound sketchbook, enhanced by new color reproductions of some of the same statues originally photographed by Coulommier. The resulting Remix is at once an homage, an autopsy, and a reinvigoration of Broodthaers and Coulommier's sculpture / space / image / text relationships.
OPENING RECEPTION: Sunday, November 10, 4 – 6pm
Broodthaers Society of America
520 West 143rd Street
New York, NY 10031
Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday, noon - 6:00pm or by appointment
The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to present Thorsten Baensch: Bartleby & Co., the fourth in a series of exhibitions pairing visual artists with poets in an immodest attempt to "return the favor" of ekphrasis. Here we turn the tables a bit by pairing Thorsten Baensch, a long-time Brussels-based artist, with Marcel Broodthaers, our namesake, who in this iteration plays the role of the poet.
Thorsten Baensch (born 1964 in Hiede, Germany) is the founder of Bartleby & Co., an artist project dedicated to handmade books. Inspired by the protagonist in Herman Melville's famous short story, "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street," for the past thirty years Bartleby & Co. has reimagined texts by nearly two hundred artisans, artists, philosophers, poets, and scientists on the themes of poetry, nature, community, and bureaucracy, among others. Uniquely scholarly, elegant, and playful, publications by Baensch / Bartleby & Co. are in the permanent collections of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton University libraries as well as the Van Abbemuseum, the Centre Pompidou, and MoMA.
For his stay at the Broodthaers Society, Baensch will present several of his poetry-related publications in addition to an intervention with Marcel Broodthaers. His facsimile of John Milton's Paradise Lost (2015) foregrounds the role that Samuel Simmons played in the epic poem, not only as its first printer but also as author of the "arguments" that introduce each of its twelve books. Another item is Three Early Poems by Gerald Manley Hopkins (2003), including his "For a Picture of St. Dorothea," in which Baensch proposes a speculative serendipity between a 19th century view that Manley Hopkins may have enjoyed from Hampstead Heath and a current, adjacent park bench dedicated "to Dorothy Rather, who fed the birds here."
Statues de Bruxelles Remix: livres trouvé, textes perdus began when Baensch found a copy of a catalogue published by the Musée d'Ixelles, Brussels, pairing photographs of public sculptures by Julien Coulommier with poetry by Marcel Broodthaers. Titled Statues de Bruxelles, the original concept for the book dates to the late 1950s but was only realized a decade after Broodthaers' death. For Baensch, the found book, the extant sculptures, and the "lost" poems it contained presented an opportunity to reimagine all three. He carefully cut up and rearranged the book's contents into a kind of scrapbook / spiral-bound sketchbook, enhanced by new color reproductions of some of the same statues originally photographed by Coulommier. The resulting Remix is at once an homage, an autopsy, and a reinvigoration of Broodthaers and Coulommier's sculpture / space / image / text relationships.