La Signature. Série 1. Tirage illimité, 1969

THE EDITIONS OF MARCEL BROODTHAERS
Michael Compton

Broodthaers's other main groups of multiple works, the books and prints, are extremely heterogeneous in their use of the medium and in their poetic devices [...] His prints are explicitly "editions" rather than "gravures" or "empreintes". Many were published by galleries, presumably, as a cheaper and more saleable form of art, as have been many artist prints. This was a period in which the multiple was promoted as a means of democratization of art. But, like other artists, he followed the practice of valorizing limited editions of technically indefinite print runs by the device of manuscript enhancement. That is he played out the game, just as he did in book publication. The situation, too, is indicated by a tautology: La Signature, published by himself during the period he was maintaining his own museum, comprises 153 of his signatures, lithographed with each sheet signed in pencil, but issued in an unlimited edition.

His first print is both tautology and contradiction, referring even more directly to the artist – gallery nexus. La La Faute d'ortographe takes as its starting point the gallery's announcement of its own publication, in which his name had been wrongly spelt. The fact that until he became very well known (and even after), people continually misspelt his name in a variety of ways was a source of great amusement to him. It added piquancy to his tautologies and offered a vehicle for his constant themes of teaching and correcting, designation and (apparent) misdesignation. Here he crosses out the names of all the other artists whose names are correctly spelt, gives his own name with the proper autography, adds his first name altering the last letter, ‘t', find it too large, crosses it out and does it again smaller. The corrections, whether of the original proof or of his own corrections do not serve their conventional purpose, which is to vanish after use (being metalanguage) but become the print itself.

Broodthaers often make use of constructed errors so it is possible to see them even where they may not have been intended to be significant. Comparison of the plan of the principal floor of the house in the Rue de la Pepiniere which had housed his Museum in the print Musée-Museum with the reconstruction of half of it in the Salle Blanche shows that the former, though plausible, is wrong; but he did not make the correction. The conventional abbreviation "rat." is glossed in the print Tractatus Logico-Catologicus as "ratures" (deletions). Can it be the solution of the caption-title to the shadow image of a cat, in another print, La Souris écrit rat? Has the cat rubbed out a mouse? All of Broodthaers's prints prompt such conjectures, but he made sure not to provide answers. That is not the work of an artist, but of the viewer.