Marcel Broodthaers
The Manuscript

“The manuscript in the bottle is the title of our new edition of 120 bottles, which we are presenting together with other bottle objects,” reads the invitation card used by Galerie Block to announce the exhibition Marcel Broodthaers. Das Manuskript in der Flasche 1833/1974 in October 1974. The front of the invitation card also prominently displays two dates – 1833 and 1974 – which directly refer to the temporal entanglements with which The Manuscript plays.
Both dates as well as the English, French and German titles in different fonts can each be found on one side of the box in which the bottle object, a white Bordeaux bottle, is packaged. It is also wrapped in cream-colored tissue paper with a signature and numbering, on which a text, also in three languages, provides an initial insight into the connection between the object, title and year. He found the bottle “on the green beach of the Spree”, Broodthaers captions the following explanations in the first line, and locates the place of discovery in the present of 1974, when Broodthaers was in Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, thus turning the supposed find into a message in a bottle. This initially refers to a different time and a different place, as we can see from the following text on the tissue paper, which also describes the bottle object further: “The object: an ordinary Bordeaux bottle. In the first third below the neck of the bottle, the words ‘The Manuscript’ and the year ‘1833’ are burned in a light shade of black. / The subject: Is a story by Edgar Allan Poe ‘The Manuscript in the Bottle’, first published in a newspaper in Baltimore in 1833.” While in Poe’s story the adventures of an unknown, shipwrecked first-person narrator are conveyed by a message in a bottle, Broodthaers’ bottle object contains no message; the bottle remains empty. Rather, in allusive and enigmatic references between fiction and reality, present and past, subject and object, The Manuscript creates an ambivalence that clearly resists the clarity of an (expected) message in the bottle – or a work.
Various drafts and sketches by Broodthaers in the Edition Block archive reveal a detailed design process, especially for the design of the invitation card, tissue paper and cardboard of the edition. The prototype of a three-pack can also be found there. Originally, the plan was to offer Nos. 1-36 of the edition object as three-packs, in each of which three bottle cartons are linked together. The tissue paper for this form of presentation is signed and numbered by Broodthaers, so that it can still be executed.
There is also an anecdote to add here, according to which it was easier and cheaper to empty the characteristic white Bordeaux bottles used by Broodthaers himself than to buy them empty in the required quantity from a French manufacturer. Visitors to the James Lee Byars exhibition in September 1974 were invited to take full bottles with them and return them empty to the gallery.
Text: Birgit Eusterschulte