Marcel Broodthaers

Muse dArt Moderne - Dpartement des Aigles

Monnaie de Paris

11, Quai de Conti, 75006 Paris

April 18th - July 5th, 2015

Published at Hyperallergic.com as Marcel Broodthaers Killed Art with Currency

http://hyperallergic.com/215829/marcel-broodthaers-killed-art-with-currency/

Installation view of Muse dArt Moderne - Dpartement des Aigles

I suspect that those in the flow of the globalized 1% Art for Money Sake trend running rampant

(albeit killing the goose of artistic intention that laid the golden egg) are purposefully ignorant of

Ursula Meyer key 1972 proposal. In her seminal anthology Conceptual Art she clearly and rightly

articulates that art is not in the objects, but in the artist's conception of art to which the objects

are subordinated. (p. XI)

A complex yet pertinent example of Meyer's truth is Marcel Broodthaerss sprawling installation

piece Muse dArt Moderne - Dpartement des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art - Department

of Eagles) (1968-1972). It takes us back to a time when money and power ran infrastructure from

a high. Back then, the artists in the Belgium group Surraliste-revolutionnaire - with whom

Broodthaers associated - knew where to attack power: up. Where the eagles fly.

It is important to grasp context here, as this exhibition is ironically presented at Monnaie de Paris,

where for twelve centuries currency has been produced for circulation. In this weighty context,

Broodthaers invites a reflection on and reevaluation of the role that art as currency plays within

our increasingly connected contemporary society. Something that is consistent with the fact that

from the early days of his career as an artist, Broodthaers drew parallels between the work of art

itself and its financial worth. This is most obvious with his Gold Ingot (1970-71). Thus the

artists reflections on liquidity-as-art-as-data hold a particular resonance here. At least as an

amuse bouche.

Gold Ingot (1970-71) Museum of Modern Art, Financial Section, Department of Eagles

This exhibition is of/on Broodthaers major work, Muse dart Moderne - Dpartement des

Aigles. Chiara Parisi curated it in close collaboration with Maria Gilissen Broodthaers and Marie

Puck Broodthaers (with many loans from public and private collections). It more-or-less

reconstructs Muse dart Moderne - Dpartement des Aigles in its most complete and

accomplished form seen to date. In it, Broodthaers passed the idea of art between the two

tendencies of fiction and reality, as demonstrated in his Plaques (Pomes industriels) (1968-

1972) signs.

Muse dArt Moderne - Dpartement des Aigles - S. Littraire Fig. 1 et 2 (1971) Plaque en

plastique embouti Estate Marcel Broodthaers

Muse d'Art Moderne, Dpartement des Aigles, Section Publicit (1971) Plaque en plastique

embouti Estate Marcel Broodthaers

Plaques (Pomes industriels) (1968-1972), 16 plaques en plastique embouti et peint, Estate

Marcel Broodthaers, prt de longue dure S.MA.K. Gand. Salle 6. Morgane Walter

Broodthaers's truthiness remains relevant to us as his rather complex, mostly futile and

melancholy work reveals the edges of both the power of an art collection and the power of market

finance. It represents a lame effort to dispute traditional museum and money practices by

appropriating and altering their power and wealth as he makes the exhibition of a collection itself

a means of artistic expression, one that comments on financial and cultural power.

Granted, Broodthaers's Museum of Modern Art - Department of Eagles was once audacious - a

conceptual museum first created in his Brussels home at 30 rue de la Ppinire. It had neither a

permanent collection nor permanent location, and manifested itself in sections appearing at

various locations between 1968 and 1971. These sections typically consisted of reproductions of

works of art, fine-art crates, wall inscriptions, and film elements.

The venture gained extra merit in 1970, when Broodthaers conceived of the Financial Section of

the museum that encompassed an attempt to sell the museum on account of bankruptcy. The

sale was announced on the cover of the Cologne Art Fair catalogue in 1971. No buyers were

found. As part of the Financial Section, Broodthaers also produced an unlimited edition of gold

ingots stamped with the museum's emblem of an eagle, a symbol traditionally associated with

high power. The ingots were sold to raise money for the museum, at a price calculated by

doubling the market value of gold, the surcharge representing the bar's value as art.

Here we have both relevance and paradox. One wonders what that could mean today in the

context of what Brussels-based collector Alain Servais sees in terms of all of the money thats

pouring in to the art market from all over () spoiling things. Servais is critical of the

relationship between the museums, and the galleries saying that right now only the wealthy

galleries can get their artists work into museums. But a real 1% Art for Money Saker doesnt

much care for showing art. Recently The New York Times published an article by William Alden

on the art storage enterprise Uovo (a $70m state-of-the-art storage facility for high-end artwork

that is also a private high-end market place) entitled Art for Money's Sake.

The abysmal situation of the treatment of art as stored financial data for high-end investment

(ready to trade not publicly to be seen) might fit Broodthaers's head-games, but it does not fit

my (or most artist's) conception of art. It does not ask what new forms of subjectivity are

suggested by the presentation of - and confrontation with the art. It just places something (might

as well be a Broodthaers reproduction-as-art) into a state of waiting in the cool dry dark. Art

becomes a semi-dead, bloodless thing. Waiting on a flip.

Therefore, via the Ursula Meyer mandate, this stuff is temporarily no longer art, regardless of

what Broodthaers might suggest, as it no longer functions socially in a broad way. Broodthaers

golden ignot can have, and deserves, the name golden investment object, but not art. Cultural

objects disconnected from the people at large no longer function as art. They are points of inert

trading data. Limbo corpses in cold storage caught up in the spinning washing machine of the

global economy.

Installation view of Muse dArt Moderne - Dpartement des Aigles

Of course this is not to suggest Broodthaers is at fault for this soapy situation - just complacent

and premature. Broodthaers created a polymorphic artistic production over a period of only ten

years. After abandoning his studies in chemistry in 1942, his life is punctuated by his poetry,

publications of articles and art criticism and his small movies. Broodthaers made his first film in

1957, and from 1967 he produced over 50 short films in documentary, narrative, and

experimental styles. He later worked principally with assemblies of found objects and collage,

often containing written texts. He incorporated written language in his art and used whatever was

at hand for his raw materials, most notably egg shells and mussels, but also furniture, clothing,

garden tools, household gadgets and (most telling) art reproductions. In Visual Tower (1966),

not in the show, Broodthaers made a seven-story circular tower of wood and filled each story

with uniform glass jars. In every jar he placed an identical image of the eye of a young woman

taken from an illustrated magazine. So a sardonic humor runs through his work that plays on the

relationship between art and its representation, between original and copy, between fiction and

reality.

My own rather negligible reading of the art market today suggests something needs to be washed

from this Broodthaers myth: his powers of poetic vague in-betweeness. The valuation of art is

now widely considered to be a precise number that represents art-financial-data. For him, art was

a communal activity that is enthusiastic about the solitude and privacy of the artist and the

viewer. A past communal memory that is suggestive of inner freedom and mystical self-

enhancement for all. One that beckons a look deeper. That does not compute as value in the

marketplace of late. The moment Broodthaerss once-art-now-gold enters a hermetically sealed

museum-quality environment, all deep flows have been halted. Art-as-gold is exclusively

hoarded commodities. Sitting on the chopping block. Squandering away its artness.

Given that financial situation, Broodthaerss fake museum with real gold makes clear that it is

unacceptable to be dull-witted and passive about the situation. Artists are now more or less

obliged to be hyper aware of the technological unconscious that operates powerfully through the

art=money equation. Perhaps Broodthaers wrongly assumed to have been operating in a

benevolent public space of culture. Even if Broodthaers only meant to call society's financial

bluff, he lost big. With Museum of Modern Art - Department of Eagles, Broodthaers may have

wanted to make social networks visible in a way that makes capable the opening of occult

systems through a mixing dry humor with dryad absurdity. This approach, or taste, he formed

through the inner integration of Mallarm, Magritte and Duchamp. He has failed. Perhaps he

began poorly.

Broodthaers spent 20 years in poverty as a struggling poet and at the end of 1963 decided to

become a visual artist and began to make objects by performing the symbolic act of embedding

fifty unsold copies of his book of poems Pense-Bte in plaster. From 1969 on, Broodthaers lived

mainly in Dsseldorf, Berlin, and finally London, dying of liver disease in Cologne on his 52nd

birthday.

Twenty-four years after the retrospective dedicated to him at the Jeu de Paume, this show does

him no service by stressing financial concerns within his criticism of meaning and context and in

his staging of exhibition dcor. His questioning of the museum and money may have launched

what has become known as "institutional critique," in which interrelationships between artworks,

the artist, and the museum are focused upon, but the focus has gone soft in light of the increasing

importance of state-of-the-art storage facility for high-end artwork that is also a private high-end

market place.

Cinma Modle, Programme La Fontaine (1970), Projections de cinq films, Estate Marcel

Broodthaers. Section Cinma

The abysmal post-Broodthaer situation of the treatment of art as stored financial data for high-end

investment (ready to trade not publicly to be seen) does not fit a valuable conception of art. For

a possibly catchier phrase for this kind of misleading market transcendent object I considered

golden Broodthaers. I like the way that sounds in my inner ear. But perhaps we need to

temporarily drop Broodthaers's Financial Section altogether, so as to strip the investment object

of even that worth. And just call that luxury stuff goldart. Stuff in a temperature controlled dark

room is temporarily too philosophically weak to call art, as it is, more precisely, the (temporary)

end of art (as art is a social memory pleasure service).

The flip side of flip art is Broodthaers's Gold Ingot as goldart made flat and uninteresting by

the steamrolling of the (so called) free market. My critical point is that Broodthaers's Financial

Section project foresaw but failed to resist zombified goldart something that has become a

salient feature of our cultural times. Broodthaers's tongue-in-cheek satire with Gold Ingot only

helped create the teeming but tepid homogenization of culture brought on through the effects of

globalized capital. I feel that it was Broodthaers's role (duty) to call out the artistic dishonesty of

art's grandiose posturing in a more effective manner. Broodthaers's Financial Section needed to

put forward an anti-art function that stressed the importance of interpretation over

implementation. Some form of social empowerment that sustains subjectivity in light of the

specific conditions and relations of power that are imminent to goldart - and its violent

appropriation of art typical of empire (including its inevitable delusions of grandeur).

Broodthaers's Museum needed an aesthetic philosophy of transfiguration achieved through

dissonance, not cynical mockery. Of course, one with a healthy jocular sensuality that is spiritual,

even as it posits a common ground that becomes the starting point to elaborate new forms of art

suited to the high-end structure of contemporary power.

Post-Financial Section art now requires a fucking with the horizontal invisibility of big data

infrastructure, and most people hardly know what their electronic devices do behind their backs.

The network of networks within which we and our money communicate and interact today is, to a

great extent, based on infrastructures and devices that are increasingly and invisibly post-medium.

The now famous post-medium idea of art was formulated by art critic Rosalind Krauss in her

1999 essay A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition where she

discusses the work of Broodthaers in terms of conceptual art, television, and poststructuralist

theory. However, Krauss tied her idea to the Greenbergian concept of medium-specificity where

media is recognized as differential and self-differing.

With networked mobile computers and artificial intelligence at work now, Krausss preferred

older techniques have become increasingly outmoded the way Financial Section has and a period

of retro-media has ensued in which unproblematic art practices were found to function in

essentially complicit ways with global investment capital. This has been seen in recent run-away

secondary market prices for effectively average abstract paintings by young men.

Krauss, like Broodthaers's Museum of Modern Art - Department of Eagles, failed to overthrow

anything. Artworks need new materials, new definitions and new conditions, with new rituals and

ceremonies, to survive as art. Krauss's theory, like Broodthaers's Museum failed to provide a

different discursive framework for art than formal object-hood. It failed in providing art today

with an escape from the melancholia of market doxa. Broodthaers's cynical satire offered no way

to re-establishing arts role as the common ground for collective imaginaries, shared aesthetic and

ethical aspirations. But I think that there is something in the general groping artistic nature of

Broodthaers's museum money project to make hopeful, pictorial observations possible, if we

reject him. The creation of new forms of demythologizing art and money is one of the key jobs of

art. It is that philosophy that gives art it true value.

Joseph Nechvatal