Un Jardin d’Hiver

Marcel Broodthaers
Born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1924; died in Cologne, Germany, in 1976.
He lived and worked in Dusseldorf and Berlin, Germany, and London, UK.

Marcel Broodthaers was a Belgian poet and conceptual artist who remains widely influential in contemporary art. Having experienced firsthand the horrors of World War II , Broodthaers wrote poetry as a young man and preferred to work in isolation, though he was familiar with the work of the Belgian surrealists, including the poets Paul Nouge and Marcel Lecomte and the painter Rene Magritte. Broodthaers completed his first poème cinématographique in 1957 and began publishing articles with original photographs the following year. In 1964, aged forty, Broodthaers ceased writing poetry altogether and focused solely on visual art for the last twelve years of his life.
Pense-Bête (Reminder) (1964) is a revealing work that mourns the loss of the written word. It is a rather unsightly plaster sculpture that cements fifty unsold volumes of his poetry as if it were sedimentary rock set to erode slowly in time, never to be read again. Instead, the work foregrounds its materiality and the double entendre of plaster, which appears to both protect and silence the merits of language. In his art, Broodthaers often pointed to such contradictions inherent in materials, objects, and images, intended for one purpose and yielding another. He delighted in the syntactical rearrangement of parts to form ambiguous impressions of a whole. Objects and motifs, such as the eagle, appear repeatedly across his body of visual work, but they never achieve iconic status. Broodthaers widens the gap between an artifact and its significance, liberating things and the oppressive ideas that lay claim to them.
In his most ambitious series, Décors (1974–1976), Broodthaers assumed the role of scenographer to present theatrical installations that were disquieting and emptied of dramatic story. These installations operate as institutional critique, specifically of retrospective exhibitions that historicize and encapsulate an artist’s career in the past tense. The Décors are both pessimistic and yet playful in their artificiality. Stark lighting, potted palm trees, and nineteenth- century stage props parody the pageant of history whereby solemn events and documents are subsumed within representational cultures of consumption and entertainment. And while Broodthaers bewilders spectators with the opacity and internal discord of his installations, he simultaneously invites them to dwell in their negation of meaning and to become imaginative and aware of the unsettled force of history. One such Décor, on view at the Biennale di Venezia, is Jardin d’Hiver (Wintergarden) (1974). The installation consists of thirty-six potted palm trees, sixteen folding chairs, six black-and-white found photographs, two vitrines with art prints and a catalogue, a carpet, and a melancholic self-referential film.