Marcel Broodthaers: My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight

This intimate and gorgeously produced book pairs Belgian artist-poet Marcel Broodthaers’ first two collections of poetry, My Ogre Book (1957) and Midnight (1960)―both previously unpublished in English―with an 80-image projection work, Shadow Theater (1973–74), made toward the end of his too-brief life. Together these works reveal a dizzyingly prodigious interplay between the images and texts, particularly illuminating Broodthaers’ use of the oblique and dark fairytale framework within (and against) which he plays with reflections and reproductions, inversions and fictions, body and shadow, decor and violence. My Ogre Book (Mon livre d’ogre) and Midnight (Minuit) served as a wellspring for Broodthaers’ later visual work: he continually recycled and reworked them into new schemata in his installations, films, sculptures and paintings. Both are wildly cinematic books that perform like a fictional theater set (or museum) for a dark fable of which we are only dimly aware. In this vein, Shadow Theater (Ombres chinoises), published in full for the first time here, creates a fantastical poetic landscape of semblance and sleights of hand. The three works are published together to provide the reader with an unprecedented opportunity to read Broodthaers in both language and image.