Rachel Haidu on Broodthaers Decor: A Conquest

"For his first self-retrospective, in 1974, Broodthaers remade a 1966 exhibition catalogue titled Moules Œufs Frites Pots Charbon, adding the term Perroquets (Parrots) to the title.¹ He placed two copies inside a glass-topped exhibition table and placed the table next to a caged parrot between two palm trees, thus constituting a work titled Ne dites pas que je ne l’ai pas dit—Le Perroquet (Don’t Say I Didn’t Say So—The Parrot). A mordant commentary on the condition of artists consigned by the market to grandiose repetitions of their earlier experiments, Ne dites pas . . . mercilessly dramatizes the efforts at self-historicization that are an artistic institution in themselves. This self-parodic mode becomes a manner of reframing the question of how institutions produce the traditions they are charged with keeping. As institutions that produce history and those that produce art and artists are set into a relay with each other, an uncomfortably similar static quality emerges from the comparison. For all the alleged differences between their audiences and functions, a series of rooms dedicated to a radical avant-garde artist’s retrospective and a series of rooms dedicated to the seemingly inert view of the past proposed by a historical society share utterly conventional pedagogical aspirations and a singular appeal to the spirit of collection..."