ABSTRACT

    In the context of contemporary art, an investigation centred in Marcel Broodthaers' authorship is anything but casual. The examination of his artistic career focused both theoretically and critically allows us to value his work as heterogeneous and coherent rather than as a series of experiments which includes poetry, photography, cinema or sculpture in the strict sense of the genres.
    Globally, his proposals turn around the question of both the role of art and also the role of the artist in society. Broodthaers began to make his first assemblages at the end of 1963 wondering whether he might sell anything. Later on, in 1968, he built in Brussels the fiction Musée d'Art Moderne, Départament des Aigles in the middle of a social atmosphere of revolt intending to put into stage the confrontation between institutional violence and poetic violence. The impression left by this experience justifies eventually the conception of retrospective or anthological exhibitions as other forms of fiction, and the idea of Decor becomes the synthesis of his queries about the social function of the work of art. However, the repercussion of Broodthaers' work and his relationship with the artistic institutions – galleries, museums, fairs of art, macro-exhibitions, etc. – is most interesting. 
    Broodthaers' authorship constitutes a model of utopia. Yet it is not a pure romantic utopia but a bastard and hybrid utopia which updates the artistic legacy of Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Duchamp, Schwitters and Manzoni. This model of authorship becomes a way to exert artistic freedom and also to preserve the memory: a strategy of resistance and spiritual survival which nowadays proves to be rather exciting.