The first place we visited today was the Center for Book Arts. If you're into bookbinding or letterpress printing, you'd love it without a doubt. It's just a little hole in the wall studio, but it's also feels very much part of the book arts community. You come through the door into this huge open loft space with all these machines that look kind of like torture devices, but are actually typographical equipment. The work itself was slightly too decorative and less about the idea of ‘the book’ but about its physical qualities.
We returned to the Museum of Modern Art to see the Marcel Broodthaers exhibition. The show includes around 200 sculptures, films, photographs and poems. What drew us to Broodthaers originally was the total impenetrability of the work. He created an installation in his house that he entitled the Musée de l'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles, or Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles. This was a fictive entity in that the museum had neither a permanent building nor a collection; nonetheless, Broodthaers elaborated it in about a dozen further installations. Evidence of the museum's existence (apart from its title) ultimately encompassed specially created objects, films, and art reproductions as well as ephemera such as wall labels and signage. So, here’s a guy who just decided to make his own museum, which is exactly what we all do today on the Internet. Every blog/Facebook/Instagram is just someone making his or her own museum. Broodthaers did it because he could – he didn’t ask permission. And we think this attitude emerges from poetry because in poetry you don’t need to ask permission. No one really cares, unlike in visual art or architecture where things cost a lot of money. Poetry functions in the same way Broodthaers did. He understood the economy of language. He kept it taut and conceptual.
Going to see the exhibition of architectural models at MoMA gave us a thought for a potential piece; public art works one would use for an architectural model. For example if you were designing an outside area and there was going to be some art there, is that something you can buy for your model? Is there a standard ‘public art’ piece that can be purchased and attached to your design? We could maybe design the packaging and make them ourselves, giving them the appearance of mass production but actually they’re unique.