A voyage on the North Sea
Object number1976.0193
TitleA voyage on the North Sea
Creator Marcel Broodthaers, Petersburg Press (uitgever)
Descriptionboekje en 16 mm film (4.15 min.)
Both book and film components of A Voyage on the North Sea deliver a befuddling, progress-defying narrative, pairing images of an amateur’s 19th century painting of fishing vessels with photographs of a 20th century sailboat. The film is structured like a book with 15 paginated titles interspersed between static images of the boats while the layout of the book, on the other hand, is structured like the comparative grid of the art historian’s slide show. Broodthaers’ complex dialogue between painting, photograph, book and film plays hide-and-seek with the original, exploring a frustrating journey through the conditions of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
A sea of contradictions collapsing original and reproduction, image and text, book and film, 19th and 20th century modalities, A Voyage on the North Sea is relentlessly confounding: it is a booby-trap rigged with rhetorical trickery to befuddle, to bemuse or perhaps to engage the reader/viewer. In characteristically elliptical language, Broodthaers here describes, on the press release of 1974, the subject of this work on the occasion of its original screening in London: More than a theory, the subject of this proposition reflects a simple image of the frustration that rules the social condition of today, for example of the frustration of this year. Perhaps I should add that le sujet brille.
-- M.B., January 28, 1974
Both book and film components of A Voyage on the North Sea deliver a befuddling, progress-defying narrative, pairing images of an amateur’s 19th century painting of fishing vessels with photographs of a 20th century sailboat. The film is structured like a book with 15 paginated titles interspersed between static images of the boats while the layout of the book, on the other hand, is structured like the comparative grid of the art historian’s slide show. Broodthaers’ complex dialogue between painting, photograph, book and film plays hide-and-seek with the original, exploring a frustrating journey through the conditions of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
A sea of contradictions collapsing original and reproduction, image and text, book and film, 19th and 20th century modalities, A Voyage on the North Sea is relentlessly confounding: it is a booby-trap rigged with rhetorical trickery to befuddle, to bemuse or perhaps to engage the reader/viewer. In characteristically elliptical language, Broodthaers here describes, on the press release of 1974, the subject of this work on the occasion of its original screening in London: More than a theory, the subject of this proposition reflects a simple image of the frustration that rules the social condition of today, for example of the frustration of this year. Perhaps I should add that le sujet brille.
-- M.B., January 28, 1974
Production placeLonden
Production date 1974 - 1974
Production period20e eeuw
Object namekunstenaarsboeken
Object categorykunstenaarsboeken
Dimensions
- pagina-aantal: 38
tijdsduur: 4.15 min.