Marcel Broodthaer's
Un jardin d'hiver (objet – sujet), 1974-75
Artist
Marcel Broodthaers
Title
Un jardin d'hiver (objet – subject)
Year of creation
1974-75
Year of acquisition
2011
For a group exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1974, Broodthaers developed a large-scale work for the first time, which he called “Un jardin d'hiver” and in which the palm metonymically stood for the bourgeois longing for exotic countries, which, as a consequence, was theirs , beyond the private “decor” winter garden, were considered places of unrestrained exploitation and the pursuit of profit (for his home country Belgium, the colony of Congo is particularly representative of this, see J. Conrad, The Heart of Darkness).
The room with around 26 palm trees, 16 folding garden chairs, six photo reproductions of printed natural history diagrams, display cases and other props was also the location for the film “Un Jardin d'Hiver (ABC)”. The film was later shown on a screen in the second version, in “Jardin d'Hiver II”. Afterwards, other versions were created, of which the last one presented here remained unfinished. It is a double projection of 80 slides per carousel. The images selected for the slide series come from books from the 17th to 19th centuries. Century and show a mixture of scientific illustrations, exotic depictions of trivial adventure books, garden depictions and much more; a disordered encyclopedia about the science and world of things of the Enlightenment, whose main work “L'Encyclopédie” edited by Diderot and D'Alembert served Broodthaer as a starting point for many of his works.
Marcel Broodthaers uses the bourgeois version of the princely orangery, the winter shelter of exotic plants in baroque gardens, to indicate the absence or increasing loss of poetry. Already in the title he consciously uses the opposition of the “word image” winter-garden, which conjures up the danger of death from the cold of the centuries-long, rich poetic relationship with nature. In the winter of the consistent, anti-poetic Enlightenment, the garden has withered, nothing reminds us of its former, non-rationalized splendor, which systematizes plants in scientific works, just as art is historicized in museums. Broodthaers works against the withering away of poetry and magic in Western industrial modernity, which, in its materialistic, economic world view, allows the garden to degenerate into a desert: “This desert that prevails in our society, the desert of leisure pleasures, and ultimately the desert of the art world. (M. Broodthaers in an interview with Freddy de Vree, 1974).
The slide series ends on one side with the positive and negative image depicting a “Laterna Magica”, an early form of slide projector, and on the other side with a painter's palette with different brush thicknesses shown underneath. In these two final images, Broodthaers consciously contrasts the projections of science with art, creating a poetic enchantment, so to speak, through the selection and (dis)ordering of the drawn, not yet photographed photographs of nature, all of which served to enlighten the world in a scientific or trivial way a “Laterna Magica” of nature viewed through art. The orderly garden falls back into its paradisiacal original state, into the magic of its language that evades rationality. Broodthaers acts for this “other” language that has yet to be found. The leaflet printed for the first version of the winter garden, which every visitor was allowed to take with them, read: “… To be forgotten. For sleeping, serene and well adjusted. New horizons come into view. I see new horizons approaching me and the hope for a different alphabet.”
Eugen Blume
