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30/6/2003

Marcel Broodthaers

Kunsthalle Wien, Wien

The Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924 - 1976) was more of a poet, journalist, and photographer when he decided, at the age of 40, to become an artist. His entry into the fine arts was strategically planned and resulted from his reflections on the art scene. On the invitations to his first exhibition in 1964, he announced: 'I, too, asked myself whether I could sell something and be successful in life ... in the end I had the idea to invent something dishonest....' The entire invitation was printed on four-color magazine advertisements. Broodthaers presented himself in a radically subversive way. His offensive offer was a pleasure with obstacles. The central object of the exhibition consisted of a 'recycling sculpture': namely, 50 plastered over, unsold (sic!) copies of his book of poetry Pense-Bête.

Commencing from this programmatic turning point between text and sculpture, language and object, Broodthaers followed a path along his vision of the politique magique, which attempted the feat of grasping reality through fiction. As though wandering through a dream, he switched back and forth between medias and roles, worlds and languages. In a masterly fashion he nested in the interstices and defended poetry against interpretation. He coquettishly tossed values and ideas into the economic market and investigated their exchange value and the category of added value. He placed semantics and syntax of language and image together in new connections. These picture puzzles are tied in with a new system for reading the world - he brought in literature and nature studies or even ethnology as sources.

For Broodthaers, poetry is an instrument for proceeding beyond the straitjacket of classification systems. It destabilizes that which is well known, removes it from the circular system of availability and produces a new poetic universe in which nothing can be classified and everything is possible - a radical critique of our cultural and technological achievements.

In 1968, in his apartment in Brussels, Broodthaers founded the fictive Musée d’Art Moderne with himself in the role of director. He thereby showed by example how a complex reality arises around nothing, from a claim, through the outgrowths. In doing so he displayed great virtuosity in using cultural codes and systems such as the museum, including its tags, labels, and signs, or the signature of the artist as proof of the original as well as the existence.
Additional to that is a questioning of our knowledge systems: the archive, the library, in short the institutions that define values and write history. In other works, he also thematized the book, the illustrated chart, and the signature of the artist as proof of the original, the esteem and self-ascertainment of existence.

Broodthaers understood media such as film, printing techniques, photography, but also public letters as processes - which is also how he understood exhibitions themselves, in which he continually produced new structural relations in his work. His works in all of the reproductive media serve to examine the media themselves, which he sees as vehicles to make reality representable. His projections - both film and photography - are fundamental starting points in his confrontation with imagination and appearance. Broodthaers’ (thought) figures operate in the imaginary realm. His works are demonstrations of the production of sense: incomplete, unstructured, and placed in constantly changing meanings and contexts. The means involved are diverse and rhetorically complex. They range from paradox to irony, humor to polemics. That which is foreign, the stereotype of the faraway, the exotic, the unknown journey - lead to one focal point: the hard trade of the economy, which underlies every production that addresses the money market, the reigning capitalist culture.

The exhibition shows explicitly those works which, on the one hand, revolve around the concepts of brand, trade value, original, and copy and on the other, mark out the field of travel, colonization, and the exotic. This first solo exhibition of Marcel Broodthaers in Austria highlights in particular the thematical relations within his work based on a selection of editions, graphics, slide projections, and films.

Curators: Sabine Folie, Gabriele Mackert

Press conference: Tuesday, 1 July 2003, 10 a.m.
Opening: Tuesday, 1 July 2003, 7 p.m.

Daily 10 am - 7 pm, Thurs. 10 am - 10 pm

Credits: Marcel Broodthaers, Werbeanzeige für van Laack - 1971 in: Der Spiegel, 22. März 1971, S. 166
© Estate Marcel Broodthaers, Brüssel, © VBK Wien 2003

KUNSTHALLE wien
Museumsplatz 1
A-1070 Wien
Tel: +43-1-521 89-1221
Fax: +43-1-521 89-1220

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