Broodthaers at Monnaie

At the Monnaie de Paris, a retrospective on Marcel Broodthaers, thanks to outstanding loans, adds sense, valuable notes and information to his personal mythology and research.

Marcel Broodthaers, Jardin d'hiver, Monnaie de Paris

Shaped by the delightful and outmoded sound of cinema projectors and perfectly in tune re material and location, the Marcel Broodthaers exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris keeps Baudelaire’s promise of “a second of eternity”.

This retrospective, designed by the curators to be precise but not exhaustive, functions like most of the experimental films by the Belgian artist who died in 1976, requiring contextualisation and benefiting from real décor, the splendid Monnaie de Paris building. It is conceived as a posthumous autograph or rather a self portrait that is as insincere as possible, as the artist often described his practice.

Marcel Broodthaers, Monnaie de Paris, 2015

Adhering to the narcissistic model that was at the core of his scathing criticism of the art system – Je me regarde dans un film comme dans un miroir l’idée me suffisait – this is a commented exhibition – and extremely precise, thanks to outstanding loans from museums and private owners – which adds sense, valuable notes and information to his personal mythology and research. Broodthaers seized on the aporias of musty 19th-century museum liturgy and formalised it in a vigorous series of direct comparisons with post-war conceptual research.

Marcel Broodthaers, <i>Section des Figures</i>, Monnaie de Paris 2015 — Marcel Broodthaers, *Section des Figures*, Monnaie de Paris 2015

He challenged the great protagonists on their own terrain, from Beuys to Warhol (for whom he cried), and sought via an imponderable number of exhibitions and actions to free himself of the problem of the work, of authenticity, of value and subject, in sole favour of consistent artistic practices that laid the artistic tautology bare. He was a poet not a filmmaker and used words to prepare and inject his work with a philosophy that verged on the happening for the quantum of surprises he could bring into an exhibition.

Marcel Broodthaers, *Lettres Ouvertes*, Monnaie de Paris 2015

J’aimerais controler le sens de la culture was a huge undertaking and reappeared in the odd passage in his Lettres Ouvertes to colleagues –from David Lamelas to Immendorf – and to institutional figures – from the Belgian Ministry of Culture to the Berlin senators – in a post-1968 ambience in which the pithy political sign questions the organisation, fruition and perception of the artistic event. Broodthaers turned up at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels with a camel and invented museums that prohibited entry to children.

The very opposite of today’s tour-operator art, here post-prophetically parodied by his 1975 Monsieur Teste, a small doll reading L’Express in front of a large tourist-agency poster of a tropical beach, the man intentionally turning his back to the view.

Marcel Broodthaers, <i>Monsieur Teste</i>, 1975, Monnaie de Paris 2015 — Marcel Broodthaers, *Monsieur Teste*, 1975, Monnaie de Paris 2015

By the late 1960s, he was a Master to all those engaged in simulation practices. This considerate display of handwritten letterings, humble materials and simple 1970s’ technology confirms a profound awareness, which is why his work is at the heart of a revival and his fame is spreading from a small audience of devoted documentation consumers to the more consistent realisation by artistic institutions that they can show his work again without running the risk of remodelling it.

Marcel Broodthaers, <i>Salle Blanche</i>, Monnaie de Paris 2015 — Marcel Broodthaers, *Salle Blanche*, Monnaie de Paris 2015

In this exhibition, Chiara Parisi, working in close collaboration with Maria Glissen Broodthaers and Marie Puck Broodthaers, has retained unaltered the critical presence and poetic inventions that are key to understanding the artist but has also embarked on the testing challenge of reconstructing some of the “sections” of the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles of which the artist proclaimed himself director and conservator.

This visionary work continues to question the art system, demolishing it from the foundations. There are obsessive and precarious aspects and a fair helping of domesticity and “officialness”, from its presentation in his Brussels apartment to the 1972 Documenta V in Kassel where the artist focused exclusively on the advertising side of the artwork Section Publicité, a store of materials and figures that has strongly inspired and informed the practices of generations of younger artists.

Marcel Broodthaers, <i>Section Financière</i>, Monnaie de Paris 2015 — Marcel Broodthaers, *Section Financière*, Monnaie de Paris 2015

It is no accident that the gold lingot chosen to present the Section Financière here at the Monnaie belongs to the artist Danh Vo, whose research is closely linked to the use of gold and settings similar to those of Broodthaers, underscoring the physical permanence of this continuity.

Presented on the cover of the 1971 Cologne Art Fair Catalogue and with a totally fictitious value far removed from the market one – twice the price because a work of art – this gold bar is not a work but a stock index, a portable monument to the exploded equivalence of blue-chip art and with only today’s financial connotation. It marked a turning point in the history of the artist’s very personal Musée, put up for sale on account of bankruptcy, but prompts several reflections. As do the transport crates, palms, editions and reconstruction of the splendid Salle Blanche, as presented by Pontus Hultén in Paris in 1975 in the early history of the Centre Pompidou.

Marcel Broodthaers, Projection sur caisse, Monnaie de Paris 2015

Visitors move through a world of critical poetry or, perhaps, a manifest declaration of incompatibility with the system. What is moved and evoked here begins with the reconstruction of a room in his home and unconsciously opens a window on the extraordinary loans of the showcase and multi-billionaire museums of our times.

Broodthaers used to say that his tender and poetic museum of “resistance”, with postcards of masterpieces, projected slides and crates loaned by the Menkés transport firm, was born out of circumstance and the concept really came afterwards. This is harder to believe today now that this subject – the museum business – has convinced the public imagination that it is above criticism; or, more probably, these are the starting points for a clearer understanding of the art of the near future.

Broodthaers at Monnaie

At the Monnaie de Paris, a retrospective on Marcel Broodthaers, thanks to outstanding loans, adds sense, valuable notes and information to his personal mythology and research.

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