32 Fictions July 2003

THE TRUTH OF THE LIE
The museum as a fictional device in the work of Marcel Broodthaers

Miguel Leal

Portuguese

The depletion of the logics of rupture and transgression which the artistic avant-garde has confronted, particularly since the early 1960s, led it to a profound questioning of the institutional mechanisms that regulate norms and deviations. This is the case of museological heterotopies that could be interrogated on the basis of their fabulatory and fictional capacities. It was at the heart of this debate that, in 1968, Marcel Broodthaers opened the Section XIX^ème Siècle of his Musée d’Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles. The complexity of this project, which was to continue in various configurations until 1972, opened up a discussion on the very ontology of art at a time of apparent crisis.
In this article we attempt to reflect on the reason for choosing a fictional device for the construction of the heterogeneous succession of objects and events that constituted the Musée d’Art Moderne, Department des Aigles, thus seeking in the very restlessness and unpredictable movement of the fictional narrative answers to help us understand the moves of Marcel Broodthaers.