#wiels

Wolfgang Tillmans: Today Is The First Day, IMMA, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Baile Átha Cliath / WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Bruselles-Brussel / Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, Köln, 2020 [Copyright Bookshop, Gent / Antwerpen]

Paulo Nazareth at Wiels

Brussels

by Jef Geys

Marcel Broodthaers’s (1924-1976) suggestive, freely associative language contrasts starkly with the biased language of marketing or the hard data of electronic communication being introduced at the time. The repetitive messages in standardised language are questioned in these multiples, which he also entitled ‘Industrial Poems’. Taking the popular aspects of plastic street signs, he composed enigmatic visual poems with signals, images, letters, words or punctuation, eluding direct and universal meaning. Made industrially with a technique of vacuum formed moulds, the soft contours of the characters and graphics make the printed language palpable, words and pictograms moulded into containers for ideas. He defined these works as “treating the image as word and the word as image”, a criticism of conceptual art’s utilitarian use as information of language, favouring instead its poetic dimension.