Marcel Broodthaers: Décor

Here we play every day^[1]

Repetition and erasure; writing and image; canons and fictions. The apparent opposition of these terms make it possible to determine some of the main features that constitute the conceptual horizon of Marcel Broodthaers’ production (1963-1976). With a great deal of irony, he put in check issues of taste and subscribing to a signature. Knowing that the purpose of this bourgeois invention was always to forge an idea of singularity, he decided to associate it with its opposite principle, that of the unlimited circulation, in the title La Signature, series 1, Tirage illimité (1969) – which, in contrast, refers to a work itself of limited circulation.

Broodthaers was as a poet until his strategic entry into the field of visual arts with Pense-bête (1964), his first sculptural work from his book of poems that, immobilized in plaster, acquire a three-dimensional existence.

His experiments focus, from the outset, on the banality of everyday culture, as can be seen in his works with pots, pans, charcoal, mussels, eggshells, etc. Although the famous Belgian artist René Magritte (1898-1967), with whom he established an intense dialog, also questioned the relationship between words and objects, Broodthaers will expand this reflection beyond the familiar limits of the painting.

Amidst the convulsive events of May 1968, Marcel Broodthaers participated with other artists in the occupation of the Palais de Beaux Arts in Brussels, aiming to challenge the role of that museum in the capital, that is, the relationship between art and society. In September 1968, he established in his house the Musée d'Art Moderne – Département des Aigles, his most complex project and today seen as a turning point in the history of 20th century art. 

Structured in twelve sections, this fictional museum declared its closing in 1972. During these five years, in parallel with the museum sections (1968 – 1972), the artist produced the industrial plastic plates which are a very important part of his work. Broodthaers devoted this entire period to simultaneously legitimize and denounce the functioning of collections and the arbitrary mechanisms of the institution's role and, ultimately, of Art itself.

The institutional apparatus of Art would be identified, thus, from a series of interdictions and operational elements that constitute it. Hence the production of signs that emulate the signaling system of these spaces, with indications such as the arrows we see in Museum – musée, Section Cinéma (1971), which wittily point to opposite directions. The invitations to the openings allow us to follow the profile of this mission, as in Département des Aigles, Section Cinema (1971).

Still in the institutional realm, Marcel Broodthaers introduces the concept of Décor, structuring each exhibition as a work in itself – hence the constant challenge of gathering loose pieces that can be presented repeatedly as an organized set. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he was an exhibition maker, someone who mastered the art of display so deeply that he impressed the status of language on the exhibition, even adding soundtracks to connect words, objects, palm trees and other elements in the space.

Among the most representative works of this moment of Broodthaers’ production are Un Jardin d’Hiver [A Winter Garden] and Ne dites pas que je ne l’ai pas dit [Don’t Say I Didn’t Say So], both from 1974. The latter, which we’re happy to be able to show, consists of the arrangement of a cage with an alive grey parrot, two palm trees and a table on which is seen the catalog of a 1966 exhibition in which his text Ma Rhétorique can be found, which, in turn, echoes in a recording where we hear the artist says “Je tautologue. Je conserve. Je sociologue. Je manifeste manifestement.” [I tautologue. I conserve. I sociologue. I manifest manifestly].

Text and voice, object and image, animal and plant: the grouping of these elements synthesize Broodthaers' effort to explode the senses and embrace multimedia works. On this, the artist would comment: “I have tried to articulate in a different way the objects and pictures made on dates ranging between 1964 and this year, to form the rooms in the spirit of décor. That is to say, to give back to the object or painting a real function. The Décor is not an end in itself.”^[2]

Marcel Broodthaers created for himself a system of recurring signs based on elements that will be recombined in different supports and situations. This is the case of the moules – an ambiguous word that, in French, designates both mussels and molds – and of the eggshells that appear in various works, both appropriated in natura as well as drawn, photographed or in texts. Other examples can be found in the colors of the Belgian flag and in the coal of Trois tas de charbon [Three Piles of Coal] (1966).

The repetition of varied images in the work Bateau Tableau, which consists of 80 slides as a projection, and the book and film A Voyage on the North Sea, both from 1973, operating a kind of iconographic encounter (painting, photography, and film) of the same motif – which is a XIX century painting – to construct an overlapping and timed image: a boat at sea.

I've been using photographic canvases, films, slides, to establish the relationships between the object and the image of that object, and also the relationships that exist between the sign and the signification of a particular object: writing.

M.B., 1968

Visual poetry has accompanied Marcel Broodthaers' production throughout his career. His interest in written language continued to be nurtured and exercised mainly through works in which approximations between word and referent are tensioned in different ways: either in a kind of investigation of the correspondence between the named element and the term that designates it, as when he incessantly repeats the word pot [pot, container] and draws a pot beside it; or in a kind of exercise of correspondence confusion when he writes the word moules next to images of eggs.

The imbrication of gesture with writing is seen both in his handwriting, sometimes shaky, erased and errant, as well as in works such as La Pluie (Projet pour un texte) [The Rain (Project for a Text)] (1969), in which, while under a downpour, writing boils down to its mere act, since whoever writes has their words diluted and erased by the rain and yet persist in the gesture.

There is also a frequent game between the signifier and the signified, as observed in Les Poissons [Fish] (1975) when, on the canvas, we see the names of the elements that would be portrayed there, and not their form, including alleged intruders among the “fish”, notably the “egg” next to the “herrings”.

After being questioned by his editor regarding the motive for which he published a book, Broodthaers answered: “To make out dedications and establish an art/merchandise relationship.” The dialogue is featured on the sheet pasted over the initial pages of the book Vingt Ans Après, by Alexandre Dumas, written in 1845, and whose reedition as Livre de Poche in two volumes was appropriated by Brooodthaers in 1969, when he adds to it a partial book jacket with his name.

According to Rosalind Krauss, if we were to name Broodthaers’ main medium, it would be fiction.^[3] It is not a coincidence, therefore, that the artist uses a 19th century novel to intervene in the imaginary of creation. If the novel was the “technical support through which fiction was conventionalized during the 19th century”^[4], the artist expanded his speculative field, since, according to his own words, “a fiction allows us to grasp reality and at the same time what it hides.”

The inexhaustible nature of the problems addressed by Marcel Broodthaers in his work is what invites us on the journey: it is as if, somehow, everything was there. It's always good to remember the humorous aspect of Marcel Broodthaers’ work, lending lightness to the estrangement it can provoke. His message couldn’t be more playful:

À mes amis,

... peuple non admis. On joue ici tous les jours, jusqu’à la fin du monde.

M.B., 1968^[5]