Robert Barry's Linguistic Wallpaper, Nam June Paik Naked, etc. [Collected]

A still from Marcel Broodthaers' 1969 film La Pluie (Projet pour un texte), at Marian Goodman. Photo: 16 Miles

• "Chasing the Dutch Muse by Rail": In 1986, the inimitable Israel Shenker set out to see the museums of the Netherlands via train, helped along only by "the Groot Museumboek (Big Museum Book), a 432-page, color-illustrated inventory of Dutch museums." [NYT]


• Thirty miles of yarn is almost twice as long as sixteen miles of string. [Fast Company, via C-Monster]

• New York Times critic Sam Sifton's four-star review of Del Posto is the big news in restaurant criticism right now, but let's not overlook the fact that he dropped another art reference last week, in his review of Vandaag: "Eating it in this room is to be thrilled by the unfamiliar, and to experience what the art critic Robert Hughes called the shock of the new." [NYT] (A complete list of Sifton's art references is also available.)

• Jed Perl is not impressed with MoMA's Abstract Expressionist survey. [The New Republic]

• Robert Barry has filled a Glasgow building with words. [This Is Tomorrow]

• Super–detailed photographs of Ab-Ex paintings in MoMA's survey. [Look Into My Owl]

• Rebecca Warren discusses her new Renaissance Society show: "These new ones are uglier and more awkward, like chewed-up Meissen ware." [Artforum]

• Nam June Paik, naked and out of control in Iceland, 1965. [Greg.org]

The Parrots of Marcel Broodthaers

Partial installation view of Marcel Broodthaers, Dites partout que je l'ai dit, 1974. Parrot under bell jar, audiotape, two framed works, at Michael Werner, 2010 Photos: 16 Miles

Little by little, New Yorkers are being given the opportunity to see and explore the work of the late Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers. Last year, Peter Freeman showed Ne dites pas que je ne l'ai pas dit (1974), which was first displayed at the Wide White Space gallery’s Antwerp location and includes a live parrot (an African Grey Parrot, to be exact) and two palm trees (pictured below). The parrot was completely and sadly silent when I visited, but, according to the New York Times, that was not unusual: she only spoke when the gallery was empty of visitors.

As Freeman noted in his press release, shortly after installing his Wide White Space show, Broodthaers moved on to the Kunstmuseum Basel, where he debuted Dites partout que je l'ai dit, now on view in Michael Werner Gallery’s “Marcel Broodthaers: Major Works” exhibition. There is a parrot here, too, though it is quiet this time because it is dead: stuff and placed under a bell jar. Broodthaers famously became an artist at the age of 40 (he had been a poet previously), and died 12 years later of liver failure in 1976. In that short time he built a career in miniature, moving quickly from making almost sardonically vital art (a live parrot) to artworks in the form of prepackaged retrospectives (a parrot under a glass jar).

Even 35 years after his death, Broodthaers’ art is still hard to work out, not quite easily integrated into any history of recent contemporary art. As New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl noted in his 2004 profile of gallerist Marian Goodman (who started her gallery in 1970s with the express purpose of showing Broodthaers’ work), his “twisty, cerebral art — including elegant installations of, say, common objects in vitrines, eighteenth-century engravings, ironic texts, and the odd palm tree, concerned with protocols and politics of exhibition — is still a hard sell in America.” Goodman’s current show, focused on the Section Cinéma (1972) of Broodthaers’ sprawling Musée d’ Art Moderne, Département des Aigles project, should help change that. Though it includes no parrots, it presents the Broodthaers' comic, elegiac short films alongside his haunting installations, and it makes a strong case that it is time for New York and its young artists to embrace him.


Partial installation view of Marcel Broodthaers: Ne dites pas que je ne l'ai pas dit – Le Perroquet, 1974, at Peter Freeman, Inc., 2009. [more]



Partial installation view of Marcel Broodthaers: Ne dites pas que je ne l'ai pas dit – Le Perroquet, 1974, at Peter Freeman, Inc., 2009. [more]

Marcel Broodthaers's Parrot at Peter Freeman, Inc. [Photographs]

Marcel Broodthaers, Ne diets pas que je ne l'ai pas dit - Le Perroquet, 1974. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Even if you have seen a live cat, mouse, coyote, maggots, flies, or a donkey in an art gallery, it is possible that you have never seen a live bird. (I certainly had not.) Until Wednesday, December 23, Peter Freeman is showing Marcel Broodthaer's 1974 commentary on retrospectives, which involves a parrot, a recorded poem, and some nice potted plants. It is called Ne diets pas que je ne l'ai pas dit - Le Perroquet, which translates to "Don't Say I Didn't Say So – The Parrot." While it didn't speak during my visit — it was too busy enjoying grapes — it does supposedly talk every once in a while. If you're lucky.