{"id":2701,"date":"2017-04-03T09:59:41","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T07:59:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/allover-magazin.com\/?p=2701"},"modified":"2017-05-08T15:04:19","modified_gmt":"2017-05-08T13:04:19","slug":"richard-wagner-pornographizes-jacques-offenbach-socializes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/allover-magazin.com\/?p=2701","title":{"rendered":"Richard Wagner Pornographizes, Jacques Offenbach Sociologizes 1<\/sup><\/a>"},"content":{"rendered":"

A third and final presentation\u00a0of Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective<\/i> is on view in D\u00fcsseldorf (4.3\u201311.6.2017). It concludes a transatlantic voyage that began, manifestly<\/a>, over a year before, and to the fortieth jubilee of Marcel Broodthaers\u2019s death (1924\u20131976), at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition then stationed, grandly<\/a>, at the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sof\u00eda in Madrid. Now, finally<\/a>, the works arrive at K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in D\u00fcsseldorf. One work returns back home at the end of this tour: the Section Publicit\u00e9 <\/i>of the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Moderne, D\u00e9partement des Aigles <\/i>(1972) (Fig. 1). It was mainly thanks to this \u201cpublicity section\u201d of Broodthaers\u2019s fictive museum \u2013 a key work of the artist, which belongs to the K21 collection \u2013 that the institution became a step-partner in this major-players\u2019 collaboration. Since Broodthaers lived in D\u00fcsseldorf between 1970 and 1972, the works perform more than an institutional homecoming; yet in comparison with a certain sense of urgency that characterized their making, as institutional property they return \u201covervalued,\u201d to speak with the artist\u2019s words.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Fig.<\/a>

Fig. 1: Marcel Broodthaers, Section Publicit\u00e9 du Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Moderne, D\u00e9partement des Aigles, 1972, detail. Installation with multiple parts, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, D\u00fcsseldorf. Photo: \u00a9 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017, \u00a9 Kunstsammlung NRW<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/i>The works in this exhibition compose, more or less, the same fine selection as in the previous rounds. The sensitivities shift: whereas the condensed MoMA exhibition introduced the artist to a new audience with an explanatory narrative, showing how Broodthaers transformed from poet \u2013 into artist \u2013 into director of his own fictive museum \u2013 and into artist back again (\u2013 and finally, through the acquisition of the Daled collection, into MoMA\u2019s assets),[3]<\/a> the spacious halls of Reina Sofia offered an open playing ground for chance and poetry (successfully applying, perhaps, the formula \u201cdisinterest plus admiration,\u201d with which Broodthaers hoped to entice his audience in an open letter from Ostend, 7. September, 1968?).[4]<\/a> In K21 the installation of the works seems calculated with efficiency.<\/p>\n

Again, like in both previous venues (and elsewhere too), the show begins with L\u2019entr\u00e9e de l\u2019exposition <\/i>(1974): an environment and at the same time a mini-retrospective that is composed of palm trees, graphical works and photographs.[5]<\/a> Here, palms that stand in the central atrium announce Broodthaers\u2019s presence in the house, and lead the visitors down the stairs, to the basement, where the exhibition is located. The gesture befits the artist well, time and again he subversively mused with the foundations of the museums that hosted his production, and while living in D\u00fcsseldorf he even operated in a basement, at Burgplatz 12, which he transformed into another section of his museum \u2013 the Section Cin\u00e9ma<\/i> (1972). In the basement of K21, the palm-treed entrance to the exhibition opens to a panorama: at the far back end to the right, one recognizes the greenery of Un Jardin d\u2019Hiver II <\/i>(1974) that fills the apsis viewing the duck pond outside. To the entrance\u2019s left, in its own blackened room, stands the bright wooden construction of an interior, La Salle Blanch <\/i>(1975), with black words inscribed on its inner walls. A black booth, the Section Publicit\u00e9<\/i>, overpopulated with images of eagles, mirrors it straight ahead, blinking at the viewers with a double eagle slide projection. Black vitrines that contain a selection of Broodthaers\u2019s open letters from 1968 to 1972 stand in between. To their right, on another black painted wall, hang the Industrial Poems<\/i> (1968-69), combining words and images in plastic plaques. The oeuvre is cleverly laid out in smaller constellations in the pathways. But behind the black wall with its shiny signs hides the true bonanza of this exhibition: a reconstruction, or better, a re-collection of the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Moderne, D\u00e9partement des Aigles, Section XIXe si\u00e8cle (bis) <\/i>(1970).<\/i><\/p>\n

This Section<\/i> was the first Broodthaers opened in D\u00fcsseldorf, and it was already then a \u201cbis\u201d \u2013 a French term meaning \u201cencore\u201d in English \u2013, namely of the Section XIXe si\u00e8cle<\/i> with which the artist inaugurated the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Moderne, D\u00e9partement des Aigles<\/i> on September 27th, 1968, in his home\/studio in Brussels. J\u00fcrgen Harten, assistant director at the St\u00e4dtische Kunsthalle in D\u00fcsseldorf, was at the time looking for radical artists, and following a recommendation, he visited Broodthaers\u2019s museum in June 1969 (the museum was already running for almost a year, yet Harten was merely about its seventh visitor!). There, Harten would encounter empty art transport crates, a selection of museum postcards on the walls, a slide projection, and the museum director, who showed up late, apologizing politely that he overslept.[6]<\/a> One could imagine how Broodthaers \u201cshowed what he<\/i>\u2019d done to J. Harten, <\/i>the assistant <\/i>of the St\u00e4dtische Kunsthalle<\/i>,\u201d <\/i>and how he said: \u201cBut it is art [\u2026] and I will willingly exhibit all of it.\u201d[7]<\/a> Harten immediately offered the artist to exhibit his museum in the revolutionary Between<\/i> series, taking place at the Kunsthalle between one programmed exhibition to the next. Broodthaers would only agree to the proposal, on the condition that instead of showing empty crates, he would be able to use the operation of the hosting institution to loan real works of art for his demonstration. \u201cAgreed,\u201d replied the museum\u2019s director and the assistant director.[8]<\/a> And so, following an official opening speech by Harten, between February 14th and 15th, 1970, for two days only, eight nineteenth-century paintings from the D\u00fcsseldorf Municipal Art Museum hung at the Kunsthalle, in the framework of a fictive museum that conquered a real one.[9]<\/a><\/p>\n

The current \u201cencore\u201d of the \u201c(bis)\u201d in K21 comprises: a poster of this section, featuring the four caryatides representing the visual arts that (still) stand near the Kunsthalle; several copies of two posters with images of crates, advertising the museum\u2019s Section XIXe si\u00e8cle <\/i>(September 1968 \u2013 September 1969, Brussels) and Section XVIIe si\u00e8cle <\/i>(September 27th \u2013\u00a0 October 4th, 1969, Antwerp), hanging above the visitors\u2019 heads; documentary photographs from those previous sections of the museum; a film \u2013 Un Discussion Inaugural <\/i>(1968) \u2013 and a continuous projection of images of nineteenth-century paintings and caricatures; wall inscriptions that read \u201cDOKUMENTATION \/ INFORMATION\u201d and \u201cMUSEE D\u2019ART MODERNE \/ XIXe SIECLE (BIS) \/ DEPARTEMENT DES AIGLES\u201d; and the same eight nineteenth-century paintings from the art museum (today called Museum Kunstpalast), arranged in a grid according to size and genre (Fig. 2). To these the curator Doris Krystof \u2013 who took up the challenge of re-presenting this work for the first time since 1970 \u2013 supplemented a grey carpet, mimicking the Kunsthalle as it appears in documentary photographs of this event, which are also present in a black vitrine in the room, and a black museum\u2019s leather bench.<\/p>\n

\"Fig.<\/a>

Fig. 2: Installation view Marcel Broodthaers: Eine Retrospektive, 2017, K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, D\u00fcsseldorf.Photo: \u00a9 Achim Kukulies, D\u00fcsseldorf, \u00a9 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n

This is truly a bonanza, not because it is real gold \u2013 which is elsewhere to be found in the exhibition, by the museum\u2019s Section Financi\u00e8re<\/i> that in 1971 offered a gold ingot with the eagle emblem for sale, for a price fixed in relation to the gold\u2019s value: namely, double. This is truly a bonanza because the \u201cencore\u201d of the \u201c(bis)\u201d is rather unconvincing. The first \u201c(bis)\u201d at the Kunsthalle was questionable to begin with, showing paintings that are quite mediocre (in the retrospective\u2019s opening, Manuel Borja-Villel spoke about the improbable possibility of showing this work at MoMA with paintings from the Metropolitan, or in Madrid with paintings from Prado). Furthermore, the current \u201cencore\u201d is an unconvincing imitation of the previous, by now iconic \u201c(bis)\u201d, since the room is too small, and an architectonic pillar divides it further in two. Finally, if one endeavoured to truly reconstruct the work, one could do it at the Kunsthalle directly, in situ (for two days only? or longer?). But it is exactly because of these deviations that this imitation, copy, or false re-presentation, reveals something real.<\/p>\n

I am thinking here of the double screenprint Museum-Museum <\/i>(1972) that hangs in L\u2019entr\u00e9e de l\u2019exposition<\/i>: in its two parts, the word \u201cMUSEUM\u201d titles images of the eagle-marked gold ingot, which are lined four by four, and under each appears an inscription (Fig. 3). The last row reads: \u201cIMITATION\u201d, \u201cKOPIE\u201d, \u201cCOPIE\u201d, \u201cORIGINAL\u201d in the left part, and in the right: \u201cIMITATION\u201d, \u201cFALSCH\u201d, \u201cKOPIE\u201d, \u201cORIGINAL\u201d. Broodthaers questions the relations between the museum and the value of the objects it conserves. What could his fictive museum guarantee, doing business with an eagle mark and gold ingots? What is the status of Broodthaers\u2019s Mus\u00e9e<\/i>: a museum\u2019s imitation that maintains copies, a fake museum, yet an original work of art? What happens when a real institution exhibits a fictive museum, as the Kunsthalle did in 1970 and in 1972? Could a museum exhibit the \u201coriginal\u201d Mus\u00e9e<\/i> today, or is every attempt doomed to failure, (re)producing nothing but an imitation, a copy, or a fake?<\/p>\n

\"Fig.<\/a>

Fig. 3: Marcel Broodthaers, Museum-Museum, 1972, two screenprints, each 83 x 59.1 cm; publisher: Edition Staeck, Heidelberg; printer: Gerhard Steidl, G\u00f6ttingen; edition of 100, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Associates Fund, 1991. \u00a9The Estate of Marcel Broodthaers c\/o SABAM Belgium \u2013 VEGAP 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

For those of us who now experience the museum for the first time (and most of us do \u2013 but do we?), this Section<\/i> represents (once again), a key to its own critique. With every click of the continuous slide projection, and with the altering sequences in the film that runs beside it, this Section<\/i> unlocks the relations of the artwork and the museum. The film shows, among other fragments, Broodthaers smoking while pacing back and forth in the garden of his Mus\u00e9e<\/i> (one recognizes the inscription \u201cDEPARTEMENT DES AIGLES\u201d on the brick wall behind him). A cut replaces this scene with a close-up of a girl\u2019s face. It then returns to Broodthaers, and alternates back to the girl, for a few times, before continuing with other fragments. In the neighbouring slides, images rotate between nineteenth-century paintings and caricatures. Most paintings are Ingres\u2019s, showing naked women in erotic poses. Sometimes Broodthaers inverts the image, and in the negative the voyeuristic paintings expose black bodies. The caricatures are pear-faces by Grandville. Compared to the subversive transformations from man to fruit that the caricatures suggest, high art seems bluntly pornographic: white flesh may turn black by a trick, yet the painted bodies remain nothing but bare sex commodities on display. The paintings that hang on the wall strengthen this impression, with some female nudes or semi-nudes in mythological themes. The unease that the pornographic in art evokes, extends to a sense of fetishism that the painted representations unveil: of landscapes, in aestheticized romantic depictions; of farm animals, in naturalist studies that take their bodies apart; of portraits, in the sought-after authoritative likeness; and of death, the physical allure of which a human skull embodies. The cultural-ideological fetish in the artworks expands into the materialist cult of the artworks, into the lust for the original artwork itself.<\/p>\n

Joseph Beuys adds magic and politics into this cult, or this is what Broodthaers reproaches him for, in another D\u00fcsseldorf episode. In a famous open letter Broodthaers addresses to Beuys in 1972, Broodthaers \u201ccopies\u201d a letter from Jacques Offenbach to Richard Wagner, which Broodthaers allegedly \u201cfound\u201d in an attic in Cologne.[10]<\/a> Broodthaers thus identifies Beuys with Wagner and himself with Offenbach. Now, in Broodthaers\u2019s retrospective, we find another message from Broodthaers-Offenbach, this time in a basement in D\u00fcsseldorf, where we can further identify him with Grandville. Walter Benjamin suggests that commodity fetishism is the secret theme of Grandville\u2019s art.[11]<\/a> Broodthaers\u2019s is cultural fetishism. He shows us further, how, as Grandville\u2019s faces transform into pears and vice versa, pornographic art becomes cultural capital, and cultural capital becomes objectified fetish. Broodthaers\u2019s mussels and eggs works are already covered with a patina, MoMAfied, \u201covervalued.\u201d His museum escapes this fate: when every attempt to put the fictive Mus\u00e9e <\/i>on display is real, it could not but results in a failed imitation, a copy, a fake. And so, as Grandville\u2019s faces of authority turn into pears, the Mus\u00e9e<\/i> pears away.<\/p>\n

\u201cMuseum. enfants non admis\u201d says an Industrial Poem <\/i>on the other side of the wall: \u201cMuseum. children not admitted.\u201d Is it because of the porn, that the young girl from the film should stay out of the museum, in which Broodthaers paces back and forth, smoking, so restlessly? Or, perhaps, born too late to enter Broodthaers\u2019s \u201coriginal\u201d Mus\u00e9e<\/i>, today\u2019s children can now only admit a caricature \u2013 Again? Encore!<\/p>\n

\n
\n

[1]<\/a> The title adds two variations to the sentences Marcel Broodthaers states in a series of literary paintings, S\u00e9rie en langue fran\u00e7aise (S\u00e9rie de neuf peinture sur un sujet litt\u00e9raire) <\/i>(Series in the French Language [Series of nine paintings on a literary subject]) (1972), which read \u201cPAUL VALERY FUME\u201d (Paul Valery smokes), \u201cRENE MAGRITTE ECRIT\u201d (Ren\u00e9 Magritte writes), and so on. The paintings are shown in the Broodthaers retrospective in K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen D\u00fcsseldorf, and are also reproduced in the comprehensive catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective<\/i> (cat.), New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2016, p. 275.
\n[2]<\/a> See Broodthaers\u2019s open letter from Paris, 29. November 1968, reproduced in Ibid.<\/i>, p. 180. See also the quotation in note 6.
\n[3]<\/a> Herman and Nicole Daled, Broodthaers\u2019s friends and collaborators, were enthusiastic supporters of Conceptual Art throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 2011 MoMA acquired their collection, on which this retrospective noticeably relies.
\n[4]<\/a> \u201cWe trust that the slogan \u2018disinterest plus admiration\u2019 will entice you,\u201d Broodthaers writes concerning the planned opening of the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Moderne, D\u00e9partement des Aigles. <\/i>See Broodthaers\u2019s open letter from Ostend, 7. September 1968, reproduced and translated in Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective<\/i>, <\/i>p. 228.
\n[5]<\/a> The work opened the Broodthaers retrospective at Fridericianum in Kassel in summer 2015 as well, which I reviewed here: \u201cNo Tricks, no Scams. Marcel Broodthaers at the Fridericianum, Kassel,\u201d Tohu Magazine<\/i> (December 2015)<\/a>.
\n[6]<\/a> Broodthaers lists the components of the museum in the open letter from Paris, 29. November 1968, as follows: Thanks to the support of a shipping company and of a few friends, we have been able to set up this department, which comprises in principle order: 1\/ crates 2\/ postcards \u201covervalued\u201d 3\/ a continuous projection of images (to be continued) 4\/ a devoted staff Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective<\/i>, p. 180, translation revised.
\n[7]<\/a> I here adapt the often-cited confession on the invitation to Broodthaers\u2019s first solo show: I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life. For some time I have been good for nothing. I am forty years old \u2026 \/ Finally the idea of inventing something insincere crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway. At the end of three months I showed what I had produced to Ph. Edouard Toussaint, the owner of the Galerie Saint Laurent. \/ But it is art, he said\/ And I will willingly exhibit all of it \/ Agreed, I replied. If I sell something, he takes 30%. \/ It seems these are the usual conditions, some galleries take 75%. \/ What is it? In fact, objects. See reproduction and translation in Ibid.<\/i>, pp. 80-81.
\n[8]<\/a> See note 7.
\n[9]<\/a> For a most valuable detailed account of the events at first hand, see J\u00fcrgen Harten, Marcel Broodthaers. <\/i>Projet pour un trait\u00e9 de toutes les figures en trois parties. <\/i>An Attempt to Retell the Story<\/i>, <\/i>Cologne: Walther K\u00f6nig, 2015.
\n[10]<\/a> See Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective<\/i>, p. 264.
\n[11]<\/a> See Walter Benjamin, \u201cExpos\u00e9 of 1935,\u201d The Arcades Project<\/i>, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 7.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A third and final presentation\u00a0of Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective is on view in D\u00fcsseldorf (4.3\u201311.6.2017). It concludes a transatlantic voyage that began, manifestly, over a year before, and to the fortieth jubilee of Marcel Broodthaers\u2019s death (1924\u20131976), at the Museum … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[129,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ausgabe-12","category-ausstellungsbesprechungen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/allover-magazin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/allover-magazin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/allover-magazin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allover-magazin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allover-magazin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2701"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/allover-magazin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2959,"href":"https:\/\/allover-magazin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2701\/revisions\/2959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/allover-magazin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allover-magazin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allover-magazin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}