| The Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers is widely understood today as a progenitor of installation art, and specifically the kind of art known since the eighties as institutional critique. He is not, however, as readily associated with another tendency in later twentieth-century art: the exploration of identity. In an effort to demonstrate that the probing of artistic subjectivity was indeed a dominant theme and artistic strategy for Broodthaers, this dissertation takes into account various kinds of self-portrayal—self-portraits, the name of the artist, bodily references, acting, and artists statements. Generally, these auto-reflexive gestures amount to a critique of the notion of an original, masterful artist, an idea that is still encouraged by art institutions. Yet, my research has found in Broodthaers' œuvre not a consistent critique—of either institutions or the artist/author—but a constant vacillation between the exhilaration of self-representation and the ironic exposure of its inauthenticity, between self-referential mirrors and self-dissolving mis-en-abymes, between identity and dispersion. By focusing much of his artistic energy on these self-representational alternatives, Broodthaers demonstrated that a thoroughgoing critique of cultural institutions is in fact premised on self-scrutiny.; In successive chapters, the dissertation sorts Broodthaers' self-references into four categories: the signature, photographs, films, and works of art that posit the artist as a sacrificial self. These groupings show, on the one hand, the prevalence and breadth of self-depiction in his œuvre, and, on the other hand, the myriad theoretical and art historical associations that are produced by his different modes of self-portrayal. The last chapter looks beyond the immediate context of the European art world to consider how Broodthaers' self-representations compare with the work of one of his contemporaries, the feminist performance artist Carolee Schneemann. Both artists, in their references to the image and body of the artist, combined self-presentation with self-sacrifice in order to raise institutional questions. In so doing, they demonstrated that the perceived phenomenon of marginalization and the apparent sacrificial alienation of the avant-garde artist are precisely what enable the broader community to persist, and at the same time allow the individual artist to continue to survive. |
