Hans Theys

__________

Hans Theys


Narcissus’ bucket
A conversation with Dr J.S. Stroop about the films of Marcel Broodthaers


Narcissus as the inventor of cinema

- You know Marcel Broodthaers personally?

Dr J. S. Stroop: I see him at least once a year, yes. Usually on our birthdays, which fall on the same day. But I already told you that the day before yesterday.

- And does he occasionally talk about his work?

Stroop: Never. But I told you that too. Marcel moved to Venice because he was sick and tired of all the narcissistic, egocentric carry-on. ‘Marre de l’art et marre de boire!’ [‘Tired of art and tired of drinking!’] is what he always used to say. But that was over twenty years ago now. Do we really need to talk about this?

- What did he mean by ‘that narcissistic carry-on’?

Stroop: Do you know the film Une seconde d’éternité ? It’s an animated film on a loop, comprising twenty-four images, in which you can see how in the space of a second, through the addition of short stripes, Broodthaers’ initials materialise. The idea that an artwork can be replaced by the artist’s name or initials isn’t so new. The entire art world is kept afloat by this proposition. Usually, it’s just the names that are bought or sold. Artworks then function as a kind of collateral that, just like the gold reserves in Fort Knox, rarely leaves the strong-room. Broodthaers, however, gives shape to this thought, so that it becomes visible. For Broodthaers, the narcissism of this film undoubtedly existed in the worship of his own name, although he also wrote a poem in which he links the looping format of the film with Narcissus’ searching gaze. Do you know that poem?

- Has it been published, then?

Stroop: No, but it’s somewhere around here. Wait… Zoe, come here a second…

(He places the silver-grey cat on his left shoulder and allows her to jump onto a cupboard. Upon landing, the cat dislodges a pile of papers and a hundred or so pages cascade to the ground. He gathers them up, shuffles the sheets into a handy sheaf and begins to quietly peruse their contents.)

Stroop: Yes, here it is:

Une second pour Narcisse.

For Narcissus, one second is already the time of eternity.
Narcissus has always respected the time of 1/24th of a second.
In Narcissus the retinal after-image lasts forever.
Narcissus is the inventor of film.

And this is the accompanying text:

On the model of Narcissus
I wanted a film
1 second (24 images) long, just for me
(I gaze at myself in the film as in a mirror)

- But what does that mean?

Stroop: Well… It isn’t totally clear. Apart from the flickering light spots on the screen, it is dark in the cinema, reality is outside. Just like Narcissus, the cinemagoer never manages to get a grip on reality. Perhaps it also has something to do with the desire to become famous. I don’t know, this is what he wrote about Magritte in 1963: ‘He is famous in New York. All of Magritte’s paintings are famous in New York. Magritte is famous.’ Such repetitions would indicate that he considered celebrity to be important. But good. If you only think of narcissism as an excessive form of self-admiration, then there’s not a lot you can do with the concept. But if you consider it to be a necessary but extravagant test of your inner conviction vis-à-vis the judgment of others, then it resembles every artist’s motivation. Do you understand? Artists feel the need to make themselves visible. They want to be seen. They are constantly striving for external affirmation. Narcissus seems to lack a certain inner conviction, as a result of which he becomes enmeshed in a sort of circle of outward appearances. His inquiring gaze is trapped in a kind of circular movement that never gets a grip on the outside world and which bounces off his supposed inner self. No matter how long he gazes at his reflection, he will never discover anything about himself. Who knows, perhaps he doesn’t even possess an inner self. There might not even be a ‘true’ world beyond this circle.


Parrots and tautologies

Stroop: Narcissism is tautological in structure. A tautology expresses the same image twice in one sentence. For Wittgenstein, every concept of beauty was tautological because we only know what is beautiful by acquainting ourselves with beautiful things. Tautology occupies a special place in Broodthaers’ work because, in imitation of Mallarmé, he believes that we are imprisoned in a flawed language system and also because, in imitation of Magritte, he explores every conceivable relationship between an object and its image, or an object and its name. ‘Je dis je,’ [‘I say I’] he says. ‘I… say… I… say… I…’ Like the jumping needle on a broken record, he falters on the cusp of speaking, just as Narcissus slips on the brink of seeing. ‘Moi, je tautologue,’ [‘I, I tautologue’] he added. In addition to the tape recorder that plays this monologue, there is a parrot in a cage. Broodthaers is the parrot of Mallarmé and Magritte, but also of himself. Every person is the parrot of the sounds that blow across his or her skull. It isn’t clear if Broodthaers also thought about narcissism in this way, but I think so. Do you know Section Publicité with its empty picture frames?

- Documenta 5? That publicity stand for the ‘Section des figures’?

Stroop: Yes, and then the Section des figures itself! All of those representations or depictions of eagles… Don’t they show, each one of them, a kind of exterior, which probably prevents us from seeing their interior? Do you think this was coincidental? Look… Broodthaers makes publicity for his own work. All those people who are involved in contemporary art are stumbling from one catalogue to another, he says. That’s why he also exhibits the entire edition of a (rejected) catalogue in a sealed showcase, and why shows photomontages and series of slides. When I first visited a retrospective of Broodthaers’ work, I was gradually lured into the grip of a silent screaming that reverberated from all those framed pictures, pasted photographs and isolated words. It seemed as if the varying shapes of the images he showed grew into an awkward or hopeless rustling which turned into a grotesque noise that pounded against our heads like an endless hammering.

- Against your head.

Stroop: Against mine, yes. I’m sorry, I can’t explain it any better. All that dilatory shuffling, all that reversing of pictures, drawing a photograph of an engraving, photographing a projection, drawing a word and speaking an image, all those collages, clippings, isolated words, objects, showcases, films, slides, texts – they’re all dancing around with their skirts in the air while simultaneously concealing something. It is a sort of silliness, an endless mucking around and flying in the face of decency, a volte face, a drumming of the fingers, a fiddling in the ears and a drawing of dots on a piece of paper. But above all, it is an endless displacement.

- What do you mean?

Stroop: It’s all a futile scrabble. Just as Narcissus is trapped in the fruitless assessment of his reflection, no one can comprehensibly or tangibly explain his own thoughts and feelings. But sometimes the futility of that scrabble suddenly becomes eloquent and not only tells us more about a crushing nullity, but also about a feather-light, liberating futility. With Broodthaers, the laughter and the seriousness turn into one another like a twisted paper strip whose ends are stuck together: you never know on which side you are standing or where one side stops and the other begins.


Mallarmé and Magritte

Stroop: Do you see the connection between the narcissism and the shuffling? The narcissist plays with a puzzle that depicts a painting of the Battle of Waterloo. He recognises himself in Napoleon, but he doesn’t learn anything about himself or Napoleon. The only thing he can do is celebrate his incapacity by shifting the pieces around and looking at them from all sides… Have you seen the credits to Projet pour un film? The camera pans downwards over a drawing, which depicts a filmstrip with credits. An impossible filmstrip, of course, because every successive image is different. And in the Slip-test film, the image glides upwards over the screen, as if the projector is slipping, while we see two wrestlers locked in a hopeless struggle. The poet shifts the words in the sentence, prises them a little bit off their hooks, and forces them into a new melody that evokes the already familiar object in an unforeseen way, one that is not contaminated by the routines of language. It is actually a kind of linguistic bricolage. Broodthaers makes one think of Schwitters. Or just cast your mind back to Magritte. Broodthaers will tell you that Magritte rescued painting from the tyranny of beauty, from aesthetics. But what was Magritte’s ultimate achievement? Above all else, he found a clear and comprehensible way of expressing mystery. Ultimately, that is Magritte: well-organised mystery. Do you understand? And how did he do that? By distilling the mystery into a few obvious, clearly identifiable objects that he simply placed side by side. Broodthaers, of course, wasn’t interested in mystery. Broodthaers was a sociologist and a positivist. But because of his strange stubbornness, he discovered that there is a kind of meeting between Mallarmé and Magritte. Finally, Magritte was a devotee of the same aesthetics as Mallarmé, who basically just followed Baudelaire’s ‘surnaturalisme’ [beyond nature]. A dislocated syntax would, in the absence of the actual flower, wrest the rose from the blank white space. Such a sentence, which by its jazzy imbalance robs language of meanings, might also be deemed a throw of the dice, or a constellation, a sign of the zodiac. It offers a way out of the tautological structure of language or the experience of beauty, even if it comprises words that are part of a language that has been contaminated by chance and the plebs. But her classic beauty has no control over the world, which remains as messy as ever.


A throw of the dice will never abolish chance

Stroop: A large part of Broodthaers’ work is related to the constant reconsideration of a sentence that he wrote: ‘The alphabet is a dice with twenty-six sides.’ In 1969, the year in which he established his Musée d’Art Moderne and filmed Un Voyage à Waterloo, he wrote an open letter on the back of a picture postcard, in which the dots and commas are reminiscent of the circles that he scratched, like twinkling stars, in the celluloid of the film Le poisson est tenace. Actually, the displaced eyes of the dice. Have you ever looked at Broodthaers’ version of Mallarmé’s Coup de dés? I have an original copy here somewhere. (Crawling around my armchair on his knees, he pulls a pile of books out from underneath.) Look… See? Mallarmé’s verses are hidden behind black strips of varying thicknesses, the size of which is determined by the point size of the hidden letters. Suddenly you see a new kind of cadence. The double-page spread resembles a constellation. Do you sense the rhythm? The same applies to the apparent repetitions or phantom arrangements in photomontages such as Ma collection, through which a secret tremor seems to pass, as Buchloh has pointed out. Anyway, the only thing I wanted to tell you is that almost all of Broodthaers’ films are related to these two subjects. Narcissism on the one hand, and the perpetual shifting of forms. In fact, both topics are directly connected to the theme of the journey… Yes?

- I’m sorry to interrupt you, Professor, but what do you mean by ‘the perpetual shifting of forms’?

Stroop: A thousand different representations of an eagle hide the eagle. We film a silhouette of an eagle. But we leave the silhouette of the eagle black. Something like that. But over and over again. The silhouette of the eagle is reminiscent of the Atlas à l’usage des artistes et des militaires in which every country has the same size, on a poetic or utopian scale, but coloured black, so that the maps are unusable. Those black maps remind me of the cream-smeared spectacles in Berlin oder ein Traum mit Sahne. Everything white becomes black. Images are constantly upended, as with Nietzsche and the truth, the latter of which you have to turn on her head, like a hetaerae, in order to see her hidden nature.


Film as falsehood

Stroop: What interests Broodthaers about film is the falsehood. Film is a lie. In order to understand that, we have to remember that there is no such thing as a moving image. For some reason, we forget this time and time again. Film is nothing but a succession of static images. The movement is suggested by a rickety optical trick, a ramshackle optical illusion. Well, what seems to interest Broodthaers is the truth of this illusion… Nouveaux   trucs, nouvelles combines! [New tricks, new combinations!] Don’t forget that Broodthaers posed as an imposter. It’s analogous to his museum, which he calls a fiction, a white lie, a mechanism by which to question the ‘staging of the truth’ in the so-called ‘real’ museums… The film The Last Voyage, for example, shows nothing more than a series of hand-coloured slides for a magic lantern, and this is also why he uses so many postcards in his films. Postcards don’t move. But at the same time, he is looking for a different kind of movement. For example, that painting you were talking about yesterday. Do you know how many different ways it was used? He simply exhibited it. He used it as the subject of the slide series entitled Bateau tableau. He used it in the film Analysis  d’une  peinture, with a gilded frame. And he used it for the book and the film Un voyage en Mer du Nord, in which the book was conceived as a film, while you could consider the film as a reading of the book. But you must have already noticed that yourself. I think it’s obvious that Broodthaers wants to evoke a different kind of movement via the medium of the layout. To understand this other kind of movement, you should also take a look at his photographs Marcel Broodthaers. Do you know the catalogue Marcel Broodthaers in Zuid-Limburg? Wait, I’ll fetch it…

(Dr Stroop leaves the living room through a doorway covered by a carmine red curtain… As he disappears behind the curtain, he begins to whistle energetically. He calls, ‘Salut les filles!’, and two cats emerge from under the curtain, fighting.)

Stroop: Here it is. Take a look at these photographs.

(He shows me two photographs, each of which depicts three archers. On the first photograph you can see, from left to right, that the initial archer is centring his arrow, the second is drawing his bow and the third has released his arrow. On the second photo, the first archer is about to release the arrow, the second is centring it and the third is turning around, satisfied.)

Stroop: Do you see it? Here, the movement is contained in an image. Not actual movement, of course, but the same kind of tremor that we find in the photomontages.

- Aren’t certain painters searching for the same effect? And isn’t this the reason why Broodthaers used that amateur painting in his films?

Stroop: There is, of course, a kind of movement in that painting. The perspective might be wrong, but it does have a kind of depth. You have the ships on the horizon, the two approaching ships, the sloop on the right and the floating bottle in the lower left corner. The water that thumps against the bow of the ship and the staggered framing in the book also create an illusion of sailing and movement. But of course, there is also the theme of the sea and the voyage. The dream of the eternal tourist still lost in the exoticism of the nineteenth century. Consider, for example, the reproductions of the engravings in Un jardin d’Hiver… The melancholy and restless dreams are connected with narcissism. The narcissist is a tourist. The tourist is someone who doesn’t actually participate in the social events that are happening around him or her. Nor does he or she learn anything. Tourists only see the things they already know. They only see themselves. Yet they dream of becoming seafarers, explorers or pirates.

- Hence the postcards in his films?

Stroop: Of course. But the postcards are also derived from the museum. Every decent museum sells postcards at the exit. After filming Un Voyage à Waterloo, Broodthaers asked Maria Gilissen if she wanted to print the photographs she’d taken onto postcard paper. You mustn’t forget that Broodthaers had replaced the paintings in his museum with picture postcards. It makes no sense to disassociate things. Broodthaers’ work is like a spider’s web. All of the threads are directly or indirectly connected to each other. If you pull on one thing, it impacts upon everything else. For example, the floating bottle refers to the story MS. Found in a Bottle by Edgar Allan Poe, which in turn refers to his translators Mallarmé and Baudelaire (Invitation to the Voyage or Anywhere out of the World). Moreover, the fictional journey presumably corresponds to the artificial movement in the medium of film. Broodthaers has repeatedly stated that art is a matter of conquering as much space as possible. The films must also be viewed from this point of view.

- And the picture postcards?

Stroop: The film Mauretania, for example, shows images of a picture postcard, horizontal travellings, alternated with images of the sea. But look at the angle of the ship’s funnels… They were probably built that way in order to make the boat look faster… Don’t you think that he chose this card for that very reason?

- And the film ‘Paris (Carte Postale)’?

Stroop: There isn’t a single postcard in that film. You see three views of Paris. The Eiffel Tower, the Seine and a railway bridge. For the rest, the film only contains some white captions with words such as ‘postcard’, ‘cartolina postale’, ‘levelezö-lap’ and ‘briefkaart’. The film itself has become a picture postcard, just as Un film de Charles Baudelaire has become a kind of museum: a place where the past is made tangible and time seems to be reversible.


Cinéma Baudelaire

- The subtitle of the film ‘Une seconde d’éternité’ is ‘D’après une idée de Charles Baudelaire’. Why is that?

Stroop: One can imagine many different reasons. First, Baudelaire is the inventor of the ‘correspondences’, the synaesthesia that became art. That is why one of the literary paintings reads ‘Baudelaire peint’. At least, that’s what I think. But Broodthaers actually refers to a verse from Baudelaire’s poem Beauty, in which a cool, irreconcilable Beauty explains that she hates shuffling lines. ‘Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes,’ [‘I hate movement for it displaces lines’] she says. Broodthaers suggests that Beauty speaks about the medium of film here. But no art has as many shuffling lines as that of Broodthaers or Baudelaire. In the great painterly debate Baudelaire always preferred the colourist Delacroix over the linear Ingres. ‘A good drawing’, wrote Baudelaire, ‘is not a hard, cruel, despotic, motionless line that encloses a figure like a straitjacket. Drawing should be like nature, living and reckless.’

- And Broodthaers preferred Ingres?

Stroop: Yes, but I don’t know if it’s all that important. I’m not sure how to explain it. As good Catholics, Baudelaire and Broodthaers both seem to assume that there is a true world and even a truth. Only they don’t seem to be able to gather enough evidence to prove it. It seems as if reality is always absent, while everything that is unreachable suffocates them. How can I put it? Have you ever seen the installation entitled Un jardin d’Hiver?

- Not yet.

Stroop: Look especially at the film. In it, we see a monitor and on that monitor we can discern Broodthaers leading a camel through the Paleis voor Schone Kunsten during the exhibition opening. Try to imagine it. You’re surrounded by a mise-en-scène that includes tropical palms, folding chairs from Pittoors and a video monitor. Photographic reproductions of engravings hang on the walls. One of those engravings depicts several dromedaries at an oasis. Suddenly the projector starts whirring and you see the living ‘installation’. And what do you see? A film that shows a video-image of a man walking with a real camel. The genuine camel seems to have become less real than the dromedaries depicted on the engraving. But at the same time, the reverse is also true. Precisely because of these two cameras and the double projection (first the video-image of the camel on the monitor and then the image of the monitor in the film), which form a kind of double screen between the spectator and the ‘real’ event, precisely because of that distance, the whole event seems to become more real. How could that be? Well, what becomes real is a sense of loss. Something becomes real because it is withdrawn from us. And, in this way, the film speaks of a dizzying absence, of a perpetual longing for another place, of the impotence of the artist and of the way in which the melancholy, the dreams and the impotence are made tangible. It is about loss, I mean, but I cannot explain it any better.


Montagne de Miel, 8 November 1996