Marcel Broodthaers - Evening & Day Editions London Wednesday, December 11, 2013 | Phillips

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  • Exhibited

    Specific Object/David Platzker, New York, Marcel Broodthaers: A Voyage on the North Sea, 28 January - 20 March 2009 (another example exhibited).

  • Literature

    Marcel Broodthaers and Norbert Nobis, p. 70 (illustrated, p. 71)
    See also Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London: Thames & Hudson, 2000

  • Catalogue Essay

    Voyage on the North Sea comprises a book and a short silent film projecting simplistic yet contrasting depictions of 19th and 20th century nautical images. According to the contemporary video artist Rosalind Nashashibi, Broodthaers’ work “insists that you look repeatedly at the same cliched images until they lose their ordinariness. The film is so simple, and yet it holds on to its mystery”; a mystery that is compounded by the confusing, disjointed narrative between 19th century amateur paintings of fishing ships, and contemporary photographs of modern sailboats. The film and the book reverse aesthetic roles, with the film reflecting the structure of a novel with fifteen paginated titles sporadically inserted amongst the static images of boats, whilst the book is laid out in a grid form, echoing the movement of a film strip or slide show. Broodthaers explores the impact of the age of mechanical reproduction on the aesthetic condition with a complex dialogue of rhetoric through the media of book and film.

    Having made over 50 films since 1967, Broodthaer’s book-film duality is reminiscent of a reading lesson, which is introduced by the book’s preface: “It is up to the attentive reader to find out what devilish motive inspired this book’s publication.”

42

A Voyage on the North Sea

1974
The book with offset lithographs in colours, plus the 16mm silent colour film,
Film duration 4:15 minutes
signed with initials and numbered 99/100 on p.37 in black ink (there were also 1,000 unsigned copies without the film), published by Petersburg Press, London, in very good condition (another example illustrated).

Estimate
£6,000 - 9,000 

Sold for £13,750

Contact Specialist
Robert Kennan
Editions, London
rkennan@phillips.com
+44 207 318 4075

Evening & Day Editions

London 12 December 2013 2pm & 6pm