PRECEDENTS
Marcel Duchamp, Boîte-en-valise, 1936-1941, assemblage, variable dimentions
La Boîte-en-valise began in 1935 as a major retrospective of Duchamp's work, with 69 reproductions to date including small replicas of several readymades. Downsizing the museum exhibition to a portable scale, this "art book" provides an unmistakable similarity with the traveller's suitcase.
Robert Filliou, Galerie légitime, ca. 1962-1963
Assemblage, 4 x 26,5 x 26,5 cm
Locating its entire production in the sphere of the consumption culture, Fluxus defined the mercantile goods as the unique object and the unique way of distribution from which the art could take place and be perceived. In many occasions, this departure point took them to simulate" institutional" and “business” frameworks of presentation and distribution: the Fluxushop, the Implosions, the Cédille qui sourit, were "companies" that tried to work like artistic projects of production and distribution of diverse objects and radically democratised tools.
The Galerie légitime (Legitimate gallery) of Filliou was another early example of the institutional critic of Fluxus. "Founded" in 1966, the "galery" was in fact the bowler hat of the artist (when not its Japanese variant or cap), that contained many manufactured objects, notes and photographic images of their own works or from other artists who had chosen (or they had been chosen by Filliou) to "show" in one of his travelling "exhibition".
Marcel Broodthaers, Musée d'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles, Section XIXe siègle, 30 rue de la Pèpinière, Brussels, September 27, 1968.
In September 1968, after participating in the student riots of May in Brussels, Marcel Broodthaers opened his museum to the public, presenting himself as director. This action, grotesque and comic, was the inception of a new construct for the institution of the “museum.” In this new paradigm, the artist no longer worked or was defined as a producer, but rather as an administrator, occupying the site of control and determination. Broodthaers’ museum and successive work demonstrated a voluntary artistic practice free from the usual institutional influences. Making his own work the very center of administrative power and ideology, Broodthaers became positioned within those structures that had previously been excluded from the conception and reception of the work of art. He was simultaneously able to articulate a critique, playing the roles of artist, audience, and reviewer.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh
Art since 1900 modernism, antimodernism, postmodernism,
2004, Thames & Hudson, London, pp. 275, 459 and 552.