FUCHS. Mais qui mangera le fromage?

This is one of the lighter and funnier moments in Marcel Broodthaer's life as an artist. Two years after his legendary installation, Der Adler vom Oligozän bis Heute at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, fellow Düsseldorf artist Lothar Baumgarten and ethnographic historian Michael Oppitz mounted a show in response titled T'E-EN-T'E at Galerie Konrad Fischer. It could be said, and was certainly implied, that T'E-EN-T'E was a "properly serious" ethnographic handling of the eagle grounded in its mytho-cultural significance to Native Americans. Broodthaers, in Berlin on a DAAD Fellowship, sent Baumgarten and Oppitz a custom post card saluting them for their exhibition but also asking the foxy question, "But who will eat the cheese?" One-upmanship is best served as a rhetorical dairy product, lovingly embossed in red letterpress ink.

Berlin: Marcel Broodthaers, 1974. Offset black ink recto and verso, red letterpress ink verso.