Marcel Broodthaers
About the Artist
Broodthaers was born in Brussels in 1924 and mainly focused on poetry until he was forty, when he began his practice in the visual arts. Over the course of the next twelve years, until his early death, his work retained a poetic quality and a sense of humor that balanced its conceptual framework.
Broodthaers is considered one of the most complex and multifaceted artistic figures of the 20th century. As one of the leading representatives of conceptual art, he critically explored not only the relationship between art, language, and communication but also the mechanisms, including the economic ones, that revolve around museums and the art system. He is therefore regarded as one of the fathers of the conceptual movement known as Institutional Critique. Broodthaers passed away in Cologne, Germany, in 1976.
"Une Seconde d'Éternité" (D'après une idée de Charles Baudelaire)
1970
35 mm film transferred to 16 mm, b/w, no sound
The artwork is a film on celluloid in which, frame after frame, stroke after stroke, within the 24 frames that occupy a second in the projection of a 16 mm film, the artist composes his own initials: «M. B.».
After dismantling the rules of the museum by exhibiting ordinary objects with the effigy of an eagle, labeled as «ceci n'est pas un objet d’art» (this is not a work of art), he performs another unsettling gesture by making his own initials the subject of the exhibited film, crystallizing in the fleeting but endless looping image narrative one second for eternity. The discourse on aura, authorship, and the nature of the artist's authority unfolds along the film, which represents the body of water in which Narcissus, the artist’s alter ego,reflects and «disperses».