Niele Toroni. Andata E Ritorno (Orange), 1991; installation of four canvases, easels, imprints of No. 50 brush repeated at regular distances; 39 1/2 x 39 1/2 x 1 1/8 in. each. Courtesy of the Artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, London. Photo: Thierry Bal.

In Michael Newman’s poetic text accompanying the exhibition The Supreme Rifts… A Measured Propinquity at London’s Marian Goodman Gallery, he attempts to justify the grouping of five (exclusively male) artists that, to this author, initially seemed based purely on art-world pragmatism and economic interest: Sol LeWitt, Gabriel Orozco, Gerhard Richter, Ettore Spalletti, and Niele Toroni. Might this layering of grids, cubes, and chromatic forms—displayed (for the umpteenth time) with plenty of prime white-cube space left for phenomenological shuffling—be supreme, an adjective that Newman borrows from a poem to describe the “rifts,” or spaces of discourse opened between the different works? Can it still be so, especially when so many of the works were produced last year?[1] Newman’s stream-of-consciousness explanation of the exhibition’s title does little to dissuade.

Newman’s quasi-exegetic exploration of the arrangement of LeWitt’s “rules,” Orozco’s “combination of the machinic and the handmade,” Richter’s color strips, Spalletti’s chromatic “depth,” and Toroni’s signature brush imprints leads him to consult Stéphan Mallarmé. Just as Marcel Broodthaers had declared Mallarmé to be the source of all contemporary art, Newman remarks that Mallarmé is the “key to almost everything that has happened in art since he wrote.”[2] Mallarmé’s seminal poem “Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard” famously utilized white space, making a “spatialized poem.” With this, Broodthaers claimed, Mallarmé invented modern space. Newman instead invokes Mallarme’s “Mystery in Literature,” and from there culls the phrase “the supreme rifts,” in his view describing the physical and immaterial spaces of argumentation between the arranged works. What about a measured propinquity, implying a more-than-coincidental proximity? Newman claims that there exists an essential reason why these works should be shown in this way.

Such a quest for a justified propinquity ultimately belies a potentially more convincing result of the works’ positioning: an evocation of the tension between physical materiality and process-based strategies, two different poles of production that many of the works navigate between. For example, Toroni’s characteristic brush imprints—shown with the group BMPT (Buren, Mosset, Paramentier and Toroni) in 1967-68—have clearly lost their political verve.[3] However, the contemporary reactivation of this cool Conceptual gesture makes underlying pencil-drawn X’s, marking the points where brush had touched canvas resolutely visible: an evocation of their material construction. So too with LeWitt’s “sloppy” cube paintings: The presence of the artist’s “hand” is not lost. After passing paintings by the older postwar titans, Orozco’s Blackboard Drawing works (1998) show that the traditions of “first generation” conceptual artists, themselves informed by Minimalist aesthetics, have not been forgotten. Such drawings—in sharp contrast to Orozco’s earlier poetic work—retain clean geometry and a precise process. Perhaps this arrangement can, in fact, be supreme—or affectively contentious—if we follow the pertinent discourses between different generations.

The Supreme Rifts… A Measured Propinquity will be on view through April 8, 2017.

Andreas Petrossiants is completing his MA in art history at Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He is currently writing on the work of “second generation” institutional critique artists, and their inscription of labor within research-based practices.

[1] The short answer is no.
[2] Marian Goodman Gallery, The Supreme Rifts…A Measured Propinquity, Gallery Press Release, London, 2017, http://mariangoodman.com/exhibition/4279/press-release.
[3] Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Group That Was (Not) One: Daniel Buren and BMPT,” Artforum (May 2008).

Marcel Broodthaers. Pense-Bete (Memory Aid), 1964; books, paper, plaster, and plastic balls on wooden base, without wooden base; 11 13/16 × 33 1/4 × 16 15/16 in. Courtesy of the Collection Flemish Community, long-term loan S.M.A.K. © 2016 Estate of Marcel Broodthaers, the Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, SABAM, Brussels, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In Marcel Broodthaers’ poem “Question de Peinture,” he asks whether paintings by famous artists smell of “the monstrous praise of which/they are victims?”[1] We might ask whether Broodthaers’ work similarly smells in his current major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Upon first glance, it might seem this way; however, the retrospective’s attention to Broodthaers’ gesture of institutional critique allows his work’s critical voice to speak over the stink of praise.

Before declaring himself an artist in 1963, Broodthaers, influenced by Stéphane Mallarmé, wrote poetry. His career switch was not an attempt to end his poetry, but rather to continue his work with new means. Pense-Bête (1964) exemplifies this, a work created by taking the remaining unsold copies of his book by the same title, the original wrapping paper still visible, and inserting them into a plaster base, fusing plastic objects into the plaster as well. Making the book unreadable negates its functionality, and thereby questions the relationship between the art object and language.

The retrospective demonstrates Broodthaers’ continued questioning of how the institution reifies an artwork, paying specific attention to two later phases of his career. Firstly, the artist’s fictitious museum, Musée d’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles (1968–1972), under the auspices of which he staged multiple temporary presentations, called “sections,” and in his later installations under the tagline of décor, some of which are reinstalled in the retrospective.

Taking note from Marcel Duchamp, who first utilized the found object as readymade, Broodthaers reworked its implementation and used groups of objects and even entire exhibitions as readymades, as in Section des Figures (1972), installed by his “fake” art museum referenced above. In that “section,” Broodthaers placed mundane objects, such as champagne corks, in line with traditionally accepted works of art—including one by René Magritte, and another by Gerhard Richter that was commissioned by Broodthaers. Next to each object, painterly or otherwise, was a tag in French, German, and English: “This is not a work of art.” In doing so, Broodthaers questions the value implicitly given to the art object within the institution.

Broodthaers’ meta-gesture of quasi-absurdist experimentation and his perpetual critique of art’s institutional commodification and representation shines—albeit somewhat ironically—in the MoMA retrospective, providing visitors a profound view into the entire oeuvre of the Belgian conceptual master.

Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective is on view through May 15, 2016, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Andreas Petrossiants is finishing his undergraduate thesis at New York University this May before going to complete his MA in art history in Global Conceptualism at the Courtauld Institute in London. His studies focus on the work of contemporary artists who have adopted conceptual practices from 20th-century vanguards.

[1] Marcel Broodthaers, “Questions de ‘Peinture,’” translated by John Shepley, October vol. 42 (Autumn 1987), 13.