the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Rachel Haidu

Marcel Broodthaers or: The Absence of Work

This lecture took place on October 27th, 2009 at 7:00 pm in the Rose Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

Rachel Haidu will discuss the “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles,” the four-year project initiated by Marcel Broodthaers in his home in Brussels in 1968, which ended at Documenta V in 1972. A project that began in the aftermath of May 1968 ended as a rebuke to the world of international art exhibitions; what began in a living room crammed with empty art transport crates ended in an exhibition of “publicity” that Broodthaers created especially for his “fictive” museum. The problematic of fiction, the ways art can or should respond to political and social crises, and the intersection of national identity and the markets for art are all at the crux of Broodthaers’s “Modern Art Museum, Department of Eagles.”

About Rachel Haidu

Rachel Haidu is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. She has published essays on contemporary art in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Obieg, and Documents, and in the forthcoming volumes Avant-Garde in the Block (Warsaw: Foksal Gallery Foundation) and Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press), among others. Her book, The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964-1976 is forthcoming from October Books/MIT Press in Fall 2010.

Relevant Links

• Readings for this lecture are available on the student login page.