On Tuesday, April 18, the Broodthaers Society of America will conclude its month-long lecture series on the interrelated themes of Fiction, Trust, and Surveillance. The lectures have been taking place at the Hauser & Wirth Bookshop and Roth Bar, 548 West 22nd Street, New York.

For the final session, artist and publisher Joe Scanlan will give a lecture titled L’oeil Vigilant (“The Watchful Eye”) and detail what he sees as a distinctly paranoid perceptual condition in Marcel Broodthaers’ late work, particularly the two-volume artworks No Photography Allowed and L’Angelus de Daumier. These publications posed as accompanying “catalogues” for his exhibitions at the DAAD Berlin (1974), the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1975), and the Rothschild Foundation, Paris (1976). The strategies of visual engagement and deferral in these artworks have roots in Broodthaers’ earlier explorations into spatial perception and have much in common with our current all-encompassing surveillance society. Fittingly, L’oeil Vigilant is also the name of a digital poetry magazine Scanlan edits for the Broodthaers Society that is published in the form of a 24/7 surveillance feed for your smartphone. Scanlan is a professor and director of the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University. He is represented by Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp; and Galerie de Expeditie, Amsterdam. Scanlan is also a widely read, discussed, and translated writer for such venues as Artforum and frieze, as well as his imprint, Commerce Books, and his website, www.thingsthatfall.com.

The Broodthaers Society of America promotes new interpretations of the work of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers in the political and cultural context of the United States. While our primary mission is to promote scholarship on his work as a poet and artist, we also encourage using his oeuvre as a creative jumping off point for wider social and aesthetic explorations.

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