The linguistic turn in 1960s and 1970s art has presented an ongoing problem of contextualization: to what extent do our readings of this art need to draw on the histories and interpretive conventions of writing generally and literature specifically? Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Robert Smithson, Marcel Broodthaers, and many other artists produced experimental writing that exploded the dominant genres of artistic “expression,” the artist statement and the essay. Similarly, works from this period frequently challenged the idea that, for artists, writing was a secondary medium that must take on the role of explaining or contextualizing some ostensibly more real art object. Several of these new bodies of writing-as-art, Smithson’s in particular, have gone on to become significant events in the history of literature. The problem of framing such works is further complicated by the fact that much writing during this same period, poetry especially, underwent a conceptualist turn toward modes of site-specificity and institutional critique. So far this messy grey area between the disciplines has been mostly claimed by the powerful engines of art history. By this I mean not simply that art historians have done most of the writing about it; rather, that in doing so, they have tended to contain this work snugly within the dominant paradigms of their own discipline. But this may say more about the institutional power of art history than it does about the potential implications of these particular texts and objects, and text-objects.

Consider the case of Broodthaers, whose transformation from poet to artist in the mid-1960s is the central concern for Rachel Haidu in her new monograph on the artist, The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964–1976. Long a cult figure whose books and artworks have been largely inaccessible, Broodthaers is best known for his fictive Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, which the artist began in 1968 in Brussels and developed in multiple iterations until 1972, four years before his death in 1976. Like Smithson, Broodthaers was an artist whose practice in the 1960s pressurized not only the more palpable elements of art making at the moment—the art object, the museum as that object’s would-be neutral setting—but also art’s less tangible frames: the language in which art circulates, in particular developmental models of art history, avant-garde above all. Each of Broodthaers’s statements in interviews, press releases, printed cards, or invitations tends to have, as Haidu demonstrates, both an immediate complexity and a playful awareness of its precise role within circuits of discourse. Broodthaers, that is, carefully situated his meta-statements both in space and in time: from his famous “Me too, I asked myself if I could not sell something and succeed in life” (1), printed over a contemporary women’s magazine as the opening line of an invitation card to his first exhibition, to his letters from the museum, which evoke and deform the range of instrumental tonalities associated with the “dealer or hawker,” the bureaucratic administrator, and the “conscience stricken ‘activist’” (157).

One of the strengths of Haidu’s book therefore is that she does not simply assimilate him to a familiar narrative of avant-garde development or progression—say, a tight sequential account of institution critique (which, as a recognized term, his work largely preceded) or site-specific art. Instead she articulates the strange and rebarbative time (the non-progressive, teleological or developmental sequences) of his practice, locating one excellent instance of it in the very statements of his museum, its “shifters of organization”—as Roland Barthes called those historians’ statements (including prefaces and authorial speech acts involving an “I”) that double historical time by pulling us from the past under consideration to the now of its consideration. Broodthaers did this by declaring of the works displayed in his museum, “This is not a work of art.” This inversion of Duchamp at once invokes the artist’s performative power to declare on the status of the object and reframes the site or context of that declaration as the institutional, not the individual artistic, speech act. Because say what it wants at the level of such individual statements, Broodthaers’s museum, as an institution, cannot help but say art. As Haidu puts it: “In order to create such a contradiction (in which the content of a proposition is undercut by its illocutionary force . . .) Broodthaers must implicate his audience” (196).

Just how we are implicated, though, involves another temporal displacement that Broodthaers’s practice highlights and savors: museums tend to promote the fiction that they represent a pre-existing “public.” Broodthaers’s museum, by contrast, calls attention to “the action of forming a public that museums mask” (196). This temporal projection is, as Haidu nicely phrases it, a “hiccup of reciprocal self-legitimation” (197).

We get, however, a far less resolved concept of time—both as developmental sequence and as disciplinary history—in the version Haidu presents of Broodthaers’s break with poetry. Part of the problem, certainly, stems from Broodthaers’s own statements. Though he knew a great deal of French modernist poetry and could have quarried from it a very different understanding, he seems (at least after he abandoned poetry) to have subscribed to a traditional division whereby poetry was a private discourse of interiority, and art, despite its many compromises, a public enterprise—even if it had to build the public it met. The only exception to this—Stéphane Mallarmé’s embrace of the utopian aspects of mass culture, especially advertising—is, in Haidu’s rendering, a failure that proves the rule: pursuing advertising’s “breakdown between every register” (text and image, object and experience, performer and receiver) propels Mallarmé on his trajectory toward the reification of words, and his ultimate failure to communicate. And so this bizarre cautionary tale sets up Broodthaers’s turn to art as the necessary breakthrough: “Until that moment,” he writes, “I had lived practically isolated from all communication, since my audience was fictive. Suddenly I had a real audience, on that level where it is a question of space and conquest” (xxiv). Now obviously Broodthaers is casting his movement into this space of art in a predatory, imperial light, and thereby undermining the supposedly beneficent public functions with which art is typically associated. But in the rush to embrace this counter-intuitively critical framing of the artist’s emergence, Broodthaers’s critics have simply accepted the view of poetry on which it is predicated.

In Haidu’s case—that is, in a book explicitly about the meaning of this shift—such uncritical acceptance has major and unfortunate consequences. After his renunciation of the category of poetry, Broodthaers subsequently produced seventeen more books (many based on poems by Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Heinrich Heine, and other poets). One needs a particularly rigid—even ahistorical—concept of “poetry,” therefore, to understand his practice as adhering strictly to the letter of his pronouncement. But the question is not simply whether Broodthaers’s work in book arts and related fields should be seen as poetry; rather, it is what, precisely, Broodthaers was renouncing, and what this renunciation is supposed to have done for him.

For Haidu, Broodthaers’s understanding of Mallarmé’s failure allows the artist to make one of his most decisive gestures in relation to contemporary artistic practice: complicating the rhetoric of linguistic transparency that she sees as guiding normative versions of conceptual art: “By retracing the effects of reading that crosses mediums, surfaces, and supports to Mallarmé, he historicizes the reading-effects of his own era and the art that registers its process” (82). And yet, by refusing to cross mediums and trace the actual activities of poets working at that moment, Haidu dehistoricizes the very reading-effects she claims Broodthaers traces. The result is “poetry” as a blank surface that supports Haidu’s projection (of ahistoricism) onto it.

Broodthaers’s “failures” thus appear as those of poetry in general. “In his early artworks,” Haidu writes, “derisive testimonies to the failure of poetic experimentation, Broodthaers seems to be taking stock of all that is left in the abandoned place of poetic experimentation” (8). But it is difficult to answer just what had gone wrong with the discipline of poetry when the only poets that receive attention, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, had been dead for 101 and 70 years respectively by the time Broodthaers opened his museum. Instead we learn that “poetry” remains tied to regressive concepts of beauty, rich metaphors, and outmoded concepts of craft. Imagine the liberation he felt, then, with his earliest artworks, in which he would glue huge masses of mussel shells to panels: “By using such clichés of Belgian identity [as moules-frites], the former poet succinctly and effectively abandons poetry’s rich metaphorical chains and inventive rhetorical forms. His materials in the mid-1960s do not start but end chains of signification” (23; emphasis in original). Public clichés over privately crafted sincerity, flat metonymy over fluff metaphor, deftly derailed meaning over hefty veiled symbolism. It’s a wonder all the poets didn’t run screaming from their discipline!

As a poet/critic my first reaction is to correct this glaringly inaccurate picture—to point to the numerous poets who, at that very moment in the 1960s and early 1970s, already explored clichés, distrusted metaphors, and anatomized circuits of meaning production rather than merely reveling at the endless generation of new meaning—and who did this in public to boot: Jack Spicer, Bern Porter, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Jackson Mac Low, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Bernadette Mayer, and Clark Coolidge, among others, did some or all of the above. Concrete poets like the de Campos brothers and Décio Pignatari did another version of this even earlier.

But simply correcting this “oversight” would leave unaddressed the larger institutional forces that make it possible for Haidu’s book to frame itself around Broodthaers’s move from poetry to art without understanding poetry as a historical discourse—as an object of study that at least demands chronology and some attention to the range of positions available within the field at a particular moment. That Haidu is attentive to such demands in her own field is beyond question; indeed, she carefully and insightfully positions Broodthaers in relation to over twenty-five practitioners, from modernists of the earlier part of the century, to peers in Europe and America, to a range of younger artists moving out from some of his concerns.

“Art histories may be measured in time,” Smithson suggested, “by books (years), by magazines (months), by newspapers (weeks and days), by radio and TV (days and hours). And at the gallery proper—instants! Time is brought to a condition that breaks down into ‘abstract-objects’” (Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Jack Flam, ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, 37; emphasis in original). An early critic of art history’s drama of temporal positioning, its notion of career property as a matter of (always more) minute chronology, Smithson may have helped some subsequent writers stop cramming these abstract temporal objects into triumphant, progressive narratives of art history. But he could not provide any relief from the asymptotical sense of time that increasingly attended the successful art career, and the labors of its chroniclers. One wonders if the concept of “poetry” developed during this period—and there were many other prominent artists and art historians besides Broodthaers who made a concept of poetry central to the framing of their practices—may not have operated as a therapeutic, fantasy escape from time’s demands. In “poetry” the artist could step for once outside of relentless temporal sequence—even, and especially, when the righteous would, after a pleasant respite, come to, get hold of themselves, and stride purposefully from this Lethe of poetry, once more to cast their lots with time.

But while not all art-based poetry users felt the need to puncture this bubble of timelessness, most shared the idea that poetry should be evoked distantly rather than examined directly. In this sense poetry tends to remain legendary in art history, even when it’s bad. Thus it was possible for a concept of poetry to play a centrally negative and instrumental role also in the writing of Michael Fried, famous enemy of time. It is precisely the “poetic” art criticism of Frank O’Hara and the poets associated with Art News that mobilizes him (and to a degree even Clement Greenberg before him) to circle the wagons and develop a professional language of late modernist art criticism that would vanquish poetry from the field of art history. (For an account of this see my Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006.)

Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the spectrum, poetry, perhaps surprisingly, plays an analogous structural function for the Situationists. That is, while they have reversed the evaluation and positively designated the experience of their dérives as poetry, poetry as a category is nonetheless an off-screen activity. For them, it signals either this private experience of the dérive itself or, in a larger sense, the as yet unrealized promise of a future social totalization—the lived poetry that will be possible for everyone (only) in a Situationist society.

But the most widespread use of the term “poetic” is that inaugurated by Benjamin Buchloh, who may have been directly affected in this thinking on the topic by his contact with Broodthaers himself, whom he knew personally and about whom he wrote an early and influential essay, “Marcel Broodthaers: Open Letters, Industrial Poems.”¹ In any case, Buchloh uses the term “poetic” consistently—in his writings on Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, and others—to identify both a lack of critical reflexivity and a slippage from the domain of factual history into that of personal myth. We see this model of the poetic in the writings of James Meyer, for instance, who maps recent art according to whether it is “critical” or “poetic.” And now we see it in Haidu, whose book was initially a dissertation completed under Buchloh and Rosalind Krauss.

While Haidu’s book does have many of the virtues one would thus expect—it is focused, careful in its vocabulary, theoretically sophisticated, and insightful about Broodthaers’s relation to the art of his contemporaries—her decision at once to frame the entire monograph around Broodthaers’s renunciation of poetry and then to refuse poetry’s status as a historical discourse brings to a head the lingering and widespread problem I have tried to sketch of just what poetry or “the poetic” is supposed to mean for artists and art historians. Twenty years ago the prescription for treating this problem would have seemed self-evident: greater interdisciplinarity across the board. But interdisciplinarity as a pure value in itself has not proved to be the cure-all it was imagined to be. It seems to work best as a response to certain questions and problems rather than as an obligatory point of departure. Though it too might be framed otherwise, the linguistic turn in the 1960s and 1970s is a likely candidate for interdisciplinarity. What will not work is to frame one of its central participants as breaking with poetry without addressing poetry. And so to my more site-specific recommendation: if art historians are going to continue using “poetry” and “the poetic” as central interpretive categories, it is time they granted these concepts the basics of chronology, a little history, and even some grounding in the practices of actual poets. Ultimately, poetry might like to respond to its surprisingly central role in art-historical thinking. But so far, given its characterization as the figure of timeless anti-rigor, it can’t even recognize that it’s been evoked, let alone slandered.