‘MUSEUM / enfants non admis’: Arriving Late to Marcel Broodthaers

In 1968, the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers inaugurated the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles at his home in Brussels, with the Section XIXème siècle. In 1972, Broodthaers closed his Museum at documenta 5 with the Musée d’Art Ancien, Département des Aigles, Gallery du XXe siècle. Art historical discourse has framed the fictitious Museum project as institutional critique. My essay shifts the focus to the historical critique embedded in Broodthaers’s Museum by introducing an analytical meditation on the project’s temporality. Following the artist’s references to a large span of historical periods in the Museum’s Sections, my essay claims that they demonstrated disjointed temporalities. The Museum, temporal and ephemeral, was anchored in its present, and left very few material traces. Pausing on a verse that reappeared in the artist’s works, ‘Museum / children not admitted,’ I suggest that the artist problematized access to his Museum for generations of future viewers. My reading shows how the artist blocked the past, while appropriating historical materials or burying his own work. Reading these complex temporal relations in the light of the theoretical writings of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, I suggest that the artist buried the nineteenth century for a future to come. В 1968 году бельгийский художник Марсель Бротарс открыл в своем брюссельском доме музей — «Музей современного искусства, отдел орлов, секция XIX века». В художественно-историческом дискурсе этот вымышленный музейный проект осмысляется как институциональная критика. В свою очередь, автор данного эссе предлагает проанализировать темпоральность проекта Бротарса.