In -depth analysis or close-reading on Marcel Broodthaers's seminal work 'Pense-Bête'

The inaugural volume of UpClose—a series of publications focusing on key works from the substantial collection of S.M.A.K. (Ghent, Belgium)—discusses one of its most significant sculptures, Marcel Broodthaers’s Pense-Bête, finished in early 1964. One of his first works as a “visual artist,” Pense-Bête features a partially ripped-open package of (now) 44 volumes of Broodthaers’s book of poems, also titled Pense-Bête, embedded in plaster.

The book is organized in half a dozen sections, each of which foregrounds a leading question or isolates a material or other signifying component of the work’s formation, make-up and semantic journey. Welchman examines the situation and stakes of the first exhibition of Pense-Bête later in 1964; key aspects of the material constitution of the work and the processes by which it was elaborated—wrapping/unwrapping; the use of plaster; and the deployment of spherical and ovoid shapes—two plastic balls, and a rough plaster sphere set inside a cracked eggshell. These sections are joined by discussion of the contexts and situations of Pense-Bête in relation to ideas about thought and thinking (la pensée); reflection on how the sculpture, but also Broodthaers’s work more generally, addresses animals and beasts (bêtes); and a meditation on how Pense-Bête relates to the Surrealist genre of the poème objet (Poem-Object) and to later ideas and practices of object-production.