Selected Works & Awards

2016－2017

Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA/Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain/Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany

2015

Venice Bienniale, Italy

1997

Documenta 10, Kassel, Germany

1982

Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany

1980

Venice Bienniale, Italy

1978

Venice Bienniale, Italy

1976

Venice Bienniale, Italy

1972

Documenta 5, Kassel, Germany

Exhibition

Carte dʼune utopie politique et petits tableaux 1 ou 0 (Map of a Political Utopia and Small Paintings 1 or 0, 1973) consists of a map of the world and two small canvases with collage, letterpress and handwritings. Broodthaers replaced the word “monde” (world) on a commercially available world map with a “utopie” (utopia) that is nowhere to be found. Through this extremely trivial act, he transforms the way we look at the world, like a magic wand given to contemporary art.

This work, displayed at the beginning of the contemporary art exhibition at Aichi Triennale 2022, can be read as an articulation of the stance that underlies the entire festival. How can we change the political map of the world today, when the world is facing all kinds of difficulties and sorrows due to the COVID-19 pandemic, while new civil conflicts and wars are erupting in the meantime? While art may not be capable of direct solutions to pandemics and political conflicts, it can use the power of the imagination to envision another world, think about the meaning of life, and live through the adversity of the present. This is also one of the hopes of the Triennale.

After being active as a poet until the age of 40, Broodthaers was also a conceptual artist up until his death at the age of 52, and his humorous and witty works that make use of words and signs had a great influence on later generations. Many of his cartographic works that use maps survive today, and he is also well known for Carte du monde poétique (Poetic Map of the World, 1968), in which he replaced the word politique (political) with poétique (poetic). Maps of the world show political boundaries. Not only have these borders been highlighted by the separate measures taken by each country in the wake of the pandemic: they also allude to the history of various colonialisms and wars throughout human history. How can we imagine a utopia from this map? Let us ponder this question together through the exhibition of various contemporary artworks that begins here.

• Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2022
• Map of a Political Utopia and Small Paintings 1 or 0 / Carte d’une utopie politique et petits tableaux 1 ou 0 1973, 1973
• Photo: ToLoLo studio
• Copyright Estate Marcel Broodthaers

Exhibition

Near the entrance to the 8th floor of the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art is a row of potted palm trees, an artwork titled Lʼentrée de lʼexposition (The entrance to the exhibition). Marcel Broodthaers first exhibited them in 1974 at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. People at the time must have felt as if they were being posed the question of how these ornamental palm trees could have become art as soon as they entered their imposing hall of contemporary art built in the 1920s.

Broodthaers, who began his career as an artist at the age of 40, persistently questioned the role and function of art in society. In this work, too, he blurs the boundary between the everyday and the museum by displaying palm trees spanning both the outside and inside of the gallery. From the perspective of Western culture, palm trees are a symbol of the exotic Other, reminiscent of the distant South. One may also be put in mind of the imperialism of the time that was behind the collections of these plants in botanical gardens in Western countries during the late 18th century.

In one of his most famous works, Musée dʼart Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, 1968–1972), with twelve sections, Broodthaers exhibited postcards, shipping crates, documentations, publications, objects, films and slides projections in different locations as part of an imaginary museum department. In his later years, he presented several large-scale “Décor” exhibitions where he turned entire spaces into works of art, including Un Jardin dʼhiver (A Winter Garden, 1974), for which he used many palm trees. Broodthaers once said that “in order to circulate in art, to function as an artist, there is a law: one has to be dressed in the fashion of oneʼs time.”* Some 50 years later, his poetic gestures still stimulate our mind and consciousness.

La Pluie (The Rain) is a short black & white film shot by Broodthaers in the garden of his home in Brussels, where he first exhibited his own museum, Musée dʼart Moderne, Département des Aigles – a fact that can be seen from the writing on the wall in the background. As soon as he writes in ink, the words disappear in the rain. As a poet, Broodthaers often used words and text in his artworks, hinting at their potential meanings and interpretations. This film, in which the words Projet pour un texte (Project for a text) appear at the end, also seems to allude to the sense of emptiness and nihilism that surrounds words, and even the impermanence of this world, as the words rapidly dissolve in the rain.

 * Rachel Haidu, The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964 – 1976, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2010, p. 242.

• Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2022
• L’entrée de l’exposition (The entrance to the exhibition), 1974
• Photo: ToLoLo studio
• Copyright Estate Marcel Broodthaers