Mortui Docent Vivos: Jeremy Bentham and Marcel Broodthaers in Figures of Wax¹

Quelle est la figure aujhourd'hui qui n'est pas en cire? (Les étudiants, peut- être?)²

– Marcel Broodthaers

At a time when anatomisation was controversial, the slogan Mortui docent vivos (let the dead teach the living) justified the dissection of corpses to determine the cause of death. While traditionally a motto for anatomy schools, the paradoxical idea could be more broadly applied to libraries and archives, universities, and lecture halls, or for that matter, to historical documents and works of art. Though the concept of engaging the dead for the edification of the living is a commonplace in the liberal arts, it is not so commonly an obvious theme in post-World War II art. A rare exception is the work of the Belgian poet, artist, and filmmaker Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976), who found many muses as well as a few rivals among the illustrious dead. Always quick to make cultural, political, and social connections to his practice, he was among the most historically engaged artists of the post-war period. This element of his work is distilled in one of his last films, Figures of Wax, Jeremy Bentham (1974, 16 mm., colour, 15:40), where he engages a wax figure of an Enlightenment sage in discussion. Significantly, this particular (dead) person is Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), who had advocated for posthumous dissections and, more peculiarly, posthumous conversations, too. But while Broodthaers' film entertains this notion, it stops just short of necromancy, and Bentham is cast as a silent muse in the film. As such, the Bentham figure manifests the persistently non-communicative aspect of Broodthaers' work generally, and also suggests a broader post-war revision of the usefulness of the dead to the living.³

Broodthaers' works have long defied clear categorisation and easy interpretation, often slipping from behind the various art-historical labels assigned to them (such as conceptual art and institutional critique).⁴ Despite his work's more elusive characteristics, one unifying element that is consistently identified by scholars is Broodthaers' penchant for rhetoric and figures of speech. The poem, La Moule (The Mussel) and artworks featuring mussel shells are often cited, as they explore the concept of the mould through a pun on the French ‘moule’ (meaning both mussel and mould). A work such as Rhétorique (1971), which showcases reproductions of objects from an installation, is one of many works that stresses a parallel between rhetorical convention and visual modes of display.⁵ In addition to puns, many scholars have discussed the extent to which rhetorical devices, like metonyms and synecdoche, produce and also refuse to produce meaning in his work. However, one convention, the literary topos of speaking with the dead, has remained undiscussed up to this point.⁶ This essay explores how Broodthaers' manipulation of this convention in this film winds up illuminating, in a novel way, many of his most enduring themes.

Figures of Wax constellates a number of the filmmaker's habitual themes and practices around Jeremy Bentham's ‘Auto-Icon’ (the preserved skeleton of Bentham surmounted by a waxen head), arranging a complex system of likenesses and differences that connect it to and differentiate it from Broodthaers' other representations (Fig. 1). The wide variety of artistic concerns that are figured in this encounter with the waxwork include his musings on modes of storage and display; a desire to record the shifting values of objects and goods; an insistence on interacting with and even appropriating the work of earlier artists as part of an institutionalised process of artistic validation; and a fascination with issues of death and history in works of self-representation. Bentham's Auto-Icon thus allows Broodthaers to expatiate on these recurrent themes, but it also allows him to go beyond his usual aesthetic concerns in a unique encounter with temporality and the enabling uses of the dead for the living.

Binding together the film's riot of thematic threads is time – both present and historicised – significantly expressed through the media of film and wax. In the title, Broodthaers alludes to the connected tasks of memory and figuration that have been carried out historically through both media. The expression of memory as ‘the wax tablet of the mind’ dates back to ancient Greece.⁷ In this vein, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian suggested paraphrasing or refashioning language, ‘just as shape after shape is remodeled in the same wax’, in order to hone one's rhetorical style.⁸ A modern example, Freud's writing on the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ – a toy wax tablet so easily imprinted, superficially erased, but also retaining traces of the imprint in its waxy layers – as an analogy of memory, was known to and referenced by Broodthaers.⁹ He is clearly interested in wax's indexical and iconic capacity, and links it to figures in terms of writing, images, and sculpture.

In the film, montages and other cinematographic techniques of juxtaposition repeatedly evoke temporality through contrasting pairs: stasis vs. movement; death vs. life; photographic representation vs. moving pictures; bodily remains vs. live bodies; the archival vs. the commercial; memory vs. experience; and waxwork vs. mannequins. Moreover, the movie's style fluctuates between documentary and avant-garde film, seeming to be of two minds, one trying to tell the story of Jeremy Bentham, the dead intellectual, and the other trying to express the creativity of Marcel Broodthaers, the living artist. The ‘documentary’ approach unfolds a narrative about Jeremy Bentham with a description of his ideas dominating much of the movie's soundtrack, which overdubs views of both contemporary London and the wax figure of Bentham himself. But with his avant-garde technique, Broodthaers disrupts sequential narrative logic through extended silences, musical interludes, and ‘poetic’ montage sequences – shop windows, a protester, a beggar, mannequins, and inter-titles featuring symbols and names and scratched-out writing – which frequently leave viewers guessing about their connection to the topic.¹⁰ Inserted about halfway through the movie, in a surreal and distinctly parodic episode, Broodthaers tries to stage the bridging of the divide between the documentary and avant-garde, as well as between the dead theoretician and the live artist. At the moment when he conducts an impossible interview with the ‘Auto-Icon’, Broodthaers revives, but also significantly alters, the convention of conversing with the dead.

The Auo-Icon

The Auto-Icon first pricked Broodthaers' interest while he was teaching at University College London's Slade School of Fine Arts, where it is still on display at the end of the South Cloisters of the main building. Like a figure for memory itself, Bentham's preserved skeleton and waxen head must have starkly contrasted with the students, whom Broodthaers tellingly described as ‘pas en cire’.¹¹ Broodthaers remarked about the unimpressionable students in a letter where he first mentioned his desire to leave his mark on the institution with a film about Bentham.¹² The founder of British utilitarianism, Bentham at first glance seems not to have much in common with Broodthaers. Bentham is famous for underrating the importance of art and for trying to reduce human motivation to a pain/pleasure calculus.¹³ In contrast, Broodthaers is known for his self-conscious preoccupation with the idea of institutionalised conventions of artistic discipleship and display. One developed an Enlightenment system; the other parodied the modern institutions that have been built upon it. Nevertheless, as both were critical of the institutions of their time as well as preoccupied with institutionalisation, Broodthaers must have found in the utilitarian a fitting figure for the artist.¹⁴

The film recapitulates some of Bentham's theories, but it seems to have been the Auto-Icon itself that most interested Broodthaers.¹⁵ In an attempt to be of use even after his death, Bentham had bequeathed his body to his physician friend, with instructions that it be publicly dissected and the remains retained. In compliance with his will, the head was mummified and was, for a short time, placed on top of his skeleton which had been articulated in a sitting posture, padded with stuffing, dressed in one of his suits, and left on display. The desiccated and mummified head was quickly deemed abject, and was replaced by a waxwork likeness of the live Bentham's head.¹⁶ In his description of the figure, we sense his amusement as he describes Bentham's skeleton, which ‘served as the ossature (Ha! Ha!), to construct a wax figure representing his eminent personality, life size… . Indeed, here is good scientific study for a university film’.¹⁷ The filmmaker was clearly intrigued by the preservation of remains (the ‘Auto’ part of the ‘Auto-Icon’) in the portrait's self-made aspect, for it represents the sort of slippage of person into figure that had always fascinated him. It is not unlike the mussel, which Broodthaers' poem had suggested is cast in its own mould. Thus, in the letter he calls attention to his own pun on ‘ossature’ by a little textual laugh – ‘ (Ha! Ha!)’ – indicating his appreciation of such slides from an original or literal meaning (‘ossature’ as skeleton) to its normal but also figurative extension (‘ossature’ as an architectural term for a building's or monument's supporting structure).¹⁸

Besides idiosyncratically leaving his remains, Bentham had proposed that the Auto-Icon should become a prop for staged conversations with other Auto-Icons. In his short pamphlet, ‘Auto-Icon; or farther uses of dead to the living’, he explained that all people should have Auto-Icons made of themselves after death. The benefits, he stated, were numerous: more truthful portraits; relief of the financial burden of burial; providing bodies for scientific research, and so on. More importantly, the dead could serve a pedagogic service, as the living could cart out the figures, conjure their ideas, and enact enlightening conversations among them. The film ironically carries out Bentham's instructions. Broodthaers, who had made much use of appropriation before, straight away organises the Auto-Icon into his signature themes.¹⁹ This ‘university film’ might provide a ‘way of being memorable’ similar to Bentham's: just as Bentham was preserved in memory through wax, Broodthaers would be preserved through the film. He would imitate Bentham and thereby make himself another such figure in the institution where he was a visiting instructor. Thus he would enter into and fulfill, to some degree, Bentham's goal of finding utility in the dead for the living.

Modes of Display

Figures of Wax is one of several films by Broodthaers that positions the artist/filmmaker as a quasi-documentarian.²⁰ His journalistic intentions, though, are given tongue-in-cheek articulation in the letter, and the actual film satirises its documentary premise and undercuts its referential authority to a great degree.²¹ Near its start, the narrator proclaims: ‘Although shot between the elections, any identification with reality is entirely incidental and not the intention of the author’. This curious statement both historicises the film and raises doubts about its own documentary credibility, presenting the film's modus operandi in miniature. Many of its formal characteristics – curious montage of imagery, sequential incoherence, mismatch between soundtrack and image, use of intercut text to represent dialogue – prevent Figures of Wax from being a faithful cast from a documentary mould.²² The film veers away from the topics of Bentham's utilitarianism and his Auto-Icon to the fact of his being displayed in a wood and glass box, and thus the film turns into a rumination of modes of display and their relation to value over time.

In the letter to his collector, Broodthaers describes the Auto-Icon as ‘[d]ressed in everyday clothes of the deceased, with a straw hat imitating a topper, the figure is seated on a chair at the back of an illuminated cupboard, and oversees with his blue eyes the innocent comings and goings of the new generation’.²³ From the vantage of his storage-display and the privileged perspective of the film, the Auto-Icon is brought into contrast with contemporary London. The initial montage takes the spectator to the film's four sites: (i) the street with the distant façade of the former London Stock Exchange (now the Royal Exchange); (ii) a discount shop window seen from Moorgate Street; (iii) a vitrine of the Selfridges department store in Oxford Street; (iv) Bentham's cubicle in the University. Like Bentham's ‘cupboard’, each of these locations serves as a distinct form of visual display that imparts relative status and value to its objects; each also suggests a distinct relationship to time. A shot of a picketer holding a sign introduces us ironically to the former Exchange's neoclassical pediment (Fig. 2), whose tradition-bound formulation provides a sense of security with its ‘timeless’ classical figures that divert attention from the actual constant flux of capital and value. The window of Selfridges similarly tries to defy time (Fig. 3), presenting chic goods on mannequins, here frozen in the ‘timeless’ state of ideal modernity, as the ‘latest’ arrival, and the ‘next’ necessity. At times, Broodthaers undermines their ahistorical purpose by superimposing names and dates of historical figures. Nonetheless, inside these two displays, the idea of time is distorted by the logic of the market, which wants to represent time-without-loss, whether it be registered as an impossibly ideal past (classicism), or an ever on-rushing future (fashion). In light of the UK's dismal economic predicament in 1974, the gulf between the representation and the reality would have been particularly clear.²⁴

In contrast, a pictured beggar is related to the discount store (Fig. 4), which literally and figuratively foregrounds time-as-loss (loss of value, obsolescence, failure).²⁵ This recession-era display window is crowded with signs representing various prices, some crossed out, revised, evidently written at different times. These common goods (such as pipes, dolls, razors), for which there are many alternatives or substitutes, have price elasticity, and their status as objects of changing value has rendered the glass virtually opaque with desperate signage. Text almost completely obstructs the job of the picture plane/vitrine, failing to display the commodities and make their ideal promise. The financial ruin of the store (the window states it is going out of business) and the failure to fix value over time are literally writ large. If the window were compared with an eye that bares the soul, then this glass, like a cornea scarred over time, casts a dark shadow (of doubt, or alternately, truth) on the object-turned commodity, extinguishing its dazzling aura. This glass is like a wax tablet onto which figures are scratched, and loss of value is inscribed into the surface of memory.

The Auto-Icon, another sort of figure in wax, featured in the opening sequence sitting in its display box (Fig. 5), is a kind of memorial, and thus manifests a relationship to time and value that is dissimilar to that of the classical figures, mannequins, or bargain goods. While time may have had very little effect on the display, we perceive it as outmoded and acknowledge time's passing. But by juxtaposing shots of Bentham and the stylish mannequins, Broodthaers establishes both contrast and similarity, an effect of which is to diminish the aura the stylish figures would have in isolation. Frontal close-ups of Bentham alternating with those of the mannequins declare a double affirmation of temporal congruity and rupture (Figs 6 and 7). They both represent the constraints of time, but differently. Evoking the ideals of novelty, everlasting youth, and a current taste for feminine angularity, there is no doubt of the mannequins' difference from Bentham's Auto-Icon. We know that they have no obvious metonymic relationship to the past (they have no old bones or vintage clothing), and have thus not yet entered – for most onlookers at any rate – into history. And yet, even as the mannequins seemingly make a mockery of Bentham, his figure mocks them back. Through the pairing of the fashionable and the fashion of yester-year, Broodthaers – no doubt unwittingly – echoes observations made by Walter Benjamin in his Passagen-Werk, where he wrote that ‘[f]ashion was never anything but the parody of the gaily decked-out corpse…and the bitter, whispered tête-à-tête with decay’.²⁶ In what was to become a common critique of modernity, Benjamin revealed fashion as the ultimate time-bound commodity, ‘a configuration of repetition, novelty, and death’, but which acknowledges only youth and novelty. In a futile bid to avoid decay, Benjamin writes, a woman ‘changes…rapidly, teasing death, already becoming something else again, something new, as death looks about for her in order to strike her down’.²⁷ In the face-off between the mannequins and the Auto-Icon, the latter emerges as the less delusional option.

The film thereby implies that the Auto-Icon has an advantage over the objects in the stores. As a composite of statue, reliquary, wax figure, and archival specimen (but not one of these things alone) it is valued according to different standards from those of commodities, and one could say it is a figure for such value.²⁸ As a trace, a remainder of both Bentham and the Enlightenment, the Auto-Icon is unique and highly valued for both its indexical and its iconic proximity to its source. It cannot be reproduced, as could a figure in a wax museum. It represents its own history and, by arguable extension, history in general. Archiving can be said to benefit objects conceptually, in that they gain both authenticity and value, which when adequately preserved accrues over time. Obsolescence itself becomes a rarefying factor. To be sure, just as the commodity is fetishised in part to hide the obsolescence that keeps the market moving, so, too, can archival material, like religious relics, become fetishised in order to represent a ‘lost’ totality that is really only phantasmagoric.²⁹ Broodthaers demonstrates the temporal process of valuation through cinematic montage: a scene of shoppers in front of Selfridges cuts to a static dollar sign (notably not of high value in the 1974) against a black ground, then to manuscript pages with writing scratched out, emphasising revision. The appearance of the dollar sign, though, also corresponds with the resumption of the paused narration about Bentham: ‘…where both his body and his works are closeted.…’ Bentham's institutional closet buffers the body and its effects (ring, hair, trousers, bones) from market values. The visual/verbal juxtaposition also urges us to perceive archival specimens as privileged commodities linked to the maintenance or even increase of value over time.

The display of archival specimens had been a pre-occupation of Broodthaers' for several years prior to making Figures of Wax. In 1971, for example, he organised the installation, Section Cinéma (Fig. 8), part of his Musée d'Art Modèrne, Département des Aigles (1968–1971).³⁰ The Section Cinéma exhibition is indicative of Broodthaers' concern to demonstrate the institutional value of obsolescence – through fetishisation – which is further enhanced by modes of display that create contemporary notions of an archived, marketable, and hence viable art and artist.³¹ This installation featured artefacts of earlier films as well as labelled and signed film canisters, binders, and archival photo boxes.³² To the viewer, the contents of the containers were inaccessible, yet labelled as they were – (Fig. 1) Ecritures/(Fig. 1) bis Signatures, (Fig. 7) Documents Portraits – the containers produce the effect of a display of a full collection of archival specimens. But Broodthaers was also intent in this installation on demonstrating the artist's failure to appear. By abbreviating ‘figure’ as ‘fig.’ he calls attention to the use of fragments to represent things and their absence combined.³³ If a rhetorical figure of speech detaches words from their original meaning and reassigns meanings in a new context, the use of the term ‘figure’ or ‘fig.’ performs a similar function in Broodthaers' art. Like archival canisters and boxes, and as traces from Broodthaers past, Bentham's Auto-Icon is different from a traditional wax figure in that it is a container for parts of dead Bentham's body. The Auto-Icon figures its own absence (death) through its very presence. Figures of Wax refers at once to the ‘iconic’ part of Bentham's Auto-Icon (the representation made of wax) and to the ‘auto’ part of the term, the bones that are housed in that body, which, despite their invisibility, represent both Bentham and Bentham's absence in a far more intimate and even literal way than the wax covering.

‘Farther Use of the Dead to the Living’: Conversations

Broodthaers points to the Auto-Icon's singularity – the bodily remains contained in the portrait – about one-third of the way through the film, when he stages an impossible interview with it.³⁴ Following a sequence of shots centering on the Auto-Icon, showing details of his clothes, and so on, Broodthaers is shown in profile as he begins to speak (Figs 9 and 10). Significantly, this moment corresponds with narration about Bentham's remains, effects, and archives. There is a comically absurd contrast between Broodthaers' filmed mobility and Bentham's utter stillness, between life and death, between film as a medium for catching movement and wax as a ‘frozen’ medium, akin to still photography. The present and living nature of the artist/filmmaker/interviewer is emphasised after the interview by footage of Broodthaers smoking and reading a newspaper – his breath visualised indexically by puffs of smoke, his ‘times’ represented in the newspaper. In the interview, we see the one-sided conversation only in subtitles – Bentham is given no lines – and we are left with fragmented, incomplete, and frustrated utterances that receive no response from the dead. Broodthaers proceeds like a medium posing questions asked during a failed séance:

If you have. …/ a statement to make… ./ please do so. …/ if you have a secret/… .tell me/ … .or a special message/ give me an indication/ if you wish to protest/ I promise to keep it. …/ … .or… ./ you prefer to dream?/ a new statement… ./ a secret… ./ a special message…/… .a protest/ or an artistic idea…/… .a dream/ Von Beethoven/ Chopin ³⁵

The film sends a double message. On the one hand this bizarre exercise emphasises that the Auto-Icon is as immobile and insensate as a piece of furniture. On the other hand, it dramatises in both the urgency of the questioning and the intensity of Broodthaers' gestures that the filmmaker cannot help attributing some sort of personhood to the illustrious dead body. An actual dead body, even when housed in or topped by a wax semblance, is not just another statue.

The waxwork head of Jeremy Bentham cannot be made to say anything, but we know that Broodthaers had at least considered giving it a voice, for among the artist's archived papers is a chatty, unused script for the interview. In this draft, Bentham not only responds to questions, but also poses his own. Here, the waxwork is curious to know what this moving picture is, and questions whether or not he is the person depicted. As a revitalised and sensate being, Bentham finds his identity in the Auto-Icon and is intrigued by – albeit somewhat disbelieving of – the cinematic images:

JB: I am cold. Close the window please. What is [sic] all this lights and apparatus? MB: It is material of cinema. JB: What is that? MB: Movie pictures … Representations of reality. JB: Very interesting. I desire to see a film. (Pictures of Bentham) JB: Is it me? MB: Yes and this… JB: Is you.³⁶

The speaking Auto-Icon reciprocates Broodthaers' attention with an answering interest in images and equipment, and he even seems to be reflecting on his own materiality when he begins to complain about the damage the lights might do to his waxy substance: ‘I have too much warm [sic] with these lights’, he protests. This conversation would have been a far more complete appropriation of the wax figure, one in which wax is conceived as essentially malleable, and the dead person pressed into the present via cinematic trickery.³⁷ But, in Figures of Wax, Broodthaers foregoes this temptation, and the result is that Bentham seems entirely of the past. His very silence and the impassivity of the hard, staring wax head signals that time does indeed march on, for in the time of cinema, wax figures have perhaps lost their ability to make us suspend disbelief. While wax is a highly plastic medium, and cinema a perfect medium to give the illusion of animation to an unmoving body, in the end Broodthaers dwells on the deathly stillness of Bentham's figure, its waxwork iconicity tethered to the historical past. The institutional and other contextual conditions of its existence are presented as preserving forces. We do not see the bones and yet the knowledge of their presence seems to demand a certain kind of attention that enforces stasis and silence. Following the interview, we leave the static image of Bentham behind, but death is not forgotten. Broodthaers is on the street. Chopin's Death March plays on a piano soundtrack, and we see Broodthaers' foot tap the beat, keeping time.

The message that there may be some utility to pretending to converse with dead seems all the more obvious when we consider Bentham's prescription of an intellectual afterlife for his Auto-Icon. Placing Auto-Icons into conversational groups and imagining their discourse was, for Bentham, a means of demystifying death, as it would discourage both superstitious dread of them and the attribution of sacred or spiritual meaning. The discursive use of remains was, in other words, to be part of an Enlightenment, secular campaign. At least one of his fellow British secularists, William Godwin, had earlier proposed something similar: making pilgrimages to burial sites so as to have ‘live intercourse with the Illustrious Dead of All Ages’.³⁸ Neither Bentham nor Godwin tried to reason out just why the proximity of the corpse itself was necessary to facilitate such conversations, but we might note that their proposals were linked to their tendency to concentrate on materiality, and to discourage otherworldly spirituality.

The filmed interview in a sense obliges the dead philosopher's high-minded intentions by staging a conversation. But as he is described as a figure of wax in the movie's title, it also brings Bentham into historical association with the popular culture of wax museum displays. Concentrating on the waxy iconic aspect of the Auto-Icon reminds us that Bentham lived during what was arguably a golden age of wax museums, when their purpose was to satisfy appetites for both pedagogy and entertainment. Wax as a privileged medium linking the deceased and the living dates to ancient times, with death masks and encaustic funerary portraiture providing especially lifelike examples.³⁹ But the sense of wax's historical role in preserving true likenesses and lifelike qualities, as well as its potential for historical facsimile, was in the ascendency from the late-eighteenth century into the mid-nineteenth century. London had been home to many well-known wax displays since the seventeenth century. It is likely that Bentham was aware of the Wax Works on Fleet Street, operated by modeler Mrs Salmon, whose flair for morbidity (she is said to have worn a white crepe cap with coffin trimmings, and slept in a shroud) would have highlighted the conception that wax is a connector between life and death. Stepping in her footsteps, Madame Tussaud brought her waxworks from France to England in 1802.⁴⁰ In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most wax museums also displayed anatomical specimens and biological oddities; hence even Bentham's mummified head, displaced from the top of his body by the wax head, would have been at home in the various houses of wax, also known in French as cabinets des figures.⁴¹ Particularly relevant to Bentham's desired posthumous application of the Auto-Icon is the human-wax rendezvous staged by wax impresarios, like Philippe Curtius, who, before the French Revolution, charged customers twelve sous to ‘wander among the models and touch them, imagining they were in a real salon with distinguished guests eager for clever conversation’, while a ventriloquist would perform the waxwork's part of the conversation for an additional charge.⁴²

The ‘intercourse’ with facsimiles of illustrious personages was, therefore, an Enlightenment and early-nineteenth-century notion linking the two parts of the Auto-Icon, the corpse and the wax figure. But the convention of speaking with the dead is also a rhetorical tradition with deeper historical roots. From the time of Homer, poets had used the convention of writing conversations between the living and the dead, with the dual values of mimicking the master and gleaning wisdom about the present by establishing contact with the past. In the words of literary critic, Jürgen Pieters,

The scene of the traditional conversation with the dead…lays out and organizes the practice of the historian: it provides his interest with a scenario which is that of a paradoxical question-and-answer-session in which one party is present and another is not, but which does nevertheless result in the unproblematic performance of a narrative of insight and understanding. Through this conversation, the humanist scholar attains knowledge, not so much of the past but of his own time – or better still, he gains insight in his own time through the detour of the past. ⁴³

In its classic conception, the literary topos ‘corresponds to the great historia magistra vitae model: it is founded on the parallel. It calls upon the lessons of history and valorizes imitation. Bearer of examples, the past is not (truly) of the past, for it is not outdated… Time does not march on’.⁴⁴ Bentham had updated this view of history when he emphasised the material presence of the dead body during such exchanges. In his turn, Broodthaers' interview of the Auto-Icon conjures the Enlightenment version and alters it yet again to align it more fully with other twentieth century approaches where the topos is, instead, mobilised to reveal ‘the distance that separates the living from them and, connected to that, the obligation of the living to… give them a place in our culture’.⁴⁵ Pieters observes that in its latest development, ‘[w]hile the conversation with the dead used to be about not having to miss out on the timeless wisdom of previous generations, it is now most definitely about bereavement and missing… . Apart from being gone, the dead have also turned silent’.⁴⁶

Broodthaers' artistic practice had, in fact, always given the dead a great deal of space; filtering his artworks through a canon of earlier masters, he constructed a clearly institutionalised œuvre, and placed himself in a genealogy of defunct geniuses. He delighted in a jeu d'esprit that invoked and sometimes confounded or combined his own identity with such illustrious deceased as La Fontaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, and René Magritte, in part to debunk the notion of artistic autonomy and to frame his own originality with their signs.⁴⁷ As the letter I mention earlier indicates, he began Figures of Wax with similar designs on Bentham: he would incorporate the Auto-Icon, the very figure for self-figuration, into his own film, thus imitating and appropriating the dead. Moreover, he would satirise his own process and reveal that the object of imitation was also imitative. Thus, as we have seen, he creates a genealogy for his ‘documentary’ filmmaking in the Auto-Icon, and then traces its genealogy in wax works and their traditional displays in ‘cabinet des figures’ as well as in the rhetorical figure of conversing with the dead.⁴⁸

We should note as well that Broodthaers indicates the failure of the utilitarian's intention to make a radical break with the religious past in his plans for his corpse. Whereas Bentham had intended the Auto-Icon as a secularisation of the afterlife, Broodthaers' film repeats and gently pokes fun at that ambition when the film's conversation with the dead looks less like the rational pastime of a committed materialist than like the delusional enterprise of a spiritualist. While the Auto-Icon insists on Bentham's passing, it also attests to Bentham's desire to remain in the world after his own death. Bentham's move towards a utilitarian model of death notwithstanding, the insistence on the mummification of his head and the preservation of his bones within a container are suggestive of a Christian reliquary. And though he advocated for reform by criticising the English Church as a factor in systematised political corruption, and intended his likeness to represent a rupture with religious superstition about both body and soul, it also represents continuity. This body therefore figures not simply as the replacement of a religious by a secular order, but also the ‘displacement of religious onto secular phenomena’.⁴⁹ It was precisely this kind of historical residue that continually intrigued Broodthaers, and thus the film both liquidates and recasts the ideas that it inherits from Bentham.

The Difference the Bones Make

Figures of Wax is not just another of Broodthaers' self-reflective meditations on the inescapably imitative nature of art, or on the fact that all of his art is a kind of conversation with the dead. The singularity of the Auto-Icon – part corpse and part waxwork – makes a difference in his treatment of this theme. We have noticed that the Enlightenment secularist, Bentham, could neither explain nor deny his attachment to the bodies of the dead. Physically they were only pieces of insensate matter, but psychologically and culturally they were remnants of persons and consequently they contained built-in meaning. A skeleton, both as matter and as form (insofar as it retains or is re-rearticulated as the organism's substructure), is both a synecdoche and an icon of a former person. It seemed to him and probably still seems to us to be a form of ‘natural’ representation; a kind of ‘stick figure’ of himself that the departed person cannot help but leave behind. Unlike works of art, skeletons are not consciously made, and they remain invisible to the conscious self. Bentham's will is a prospective imagining of a new kind of self-portrait that he would never behold; with death the condition of its making, he took extreme measures to insure the tethering of his body in perpetuity to his archive, and the idea of ‘Jeremy Bentham’. In the film, Broodthaers signals his awareness of the wholly retrospective nature of this particular artefact by flashing at the end of the film the names plus birth and death dates Bentham's contemporaries Beethoven and Chopin.⁵⁰ Like one's own mummified head or wax death mask, the span of one's life is usually only visually and conceptually available to posterity.

Figures of Wax, therefore, shares many of the themes and procedures of Broodthaers' larger oeuvre, for Bentham's corpse-waxwork, is a palpable case of remnants of a body preserved inside an image of itself through the activities of the period's artistic and educational institutions. The filmmaker of Figures of Wax renders the coalescence of death, institutionalisation, and value particularly overtly. In short, Figures of Wax confirms Broodthaers' career-long interest in the interweaving of identity and oeuvre with institutions of cultural production and display. And yet this project makes death the key enabling factor more insistently than the others do. It can be seen, moreover, as providing a revelation with regards to Broodthaers' project of self-representation. As the film grapples with the temptation to converse with the illustrious dead, it mobilises and reorganises Broodthaers' usual themes in such a way that they reveal the sense of loss behind the post-war uses of the convention. By invoking past masters, he had moulded his ‘own’ admittedly parasitic identity inside theirs, and vice versa. Figures of Wax goes much farther in exploring his relation to the dead by envisioning a confrontation with a corpse and the rigid wax head that will not speak to him. This film confronts a figure so anchored in the corporeality of the corpse that it can only mutely suggest one message: Jeremy Bentham is still dead. It is this un-uncanny attitude that characterises post-war representations of conversations with the dead.⁵¹ The Auto-Icon stands for the finality of death, but also for a persistent desire to side-step death and re-animate the dead by incorporating their remains into us; it stages the simultaneous necessity and futility of that drive. The silence of the dead in this film speaks volumes. It says that no amount of modern enlightenment would allow Jeremy Bentham to regard his future corpse as merely insensate matter, and that no amount of post-modern play would let Marcel Broodthaers regard this Auto-Icon containing Bentham's corpse as just another waxwork.