28 Janvier 1924
28 Janvier 1976.

 
But even that isn’t certain – it seems too neat, too scripted, that he should have died on his birthday. The matter of the ‘scriptible’ extends too to the object itself, the gravestone. It is inscribed on both sides, making for a ‘double-grave’ and a memorial with a recto and verso, like a page. The catch-phrase ‘il n’y a pas de hors–texte’ would be on the tip of the tongue, were it not for the fact that Broodthaers has already anticipated it, pre-empting any final word at the ceremony, even that uttered by his semblable, the expert reader:

there is no proof that the real simpleton isn’t the author himself, who thought he was a linguist able to leap over the bar in the signifier/signified formula, but who might in fact have been merely playing the professor.

 
So what is inscribed there, in the afterlife? The joking continues (it is protracted, off-beat ‘joking’ rather than a series of discrete ‘jokes’ – walking around the retrospective at MoMA you find yourself repeatedly chuckling at the jibes and manoeuvres, but there is rarely any sense of a ‘pay-off’); there are the same deskilled images and ‘handwritten’ words and phrases, reminiscent of children’s primers; the tradition of modern poetry and the world of then-contemporary art (Nouveau Realisme, Pop, Fluxus, Minimalism, Conceptualism) are not far away; marketing, mass consumption and industry, ever-present in the preposthumous work, are at a remove, but what they consigned to the past – imperial emblems, dusty and ornate museums, ‘high art’ (particularly painting), former colonies, the certitudes of the man in the bowler hat – are still there; and Broodthaer’s own art is referenced. The aesthetic is modest and largely unengaging, an antidote to the appropriation of loud mass imagery by Pop, or the claims to bureaucratic neutrality of Conceptual Art. And there’s Minimalism, on the side of the stone without his name and dates, in the middle of a rather haphazard arrangement of what look like simple book illustrations and subtitles to illustrations, above the parrot (or eagle?) and below (Magritte’s?) pipe, next to the palm tree, not far from the words ‘museum’, ‘fig. 0’, ‘allegro’: four solids of spectral appearance – a cube, a pyramid, what is probably a sphere, and a cylinder. ‘There are no primary structures / there are no “primary structures”’, Broodthaers had (doubly) pronounced in 1968, two years after the seminal ‘Primary Structures’ exhibition in New York. But the (not really there) solids also suggested a much older iconic moment in art history: Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514). There are the solids again, a sphere and a rhombohedron to the left of the Saturnine angel, this time looking all too material – what should have been the ideal, geometric building blocks of art and existence, looking like the parts of a game that has gone stale. And sure enough, on the gravestone’s verso (or is it recto?) – the more ‘poetic’ side, in any case – more composed, and with the name and fateful dates – the word appears – ‘Melancolie’. In fact it is invoked, as part of a line from one of Broodthaers’ poems, composed before he made the ‘insincere’ gesture of encasing his final poetry collection Pense- Bête (1964) in plaster, and found an audience:

Ô Mélancolie aigre château des aigles

(O Melancholy sour castle of eagles).

 
A retrospective, like that at MoMA, is also a gravestone of sorts, and is concerned with an artist’s afterlife. In some respects this was Broodthaers’ canonisation, a rich, considered and detailed exhibition of his work in what is arguably the ‘museum of modern art’. There had been US exhibitions in 1989, but as Broodthaers’ widow, Maria Gilissen, mentions in the exhibition catalog, these ‘occurred perhaps a little early with respect to the sensibilities of the wider public’. Broodthaers himself, a scrutiniser of museums and their role in the public authorisation of artworks, would have recognised the difference. Despite the historic occasion, however, what struck me most, passing through the various areas arranged more or less chronologically, was the air of melancholy hanging over the spaces – of elements being arranged and rearranged which could never catch fire, too much dust having collected in their awkward joints and crevices, lacking the smooth surfaces of a confident modernity. It should not have been the case: I visited on a Friday evening, when the museum opens late and there is free entry. Consequently the place was jammed, particularly with groups of students, a constant flow through the exhibition’s circuit like the crowd around the Kaaba. It wasn’t exactly a situation conducive to experiencing feelings of solitude, repetitiveness and ultimate, worldly emptiness. But despite the kids relaxing in the Winter Garden (1974), checking their smart phones or idly chatting among the potted palms, the sparse installation with its plants and 19th century illustrations of peacocks, elephants and camels still felt like the gesture of a shopkeeper towards a store emptied by bad conditions. And would you have it full again? The charming exoticism, after all, relied on the same empire that gave birth to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). And we were in the financial heart of an America that was again to be ‘great’, that would again grasp its eagles and lion heads, and, yes, its shiny, world-beating international art and new museums, successfully lifted above the rubble of the old bourgeois West, the world of Broodthaers’ childhood. His allegiances leap back and forth over a dividing bar, to adapt his own literary figure.

 
In Grove Art Online’s entry on Broodthaers Michael Compton makes the extraordinary statement that the artist ‘regarded his art as a defence of European high cultural traditions in the face of barbarian threats and especially of western commercialism’. Which ‘high culture’, we might well ask? That of the Mallarmé, whose spatial quality Broodthaers forefronted by replacing the lines of poetry with thick, black bars (Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé [1969])? That of Ingres, whose paintings appear in the form of postcard reproductions next to empty crates stenciled ‘PICTURE’ ‘WITH CARE’ ‘KEEP DRY’ (Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles: Section XIXe Siècle [1969]). Those objects sacralised in a 19th Century Musée des Beaux Arts with its plush, mummified interiors (L’Angelus de Daumier: Sale rose [1975])? This is taking Broodthaers at face-value, a move as walleyed as those made by his American contemporaries (‘commercialist’ or ‘barbaric’), to Broodthaers’ mind (though he could be ‘touched and amused’ by them as well, as his widow says he was by Warhol), and to which he offered the rejoinder of the carefully ordered residues of ‘high culture’ – the museum as institution, the ‘history of Ingres’, the emblematic eagles, the dreams of internationality, his own locality, Belgium, mussels and frites, bourgeois mentalities. More deeply, the inescapable subtitle that goes with the image – be it only ‘fig. 0’. And under this again, the egg of Broodthaers’ art, that has been cracked to form the plaster base of Pense-Bête — poetry.

 
The retrospective at MoMA made two very important advances on any exhibition of the Belgian’s work that I had seen to date. First, it didn’t show the pieces in isolation, as discrete artworks – it tried to recreate the sense of their immersion in carefully orchestrated occasions (‘environments’, perhaps, but with a surrounding of announcements and informal performance). What had always seemed missing to me when encountering a ‘Broodthaers’ at an exhibition was immediately restored – a kind of discursive and aesthetic milieu in which the separate moments were expected to appear and which they punctuated and prolonged. Second, the poetry. It is invariably referred to, if only to introduce the grand gesture of Pense-Bête, but we are rarely presented with the actual poems, which are sly, lyrical and inventive, in a post-surrealist way, and well worth reading. It is also, as this exhibition makes clear, there at the heart of all the subsequent visual art. He may have effaced himself as a poet in order to become an artist, but that effacement became the most significant of those residues with which he confronted the successful art of the world in which he found himself, a trader from a largely insignificant, former colonial empire with a shop of remainders. A substantial collection of the poetry books were on show at MoMA, with many individual poems there to be read, and fragments of these poems could be found throughout the subsequent artwork, right up to that moment when it appears also on the gravestone. We’ll take the lesson to heart, and give the poem from which the line comes (from the collection Mon livre d’ogre [1957]), along with a rough translation:

ÔTristesse envol de canards sauvages
Viol d’oiseaux au grenier des forêts
Ô Melancolie aigre château des aigles.

 
(Oh Sadness, taking-off of wild ducks / Violation of
birds in the woods’ loft / Oh Melancholy, sour castle
of eagles)

Fletcher’s skill throughout the biennial was to articulate art’s critical potential – especially in political terms – whilst also maintaining a varied yet coherent sense of what the specific contribution of art, as distinguished from say photojournalism or political campaigning, might yet be. This had not only to do with overt expressions of protest, but also with the affirmation of alternative, less instrumental ways of thinking; of an enlivened attention to the material fabric of everyday life; and of an unruly way of drawing images and things into the charged field between thought and sensation.

That the concern with politics would not be trained upon class and economics alone was immediately evident upon entering Limerick City Gallery of Art. Iveković’s Shadow Report (the first manifestation of which appeared in 1998) straight away brings the issue of violence against women in Ireland into visibility. Strewn across the floor of the first room, and scattered further afield by the time of my second visit, were scores of scrunched up pieces of red paper printed with a disturbing report provided by the National Women’s Council of Ireland. These crumpled sheets, coloured an angry red and casually kicked and buffeted around the gallery, constituted a precarious yet indignant gesture; and its weight became more insistent as it was encountered repeatedly throughout eva’s main exhibition spaces.

Iveković’s piece provided a frame for understanding the formally very different work of Kate Davis in an adjacent room. Curtain I-VII (Die Schönste Frau in der Geschichte der Mythologie) (2011) comprised seven copies of a poster of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, with a differently degraded image of the infamous slash made by suffragette Mary Richardson in 1914 superimposed onto each. Here Davis alerts us both to art’s historical complicity with patriarchal forms of representation, and to examples of radical, violent models of spectatorship. Which is more precious, the rights of Emmeline Pankhurst – ‘the most beautiful character in modern history’ – or a painting of ‘the most beautiful woman in mythological history’?

Also at the LCGA was a suggestive juxtaposition of three artworks exploring the basic operations of architectural, semiotic and pedagogic structures. Emma Houlihan’s stark, cast concrete Arch (2010) presented a monument to the utter failure of social cohesion attending the progress of the Celtic Tiger. The arch, dependent for its defeat of gravity on the mutual support of each stone by its neighbours, is here reduced to a lumpen rubble of disassembled units. This work shared a space with Broodthaers’ slide piece, Images d’Épinal (1974). Broodthaers sequenced images from mid-nineteenth century lithographs produced in the French town of Épinal, pictures that became so popular that image d’Épinal is still used in French as a synonym for the stereotyped image. It is from such images that as children we learn to connect words with images and things: the world becomes intelligible, but only by way of our submission to systems of classification and stereotyping that are implicated in the exercise of power. Broodthaers alludes to this discursive function while also reveling in the suggestive potential of the juxtaposition of these image-emblems. Pedagogy, classification, rudimentary architecture and an interrogation of creative expression are enfolded in a third work in this cluster: Priscila Fernandes’ Product of Play (2011). This video projection observes a boy arranging a set of coloured building bricks and an older girl who, having riotously scattered a set of such blocks, laughs playfully before uncannily breaking into the song of a trained operatic voice. Here the disciplinary shaping of children produces unsettling results.

I found the remaining works downstairs at LCGA a little less convincing. Pilvi Takala’s The Trainee (2008) documents a performative attempt to disturb the smooth running of the marketing department of Deloitte, during which the artist lingered in odd places (she spent one day in a lift, for example) and conspicuously performed no tasks. While her presence certainly provoked concerned reactions from her co-workers, these were not of a particularly surprising kind, and the artist seemed rather too keen to alert the other employees to her odd, Bartleby-like behaviour for it all to avoid the air of self-conscious wackiness. Anibal Catalan’s site-specific installation, Morphological Zone (2011-12), which combined pictorial, sculptural and architectural elements, carried some of the formal dynamism of Russian Constructivism. However, almost 100 years on, and with those forms of immersive dynamic abstraction so familiar to design and product showrooms, the utopian charge of the original avant-garde project does not carry over here. Upstairs at the LCGA, however, Hyewon Kwon’s unemphatic video, Untitled ♯1 (2010-11), was particularly powerful. Kwon looped some archival footage filmed in Seoul’s Municipal Workers’ Dormitory in 1962 with various newsreel voiceovers and musical scores. These offered dramatically different narratives and, oddly and disturbingly, the footage was able to act as convincing backdrop to each one.

Moving away from the LCGA, Marcus Coates’ video The Plover’s Wing (The Palestinian/Israeli Crisis) (2008), on view at the Belltable, was absurd, bewildering and provocative, but not very good. Coates, dressed in a light blue Adidas tracksuit, wearing a badger skin on his head, and with a stuffed hare’s head poking out of his jacket, is meeting with Moti Sasson, mayor of the Israeli city of Holon. Coates, earnest in both his published interviews and on-screen demeanour, offers his shamanic services to Sasson, and the wisdom derived from his access to the world of animal spirits. We see an apparently sincere Coates act out his entry into this world and, returning back to us after a staccato sequence of shrieks and grunts, he brings with him the tale of the plover bird, the behaviour of which he then allegorizes to inform the mayor that Israel has a victim complex. Not perhaps the most subtle piece of political analysis ever delivered, and Sasson, a bit bewildered but remaining surprisingly well disposed, does not feel the need to ask Coates any further questions. Like an imagined meeting of Joseph Beuys, Ali G and The Mighty Boosh, the piece carried considerable entertainment value, and was certainly more telling than the ignorable work on the 10th floor of Riverpoint. Here, José Carlos Martinat’s Vandalized Monuments: Power Abstraction 4 (2012), like many relational artworks, failed to deliver on the liberatory claims made on its behalf.
Along with the LCGA, eva’s second major exhibition space was 103-104 O’Connell Street. Dozens of artworks were installed over four floors and, while not all the juxtapositions were equally illuminating, there were some brilliant moments. The different floors were linked by the recurrence of Iveković’s Shadow Report, and by the lengthy interviews filmed by Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh (of the latter, the one featuring Sylvère Lotringer was particularly compelling).

Seeing Mark O’Kelly’s work on the 2nd floor made me aware of how little painting featured in the exhibition, although the slow tempo of Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s digital video collages elicited the kind of prolonged, decelerated attention often characteristic of that medium. On the 1st floor a spare, elegant sculpture by Greg Howie, simply titled ( (2011), used ratchet straps to bend a sheet of glass into a shallow arc, its curve supplying enough stability for the sheet to stand precariously upright. Attending to this work – a combination of ubiquitous building materials and a delicate formal solution – made me suddenly more alive to the nature of materials. The tension, poise and spareness of this piece approached something of the charge of Tatlin’s revolutionary experiments, which Catalan’s more spectacular installation at LCGA failed to achieve.

Art’s proximity to political activism was perhaps closest in Zanny Begg and Oliver Resler’s satisfyingly outraged film, The Bull Laid Bare (2012). Effective as a mode of consciousness-raising, its formal innovations were enlisted in the service of reinforcing the exposure of the psychopathic logic of corporate capitalism, and its devastating effects on the Irish economy. In comparison, Sarah Pierce’s It’s Time Man, It Feels Imminent (2008) was much more sober and reflexive, seemingly driven less by an agitational agenda and more by an interest in interrogating the relationship of Conceptual Art to contemporaneous moments of popular political protest. While Pierce’s project felt rather knowing and careful, her interview with Mary Kelly, in which the latter remarks upon the replacement of the slogan, ‘Make love not war’ by the blunter imperative to ‘Stop the war, have sex!’ rivets us to the texture of language and its importance for activist protest.

For me, however, the most potent artwork in the biennial was the haunting, enlivening slide piece by KwieKulik, Activities with Dobromierz (1972-4). Here the long-marginalized experimental Polish artists Przemysław Kwiek and Zofia Kulik took nearly 900 photographs in which their own infant son appears positioned alongside various everyday household and natural objects. The means are very modest (a baby, a blanket, some onions, some ice, a bucket, etc.), and the spatial and relational propositions very systematic (the artists were reading the linguistic theory of Adam Weinsberg); but the visual, psychological and conceptual effects of seeing this baby uncannily made over into something like a lexical unit were both unsettling and somehow visionary. The rigours of logic, set theory and linguistic typology are held up against the affective dynamics of family life and the crystalline beauty of natural fragments. Dobromierz returns the viewer’s gaze, but blankly, as he is taken up in the ambitious (and sometimes disturbing) experimental games of his parents, who were forced to explore the universal in private, excluded as they were from the public sphere by a cruelly bureaucratic and repressive state apparatus.

The preponderance of lengthy video pieces in Fletcher’s show might have seemed odd, given Berardi’s emphasis on the importance of taking control of one’s own experience of time. The open temporality of the sculptural pieces, however, made up for the absence of painting in this regard, and the predominance of the projected image also leant the installation a presentational coherence. Characterised by aesthetic conviction and ethical commitment, the best moments of the biennial offered encounters that were both arresting and galvanizing. At these points, contemporary art’s ability to maintain contact with broader social and political dynamics was affirmed, without it becoming a mere instrument of other kinds of project.

eva International – After the Future was on view 19 May – 12 August 2012.

There are points, especially lately, where Goldsmith seems to be going in a direction that (like a lot of what he does) has been taken before in the art world, but has been less common in the poetry world. It’s a turn to the idea of the career itself as the most important medium of the art. There are plenty of ways to do this, but the way Goldsmith seems to be going is one that people who are critical of the apparatus of fame, the market in cultural capital and symbolic goods, and the construction of status might find disconcerting … Goldsmith distances himself from the idea of the text-as-art-object, and moves toward the effect, the stimulation of thought, and the generation of conversation about the object as the real medium of his art. It’s not quite the artist’s career as the artist’s medium, but it is a step in that direction …. It’s a direction I personally see as a bit — what? — I suppose ‘destined to produce unhappiness for those who take it’ is the phrase.⁸

While I’m curious as to how a perfect stranger might be able to predict my future mental state, Archambeau’s skepticism is typical of the unexamined reaction that the poetry world often falls back upon when they suspect poets of engaging with institutions on any level.
 
A more nuanced – but equally suspicious – reaction was generated by Dale Smith, founder of the Slow Poetry movement, during a public conversation that he and I had:

Dale Smith: By bringing Conceptual Poetry to the Whitney earlier this year, don’t you feel as though you betrayed the radical impulse behind the avant-garde? Or perhaps I’ve fallen for the performative gesture, and in my dismay over the carrying over of Conceptual Poetry to the Art World Institution, I’ve simply fallen for a scheme to generate discussion around Conceptual Poetry? 
Kenneth Goldsmith: Honestly, Dale, if the Whitney wanted to do a night of Slow Poetry, would you really say no? DS: In the context of Slow Poetry, I would have to refuse, though I would lose sleep over it. Or, perhaps, I’d pull a Marlon Brando, and send someone else to collect the trophy — use the opportunity — put it toward some other purpose. I might ask for the money to document some other kind of event — in a nursing home or something. It would be difficult, and I realize the pressure involved, but that’s how it is. 
KG: Wow! That’s amazing. Tell me more! Why would you refuse? I’m fascinated! 
DS: It has to do with Slow Poetry. It doesn’t belong to me. And there’s nothing to promote. And I don’t want to be responsible for institutionalizing anything in that sense — slipping under the Museum’s covers. I would rather send Jack Collom or Sotère Torregian or Joanne Kyger. Or a homeless person dressed up as me saying whatever they wanted to say — that would be an interesting conceptual gesture, I would think. Kent Johnson has proposed that ‘the poetic politics of [Flarf and Conceptual Poetry] begin where those of Language poetry ended.’ I wonder if by this he means that the new poetic avant-garde is inside a ‘building’ that’s been primed to receive ‘art works’ of the kind you are offering. These installations want to be provocative, but they’re inside a kind of museum, that’s been ready-made for them, if you’ll pardon the pun.⁹

Kent Johnson’s comment about Language poetry is correct in that it was a movement that recognized that it could not survive without the support of the institution. There is so little interest in the avant-garde in the general population that if not for the academy, this work would be nearly invisible. So you have the institution as survival strategy. In fact, for advanced poetries – meaning ones that are decidedly non- or anti-populist – if this work is not received in the academy, it’s not received at all. I, for example, owe my career to academies and institutions; if my work is not being taught or written about, it doesn’t exist. With this historical knowledge, over the years, as the various mainstream institutions reached out to support it – Ivy League universities, well-funded literary and academic journals, major museums, even the White House – I said yes. But with a caveat: I couldn’t be censored and had to be allowed to say what I needed to say in the way that I needed to say it, however distasteful it might be to them, or I would walk away. Shockingly, they all agreed and to this day, no major institution has even attempted to tone down what I say or do. And believe me, I have made some very provocative claims. So an engagement with an institution can be like holding up a mirror to the institution, a limit test to see what it is capable – or incapable – of.
 
Yet old attitudes die hard. The poetry world was largely critical of my acceptance of an invitation to read at the White House last May, most prominently articulated by poet and blogger Linh Dinh, who claimed,

To be a minstrel for a mass murderer is nothing to be proud of… This just heightens my contempt for the state of American poetry. Did Bertolt Brecht dance for Hitler? Future generations will look back at us and retch. Very sad.¹⁰

And yet, the institution – in the form of Al Filreis of The University of Pennsylvania (my employer) – leapt to my defense with a nuanced and moderate argument. He responded to Dinh:

I don’t disagree with you about war, that’s certain, but obviously I do disagree about what Kenny has specifically said yes to. Michelle Obama has been doing a few good things in the arts, but this project (series) unfortunately hasn’t so far been one of them; her people asked the usual suspects (e.g. Billy Collins) and someone in her office had the fairly unusual idea of trying something different, aesthetically, and so Kenny, who must have pondered the down sides of accepting, decided on balance that helping to provide some poetic range was a good thing to do. Goldsmith is no Brecht (in mode or intention) and so I don’t expect him to refuse in a manner that presumably Brecht would have, even in your imagined analogy; and while Obama has been to me and many others I admire (including you, by the way) a disappointment (and, in war policies, worse than that), I don’t consider him a Hitler (I’ve thought about totalitarianism a good deal).¹¹

In regard to my considering the downsides of the invitation, I realized that this would provide a rare opportunity to put radical poetic theory and practice into institutional play; in fact, what it would reveal about the surprising structure of that particular institution – as I’ll get to later – would prove to be more valuable than the blunt warnings against participating at all. But I did stop to consider the invitation: when I was invited to read, I wondered aloud to a colleague whether if, asked by the G.W. Bush administration to read, would I have accepted? To which my colleague responded, ‘Kenny, you never would’ve been asked to read at the G.W. Bush White House.’
 
But let’s look at what actually happened at the White House and see how it played out on institutional terms. The day was split into two parts. In the afternoon there was a poetry workshop led by Michelle Obama in the State Dining Room and then in the evening there was a formal reading in the East Room. While there were eight ‘poets’ invited to read, most of them were entertainers who performed their lyrics as poetry, such as Jill Scott, Common, Aimee Mann, and Steve Martin, who brilliantly sung an Auden poem with his bluegrass band. The only other full-time poets, beside myself, were Rita Dove and Billy Collins. I should mention that one avant-garde visual artist, Alison Knowles, was also present. In terms of the institution, when I was invited to read, I was only given one rule: that I could not read anything political. What that exactly meant I was never told. Other than that, I had free rein to read whatever I wanted. Once I had decided upon my reading, I had to submit it for approval. Upon arriving at the White House in the morning, the poets did a sound check and ran through their short sets while handlers scurried about setting up the room for the evening’s event. During this sound check, our host, Joe Reinstein, The Deputy Social Secretary to the President, was present from the Administration. After my sound check, Joe made a helpful suggestion regarding the pacing of my introduction. It was good advice and made my set flow better. From that time until the moment I went onstage, nobody commented upon what I was to read. In fact, that evening face-to-face with the President, it dawned on me that as I got up on stage, there was going to be nothing stopping me from reading something other than what I had told them I was going to do. I could’ve read something political or made some sort of unexpected intervention; much to my detractors’ chagrin, I didn’t. I stuck to the script, which for my purposes turned out to be the best thing to do. But more about that later.
 
In the afternoon session with the First Lady, when I was interviewed about my practice by Elizabeth Alexander in front of the White House Press Corps, 70 high school students, and dozens of bureaucrats, I wasn’t vetted about what I could or couldn’t say. I simply said exactly what I say again and again, making my arguments against creativity and for copyleft, file-sharing, and free culture. As Marjorie Perloff described it,

Against the usual admonition to ‘Look in thy heart and write’ (Rita Dove has just told the group that ‘Only you can tell your story. So if you remain true to your own experience, your voice will find you!’), [Goldsmith] begins by noting, tongue in cheek, that his own students are penalized for any shred of originality or creativity they might show. As he puts it in the manifesto, ‘Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering and stealing. Not surprisingly they thrive. Suddenly, what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out in the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.’ Copying, cutting and pasting, downloading, recycling: these activities, Goldsmith argues, will actually teach students more about literature than the seeming ‘originality’ of self-expression.¹²

Nobody blinked an eye. When discussing my entirely-appropriated book, Day, which is a transcription of a day’s copy of The New York Times, I was interrupted by an engrossed First Lady who insisted on knowing what day I chose to transcribe. The lack of resistance to what I was saying was remarkable. In fact, the White House was the most frictionless place I’ve ever been. Nothing ever goes wrong there. Like walking on air or being on the moon, there’s a complete lack of gravity. Due to the most insane security, it feels like the freest, most relaxed place on earth. It’s like everyone is on a combination of Prozac and Ecstasy. And everything I said there seemed to be met with big smiles and nods of approval, even things that advocated breaking social contracts – or even the law. Strange doesn’t begin to describe it.
 
That evening, with the President sitting five feet away from me, I read appropriated texts. Again, nobody flinched. I put together a short set featuring an American icon, The Brooklyn Bridge, and presented three takes on it, first an excerpt from before the bridge was built from Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, then the bridge as metaphysical / spiritual modernist icon with an excerpt from Hart Crane’s ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’, finally finishing with an excerpt from my book Traffic, which is 24 hours’ worth of transcribed traffic reports from a local New York news station. The crowd, comprised of arts administrators, Democratic party donors, and various senators and mayors, respectfully sat through the ‘real’ poetry – the Whitman and Crane – but when the uncreative texts appeared, the audience was noticeably more attentive, seemingly stunned that the quotidian language and familiar metaphors from their world – congestion, infrastructure, gridlock – could be framed somehow as poetry. It was a strange meeting of the avant-garde with the everyday, resulting in a realist poetry – or should I say hyperrealist poetry – that was instantly understood by all in the room; let’s call it radical populism.
 
Now let’s take a moment to parse the famous suit I was wearing and examine how that played into institutional critique. John Stewart speculated that it was improvised at the last minute, quipping that the afternoon before I went onstage I glanced at the wall and asked, ‘Hey, does that wallpaper come off?’ An UPenn alumnus, writing in the Penn alumni magazine commented,

Kenneth Goldsmith is pictured standing at a podium dressed somewhat like the clown he apparently wishes to be. But alas, he is not at a circus; he is an honored guest at the White House, reading his ‘work’ at an ‘Evening of Poetry’.

But the suit was actually made by Brooks Brothers, the same outfitters that supplied the suit that The President himself was wearing that evening. My suit was designed by the avant-garde designer Thom Browne under his Brooks Brothers’ owned Black Fleece label, who does pretty much what I was doing at the White House: taking the traditional patterns that Brooks Brothers is known for – in this case paisley – and pushing them way too far. Similarly, during the day session with the First Lady, I wore a Thom Browne pastel suit, which references the insane pastels of the preppy Newport set. For the suit I wore, Brown actually created a pastiche or patchwork of traditional preppy colors and literally made a remix of them. It was clear that Brooks Brothers needed to revitalize their brand, shake up the staid traditions, hence they called in Browne to bring Brooks Brothers into the 21st century, replete with self-conscious winks and nods, engaged with remix culture, and to add a big dose of impurity. Clearly that meant not ditching their classic line, but spinning off another line based on what they became famous for.
 
I figured that The Obamas – preps to the core – would in some way recognize the paisley and the pastels, but be befuddled by the size of the paisley or the way that the pastels were unconventionally stitched together. And that, in fact, was the case. Upon meeting the President, the first thing he said to me was, ‘That’s a great suit! You know? I’d wear a suit like that. But my staff would never let me.’ To which I replied, ‘Mr. President, this is one instance where it’s better being an artist than being the President of the United States: artists can wear anything they want.’ And then he glanced down at my saddle shoes and exclaimed, ‘You’re wearing golf shoes!’ Which in part was true, that being the genius of Thom Browne, to take something familiar and recontextualize it to the point of it being ‘wrong’, which is exactly what I aimed to do with my performance, straddling tradition and radicality, being both and, at the same time, being neither; embracing contradiction, keeping them guessing.
 
Now where this intersects with theory is interesting. Jacques Derrida stated that

What [the] institution cannot bear, is for anyone to tamper with language…It can bear more readily the most apparently revolutionary ideological sorts of ‘content,’ if only that content does not touch the borders of language and all the juridico-political contracts that it guarantees.¹³

As evidenced by the recent Occupy Wall Street protests, institutions were – at least in the beginning – remarkably adaptive and flexible, often sympathetic, to protesters. The modes of discourse, although radical in their political sentiments, were expressed in a common language (Derrida’s ‘contract’), one that was well-understood and mutually agreed upon by both parties. Ideological differences – agree-to-disagree – are a given, but formal challenges to language prove to be a harder pill to swallow. An example of this happened when an artist showed up at Zuccotti Park with a sign that read, ‘Gucci. Do The Dishes.’ He was nearly run out of the occupation by protesters who attacked his language for lack of clarity. They didn’t know what to do with poetic sentiment. Clearly, ambiguity broke the linguistic contracts. Yet Occupy Wall Street’s overarching genius has been to exploit these exact precepts by developing what Brian Eno calls an ‘oblique strategy’, jamming norms by refusing to make a list of demands – adapting an attitude of ambiguity – breaking the contract, leaving the institutions unsure of exactly how to respond. Brilliant, really. Derrida’s ideas were formulated in the wake of May 68, where Situationist-inspired slogans – “Sous les pavés, la plage,” “Ne travaillez jamais,” or the sorts of linguistic détournement that occurred during the Prague Spring, where street signs were painted over so as to confuse the arriving tanks – similarly were able to jam normative discourse by breaking the contract due to their oblique, poetic qualities. The lesson: by taking a rigid position – either / or – one makes oneself an easy target. Occupy Wall Street is a product of the digital age: distributed, non-specific, nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Such strategies are nuanced and complex, causing befuddlement in a binary-based black-and-white culture.
 
What happened in the White House was that radicality was clothed in the nearly identical linguistic garments of normative discourse familiar to the institution. And because it was fed to it on its own terms, the juridico-political contracts were held in tact, thereby going unnoticed. In fact, one could say that most of those in the room were talking heads, daily spouting words written by others. It’s no wonder they felt akin to appropriative and uncreative writing. So what we’re seeing with much new conceptual work is the inability of institutions to muzzle those who tamper with language because – unlike disjunctive modernisms – it is unaware that it is being tampered with.
 
And this cloak of invisibility has affected and opened up certain institutions in ways that even a few years ago, was unheard of. Recently, I was interviewed by a European academic journal and was asked a question I’ve been asked many times before:

Interviewer: The programme of Language writing seems quite congenial to what you do. They as well felt the need to react against poetry as it was/is taught at universities. Many language writers, however, are currently working at a university (and so are you). Isn’t there a contradiction in this? 
Goldsmith: It’s a fact that in the United States, the primary reception of innovative literature happens in the university; there really is very little readership outside the academy. This is a condition that preceded my arrival onto the writing scene, fostered by numerous cultural conditions in the States, as well as the warm reception of Language Poetry by the academy. As such, I simply take it as a given that this is where the readership and study of my work occurs. But it’s not all bad news. At the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach, we are given free rein to teach in unconventional ways. For example, I teach classes in uncreative writing where we encourage the students to plagiarize, appropriate, plunder and sample. They are demerited when they show signs of originality or of conventional thinking. The university supports this agenda, so you see that perhaps the academy is not what it used to be.¹⁴

The fact that I am not only permitted but encouraged to explore this in a university classroom – in plain sight – is a fact that I still find remarkable. And yet I continue on, as I have done for nearly a decade. But it’s not just the University of Pennsylvania who has permitted this: a host of other institutions have also signed on. In 2010 I was awarded the Anschutz Distinguished Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University, where I also taught uncreative writing. In fact, in my application for the award I had to propose a class and syllabus, so there were no surprises: they knew exactly what they were getting. Furthermore, a once-staid university press, Columbia, just published a book of my essays called – you guessed it – Uncreative Writing. The Chronicle of Higher Education – that standard bearer of academic institutions in the United States – recently published my entire introduction to the Uncreative Writing – all 8,000 words – in both print and on the web. And in 2009, I edited a 40-page portfolio of Flarf and Conceptual Writing for Poetry, which is consistently derided in certain circles for its inability to recognize and publish ‘innovative’ work. Think again. This litany is not about bragging: what I find remarkable is these institutions’ embrace and acceptance of what they’re most often accused of dismissing and ignoring. This is not to say that there hasn’t been pushback and anger from the public; particularly in the journals, there have been dozens of harsh responses, shocked that such ‘proper’ institutions would even entertain such ideas, much less unapologetically publish them. But in Derridean terms, this is all part of the juridico-political contract of commonly agreed-upon language.
 
Yet as recently as December 2011, The New York Times published this astonishing sentence: ‘Publishers are extremely sensitive to charges of plagiarism, considered among the gravest sins in the literary world, and in some cases are quick to respond.’¹⁵ Conceptual writing began with legitimizing plagiarism as a literary practice but, having thoroughly exhausted that terrain – need we appropriate the entire internet? – has moved on to explore non- or anti- writing. Plagiarism is still concerned with traditional literary notions (the play between the original writer and the re-writer, and of course, is deeply engaged with a readership, either duped or complicit) and is still codependent upon the role of the author. We’re far beyond the death of the author; now we’re talking about the death of literature.
 
While there are pockets of resistance – some very large ones – it appears that by and large the battle has been won. So what happens when the institutional critique is so easily absorbed by the institution, that it moves from a ‘critique of institutions to an institution of critique?’¹⁶ We’ve seen this already in the art world where performative acts of institutional critique are regularly commissioned by the institutions themselves. Andrea Fraser, perhaps addressing her own practice, writes,

How can artists who have become art-historical institutions themselves claim to critique the institution of art? …. Today, the argument goes, there no longer is an outside. How, then, can we imagine, much less accomplish, a critique of art institutions when museum and market have grown into an all-encompassing apparatus of cultural reification? Now, when we need it most, institutional critique is dead, a victim of its success or failure, swallowed up by the institution it stood against.¹⁷

One way out of this impasse might come from Marcel Broodthaers. After his initial act of institutional critique – embedding his poetry books in plaster – he entirely sidestepped the need to discourse with official institutions by inventing a series of false museums, ones which ran parallel to the world of official culture, thus calling into question what cultural legitimacy means (or more specifically, to perform a critique of what Adorno terms the ‘culture industry’.) Once again, invoking insincerity and superficiality, in 1965 the artist blatantly spoke of desiring status and power:

In art exhibitions I often mused …. Finally I would try to change into an art lover. I would revel in my bad faith …. Since I couldn’t build a collection of my own, for lack of even the minimum of financial means, I had to find another way of dealing with the bad faith that allowed me to indulge in so many strong emotions. So, said I to myself, I’ll be a creator.¹⁸

By creator, he meant founder, curator, and director for a newly created institution he called The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, 19th Century Wing, which opened in his street-level apartment in Brussels in 1969. Contained in the ‘museum’ were postcard reproductions of paintings adorning the walls and sealed shipping crates strewn about the room. For a man who couldn’t afford the real things that museums showed, his museums would have all the trappings of the museum – the scaffolding and structures of the museum – minus the objects. Over the years, his museums reappeared in various cities in Europe, spontaneously re-opening with newly installed works. And they got more complex: by the time he was done, his project was resolutely and self-reflexively museological, with a complex, invented system of arcane and functionless collecting and naming, resulting in a pataphysical institution, one that proposed imaginary curatorial solutions to imaginary curatorial problems.
 
Broodthaers’ trajectory makes us aware that in any extended artistic practice, there is an inevitable pull toward institutionalization. At age 40, after having transitioned from poet to artist, and now finding himself with the title of Museum Director, Broodthaers wrote,

Of course I now have a job, and I’d have a hard time getting out of it. In my naïvete, I actually believed that I could put off choosing a profession until my demise. How have I been trapped? . . . Yes, now, like all artists, I’m an integral part of society.¹⁹

Broodthaers confesses that his fate is his own doing, understanding that it is the price one pays to play. The other alternative is not to play at all, as advocated by Dorothea Lasky, in her widely discussed 2009 essay, ‘Poetry is Not a Project’. In it, she claims,

The term ‘project’ comes from the visual art world. And other worlds too, like science, business, and education. But especially from the visual art world. And if there is one thing that poets would like to be today, it’s visual artists. Why? Because visual artists have all the money …. A poet with a project (who can name his project and talk about it) shows that everything was all set before he even started. A poet with a nameable project seems wise, and better than other poets with an unnameable one. But this kind of thinking strikes me as BS, because I don’t believe that’s how poetry works …. I would argue that a poet who has a project that he can lucidly discuss is a pretty boring poet, at best. I would argue that a poet with a project might not be a poet at all …. I think the term ‘project’ has nothing to do with poetry …. The notion of a poetic ‘project’ may actually be very toxic to poetry …. Let’s be special for once. In the context of bankers, lawyers, scientists, painters, musicians, we’re poets. Let’s have a little pride. And let’s be gentle when describing our skills to the outside world, so that they can understand us better and we can give each other what we need.²⁰

Lasky’s pose strikes me as contributing to the stereotypical notions of poetry’s powerlessness. At a time when poetry is going out of its way to be confrontational and aggressive, Lasky tiptoes about, asking poets to ‘be gentle when describing our skills to the outside world, so that they can understand us better.’ She begs poets to ‘have a little pride’, but as far as I can see, poets today are filled with pride, filled with rage and don’t feel the need to be gentle about anything. I find her use of the term ‘outside world’ to be equally problematic, when so many have been working so hard to break down such long-standing divisions, to the point where poetry has become a regular part of occupational discourse.
 
Similarly, poets involved with institutional critique are directly inserting poetics and poetic practice into Lasky’s dreaded arenas of business, law, science, medicine, and art:

Kim Rosenfield has been taking ideas from conceptual poetics focusing on fraudulent notions of authenticity & meaning and mapping them onto psychoanalytic theories that, in turn, are being published in professional psychoanalytic journals.
Christian Bök’s Xenotext project — a poem constructed entirely in a laboratory — is being received by the scientific world, with lengthy articles about his endeavors featured in that field’s prominent journals such as New Scientist.
Darren Wershler and Lisa Gitelman have been injecting technology-based poetic ideas into the worlds of media & communication studies which are juicing that field with poetry in ways that haven’t happened since Marshall McLuhan.
Vanessa Place use the forms and languages of law to question the morals and ethics of its professional practices.
Robert Fitterman’s consumerist landscapes boldly employ the hollow rhetoric of shopping malls and catalogues, giving him the ability to critique global late capitalism by appropriating the brutal language of business on its own terms.
My own theorizing of conceptual poetics have been published by and included in the forthcoming Documenta 13 have forced the art world to take notice of what’s going on in poetry instead of the typically inverse situation.

Inspired by the complex projects and sophisticated attitudes of Broodthaers, there’s nothing ‘gentle’ about these gestures and certainly nothing that condescends in order to make the ‘outside world understand [them] better.’ Instead it’s the opposite. Darren Wershler claims that ‘poetry has left the building.’ And he’s right. We’re peeling radical poetics off the page and marching them into the science lab, into the court of law, onto the psychoanalyst’s couch, and into the East Room of The White House, forcing poetry to become a driver of discourse, at once fondly caressing these institutions, while at the same time driving a stake into their backs. To imagine it in any other way would be insulting. I would say that the path to ‘a little bit of pride’ is aggressive activist engagement, to delve head on into the conceptual, political, and institutional complexities of parapoetic practice, not to shy away from them. And until we can permit ourselves to do that, poetry will remain firmly seated on the sidelines.
 
 
Notes
 
1http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/3307/travis_holloway_performing_art/
2 John Kinsella, “Keeping poetry outside the comfort zone,” New Statesman, 13 December 2011 <http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2011/12/poem-poetry-disobedience-land>, Accessed December 15, 2011.
3 Judith Barry, Renée Green, Fred Wilson, Christian Philipp Müller, Andrea Fraser, “Serving Institutions”, October 80 (Spring 1997): 120-129.
4 Saltz, Jerry. “Critiqueus interruptus”. The Village Voice. http://www.villagevoice.com/2007-02-13/art/critiqueus-interruptus/, Viewed 15 November 2011
5 That, in fact, turned out to be the case. The plaster-embedded books, entitled “Pense-Bête” (Reminder, 1964) rarely – if ever comes up for sale. By comparison, a minor work, “Le drapeau noir” (The Black Flag, 1968-72) recently went for nearly $30,000 at auction.
6 Quoted in Marcel Broodthaers, Tate Gallery, 1980 p. 13.
7 Ron Silliman, blog entry dated Sunday, October 05, 2008 <http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2008/10/one-advantage-of-e-books-is-that-you.html>, (October 20, 2008).
8 Robert Archambeau, “Kenneth Goldsmith, or the Art of Being Talked About” < http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/kenneth-goldsmith-or-art-of-being.html> , viewed November 16, 2011
9 The Tortoise And The Hare: Dale Smith and Kenneth Goldsmith Parse Slow and Fast Poetries Monday, July 6, 2009 – Saturday, July 25, 2009, Jacket 38, 2009. <http://jacketmagazine.com/38/iv-smith-goldsmith.shtml> accessed November 16, 2011. I have edited the last portion of this paragraph for the sake of clarity. The original was: “Not too long ago, on Silliman’s blog, Kent Johnson left a comment which proposed that “The poetic politics of [Flarf and Conceptual Poetry] begin where those of Language poetry ended.” …. I wonder, actually, if by this he partly means that in fact the new poetry-“avant-garde” is very much, and quite willingly, inside a “Building” that’s quite primed and ready to receive “Art Works” of the kind you are offering. The installations proffered want to be provocative, and no doubt some in the “populist” audience …. will see them as so; but the installations are inside a kind of museum, really, ready-made for them, if you’ll pardon the pun.”
10 Linh Dinh, “Re: Penn’s Kenneth Goldsmith to perform at the White House next week” May 5 2011 <http://wwwwsonneteighteencom.blogspot.com/2011/05/re-penns-kenneth-goldsmith-to-perform.html>, accessed November 21 2011.
11 http://wwwwsonneteighteencom.blogspot.com/2011/05/al-filreis-email-to-me-regarding-kenny.html, Accessed November 26, 2011.
12 Marjorie Perloff, “Towards a conceptual lyric: From content to context” Jacket 2, July 28, 2011. http://jacket2.org/article/towards-conceptual-lyric, Accessed November 20, 2011.
13 Jaques Derrida, “Living On: Border Lines”, in Peggy Kamuf, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991, p263.
14 Sarah Posman, “Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith,” Yang (Ghent), 2006.4 “MAXIMALE VERVANGBAARHEID”http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/Yang_Goldsmith_Interview.pdf>, Accessed November 21, 2011.
15 Julie Bosman, “Is It Plagiarism? Publisher Says No” The New York Times, December 8, 2011 <http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/is-it-plagiarism-publisher-says-no/?hp> Accessed December 8, 2011.
16 This phrase is lifted from Andrea Fraser’s retrospective glance and historical gloss on institutional critique, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique.” Published in Artforum in September, 2005, pp. 278-283
17 Ibid.
18 Marcel Broodthaers, “Comme de buerre dans un sandwich,” Phantomas, nos. 51-61 (December, 1965), pp. 295-296; quoted in Birgit Pelzer, “Recourse to the Letter,” October, no. 42 (Fall, 1987), p. 163.
19 “A la galerie aujourd’hui: Marcel Broodthaers par Marcel Broodthaers,” Journal des Beaux- Arts, no. 1086 (April 1, 1965), p. 5.
20 Dorothea Lasky, “The Poetic ‘Project’ (And Other Poetry-Associated Terms I Hate)” < http://www.themillions.com/2009/04/national-poetry-month-dorothea-lasky_24.html>, Accessed November 27, 2011.

Broodthaers had consistently constructed an artistic persona based upon the assertion of his own insincerity. He relentlessly drew attention to the commodity status of art, to his own self-promotion, and to the discursive and institutional formations in which art operates. The project for which he is best known, Museé d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, was initiated in 1968 in his Brussels appartment, and led a sporadic and polymorphous life until it was officially closed in 1972. One notorious manifestation of this fictional Museum happened in this very building – the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf – in an installation entitled ‘The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present’. This contained over 300 objects and artworks borrowed from various national and international museum collections, from bottle tops to oil paintings to temple statuary. Contracting the lessons of Magritte and Duchamp, each object was displayed with a small plaque bearing a catalogue number and the words ‘This is not a work of art’. This complex work is regarded as a foundational moment in the history of Installation Art and of Institution Critique, probing as it did the assumptions, authority and expository function of public museums.

 
Particularly during the 1970s, Broodthaers took on his contemporaries, needling the assumptions of Conceptual Art and pointedly countering the shamanic utopianism of Joseph Beuys, by way of an ingenious open letter, published in 1972. His critiques of bourgeois indolence and his exploration of the discourses of colonialism and conquest became more sustained during the mid-1970s, although still in 1974 Broodthaers would affirm, ‘The way I see it, there can be no direct connection between art and message, especially if the message is political, without running the risk of being burned by the artifice.’ Broodthaers’ work insistently, if obliquely, pressed upon political questions, the artist constantly mindful of the discursive formations in which he was embroiled, and of how hungry the culture industry is for the image of artist as free radical.
 
The present exhibition features the work of ten artists in four main galleries, with works by Stephen Prina, Kirsten Pieroth, Henrik Olesen and Susanne Winterling appearing in more than one room. Reflecting the heterogeneity of Broodthaers’s own (postmedium) practice, there was huge variability in the form the works took: found objects, newspapers, assisted readymades, photographs, postcards, slide shows, projected images, sound recordings and constructed environments. Much of the work was provisional in feel, rather low-tech and unassertive, and the display certainly required knowledge of Broodthaers’ work, amongst other things, to give it coherence. The curation allowed for connections to emerge gradually between works, but to say that these were not forced would be an understatement. Nevertheless, Olivier Foulon’s presentation of Whistler’s Ten O’Clock Lectures, translated into French by Mallarmé in 1888, connect in both theme and protagonist to Wyn Evans’ appropriation of Un coup de dès upstairs. Pieroth’s concern with literary voyages and cartographic practices is also nicely introduced by Andy Hope 1930’s small painted version of A Voyage on the North Sea. Nevertheless, the range of cultural references proliferates in dizzying fashion throughout the show. Édouard Manet, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Mallarmé, Whistler, Maurice Lemaître and Karl Robert are all directly referenced, and my sense was that the exhibition required such a high level of spectatorial literacy that few viewers would feel fully adequate to it (which is not necessarily a criticism of the show). Several artists made explicit reference to specific works by Broodthaers himself: Prina to the aforementioned Eagles exhibition, Wyn Evans to his Mallarmé work, Andy Hope 1930 to A Voyage on the North Sea, and Pieroth to The Conquest of Space. These were subtle, elegant and exacting revisitings, with Prina’s Retrospection Under Duress, Reprise (2000) being a particularly sophisticated reflection upon Broodthaers’ achievement. Framed photographs of items catalogued in Broodthaers’ Eagles show were laid out on four long strips of packing paper, as if awaiting their hanging. Each was accompanied by a plaque reading ‘What else could this be?’ and, at the end of the fourth column were colour photographs trained upon the lighting apparatus used to illuminate the Acropolis in such spectacular fashion. Broodthaers’ 1972 exhibition subtly illuminated the ideological foundations of public art museums, flagging their association with the symbol of the eagle (and all its connotations). Yet the public museum remained the arena in which he chose to operate, as one of the few public arenas where this kind of complex, critical practice could still take place. Prina seems equally aware of this tension, balancing a critical attention to the power dynamics and spectacular effects of the culture industry with an assertion of the intelligence and subtlety that the spaces of art might still provide.
 

Nevertheless, Prina’s address to the question of art’s political role remains rather oblique. Indeed, aside from Henrik Olesen’s explicit queering of our vision of 19th century art, the address to politics is even less direct than in Broodthaers’ own work. Broodthaers had antagonists, and he also repeatedly held up the signifiers of colonialism and institutional authority to be thought through and puzzled over. Perhaps because a good deal of the lessons of Institution Critique have been internalized by contemporary museums themselves, these dimensions of Broodthaers’ practice are not foregrounded in this exhibition. That is not to say that the agency of symbolic systems, boundaries and currencies are not present here – Winterling and Tuerlinckx, for example, certainly dwell on the establishment of such frames and demarcations – but these tend to be abstracted from specific discursive structures and other social systems.

 
Broodthaers emerges here as a progenitor of refined, cryptic and highly culturally literate forms of artistic labour. He licenses certain demands to be placed upon the viewer and, despite (or perhaps because of) his acute critical intelligence, offers a deceptively ambitious sense for what resources are available to art in order to save it from its status as merchandise. Art’s status as commodity, however, is not a key concern (it seemed to me) for any of the artists here. Perhaps this aspect of art’s predicament now simply goes without saying: yes, art is a commodity, but it is not reducible to that status and does what it can to surpass it (although not, here, challenge it very explicitly).
 
Indeed, as Rachel Haidu, in her major new study of Broodthaers (The Absence of Work, 2010), has noted, much of the artist’s reputation rests upon his inaccessibility. Is there a way in which this work operates through a seduction by way of obscurity?As Broodthaers himself says, the viewer must want to figure out the rebuses he presents, to read them and turn them over as meaningful if elusive signs. Given the concurrence of the major Beuys retrospective held video in the opposite building, it is instructive to compare, as Broodthaers himself did, his mode of obscurity to that of Beuys. If Beuys, arguably, relied upon a suspension of the critical faculties of his audience – so that the myth of the shamanic artist and the almost ritualistic significance of his materials could be felt –Broodthaers refused the injunction placed upon the artist to offer clear messages and instead placed the emphasis upon the problem of how meaning is made, and on what (and indeed whose) terms. Without antagonists, however, this Bartleby-like refusal loses some of its purchase, which is not to detract from the sophistication of the assembled contributions here, aimed as they are in other directions.
 
 
Real Presences: Broodthaers Today was on view at the Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, 11 September 2010 – 16 January 2011.