Issue #6

  1. Introducing TONGUES

  2. Dispatches

  3. JEW BOY

  4. Oxcha, Oxcha

  5. Hack

  6. Jaffa My Love — The IsraHell Dystopia

  7. Remember Passing

  8. Confusing Their Tongues

  9. Catchat: Following an Interview With a Cat

  10. On Diasporic Speech

  11. The Yiddish Terrorist

  12. Divide, Fragment, Exceptionalize

  13. The Taste of Displacement

  14. FEAST: Semipermeable Membrane

  15. Your Love Is Like A River

  16. Doing Right By You

  17. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism

  18. The Wind and Its Hundred Doors

  19. What Makes You Choke

Catchat: Following an Interview With a Cat

Hannah M. Bruckmüller, Noa C. Ginzburg, & Michal B. Ron

 

This work was typeset by Joshua Eisenberg in OmniGraffle.

“This is an interview, recorded at the Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, 12 Burgplatz Düsseldorf,” announces the interviewer. “MIAOW! MIAOW!” replies the interviewee. In 1970, the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) conducted and recorded an interview with a cat. At the time, he was the self-announced director of a fictive museum: the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968-1972). The location of the interview — 12 Burgplatz, Düsseldorf — was home to Cinéma Modèle, one of twelve sections of the museum. The time and place are set, and a conversation begins: — “Is that one a good painting? […]” asks Broodthaers. “Miaow,” replies Cat.     

Up until today, museumgoers pay greater attention to the artist’s questions than to the cat’s replies, and so the discourse on Broodthaers’ work mainly focuses on his words. But why? Actually, the cat, the interviewee, is the main protagonist. Once we tune in to all the voices that can be heard in this conversation, what do we hear? This essay sets out to listen attentively. We attempt to tie the two parties together in a shared alphabet and transcribe the conversation between Broodthaers (B) and Cat (C) anew. This unprecedented endeavor is mirrored in the typographical layout. Our textual enterprise takes a Talmudic form, putting in its center the dialogue, transliterated from utterances in French and Cat tongues into Hebrew and Latin letters, and opening up threads that introduce questions of translation and interpretation.

Hannah Bruckmüller studied art history at the Universities of Vienna and Basel. Recently she completed her PhD on the publishing practice of Marcel Broodthaers at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2019), funded by a Doctoral Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). She lives and works in Vienna.
 
Noa Ginzburg is an artist and educator working and living in Brooklyn, New York. Recently she graduated from the MFA Studio Art program at Hunter College in New York (2019), and has shown her work in solo, collective, and group exhibitions in Tel Aviv, Medellin, and New York. She teaches visual art in several schools in New York.
 
Michal B. Ron is an art theoretician and historian. She has received her PhD from the Free University in Berlin. Her dissertation focuses on the question of time in the work of Marcel Broodthaers, as related to historical thinking, to animals, and to children. She lives and works in Berlin.