Joe Scanlan

          Demetrius Oliver (b. 1975 , Brooklyn) is an artist who revels in the paradox of making mundane things seem otherworldly. His use of such items as tea kettles, rooftop ventilators, shattered umbrellas, and coal have always lent his work a disarming, enigmatic affect. Recent exhibitions include Heliacal, a solo show at Inman Gallery, Houston, and The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, a traveling group exhibition organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Oliver has previously been an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan, Maine, the Studio Museum, Harlem, and Fountainhead, Miami. He lives and works in Harlem.
Mirtha Dermisache (1940-2012, b. Buenos Aires) was an artist known for her expansive approach to writing, which she realized in the form of letters, postcards, drawings, posters, newsletters, and artist’s books. Having cut her teeth on the concrete art and poetry of postwar Argentina and Brazil—as well as her home country’s lethal authoritarian politics—Dermisache’s work was ultimately more aligned with the theoretical distinctions of Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero and various European artist’s book publishers (such as Guy Schraenen) and literary movements (such as Asemic writing). Her works are in the public  collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, MACBA, Barcelona, and MoMA, New York.
Demetrius Oliver and Mirtha Dermisache is part of Amphiphrasis, a series of exhibitions about the descriptive power of art with and without the written word. The term is inspired by Marcel Broodthaers’ use of phonemic objects like mussel shells and projections to describe, so to speak, the social conditions of his artworks.

The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to present Gary Cannone and N. H. Pritchard, the third in a series of exhibitions pairing visual artists with poets in an immodest attempt to “return the favor” of ekphrasis. The first pairing, Three Films by Sarah Maldoror, was instigated by Maldoror herself and revisited in collaboration with her daughter, Annouchka de Andrade, and the Maysles Documentary Center. The second pairing, Demetrius Oliver and Mirtha Dermisache, and the current pairing of Cannone and Pritchard have been curated by Joe Scanlan, founding director of the Broodthaers Society.
Gary Cannone (born 1964) began his creative career in the early 80s with the Chicago-based punk band The Leeches, but he threw his hat in with the visual art crowd after attending a transformative public lecture by Vito Acconci. Cannone earned an MFA from the University of Chicago in 1991 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He is long known for his deadpan sense of humor, a wit that became all the more slapstick and elegant when he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2013. After a brief, self-imposed retirement to assess the situation, Cannone couldn’t help but notice that the daily struggles and small victories of dealing with MS shared much with the scope and temperament of his previous work, not to mention the newly gnostic materiality of language and objects and signs. He set himself to work again: weekly lists of simple but cognitively inaccessible terms like “tahini” or “grant application” painstakingly stitched into samplers. A newfound fascination with furniture, particularly chairs, and their Escherian workings. Snippets of poetry gleaned from Ralph’s Supermarket receipts that are an explicit response to N. H. Pritchard’s poetry.
N. H. Pritchard (1939–1996) was a profoundly gifted and polymathic poet working in New York City in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. He was an undergrad art history major at NYU and a graduate student at Columbia, but the critical part of his education would seem to have been a downtown Manhattan scene that included friendships with Robert Motherwell, Frank O’Hara, and Alan Ginsberg, among others. He eventually settled in at the Umbra Poetry Workshop and published his first book, The Matrix, with Doubleday and Company in 1970 and his second book, EECCHHOOEESS, with NYU Press the following year.
Pritchard’s poetry runs the gamut from lyrical prosody to concrete poetry—and everything in between. A particularly affective approach is when he writes prosody but then scatters it, so to speak, spacing out the letters of words on the page but keeping their phonemic and syntactical order, as in “The Harkening” or “The Shroud.” In these poems, reading is a recuperative process in which cognition and recognition nearly merge, like spilling a box of fasteners in a gravel driveway and having to pick the shiny, manufactured objects out of the stones. First edition copies of The Matrix and EECCHHOOEESS will be on hand in the exhibition, along with a brand new copy of The Mundus, a previously unpublished manuscript that, after 50 years, has been edited by Paul Stephens and published by Primary Information, Brooklyn.

The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to present Thorsten Baensch and Marcel Broodthaers, the fourth in a series of exhibitions pairing visual artists with poets in an immodest attempt to “return the favor” of ekphrasis. In this iteration we turn the tables a bit by pairing Thorsten Baensch, a Brussels-based visual artist, with Marcel Broodthaers, our namesake, in the role of the poet whose lines get displaced.
Thorsten Baensch (born 1964 in Heide, Germany) is the founder of Bartleby & Co., an artist project that for thirty years has been dedicated to producing handmade books. Inspired by the protagonist in Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” Bartleby & Co. has reimagined texts by nearly two hundred artists, artisans, philosophers, poets, and scientists on such themes as poetry, nature, community, and bureaucracy.
For his stay at the Broodthaers Society, Baensch will present several of his poetry-related publications in addition to an intervention with Marcel Broodthaers. His facsimile of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (2015) foregrounds the role that Samuel Simmons played in the epic poem, not only as Paradise Lost’s first printer but also as the author of the “arguments” that introduce each of its twelve books. Another item will be Three Early Poems by Gerald Manley Hopkins (2003), including his “For a Picture of St. Dorothea,” in which Baensch maps a speculative serendipity between a 19th century view that Manley Hopkins may have enjoyed from Hampstead Heath and a current, adjacent park bench dedicated “to Dorothy Rather, who fed the birds here.”
Statues de Bruxelles Remix: livres trouvé, textes perdus is inspired by Statues de Bruxelles, a book that juxtaposes poems by Marcel Broodthaers with photographs of Bruxellois monuments by Julien Coulommier. Originally conceived by Broodthaers and Coulommier in 1957, the publication wasn’t realized until 1987, more than a decade after Broodthaers’ death. When Baensch came across a used copy of the book, its contents and the extant statues of the city presented an opportunity to reimagine all three. Baensch carefully cut up the found copy of Statues de Bruxelles and rearranged its contents into a combination scrapbook / spiral-bound sketchbook, augmented by new color photographs of some of the very same statues that were documented by Coulommier. The resulting Remix is at once an homage, an autopsy, and a reinvigoration of Broodthaers’ and Coulommier’s sculpture / space / image / text relationships.
Baensch’s scholarly, elegant, and often playful publications are in the permanent collections of the Columbia University, Yale University, and Princeton University libraries; the Van Abbemuseum, the Centre Pompidou, and MoMA; and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, and the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin.

The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to present Oluwatobiloba Ajayi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the fifth in a series of exhibitions pairing visual artists with poets in an immodest attempt to “return the favor” of ekphrasis. In this iteration, we mirror Ajayi, a London-based visual artist and writer, with Cha, a writer and visual artist, whose work remains deeply evocative and influential.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (born 1951 in Busan, died 1982 in New York City) was and remains a renowned filmmaker, performance artist, and writer. Having moved to New York City from Berkeley and become a fixture in the downtown literary scene—publishing alongside such peers as Laurie Anderson, Jenny Holzer, and Gary Indiana—Cha’s most celebrated novel, Dictée, came out just a week before she was raped and murdered by a security guard in the Nolita building where her husband worked. Dictée remains a touchstone for any writer who appreciates the politics of refusal or the “entitlement,” as novelist Min Jin Lee put it, to write difficult prose—especially when you’re an immigrant writing in your second or third language.
Cha earned a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973, an MA in 1977, and an MFA in 1978. Five books by or about Cha will be on hand for this exhibition: Apparatus, cinematic apparatus: Selected Writings, edited by Cha (1980); Exilée and Temp Morts (1980); Clio: History (1982); Dictée (1982); and The Dream of the Audience, edited by Constance Lewallen with texts by Lawrence Rinder and Trinh T. Min-ha (2001). Do feel free to make an appointment if you would like to spend time with these books outside of normal gallery hours.
Oluwatobiloba Ajayi works primarily as a printmaker taking inspiration from architecture, her peripatetic life, and the family photographs that have documented it. However, rather than reify the technical capabilities of photography or fetishize the finely editioned print, Ajayi makes monotypes that are gritty and fleeting. Given that her method doesn’t allow Ajayi to see her images in the process of making them, her monotypes are not so much printed as massaged, blindly, into existence. The process is similar to pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth to emit certain sounds, maybe even words, although the tongue had no role in their conception.
It’s not surprising, then, that Ajayi would find her way to a manual typewriter—a Remington “Remette” to be exact—on which she types images that probe speech and writing in the same way that her monotypes probe familiarity and memory. Indeed, the tongue is a recurring protagonist in Ajayi’s typewriter works, and each missive takes a different stab at getting it to behave. “Stab” is the operative word here, the metal arm that is attached to each of the typewriter’s ivory keys arcing up and forcefully striking the page. These, too, are monotypes, impressed one letter at a time.
Oluwatobiloba Ajayi (born 2000 in Amsterdam) is based in London. She almost perfectly divides her time between visual art, writing, and editing, having this year participated in three group shows in the United Kingdom and Nigeria, worked as deputy editor at DADA Magazine, and published reviews in frieze, The Architectural Review, and The Whitney Review of New Writing. She earned a BA in Architecture from Princeton University in 2022 and an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2023.FUREN DAI and ANNALISA ALLOATTI & MIRELLA BENTIVOGLIO
December 15, 2024 – January 12, 2025
The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to present Furen Dai and Annalisa Alloatti & Mirella Bentivoglio. For this exhibition, New York artist Furen Dai has made a series of site-sensitive sculptures that are informed by the architecture of the Broodthaers Society and in response to Storia del monumento, a concrete poem by Annalisa Alloatti & Mirella Bentivoglio.
Furen Dai is interested in the symbiosis between her work, herself, and the institutions they inhabit. She approaches language, architecture, image production, and display with a mix of critical engagement and ambiguity. The effect of her work, however, is not so much an artist dealing with uncertainty as that of a forensic architect reimagining systems of control. Dai’s sculptures are materially rich and labor intensive. They rely on an ancient technique for preparing a ground in which an admixture of chalk and rabbit skin glue is repeatedly applied, sanded, and reapplied. The resulting objects appear to have been recovered from memory or approximated from language. When lined up on the floor or stacked vertically, however, they produce a powerful sense of innuendo.
Storia del monumento (1968) is a serial concrete poem that graphically erects, destabilizes, and then topples the Italian word for “monument” out of the letters that make it up. Alloatti & Bentivoglio playfully rearranged the letters like two children playing with alphabet blocks, stacking them higher and higher so that the structure inevitably teeters and falls. In their telling, however, the story of the monument feels more like a liberation from convention than a tragedy of culture or history, suggesting, rightly, that some conventions very well need to be dismantled. It’s significant that Alloatti & Bentivoglio’s Storia del monumento conveys this sentiment with as more glee than malice.
Furen Dai (Changsha, China, 1988) earned a BA in Russian Language and Literature from Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston. She has participated in the New England Triennial, the Moscow International Video Art Festival, and the Edinburgh Artists’ Moving Image Festival. Recently she has published Temporal Text, a critical analysis of the terms of identification used throughout the history of the United States Census (Asian Art Archive, Hong Kong, 2023), and a contribution to Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts, an epistolary manifesto published by Paper Monument (Brooklyn, 2021). She is an alumnus of numerous residency programs, most notably the ZK/U Center for Arts and Urbanism, Berlin, and the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York.
Annalisa Alloatti (Torino, 1926–2000) was a graphic artist whose work plied the space between visual and textual communication. Her work employed paravisual elements such as dots, time stamps, graphic shapes, and Braille, as well as nonverbal intonations. She participated in Arti visive. Poesia visiva (1976) and Mirella Bentivoglio’s Materializzazione del linguaggio, the landmark group exhibition organized as part of the 1978 Venice Biennale. Important publications include Finzione [Fictions] and Cecità [Blindness], both published in 1975.
Mirella Bentivoglio (Klagenfurt, 1922–2017) grew up in Milan where she published her first poetry collection, Giardino, in 1943. By the mid-1960s she had abandoned conventional poetry for more visual- and material-based approaches, from typography and sculpture to concrete poetry and live performance. She was equally polymathic professionally, having worked as a professor, an art critic, and a curator in addition to being a poet and visual artist. The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College published the first English-language monograph on her work in 2015, and she was a key figure in Primary Information’s Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979, edited by Alex Bagliu and Mónica de la Torre.