Pense-Bête

Published in 1964, Pense-Bête marks a pivotal moment in Marcel Broodthaers’ transition from poet to visual artist. In this final volume of poetry, Broodthaers pasted colored paper over portions of his printed texts, deliberately interrupting their legibility and transforming language into something to be seen as well as read. Later that year, for his first solo exhibition, he embedded unsold copies of Pense-Bête in plaster, rendering their contents inaccessible and transforming the book itself into sculpture. This tension between word and object, reading and looking, would become fundamental to Broodthaers’ practice, making Pense-Bête an important point of departure for the conceptual investigations that occupied his career.