In 1964, at age forty, Marcel Broodthaers (1924--1976) proclaimed that his years of writing poetry -- of being "good for nothing," in his words -- were over, and a brief but dazzling artistic career began. Considered a founding father of institutional critique, Broodthaers created hundreds of objects, books, films, photographs and exhibitions, including a "fictive" museum of modern art that evolved from an installation in his own home to a massive exhibition of over three hundred works representing eagles. In The Absence of Work, Rachel Haidu argues that all of Broodthaers´s art is defined by its relationship to language. His perception of his poetry´s "failure to communicate" led him to explore in his art the noncommunicative, nontransparent uses of words. Haidu´s characterization of Broodthaers´s contribution to institutional critique represents a major departure from the usual approach to this movement. With The Absence of Work, one of the first monographs on Broodthaers in English, Haidu demystifies a crucial and enigmatic figure in postwar and contemporary art