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| Marcel Broodthaers. ("Moi aussi...Galerie St Laurent"). 1964 |
Marcel Broodthaers: Invitation to a Voyage
March 5 - May 15, 2016
Marcel Broodthaers: Invitation to a
Voyage,
the first comprehensive survey of artist’s publicity by Marcel Broodthaers (1924
– 1976) consists of hundreds of rarely seen artist’s exhibition announcements,
manifestoes, posters, advertisements, hand-outs, press releases and open
letters conceived and distributed during the Belgian conceptualist’s brief but
intensive artistic career (1964 – 76). The exhibition opens at Alden Projects™
on March 05 (12:00 to 6:00) and runs through May 15, 2016.
This is no ordinary
publicity. Drawing from an unparalleled archive, Alden Projects™ unpacks scores
of never previously exhibited material, virtually all of which is entirely
absent from concurrently running Marcel Broodthears exhibitions in New York. Proposed
as a vital supplement for these other surveys, this exhibition curated by Alden
Projects™ Director, Todd Alden provides a specific and nearly comprehensive local
map of Marcel Broodthaers’ exhibition network, frequently printed not in the
familiar fonts preferred by his fellow Conceptual artists (e.g. typewriter),
but in 19th century script fonts with cryptic designs announcing his
very particular discourse network. (Warning: this material is opaque,
programmatically contradictory, and challenging to apprehend.) Unfolding
according to the artist’s shifting designs are the manifold exhibition
announcements, publicity, press releases, and other language-based open
letters, for example, issued by the artist’s own fictional Musée d’art Moderne,
founded in 1968 and closed in 1972 (“Museum for sale due to bankruptcy,” according
to the artist’s poster in this show published by the Artworker Star, Amsterdam).
As an artist who dedicated an entire
section of his fictional museum to publicity—one “wing” is titled “Section
Publicité”—it stands to reason that the publicity that the artist conceived
relating to own fictional museum (as elsewhere)—the invitations, the press
releases, the advertisements, the open letters, etc. were not conceived as
conventional supplements or as simple documentation—in other words, they were not addressed as elements to be
understood separately from, and external to the “proper” works of art in the
artist’s museum--but rather, this artist’s
publicity, these performances in script were also very pointedly conceived,
addressed, and distributed as integral elements of Broodthaers’ proper work
too. It is extraordinary that prior to
this exhibition, so much of this material has remained unregistered and little considered.
As an ex-poet formerly
associated with Belgian Surrealism, Broodthaers made art about shifting
alphabets, and the latter was sometimes associated with literary inspiration:
purloined letters, messages in bottles, and industrial poems to name only a few
(the alphabets of Baudelaire, Poe, and Mallarmé were like clay for the artist).
The title of this exhibition is partly inspired by a poem by Baudelaire, the
translator of Poe to whom Broodthaers dedicated multiple books of his own work.
Like a message in a bottle, all of the material in this show was conceived and freely
disseminated by the artist (or by his associates) at his behest, mostly in tiny
quantities to handfuls of fellow artists, curators, and art lovers comprising the
paltry mailing lists and audiences to whom these astonishingly original, deeply
perplexing, and surprisingly complex messages were once destined.
Although most exhibition
announcements are instrumental, inviting the viewer to witness a sincere, creative
presence in a white cube, Marcel Broodthaers’ first one-person exhibition poster
announces a very different approach to making art and publicity (which, in
Broodthaers’ “studio” / “museum” went hand in hand). Having been struck by the
developments of American Pop art in Paris in 1963-64, Broodthaers’ announced his
transformation from poet to artist after hitting upon “the idea of inventing
something insincere”; tellingly, this first announcement / manifesto is printed
on different pages removed from a Belgian fashion magazine. It is difficult to
say that this collision of image-and-text—this 1964 exhibition announcement--is
less consequential than just about anything else the artist produced during his
first year at work. Another tongue-in-cheek
invitation from 1964 announces “Sophisticated Happening By Marcel Broodthaers:
Dada Pop Trap op…. Participation at 50 Belgian Francs”; it is printed on a page
removed from a Belgian telephone book, and is a canny send-up of crossed
signals and the latest trends in art. Another text on an exhibition announcement from
1967 exemplifies Broodthaers’ penchant for opaque and disruptive interrogatives:
“Question: I don’t know anything. Answer: What do you have to say?”
In his publicity
and open letters, modes of address are constantly upended and shifting. The
political form of the open letter held persistent interest for the artist, and
most of the letters here were responses inspired by the changing cultural and
institutional events around May, 1968 in which Broodthaers was directly involved.
The first open letter from June, 1968 addressed “Cher amis,” speaks about
Broodthaers’ own negotiations between the occupiers and the Palais des Beaux
Arts in Brussels (as well as announcing sympathy for Andy Warhol who was shot
in New York the previous day) while others are addressed to particular artists,
including Joseph Beuys, a colleague whose messianic, mythopoetics troubled
Broodthaers. One letter is a delightfully absurd, allegorical missive, comprising
a letter transliterated into Broodthaers’ own hand-writing, but supposedly
found by Broodthaers himself “in a dilapidated Cologne tenement” which the Belgian
attempted to pass off as having been written by the composer Jacques Offenbach
to Richard Wagner; this cockamamie, yet hilarious epistolary conceit is a
component of Broodthaers’ open letter to Beuys and can be understood as an allegory
about the relationship between art and politics (an original, English language
version is present at Alden Projects™).
It is admittedly challenging
to come to terms with Broodthaers’ open letters as well as his other opaque,
language-based communications and art.
This exhibition proposes to begin by grapping with the very particular
and peculiar ephemeral forms and historical modes of address to which
Broodthaers dedicated so many artistic acts of transliteration, re-visitation,
and performative script: artist’s publicity; the invitation; the hand-out, the advertisement,
the open letter, among others. This exhibition sets out to map the very
particular places and the very particular times in which Broodthaers’ work originally
functions and some of the very particular people, events, and conditions to
which his work so pointedly responds, addresses, and invites us to consider. Then as now, it is an invitation to a voyage.
© Todd Alden 2016
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