Marcel Broodthaers. Perceptive Glance and Allegorical Practice in Contemporary Art

Since the 1980s, an allegorical interpretation of some artistic practices and works of art realized between the 1960s and the 1970s by American and European neo-avant-garde artists has been emerging in a specific area of American art criticism. This peculiar allegorical reading has shed new light on art and its contents introducing a critical focal point that significantly differs from post-structuralist analyses, cultural and visual studies, and “post-modern drifts.” Having put aside research on art in the urban space, social commitment and site-specificity, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Hal Foster started from the core of Walter Benjamin’s influential analyses on the connection between allegory, works of art and commodity, which had appeared in the following texts: “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century” (1935), “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (1938), “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and “Central Park” (1938-39). In these writings, Benjamin reflects on the historical conditions and productive processes that at the turn of the 20th century caused radical changes in the artistic production and the birth of a revolutionary allegorical vision connecting this perspective to the “historical process of reification” in which human relations come to be identified with the physical property of things. My dissertation examines Benjamin’s thought on allegory as well as Buchloh and Foster’s inquiries on the metamorphoses of this rhetorical figure in the advanced capitalist society, in order to examine through the “genius of allegory” the work of one of the most emblematic artists of the 20th century: the Belgian poet and artist Marcel Broodthaers (Brussels 1924 – Cologne 1976). Starting from the study of his poems and assemblages of mussels and eggshells considered as allegorical prefigurations, through the analysis of Poèmes Industriels (1968-72), Décors (1974-76), and different Sections of the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968-72), this research recognizes the work of this artist as a seminal moment of re-framing allegory in contemporary European art of the second half of the 20th century. Anticipating an original neo-avant-garde reinterpretation of Benjamin’s concept of allegory, Broodthaers fostered the complete transformation of art into merchandise and its dialectical relationship with the commodity fetishism. Poet, artist, filmmaker and photographer, Broodthaers constantly placed the art system and the role of museums in society at the core of his investigations and poignant subversions. Rich in enigmatic and “second degree” images, his work questioned the allegorical status of the artwork “under the reign of the cultural industry” (Buchloh, 1987) and the historical circumstances which had generated the growing complicity between art and the forces of production. Working under the aegis of Marcel Duchamp and René Magritte, mistrustful of the Conceptual Art and Institutional Critique, and believing that “fiction allows you to capture reality and at the same time what it conceals” (M. B., 1972), Broodthaers was the author of one of the major irreverent actions of neo-avant-garde “institutional detournement” (Krauss, 1999): the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, the most mature and accomplished expression of his allegorical imagery and strategy