Hidden away at Chicago’s most secretive major exhibition venue is an installation of some of Belgian conceptualist Marcel Broodthaers’ (1924-1976) most significant work. The exhibit at the Arts Club presents the much-discussed Décor: A Conquest (1975) along with Plaque en plastiques, vacuum formed plastic pieces that mix Rene Magritte, way finding signs and pedagogical texts with bland results, and Tableau Bateau (1973) an excellent meditation on an amateur naval painting.

Décor: A Conquest is a primary example of the emergence of “installation art.” Broodthaers, interestingly and strategically considered it a “conquest” rather than installation, a concept fitting in well with the content of the work, namely to equate and compare comfort with war. The installation takes on a museum-like structure, particularly in the division into two "Salle XIXe Siècle" and "Salle XXe Siècle" or the 19th and 20th Century Rooms, or salons, respectively.

The 19th Century Room talks not only of European conquests of Napoleon, but also the conquest of the American West by the American government which was also occurring in this time period. Wooden hooch kegs labeled "GIN" and "RUM" evoke a cartoony Old West and a reproduction of a Spaghetti Western poster seals the read. In the center of the room is a stuffed python, rearing up to strike, a permanent smile on it’s face and coiled in a posture like an art nouveau curlicue adds the far exotic colonial lands Europe’s countries conquered during this time as well. The main lean is toward the Napoleonic, though, with two “Waterloo style” cannon that oversee the entire exhibition. A cannon ball in the form of dried flowers in this day and age immediately resonates with a similar motif created by Takashi Murakami.

What is most odd about this exhibition is the history it itself has attained. In the passing of 33 years we have left behind the 20th Century, and the artist himself, who died shortly after the work was first created. Décor has been shown many times over the years, traveling to Documenta 7 in 1982 and Berlin in 1999 before the Michael Werner Gallery in new York last year, which set off its current tour. Broodthaers has become a seminal figure in conceptual art, canonized as a progenitor of installation art and institutional critique. The gallery handout curiously and extremely apropos to this particular instance, describes the practice as “The appropriation of objects within a site-specific context that challenges the assumed properties of art, through the lens of critical art theory. The irony of the term results from the reality that institutional critique artists primarily exhibit with the confines of academic institutions and museums.”

What is so interesting about this re-iteration or staging of this piece is how entirely it is cut off from the site of its inception. It seems very critical that Décor was installed as the first exhibition of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, and that visible from its galleries were Waterloo Place and the Mall where guards performed the annual “Trooping of the Color” ceremony for the Queen’s Birthday. The exhibition occurred during the 160th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, the site of Napoleon’s great defeat in Broodthaers’ own Belgium. The artist used this opportunity to create his film The Battle of Waterloo (1975) which mixed shots of the installation with the “Trooping of the Color” ceremony. It seems these sorts of details and features are crucial to the work. Décor, being French for the set decoration in a film or theatrical production, is also an important element. The "19th Century Room" set didn’t simply remain in the gallery, it extended into the building of the ICA itself, and out into Waterloo Place, and out through the ages of imperialism manifest in that part of London.

Why display this all now? The cannons and dusty python, the old rubber sea creatures playing cards are so very reminiscent of the old diorama style of history museums like those seen at the Field Museum.

The "20th Century Room" is now extremely cut off from the contemporary as well. Since most of our lives span both the 20th and 21st centuries, we can remember the 20th Century and think of it as the past, part of our personal and collective past. It is in a sense a contemporary past, but a past nonetheless. The juxtaposition of machine guns and lawn furniture sends me more to thoughts of the Cold War or the drug wars of the 1980s. It is interesting to compare the idea of comfort and war to the current wars being waged by the US and a few allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it is a misjudgment to think of those on the ground as being in comfort. Sure we hear of their access to videogames and computers, but in reality it is brutal and anything but comfortable. The real comfort is on the homefront and the way in which there has been no real sacrifice on the part of the American people for the war efforts. Indeed, if we had been asked to participate in the manner of World War II, or Vietnam, the nation would not have stood for such a sloppy and misleading run-up, or at least would have grown weary of an endless war much sooner. While one can glean such a conversation from this installation, it seems the real discussion of Décor is its own fate as becoming a museum piece. It is now, in a sense, a historical artifact of a practice that has come to define itself as throwing doubt on the entire notion of historical artifacts.

This is echoed in Tableau Bateau. In it, a projector rotates through 80 slides examining a thrift store painting from the 19th century. This fits well with both salons in Décor. The object starts as a painting, very much an object of the 19th century. Broodthaers has made it a slideshow, a series of images. Where the eye was once free to wander, it is now guided. But in being a slideshow, it is also very much a thing of the 20th Century. In fact, one could argue a medium such as the projector is much more tied to a specific time and place gone by than painting is.

I can’t help of thinking fellow conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth’s important text Art after Philosophy, written in 1969, six years before this piece by Broodthaers. Kosuth makes the point that the art lies not in the object but in its conception, for example, “the value of Cubism is its idea in the realm of art, not the physical or visual qualities seen in a specific painting [.]” He continues, “Art ‘lives’ through influencing other art, not by existing as the physical residue of an artist’s ideas.”

To me, this is an infinitely more engaging debate—one at the heart of this installation of Broodthaers’ work where both outcomes seem evident—than the political content originally placed in Décor. I suspect Broodthaers was conscious of the work’s potential fate and transformation. If anything, Broodthaers’ body of work lends itself well to such a multiplicity of outcomes, where the meaning and status evolves over time. The true legacy of Broodthaers’ art is a continuing examination and interpretation of the structures and methodologies by which culture digests history. Or in which history digests culture.

--Erik Wenzel