Artist: Marcel Broodthaers
The 1968 political unrest in Europe, which included artists protesting the commercialization of art by occupying the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, prompted Broodthaers, the artist group's spokesman, to create his own "museum." Housed in his apartment, the museum began with his "Department of Eagles - 19th Century Section," where he displayed postcards and slides showing 19th century artworks that all contained images of eagles, along with object labels which stated, "This is not a work of art." He also used labels to identify and number individual rooms as "galleries". Broodthaers opened the exhibition with a lecture outlining the ideas behind the piece, alongside a more formal art historical lecture given by Dr. Johannes Claedders, the director of the modern art museum in Monchengladbach. As the artist said, "This Museum is a fictitious museum. It plays the role of, on the one hand, a political parody of art shows, and, on the other hand, an artistic parody of political events. Which is, in fact, what official museums and institutions...do. With the difference, however, that a work of fiction allows you to capture reality and at the same time what it conceals."
He described his process, "These boxes arrived and I arranged them in quite a special way, precisely as one would arrange a work of art. And I said to myself: 'But basically, this is what a museum is.'" He developed the project for the next four years, creating eleven iterations, including a "Financial Section," where he attempted to sell his museum for "bankruptcy." He created gold bars stamped with eagles, selling them at twice their metal value due to their 'artistic value,' and in 1972 created the "Figures Section," where he included 300 various objects containing eagle imagery, as he said, "It is easily obvious that I wanted to neutralize the use-value of the symbol of the Eagle and reduce it to the degree of zero in order to introduce critical dimensions into the history and use of this symbol."
The work allowed Broodthaers to pose as artist, curator, museum director, donor, and art trustee simultaneously, and was a bold and innovative multi-pronged attack upon artistic institutions. It questioned their financial structure, aesthetic evaluation, and their concepts of aesthetic originality. The work also invited participation and engagement, prefiguring later works of Institutional Critique. Broodthaers' work is considered a pioneering influence upon the development of Conceptual art, but was equally relevant to Institutional Critique in his questioning of the museum, as art historian Thierry de Duve said, "as the seat of an arbitrary, monopolistic art power".
