September 21, 2006
From the Archives: 1975 Marcel Broodthaers text
Today's "From the Archives" entry comes from October 42, published in 1987, which contained a selection of writings, interviews, and photographs by the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers. This prose piece, translated by Paul Schmidt, is titled, "To be bien pensant . . . or not to be. To be blind." It was published in 1975; Broodthaers passed away in January 1976. After the jump, I've reprinted the first two paragraphs of Benjamin H.D. Buchloh's introduction to the portfolio. (Buchloh's essay on Broodthaers in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 remains the best English-language text on Broodthaers's work that I have encountered.)
What is Art? Ever since the nineteenth century the question has been posed incessantly to the artist, to the museum director, to the art lover alike. I doubt, in fact, that it is possible to give a serious definition of Art, unless we examine the question in terms of a constant, I mean the transformation of art into merchandise. This process is accelerated nowadays to the point where artistic and commercial values have become superimposed. If we are concerned with the phenomenon of reification, then Art is a particular representation of the phenomenon—a form of tautology. We could then justify it as affirmation, and at the same time carve out for it a dubious existence. We would then have to consider what such a definition might be worth. One fact is certain: commentaries on Art are the result of shifts in the economy. It seems doubtful to us that such commentaries can be described as political.Art is a prisoner of its phantasms and its function as magic; it hangs on our bourgeois walls as a sign of power, it flickers along the peripeties of our history like a shadow-play—but is it artistic? To read the Byzantine writing on the subject reminds us of the sex of angels, of Rabelais, or of debates at the Sorbonne. At the moment, inopportune linguistic investigations all end in a single gloss, which its authors like to call criticism. Art and literature . . . which of the moon's faces is hidden? And how many clouds and fleeting visions there are.
I have discovered nothing here, not even America. I choose to consider Art as a useless labor, apolitical and of little moral significance. Urged on by some base inspiration, I confess I would experience a kind of pleasure at being proved wrong. A guilty pleasure, since it would be at the expense of the victims, those who thought I was right.
Monsieur de la Palice is one of my customers.* He loves novelties, and he, who makes other people laugh, finds my alphabet a pretext for his own laughter. My alphabet is painted.
All of this is quite obscure. The reader is invited to enter into this darkness to decipher a theory or to experience feelings of fraternity, those feelings that unite all men, and particularly the blind.
* Monsieur de la Palice is the character of a French folk song who pronounces truisms. A typical lapalissade would be "Two hours before his death, he was still alive."—ed.
From Buchloh's introduction:
Just over a decade after the death of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers in January 1976, his work appears to be confronted with the alternatives of oblivion or academic exhumation. At the same time, it seems almost impossible to avoid the consecration implied in a commemorative project such as this one. But neither oblivion nor canonization, neither margin nor center are appropriate to Broodthaers's work. And while this project must assume responsibility for whatever consequences it might engender, elevation of Broodthaers to the status of master, and the personal cult that such status often generates, would be the least appropriate reception of the work.While the original impulse to edit this issue was occasioned in part by the tenth anniversary of Broodthaers's death, it also originated in the desire to counteract both the work's obscurity and the falsification inherent in its art historical institutionalization. Moreover, it was our desire to have Marcel Broodthaers's work reconsidered (or rather, since it is all but unknwon in the United States, to suggest it for a first consideration) in relation to currently dominant cultural practices and their respective capacity and willingness to reflect upon their discursive, institutional, and economic status.