Marcel Broodthaers and America

Free and open to the public.

The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to present Marcel Broodthaers and America, a two-day conference hosted by Princeton University in collaboration with Ghent University, Belgium. The conference has been organized in honor of the artist’s centenary. In addition to scholarship from young academics throughout North America and Europe, it will feature newly discovered publications and artworks related to the subject of Marcel Broodthaers and America that have never been seen before in the United States.

Indeed, for all the banal and erudite references used by Broodthaers—from mussel shells and industrial signage to Aesop and Mallarmé—”America” is the one oft-cited reference in his writing and artworks that he never experienced firsthand. This lack of empirical knowledge lends an element of fantasy to Broodthaers’ idea of America, and these speculations are the likely reason why it remains one of the least examined aspects of his work. Whatever the case may be, Broodthaers must have based his idea of America on something. This conference promises to critically examine, both explicitly and obliquely, new theories on what that something might be. The presentation schedule will be as follows:

Day I, October 9
4:30pm: Carolin Meister, “Marcel Broodthaers: Painting, Entertainment, and an Unknown Film”
6pm: Reception

Day II, October 10
11am: Hannah Bruckmüller, “Marcel Broodthaers’ Father Figures” / Simon Wu, Respondent
12pm: Welcome lunch
1pm: Marcel Broodthaers and America: a Roundtable moderated by Joe Scanlan. Sam Shapiro, “‘An Obedient Material’: Marcel Broodthaers and American Art Museums in the 1970s” / Margaux Van Uytvanck, “Marcel Broodthaers and Jean Toche: Notes on a Transatlantic Friendship” / Stefaan Vervoort, “Marcel Broodthaers, Journalist” 
2:30pm: Break
3pm: Trevor Stark, “‘The Object of a Prohibition’: Marcel Broodthaers at the Poem’s End”
4pm: Raf Wollaert, “Voyage extraordinaire: Marcel Broodthaers in New York”
5:30pm: Reception

Marcel Broodthaers and America is the centerpiece of VIS425 Haptic Lab, a course taught by Professor Joe Scanlan in the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University. VIS425 Haptic Lab has been made possible by the 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovative Undergraduate Education at Princeton.

Marcel Broodthaers and America has been organized at Princeton University in collaboration with Kunst in België sinds 1945, a multidisciplinary research group at Ghent University. It is made possible with generous support from the Humanities Council; the Department of Art & Archaeology; the University Committee for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences; and the Visual Arts Program, Lewis Center for the Arts, at Princeton University.

Participants
Dr. Hannah Bruckmüller is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the New Design University, St. Pölten, Austria. Her research focuses on intersections between art, literature, and publication practices, combining underrepresented archival material, critical historiography, and feminist thought.

Carolin Meister is a short-term Fellow with the Humanities Council at Princeton University for 2024-25. She holds the Chair of Art History at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, where she served as Vice Rector from 2017 to 2023.

Joe Scanlan is a Professor in the Visual Arts Program, Lewis Center for the Arts, at Princeton University. He is the Founding Director of the Broodthaers Society of America, an institution that examines Marcel Broodthaers’ work in the political and cultural context of the United States.

Sam Shapiro is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and a curatorial research assistant at the Princeton University Art Museum. His dissertation is titled “Confrontation and Collaboration: American Artists and Museums in the 1970s.” 

Trevor Stark is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language After Mallarmé (MIT Press/October Books, 2020).

Margaux Van Uytvanck holds a PhD in Art History from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her doctoral research focused on Marcel Broodthaers’ professional networks in Brussels. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at New York University and a Fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation.

Stefaan Vervoort is a Postdoctoral Researcher and founding member of the research group KB45 (Art in Belgium Since 1945) at the Department of Art History, Musicology and Theatre Studies, Ghent University. He is curator of the research exhibition Marcel Broodthaers—The Architect is Absent at CIVA, Brussels (2025) and author of the synonymous book forthcoming from Sternberg Press.

Raf Wollaert is a PhD candidate at the University of Antwerp and a Fulbright scholar. In 2023 he organized an international symposium on Marcel Broodthaers’ films. Marcel Broodthaers and Film: A Second on Eternity, a collection of essays coedited with Stephen Jacobs, will be released later this fall.

Simon Wu ‘17 is a writer and a PhD candidate at Yale University. His first book, a collection of essays titled Dancing on My Own, was published in June.