Michel de Broin

Michel de Broin’s art is rife with sensory ambiguities. A slight attenuation of our conventional association with objects that appear functional, renders them poetic. De Broin’s unusual and exhuberant dislocation of association blends seduction with an art of resistance. Part Duchampian, overtly conceptual, de Broin plays on and with the pragmatism that forms a central feature of contemporary society’s consumer ethos. Then he gives it a twist. With a work like Bleed, a power drill sits on its side spouting water. The Great Encounter has refrigerators interlocked, as if embracing each other. With Trompe, a rifle spirals inwardly, turning on itself. These are awkward conjunctions, and conflict is part of the language, whether overt violence, or simply challenging the way objects work.

De Broin has had great success with his public art projects such as Revolutions, 2003, whose Escher-like arcs recalling Montreal’s traditional curved stairways is situated next to Papineau Metro in Montreal. In Jean-Drapeau Park, l’Arc, a steel tree, is homage to Chilean president Salvador Allende. The public art pieces are popular for their visual precision, something that makes them accessible and understandable. As material juxtapositions, they recall the Arte Povera artists, or the British sculptors Bill Woodrow and Tony Cragg. Here is a language that is almost too comfortable in the way it breeds its metaphors and malapropisms. As an art form de Broin’s work relates to theatre, for these are ultimately props, situational devices in a great game, something that dates de Broin’s art. They recall Fischli and Weiss’s work, for example—the video The Way Things Go.

De Broin’s retrospective at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal is a well deserved mid-career tribute to an artist who likes the proverbial quip, the clever, material witticism. Yet couched beneath these are issues that anyone can get. The upturned Statue of Liberty (the original actually made for the Nile River but sent to New York by default) called Abîme de la Liberté, 2013, is shiny and black, a Star Wars-like fabulistic icon, now pointing in the other direction. One of the most recent works, Étants-donnés, 2013, consists of a bathroom sink set ajar, out of which both fire and water pour. While the obvious allusion is to the schist gas debate, it unsettles our common associations spouting a little trouble or fear out of its faucet. The same goes for Têtes de pioches, which is a truly beautiful assemblage that looks like a well designed pile of pick axe heads. Actually made of Hydrocal plaster and graphite, de Broin’s formal structure takes function and turns it into art. Objet perdu, 2002–2005, is subtly sensual, a tube or sock that retracts when it deflates, vanishing altogether into a wall.

Blowback, a set of 2/3-scale howitzer field artillery cannons, have their long barrels connected together. The implication is that like a boomerang, military actions can blow back on those perpetrating the actions, whatever side you are on. What a powerful indictment of militarism, or so-called weapons designed to ensure global security. A chain-link fence with sections pushed out, or cut out, calls up Lucio Fontana, but is made for a post-September 11th world. The message is less about art than containment, not of desire but of freedom. What is potentially lethal or threatening becomes a playful anachronism. Like the video Fumée with one of Erik Satie’s “Gnosienne” series compositions run in reverse as background music. Here we see a bicycle propel its way through a cemetery, puffing in mock combustion, with de Broin playing on allusions of energy and entropy, on the invisible and visible paradox of what things look like. The artist has learned a lot about protest art, the art of repressed societies, from his years in Europe. He embraces the language of Quebec’s bricoleur pragmatism and takes it to a point of ridicule, colouring our comfortable utopias with the dystopic dye of aesthetic discomfort. Old fashioned resistance, an old school avant-gardist edge, turns into play, a paradoxical utilitarianism. De Broin’s silent mastery of his language is likewise hermetic, self-contained. What we have at its best is concept-driven material, poetic tricks with an instinct for the jugular. These works seem dated for that precise reason. They all work, and grab our attention, but the depth is illusionary. We have turned a corner in the art world. Resistence is now play, de Broin’s art seems to say. By design, de Broin works to unsettle and challenge us, but is the intention of design ultimately superficial? 100watts to 3watts, 2007–10, is as clever as they get. A light bulb, whose glass casing is broken, is rewired to furnish power for a much smaller light bulb. The metaphoric potential of this art piece is to suggest a reduction of power, a diminution of energy, and yet light remains the medium and it works as art that makes a statement. This is futurist, visionary talk transforming objects in an impressive and intelligent manner, and Michel de Broin’s art is ultimately about intelligence.

Dead Star, 2008, is a powerful piece, a condensed agglomeration of batteries with a flair for the sublime. Are these batteries dead or are they alive? Here is an enigma born of our era; the allusion to energy, enigmatic. These batteries are aesthetic post-consumer waste, and sit there, inviting our interpretation. Potential icons of non-renewable energy, they are art. Dead Star has a powerful resonance as an object composite. What we see is what we all use, what we exhaust and empty, a finite energy source, now transformed into art, a metaphor for our times.

“Michel de Broin” was exhibited at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from May 24 to September 08, 2013.

John K Grande is an author and curator. He lives in Toronto.