Moving Image Commissions #2: Marcel Broodthaers

The second installment of the Walker’s Moving Image Commissions launch February 17 with premieres of Shahryar Nashat’s Present Sore and  Uri Aran’s Two Things About Suffering in the Walker Cinema. Both works will be presented on the Walker Channel February 18 through March 18, 2016. 

“I am not a filmmaker,” Marcel Broodthaers once declared. “For me, film is simply an extension of language. I began with poetry, moved on to three-dimensional works, finally to film, which combines several artistic elements. That is, it is writing (poetry), object (something three-dimensional), and image (film). The great difficulty lies, of course, in finding a harmony among these three elements.”

With works that span the mediums of installation, text, sculpture and 16mm film, the practice of Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924—1976) is willfully resistant to singular categorization. Descriptions of his work demand either complete specificity to materials (one can refer to his assemblages of eggshells and mussels) or inconclusive platitudes (he is variously described as a “conceptual artist,” “assemblagist,” and “collagist,” though none of them seem to quite fit). So maybe it’s more useful to think of his work, as Broodthaers suggests, simply in terms of language—its translations, opacities, and symbolic power.

Acutely aware that the matter and the meaning of language were completely different, Broodthaers sought to expose the false affinities between the ways in which words attach to images. His work destabilized its sources through punning substitutions and witty redactions in order to reveal the contingencies and structures through which meaning is produced.

Broodthaers didn’t claim to be an artist until he was 40 years old, but throughout his twelve-year career as an artist he repeatedly used of the term “figure.” A word that can also casually stand in for “knowing” or “thinking” (“go figure”), he would often abbreviate the word into “fig.,” the indexical trope of user manuals, encyclopedias, and other forms of informational printed matter. Aware that “fig.” was a traditional means of exemplifying knowledge, he repurposed the term to call attention to the double role of an object—to show the difference of an object observed and an object as an image.

Broodthaers was not interested expressing the lack between meaning and symbol, but rather he sought to foreground the infidelity of and impossibility of embodied meaning. He would often deploy his own adaptations of friend and artist René Magritte’s notorious painting The Treachery of Images (1928–29) and its depiction of a pipe next to the phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”). His works, and his films especially, are exercises in reading—not just reading carefully but becoming aware of the conditions under which one believes themselves able to read at all. As the artist said of his work, it is “something you have to want to figure out.”

Despite an artistic career that lasted just over a decade, the impact of Broodthaers’s complex and diverse legacy is still being figured out, not least in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective. His examination of the social and economic conditions under which art is (or isn’t) constituted and valued has produced a rich cultural inheritance for contemporary artists working in the 21st century, especially those for whom the repurposing and transactions between language and object is key.

Last year, the Walker Art Center’s Moving Image department invited two artists to consider Broodthaers’ conceptual legacy: Shahryar Nashat (b. 1975) and Uri Aran (b. 1977). Like Broodthaers, both work across mediums of installation, sculpture, photography, and moving image. Their work is invested in exploring modes of translation through found and repurposed objects, images and sound. But while Nashat’s work has examined how the human body interacts with and is represented through material culture­—using stand-in figures, prosthetic technologies, and appropriated objects to expose the dependencies of the contemporary body—Aran’s work explores the discord and substitutions that occur between meaning and memory. The latter’s meticulous and intimate assemblages—which often include repurposed objects, appropriated narratives, and customized display structures—lay bare the idiosyncratic systems of personal and cultural knowledge.

Nashat and Aran were commissioned to make moving image works that would premiere at the Walker Cinema before streaming online for free over one month, starting February 18, 2016. Part of the ongoing series of Walker Moving Image Commissions—launched last year with artists Moyra Davey and James Richards considering the inspirations of British filmmaker Derek Jarman—Nashat and Aran have produced works that operate less out of an explicit legacy of Broodthaers and more within the spirit of his cultural influence on today’s aesthetics.

Nashat’s Present Sore (2016, video, 9 minutes) is a composite portrait of the 21st-century body—a synthetic form whose sensuality is both constituted and mediated by inorganic substances: clothes, prosthetic technologies, pharmaceuticals, and money. Recalling Broodthaers’s notion of “figure” as something that might expose the contingencies between symbol and object, Nashat’s video combines rapid editing techniques, a discordant soundtrack composed of myriad digitized sources, and a video presented in 9:16 format—the now ubiquitous portrait format for all handheld devices.

Meanwhile, Uri Aran’s new work, Two Things About Suffering (2016, video, 16 minutes), draws from the artists’ previous productions. Working with his own recent performance documentation as if it were found footage, Aran manipulates his large cache of video material to create a new technical vocabulary replete with recursive loops, an operatic score, and improvised “outtakes.” Teetering between melancholia and slapstick comedy, Aran’s cyclical video echoes Broodthaers’ short films, particularly the black and white 1969 film La Pluie (Projet Pour Un Texte), where Broodthaers attempts to write with an ink pen in the rain. Two Things About Suffering is an absurdist and occasionally nihilistic attempt to perform the moment before language.