Marcel Broodthaers, 1964-1976; or, The Absence of Work

In his analysis of madness, Michel Foucault describes...a linguistic code that does not say anything...fold of the spoken that is an absence of work." This dissertation argues that the artistic practice of Marcel Broodthaers produces similar codes, presenting failure, erasure, and repetition in works that also analyze these conditions. The mode of spectatorship thereby produced revokes both the historical conception of progress and the rationalized, Enlightenment forms of subjectivity it celebrates. This project also disentangles Broodthaers's work from its subsumption into the discourses on Conceptual art and institutional critique. Fundamental to these discourses is the triangulation of subject, object and institution. This dissertation claims that Broodthaers's practice replaces such schematic relations by creating a viewing subject confronted by its non-place in the institutionalized narration of the "ends" of history. It is that subject, interpellated by the state yet critically aware of the state's ambiguous authority, which exploits a language that "does not say anything." Projecting his identity as a postwar Belgian artist through the use of "cast" forms such as coal and shells, Broodthaers's earliest works align the emptiness of their forms with that of national identity. This project argues that these works resist the rationalization of form's relation to content, thereby producing a template for understanding the contemporary dilemma of post-national identity. This project then demonstrates how Broodthaers's 1969 Exposition autour de Mallarme frames Mallarme's poetics against the Conceptualist mythologization of a "dematerialized" linguistic sign, revealing the interpellative, even spectacular dimensions of Conceptualism's aesthetic. Broodthaers's most ambitious work, the Musee d'Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles, undertaken from 1968 to 1972, analyzes the performative function of language through which modern states and their institutions erect and enact authority. In the utterly denuded design of the Musee's final exhibition, hundreds of eagle-representations resonant with hieratic authority describe the de-historicizing power of the modern public art museum. Exposing Broodthaers's analysis of the capacities of the sign to mask and compensate for the absence of an originating (institutional) authority or holistic (state) identity, this project posits his own claims to authorship as an extended, self-conscious demonstration of such fraudulent or split identity.