Marcel Broodthaers and Liliana Porter

Porter and Broodthaers do not share the same nationality, they do not speak the same language, they have not lived in the same cities, and they do not even form part of the same historical period, but they function in a similar way. Both the Argentine artist and the Belgian one compose their works with found objects, assemblages, and accumulations. The materials Liliana Porter uses in her compositions can be a doll, a nail, a minute character dressed in a suit and tie, a toy ship, a brush for cleaning pianos. For Marcel Broodthaers, the constructive elements may be, among others, egg shells, mussels or bricks. Porter and Broodthaers use a variety of mediums and techniques to translate their ideas: prints, slides, text, photography, film, video, sculpture, painting; but both develop a contradictory correspondence between language and image.
Above anything else, they share similar concerns: both are interested in the relationship between the artist and society; both resort to analogous strategies, and both make use of humor and the absurd to construct their artworks. And the strongest link between these two artists is, in fact, their keen, critical and irreverent humor and the conscious need to create virtual spaces for the construction of thought.
Both artists construct enigmatic and contradictory images, which often function as riddles or jokes, challenging the viewer to discern, or even produce, their meanings. Both work with simple elements and delicate configurations, conveying sharp concepts related to knowledge, philosophy and representation. The common denominator is irony, whose ultimate aim is constructive social critique.
A great admirer of Mallarmé and Magritte, the young Broodthaers abandoned his studies in chemistry to devote himself to poetry, and in 1945 he became associated with the “Groupe Surréaliste-revolutionnaire”. As Martin Herbert ( Frieze, May 2008) suggests with regard to Broodthaers’s oeuvre, his most relevant contribution to art was his ability to find a place between meaning and senselessness, positing their mutual interdependence. His work revolves around the creation of artworks whose central theme is a critique of seeing and showing, of the meaning and the context, of the mise-en-scene of exhibitions, of décors and museums.
On several occasions, Gerardo Mosquera has considered Porter the “natural continuator of Magritte’s work. […]In this way (Porter) plays with the irony implied in the fact that the work of the Belgian artist becomes incorporate in the reality he is calling into question.” The Argentine artist’s interest in Magritte has been evident since the beginning of her career, when she showed the works from the Magritte Series (1977): The Door, The Magician, The Pleasure Principle, La Lune. In the latter work, the artist “corrects” images of works by Magritte included in Suzi Gablik’s book on the history of art. With conscious naivety, she regards the figures as “real”, and in the context of that reality, she rectifies the apparent error. Porter pretends that the difference between the representational space and reality does not exist.
Broodthaers approaches René Magritte’s work from the perspective of language. And this influences the development of his artistic practice, closely linked to the transformation of the written language in art works through the materialization of texts in aesthetic contexts and formats.
At the entrance to the exhibition, Broodthaers’s work Museum: enfants non admis (1974) represents a statement on the very concept of museum. The piece, created two years before the Belgian artist died from liver disease on his fifty-second birthday, is composed of two plaques, a white one and a black one, with a text which can be read as a poem or as part of an institutional sign at a museum entrance: “ Une forme, une surface, un volume, serviles. Un angle ouvert. Des arêtes dures, un directeur, une servante et un caissier. MUSEUM: enfants non admis… toute la journée, jusqu’à la fin des temps.” (A form, a surface, a volume, all of them servile. An open angle. Hard edges, a director, a maidservant and a cashier. MUSEUM: children not admitted… at any time of the day, till the end of time.”)

Marcel Broodthaers defines the very concept of irony by means of figures which seem to suggest the contrary of what is being said. The work Sex Film (1971/72) mocks the viewer; its title holds the promise of an exciting projection, while it actually features handwritten texts which read: "Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3, W.C." and show hearts pierced by arrows, reminiscent of banal school doodles.
Liliana Porter elicits from Magritte the understanding that the meanings in his paintings are transformed into images, and even more importantly, that they reveal themselves to be arbitrary. Her interest is focused on the doubt that Magritte provokes or generates about the conventions we accept with regard to the way in which images and text are related.
In this exhibition, the works Conejo que levita (2008), Frase (1977), Clock (2007) and towards the end of the tour, Dialogue with Penguin (1999), show this relationship with Magritte’s work. The latter represents an imaginary dialogue between a gold Christ that doubles as a plastic lamp and a wooden penguin placed opposite to it, set against a background of Infinite White paper. A photograph that is a representation of representations, and that narrates, in its apparent innocence, a subversive story, an absurd situation in which space is timeless, and matterless, and the subject matter is seen with greater clarity. Thus the public receives the figures, this unlikely dialogue, without interferences, without any mediation. The artist creates scripts; she develops moments in the lives of certain objects, sincere elaborations of ideas or “images of reality.” As if arming us with a magnifying glass, her works allow us to see the objects and their contexts through a zoomed-in gaze.
The challenge is, therefore, to understand how Porter’s work situates itself in the historical context rather than rereading Broodthaers’s work from a contemporary perspective. The show is structured upon the juxtaposition, the sequencing and the repetition of works that cleverly manipulate our expectations. Therefore, it was not by chance that this project, organized by Annie Fletcher, curator at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and Tobias Ostrander, Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City, should have been at the center of the New York New Museum’s “Museum as a Hub” Program, from May 11 through July 3. The majority of the works by Liliana Porter included in the exhibit form part of the artist’s private collection, and all of Marcel Broodthaers’s works belong to the Van Abbemuseum Collection, Eindhoven.