reviews marcel broodthaers
MArcel BroodthAers
Tapis de Sable, 1974, mixed media.
Photo: andy Keate. Van abbemuseum
collection, eindhoven. © the artist’s
estate. courtesy milton Keynes Gallery
milton Keynes Gallery
26 January – 30 m arch
Marcel Broodthaers’s mussel pot is one of the most startling icons of his imaginative logic to challenge the impunity of fashionable theories – an
twentieth-century art. The version at Milton Keynes, Grande casserole de example our overly deferential artworld would be wise to follow today.
moules (chaudron) (1966) – an enormous cast-iron casserole pot struggling Lacking the brashness of American Pop art and the self-absorption of
to contain a column of overflowing shells – seems particularly monstrous Surrealism, two movements with which he is often associated, Broodthaers’s
in the centre of a clinical white-cube gallery, while just cartoonish enough difficult-to-categorise art has saved him from death by over-historicisation.
not to demand a psychoanalytic reading. Broodthaers enjoyed exposing If Milton Keynes feels an odd choice for such a major reexamination of a
the fine line between intellectual authority and schoolboy farce. In the canonical artist, you get the feeling that Broodthaers might have enjoyed
education room, a recorded interview between the artist and a cat escalates the irony. After all, he spent years fleshing out the details of his own satirical
into a heated Magrittian debate about whether or not ‘this is a pipe’, to museum, with particular emphasis on a bombastic Department of Eagles.
which the cat’s response is infuriatingly, always, ‘Miaow’. The imitation Regency mirror (from 1973), potted palms and sand carpet
The humble mussel was a perfect leitmotif for the Belgian artist: that are the very Broodthaerian stage props to this exhibition mock a clichéd
facetiously elevated to national symbol in a backhandedly patriotic bourgeois – and by association, artworld – desire for colonial exoticism and
gesture, it also promised a plentiful supply of readymades for the lazy grandiose aristocratic tastes. Thirty years after his death, Broodthaers’s
conceptualist. With a knack for undermining the apparent exclusivity of art ersatz glamour is perfectly at home in the postmodern shopping-mall
terminology, he conflated the two meanings of moule: both mussel and culture of Milton Keynes. After all, he made provincialism avant-garde.
mould are shells capable of producing copies; therefore an assemblage With Duchamp’s grave still being excavated in a quest to understand
of mussels is as legitimate an artwork as a bronze cast. In using mussels how we got into our conceptual-art endgame, Broodthaers, whose
and eggshells as infinitely repeatable units, Broodthaers cheekily extended shamanistic theatricality owes much to Duchamp, seems to offer a way out.
Walter Benjamin’s analysis of artistic ‘aura’ to question biological, as well as If his institutional critique and self-satirising about artistic genius fell in with
mechanical, reproduction. 289 Coquilles d’Oeufs (1966), a red monochrome – and even helped catalyse – postmodern circularity, his language games
‘painting’ featuring a grid of decapitated eggshells, is a bathetic parody of and disarmingly poignant visual poetry of everyday objects leave the door
minimalist art. Just as with Magritte, Broodthaers was never afraid to use wide open for aesthetic pleasure, lyricism and humour. Jennifer Thatcher
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