Marcel Broodthaers: Décor
Apr. 2nd – May 28, 2022
Gomide&Co is excited to present: Marcel Broodthaers: Décor, the first solo exhibition of the Belgian artist in Brazil. Opening on April 2nd at 11am, the show will be open to the public until May 28th, 2022. The exhibition presents a set of 37 works made by Broodthaers between 1963 and 1975, who has already had retrospectives of his work at the MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art, in New York, at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid, besides a vast history of solo shows in institutions such as Tate Gallery (London), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Jeu de Paume (Paris), among others.
Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) was born in Brussels, Belgium, and worked substantially as a poet until his 40s when, in 1964, he proclaimed himself a visual artist. In his 12 years as an artist before his untimely death in 1976, he created a large and influential body of work ranging from his early objects made of books of his own poetry, mussels, and eggshells, to his more ambitious projects such as the Musée d’Art Moderne - Département des Aigles [Museum of Modern Art – Department of Eagles] and his distinctive Décors. The latter brought unprecedented exhibition configurations, one of the reasons why Broodthaers continues to exercise a significant influence on a wide range of artists, and is of fundamental relevance to the discourse of contemporary culture and society in general.
In 1968, Broodthaers declared that he was no longer an artist, and appointed himself director of his own museum. The Musée d’Art Moderne - Département des Aigles was Marcel Broodthaers: Décor a fictional museum in which, instead of devoting himself to the exhibition of art objects, Broodthaers focused on the production of materials analogous to museum activities, such as documentation, posters, invitations, advertising, and finances.
By assuming the position of an authority figure – the museum director –, Broodthaers questioned the formalities and structural problems of museums, and the criteria for legitimizing a work of art, providing a rich commentary on the role of institutions in society. Over the course of four years, the Museum functioned circumstantially, with itinerant passages through seven cities. These passages acted as sectors or sections, and constituted 12 temporary presentations that were not limited to a single language but sought to synthesize the complexity of Broodthaers’ work through films, artworks, objects, catalogs, and exhibition invitations. Three of these “sections” were featured in Kassel’s documenta 5 in 1972: the Publicity Section, the Modern Art Section, and the Gallery of the 20th Century.
Another work from this period, La Salle Blanche, from 1975 – acquired by the Centre Pompidou in 1989 and exhibited at the 22nd São Paulo Biennial: Rupture with the support in 1994 – makes direct reference to the Musée d’Art Moderne - Département des Aigles. It is a full-scale reproduction of the studio where the museum project was born in 1968. In the work, the walls and ceiling have been filled with inscriptions of words (in French) that evoke the art world, such as “toile” (canvas), “huile” (oil), “composition” (composition), “ombre” (shadow), among others. The recurrent pictorial treatment of words reinforces the importance of writing and words in Broodthaers’ work as a whole.
“What is painting? Well, it is literature. What is literature then? Well it is painting.”- Marcel Broodthaers, What is Painting...? c. 1963 in Marcel Broodthaers (London, Tate Gallery, 1980), p.27.
One of the highlights of the exhibition is the installation from 1974, Ne dites pas que je ne l’ai pas dit, consisting of two palm trees, a Congo parrot, a display case containing two copies of the catalog of his 1966 homonymous exhibition at the Wide White Space Gallery – a 1966 copy and a 1974 reprint – set to a recording of the artist reading his poem “Moi Je dis Je Moi Je dis...”. In his last years, Broodthaers began to assemble older works with recent works, adding new elements to them. This process resulted in installation works that ended up acting as retrospectives of his own work, wittily subverting the concept of retrospective and evoking the mutability of the artist’s narrative regarding the context and circumstance in which the work is presented.
Similarly, in the video La Pluie (projet pour un texte) from 1969 – shown in Brazil in 2006 at the 27th Bienal de São Paulo: How to live together – where Broodthaers obstinately tries to write a text with an ink pen in the rain until he finds himself overpowered, it is through this irony, recurrent in his works, that Broodthaers introduces a critical commentary on the artist’s sincerity as a product of the circumstances and the contradictions of artistic production, of its revolutions and its paradoxes, contesting the idea of authenticity, as in the series of silkscreens La Signature (1969), an unlimited edition – signed – of the repetitive reproduction of his signature.
The exhibition also presents some examples of the Poèmes Industriels series that the artist created between 1968 and 1972 while director of the Musée d’Art Moderne – Département Les Aigles. These are plates that use image as text and text as image, and about them Broodthaers said: “Know that these plates are made just as waffles are made.” His words are not as arbitrary as they seem, since the Poèmes are plates made of injected melted plastic (vacuum thermoforming) – an industrial technique widely used to make advertisements, as well as the classic Belgian dish made of a mixture of flour and eggs pressed between two burning metal surfaces. Therefore, Broodthaers suggests another critical commentary on the effects of advertising and mass production. The Poèmes Industriels series was recently featured in an unprecedented exhibition at WIELS in Brussels, which brought together 120 plates, plus more than a hundred documents, drawings, and letters.
The exhibition Marcel Broodthaers: Décor at Gomide&Co is an opportunity to witness the most extensive grouping of the artist’s works held in the country since 2006, the year in which Broodthaers figures as an essential artist for the premise of the 27th São Paulo Biennial, curated by Lisette Lagnado. In this way, we hope to re-introduce to the Brazilian public the fertile production of an outstanding artist, who elaborated and subverted the thought and practice of art in an insightful way that remains current to this day.
After organizing important exhibitions of artists such as Joseph Beuys, Bruce Conner and Martin Kippenberger, Marcel Broodthaers’ exhibition at Gomide & Co reaffirms the gallery’s commitment on maintaining an open dialogue with exponents of conceptual art.