Good morning,
good morning.
I am Glenn Lowry,
Director of the Museum of Modern Art,
and I am delighted to welcome you
to this discussion
with Christophe Cherix,
Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints
and co-organizer
of this wonderful exhibition,
Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective,
with Manolo Borja
from the Reina Sofia, our partner,
and Manolo is right here,
and Manolo we thank you for joining
with us on this terrific effort.
Exhibitions of this scale
and complexity are very difficult
to pull off,
and this one
would have been impossible
without the support,
advice, guidance, and help
of Maria Gilissen Broodthaers,
Broodthaers’ widow,
their daughter Marie-Puck,
and we’re so happy that you were able
to spend so much time
working with us on this project.
We also want to acknowledge
Marcel Broodthaers’ other children,
Pierrette, Sylvie, and Constantin,
and as well the Daled family,
whose very generous gift
to the museum several years ago
of their collection
included many critical works
by Broodthaers that became a kind
of catalyst for a deeper dive
into this,
and Herman and Nicole,
and of course their son Pierre,
we’re so grateful
that you’re here as well.
This project garnered widespread
support from a number of funders,
our International Council
here at the Museum of Modern Art,
Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis,
Anna Marie and Robert Shapiro,
Jill and Peter Kraus,
the Junior Associates
of the Museum of Modern Art,
the General Representation
of the Government of Flanders
to the U.S.A.,
and the Jo Carole Lauder Publications
Fund of the International Council,
as well as the Museum of Modern Art’s
Wallis Annenberg Fund
for Innovation in Contemporary Art.
All of which is to say, Christophe,
that we are thrilled to be here
and to talk a little bit
about an artist and an exhibition
that I think are of great importance.
Anyone who’s spent any time
thinking about museums
in the last couple of decades
has had to contend not just
with the art historians
and historians who’ve thought
about museums
but the artists who have
interrogated the very idea
of what it means to have a museum,
and I don't think any artist
has done that more thoughtfully
or more powerfully
than Marcel Broodthaers.
So let’s begin at the beginning.
Broodthaers, I don't think,
started out to be an artist.
He started out as a poet,
and do you want to talk
a little bit about the journey
that brought him to here?
Yes, absolutely.
Broodthaers started as a poet,
and the first two decades basically
were devoted mostly to poetry,
not exclusively.
He did films, photograph,
a number of other things,
but he came to his first exhibition
at the age of 40 years old,
which is at least for today
rather late,
and without any training
as an artist,
which I think is quite important
to have in mind
when you look at his work.
For us, what really mattered
in that exhibition also
was to bring the poetry back.
I think there is this idea
that in ’64 when he organized
his first exhibition
at Galerie St. Laurent,
he stopped being a poet.
And Manolo and I wanted
to show that very idea again,
that he was a poet
and he remained a poet.
He was a poet in a different way,
he found new modes of expression,
but still inhabiting that world.
So the exhibition really starts,
the first room is really devoted
to the first poetry book
and those first two decades,
together with film.
That's something people
don't always have in mind,
that before becoming a visual artist,
he was already versed into film,
and the first film
is dedicated to Schwitters,
so someone who will have
a great importance on his career.
When you lay out
an exhibition like this,
especially with an artist who
had a relatively compressed career,
there is an awful lot of work
that we have to absorb,
and there are a lot of mussels,
including a mussel pot,
that we have to think about.
Do you want to a talk a little bit
about the sort of early iconography
of Broodthaers’ work
as it leads up to the –
I hate to even use
the word “more mature” because
he was a very mature man
when he began working as an artist.
But I want to start
with the mussel pots and the mussels,
and think about what
he was trying to achieve there.
One of his very early materials
before the mussel pots
or the mussel shells
or the eggshells is poetry.
We have Pense-Bête, one
of the first works in the exhibition.
You see those volumes
of unsold poetry books
carefully embedded into plaster,
and it becoming a sculpture.
And around that work you have,
it’s true, mussel shells, eggshells,
and I think for him
they had a different meaning,
a complementary meaning.
I mean eggs,
everything starts with an egg.
It’s something very primary.
And if you look back
at the end of the show,
he is very interested in the letter A,
the beginning of the alphabet.
Again, it’s this idea
to throw something out in the world,
a bit like a poet,
and let us just associate it
with the things
we want to associate it with,
so to create a system
which is extremely open-ended.
The mussel shells for him,
in French a moule means two things –
a mussel but also a mold.
So it’s also something
which creates something
through association.
And I think those two objects
were very meaningful for him
because they were
very much a starting point
in allowing to create a form
of relationship with the viewer
which would allow him or her
to appropriate the work
and to understand it
in a different way each time.
So the show really tried to show how,
by starting with those objects,
slowly his work evolved and developed
and became more and more complex,
almost adding layers and layers
to things that he started with.
And certainly with the eggshells,
there is an inherent sense
of fragility of not just creation
but its opposite that I get,
at least when I look at them.
There is also a form
of irreverence in Broodthaers.
Of course, eggshells are discarded,
mussel shells are discarded,
and they’re also extremely fragile
for the eggshells.
So he is basically asking ourselves,
“What are you going to do
with those objects?”
Now that they almost can’t travel,
or they are very difficult
to move from one place to another,
and that's something which
is a thread throughout his work.
We really wanted to end the show
with the Tapis de Sable,
with The Sand Carpet,
which has the same fragility.
It’s something extremely ephemeral
in a way,
and that goes back
to Broodthaers’ very first idea
of trying to redefine
what an art object can be.
And one of the things
that he asked himself was
what’s the function of an art object?
And one of the answers he had
was its function is precisely
not to have a function,
and to take out the function
of something
in order to make a work of art.
If you think of the beautiful
white cabinet and white table,
that’s precisely what he did.
You can’t use the table anymore.
You can’t use the cabinet anymore.
They became extremely fragile
by being filled or covered
with eggshells.
So there is this kind
of extremely sophisticated
and deep thinking
of what art means
really right at the beginning
of his work,
back then would we have understood
that it would lead him to the museum?
Maybe not,
but there is a clear path, I think,
from the very early objects
to the later years.
Just to stay with some
of the earlier objects for a moment,
does one read this interest
in the abstraction
of say monochromatic color?
In other words,
the eggshells are white,
the moule tend to be dark blue-black.
Is he interested
in problems of abstractions?
I’m not sure.
For me, it’s more
like a form of typography.
You know, a text
is black on white usually,
and he comes out of that tradition
and that knowledge
of what does a text mean on a page.
So for me, I associate that much more
with his kind of literary background
and this desire
to project words in space,
and to detach them
from their very own meaning.
I think that’s another thing
that you can feel very clearly
in the exhibition,
that the objects
become words of a poem.
They are freed by becoming art.
The heart of the exhibition
is the remarkable series of projects
that he did around his museum.
I think every artist presumably
wants their work at some point
to be in a museum,
and Broodthaers took charge
and made his own museum,
which is a very convenient way
of ensuring that your work
will be in a museum.
And so of course when his museum
is in another museum,
we start to build up
all the different layers
of really what constitutes a museum.
I want to start with something
that's always interested me
about Broodthaers’ work
which is he makes us realize
that a museum starts with an idea,
even before it starts with objects.
Do you want to walk us
through the various iterations
of his Musée d’Art Moderne,
Départment des Aigles?
Yes, the Musée d’Art Moderne,
the Museum of Modern Art,
Department of Eagles
is clearly one of the –
it is the centerpiece
of his practice.
It’s a museum
but not of his own work.
There are no works
by Broodthaers in the museum.
It’s a museum made of postcards,
of slideshows,
of press releases, of crates.
So basically he is asking
what is the function of art,
and what is the function
of a museum?
And I think that's
a better platform for him.
If you think about
how the show is built,
the two rooms just before that,
trying to make people aware
how the question of display,
of presentation,
becomes essential to his work,
in Le Corbeau et le Renard,
in Mallarmé.
And the museum is really an attempt
to detach himself
furthermore from the object,
and being someone who takes in a way
a central but also marginal position
because he did say that he started
being an artist to become a director.
Of course, there is a lot of irony.
There is another provocation here.
But it’s a museum about a museum.
It’s also a museum
in which an artist regained control.
When we think
about museums in the ‘60s and ‘70s,
they become more
and more bureaucratic.
They are suddenly led by historians,
not by artists
as they often used to be
if you think earlier
in the 20th century.
So there is a way to think
about the museum as a tool
rather than something
which preserves objects.
Something else which I think people
need to have in mind when they think
about the museum is that this museum
was in a way fictional but very real,
so there were installations
that people could go through
but scattered throughout Europe.
So they were built over time,
4 years, 7 cities, 12 sections.
So except for one exception,
there was never two sections
that you would see simultaneously.
So this idea of dispersal,
and as you say, the idea
that the museum is an idea,
and every time
this idea is expressed,
it’s developed in a different way.
And I think that's one
of the great challenges
of a Broodthaers show
is what to do with the museum.
What we wanted to do
is to keep its fragmentary nature,
like not to come to the conclusion
that if you add up all the sections,
you have a museum.
You don't.
It’s only the same idea
which is expressed in a different way
at a different time
in a different place.
So from the museum,
which he worked on
sporadically but consistently,
we get to some of the later work
which create
yet another kind of polarity, really.
And I’m thinking of
Art de Vivre, Art Militaire,
and this kind of wonderful tension
that you might say
between these great cannons
and leisure furniture
that you might associate
with somebody at a camping site.
Do you want to delve into
what was going on there?
I think in ’72,
he declares his museum bankrupt.
All too real, by the way.
And he becomes an artist again,
but an artist who will just
be a very different artist
than he was
before he started the museum.
So you see the impact
that project had on his own practice,
and in a way he becomes a curator
that like the art of display
becomes absolutely central
to his work,
and he imagined this idea of décor,
and again, thinking about art,
how can we give a function
to art again?
You know décor,
each object has a function,
and he’s going to recycle
and reuse his older work
in order to rearrange it
in a new constellation,
in a new arrangement,
every time different
as often as retrospectives.
And the exhibition you mentioned,
which is presented
in the retrospective,
Décor: A Conquest,
which was premiered at the ICA,
is maybe the ultimate décor
in the sense that it’s made
with bought objects,
objects that he hadn’t made
for most of them.
It’s really an art of display,
and trying to do two things
at the same time,
to think about this relation
about lifestyles and the military
in the 19th century
and the 20th century,
so two oppositions,
but also to think
about the opposition
between then 19th century
and the 20th century,
what happened
between those two centuries.
So there is always this kind
of extraordinary melancholy part
of Broodthaers’ work,
which he is not an artist
who had faced in modernity
the very idea of failure.
The idea that art
doesn't always lead for the best
and society is not always
something which progresses
I think is very much part
of that work
because it makes you question
the relationship
between let’s say cannons
and Victorian décor,
which seems today
a quite nice environment,
but suddenly it is a much more
aggressive and terrifying opposition
between leisure and a machine gun
or a hand gun.
And you see a critique
of our society,
which I think has maybe
never been expressed
with that force by an artist
before that time.
I’ve always thought of the cannons
in a way as a kind of pun
that he was playing with
about museums,
which are in the business of often
articulating canons of art history.
And here he’s taking real cannons
and showing a different face
to society.
I think what’s so hard to grasp
sometimes is that sense of humor
that's there,
that there is a sense
of seriousness and purposefulness
to the various projects
that Broodthaers pursued
but there is also a real
understanding of irony
and playfulness,
as you said earlier.
I think one thing
we also wanted to do with the show
is to bring Broodthaers
as a person into the show
because I think
at least mostly in the United States,
he was often turned
into a cerebral or conceptual artist,
and he was that also,
but he was not only that.
And you’ll see throughout the show,
and it’s really discussing
with friends, collectors,
or dealers who met Broodthaers,
and Herman is here
and he told who he was a little bit,
and we really wanted
to have that figure,
that presence into the exhibition.
So the first room, called Schwitters,
you hear Broodthaers speaking.
In the Mallarmé exhibition,
you hear Broodthaers
reciting Un Coup de Dés himself.
You’ll see him in films,
so the idea that he is very present.
In a way, the work
was very much linked
almost as a performance
to the fact that he would
inhabit a space with objects,
with his capacity
to completely change an environment
by just adding a couple of objects,
or regrouping older works.
And that’s another challenge
of this exhibition
is trying to bring the life back
into the work,
which often was maybe seen
in the past through archival images.
And I think one of the goals
was to trust the physicality
of the work and of the displays,
and try to rely mostly on those.
There are relatively few exhibitions
that I can remember
at the Museum of Modern Art
that have become
overrun by palm trees.
What is the significance of those?
And talk a little bit
about the issue of evocation,
that when one looks at the history
of Broodthaers’ own installations,
how does one go about
recreating them, evoking them,
dealing with them?
I think the palm tree,
the first time they appeared,
they appeared in a group show
which was composed mostly
of Minimalist and Conceptual artists.
And Broodthaers decided to stage
the first version of Winter Garden,
so there is a provocation there.
What you have is slab on the floor,
letters on the wall,
and suddenly you have
this kind of old-fashioned décor
which goes back
to Belgium’s own history,
its colonies,
but almost
an antiquated installation.
And for him,
those palm trees were first –
at least when he
installed them in ’74 –
the stage for a film.
So again, a work
which creates something else
by him inhabiting that space.
And what you see
in the second version
of Winter Garden that we are showing,
you see not only the palm tree,
but you see a film on which
you see Broodthaers walking
through the Palais des Beaux-Arts
with a camel.
So again, this idea
to bring back exoticism,
just try to work
with opposition by surprise,
and the palm tree over the years
became another signature of his work,
as the mussel and maybe the eggshells
used to be in the early ‘60s.
And he reused them
also within his own work
as he reused his mussel shells
and eggshells,
and the first piece you see
when you enter the show
is called the Entrance of the Exhibition.
You see those giant palm trees
with some of his work
arranged as a mini-retrospective,
which again is creating
that effect of surprise,
this idea that you are not
in a museum anymore.
You are transported
in a different place.
So to think about the museum
as something, again,
going back to the idea
that the museum is an idea
and can project
into an imaginary landscape.
Was he a Romantic?
Well, he loved Romantic poetry
at least.
Let us turn for a moment
to all of you
and see if there are any questions
that you would like to ask.
Please, don't be hesitant or shy.
Maria?
We’ll get you a microphone
in one second.
I would like
to answer your last question,
was he a Romantic,
and I would say yes
but he was a Realist.
I always say, if someone asks me,
he is a Romantic Realist
or a Realist Romantic.
So thank you, Maria,
that he was a Romantic Realist
or a Realist Romantic.
I asked the question for a reason
because there is a tendency,
at least for my generation,
to read Broodthaers very seriously.
And what I think this exhibition
tries to tease out of his work
is the fullness of the artist,
the fullness of the man,
and that there
is a whimsy there, right?
Those provocations are not
just meant to get people excited,
but when you think
about the kind of rigor
of Minimalism
and post-Minimalist art
in the ‘60s and ‘70s,
and the idea of these palm trees
sort of interrupting that
and making people
sort of stop and ask themselves
what are they looking at and why,
I think there is that quest
for something higher,
something even greater
than just the object itself,
and I think that's part of what
this exhibition tries to tease out
of Broodthaers’ work.
Other questions or thoughts
that anyone would like to share?
Yes, please, right there,
and we’ll get you a microphone
just so we can all hear you.
What is the significance
of the eagle?
The eagle has many signification
or no signification,
I even came to doubt that.
There is one section of the museum
where he basically put together
every object that he can find,
being fine art or just a bottle,
with the sign of the eagle.
And of course there is this kind
of power attached to the eagle
there is this past as well.
It’s something coming
from very deep into the centuries
by association,
so it’s a very powerful emblem.
But at the same time,
it’s an empty emblem.
You can find an eagle
on a handkerchief or on a painting.
So it’s something which
has all meanings but no meaning,
something which is just a shell.
And I think for him
it was a perfect image
in order to represent something
which it wasn’t about the eagle
but it was about the power
of the image of the eagle.
But I also think one
of the beauties of his museum,
the Museum of Modern Art,
the Musée d’Art Moderne,
so it’s immediate evocation
of institutions like this one
or many others in Europe.
And then instead
of having a Department of Art
or a Department
of the Twentieth Century,
it has a Department of Eagles, right?
I mean, you just – you have to smile!
You just have to say, okay,
he’s getting at the taxonomy
of museums, right?
We are all organized structurally,
either chronologically
or by media or by some theme,
and what he’s saying
is “Think about it.”
At least the way I read it,
he says “Think about it.
Does it really make sense the way
you’ve organized your museum?”
When he’s speaking
to the museum at large,
at least that's how I read it.
Please?
I see these eagles and palm trees
and shells and oysters and so forth,
they’re all poetic interventions
of one kind or another,
from my point of view,
and with those interventions
there is always a dash of irony.
And it occurred to me
that the other artist I know
who uses palm trees
is John Baldessari,
but it’s also ironic,
and I’m wondering
if you could speak to that effect
in terms of the comparison?
Well, I think John is from LA,
so palm trees
are more part of his daily life.
But clearly I think,
not to speak for John Baldessari,
but this idea of leisure
in John Baldessari,
but there is something
much more again casual
in the reference to palm trees
that maybe someone using palm trees
in the early ‘70s in Brussels,
there is this kind of displacement
which I feel is much stronger
in terms of impression
that it has on the viewer.
But also, Christophe, my sense
at least from the documentary
photography that I’ve seen
is that many
of Broodthaers’ installations
took place in Beaux-Arts buildings,
and those Beaux-Arts buildings
certainly in Europe –
and I’m thinking
even of late Victorian buildings –
they had palm trees
as part of their not art
but part of the sort of ambiance,
and is he not also kind of
pulling that out as well?
Well, I think what interested
was everything but the art,
if you think about how
he wants to study and to interrogate.
The museum is to remove
what we consider essential,
is the art object,
and it is going
to question everything around –
the taxonomy, the advertisement
department of a museum,
the way we distribute things,
the way we announce events.
And palm trees are part of that.
They are the décor, they aid décor.
Other questions, please.
Yes, in the middle there.
There are lots of tributes
to René Magritte in the exhibition.
I wanted to ask
if you could speak a bit
to the dialogue between both artists.
They met each other early
in the mid-‘40s.
Magritte was I think very important
for Broodthaers in many ways.
One of them is his understanding
and his love for Stéphane Mallarmé.
When he met Magritte,
Magritte suggested
that he read Mallarmé,
and you see how Mallarmé
is extremely present
in the exhibition,
even if you think about this room
where you have the black floor,
which is a close echo of a show
that he had organized,
the four vacuformed plates or pipes.
So they pay homage to Magritte
who helped him to understand
the significance and the importance
of Mallarmé, and in other ways.
Magritte is a master of the relation
between words and image,
so they had a deep,
interesting relationship.
Magritte I think even
was a supporter of Broodthaers’ work,
as other artists.
If you think of Broodthaers,
what we wanted to show
is the importance of Magritte
but also the importance
of Schwitters, of Mallarmé,
and Baudelaire and so on.
So Broodthaers
had a number of artists
to whom he frequently paid homage,
and he sometimes found inspiration,
and tried to bring their work
into a different dimension.
And if you think of the relationship
of Broodthaers and Magritte,
he would take things from Magritte
but he would project them
in a completely new universe.
And there is something in fact
very moving in that relationship.
Other questions?
Yes, right there, please.
Does he have a standing
in a purely literary world
besides his artistic?
Not so much.
I mean, he published
a number of poetry books
so he was part
of the literary scene in Brussels,
so he published
in important literary magazines,
but not that often.
One of the difficulties he had,
he couldn't live from his poetry,
like it wouldn't provide him
a living and an existence,
and his poetry was I think
kept to a small number of people.
So I think he was a poet
known in Brussels but without,
I would say,
a recognition much beyond that.
Other questions?
If not, before we close,
I should remind everybody
that after the exhibition is finished
here at the Museum of Modern Art,
it will travel to Madrid
in the Reina Sofia
where Manolo Borja
is not just the co-curator
of this exhibition
but also the very talented director.
And from Madrid it will
conclude its tour in Düsseldorf.
So it will be seen widely
over the coming year plus,
and we’re thrilled to be able
to celebrate its opening here
at the Museum of Modern Art today.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you.
