Marcel Broodthaers @ Marian Goodman Gallery and the Département des Aigles present Section Cinéma, 1972

“I don't believe in film, nor do I believe in any other art. I don't believe in the unique artist or in the unique work of art. I believe in phenomena and in men who put ideas together”. M.B.

The Belgium poet and conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) seventh section of his major achievement of his life‘s work is presented here for the first time in the United States.

Le musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles is a reproduction of Marcel Broodthaers’own studio. It is composed of old dusty files, reels, projectors and two screens, one of them actually being a map of the “fragile” political/poetic world. With some part of texts appearing on the map, we could see it as poetry endangered by the encounter with the technological apparatus. As he said himself “poetic reality is over. I am sorry to say. What is left? Pessimism and a museum which gives one something to think about, as a place of communication and not a shelter for works of art.”

Another part of the museum recreates the dark room.

Stencils of Figure 1, figure 2, figure 12, words like “silence”, “museum” are randomly placed on the walls, on the screen, without any objects behind.

His work, recreating a dusty museum and his nomenclature in a parody way, is thus criticizing and questioning the legitimized art and analyzed the mechanisms of the art world.

Further in the gallery, a room gathers four of his movies, “un film de Charles Baudelaire” with random words written on a black screen, “La pluie (projet pour un texte)” where he’s writting under the rain, or a movie with a representation of a pipe, directly referring at Magritte, “ceci est une pipe, ceci n’est pas une pipe...”

It is then becoming evident that he explores the nature and meaning of language, word and image through film and writing.

In the last section of the gallery stands a few frames of truncated texts, where he integrated his poet experience background in his art works. You’re not sure if you have to read or look. Le Corbeau et le Renard revisited and some other absurd texts could be interpreted as a direct critic of French literature or like Ferdinand de Saussure or Mallarmé before him, a way of breaking the logical of language.