An attic-like space: bare, low and tightly packed with stacked furniture, with chairs, tables, cupboards, sofas, lamps, boxes and ship models, partially covered with sheets and plastic tarps (fig. 1). The camera traces in stills the room's shape, fixes on some sections of the wall, shows markings on its white and black surface: “fig. 1,” “f. e.” or “fig. 12,” “museum,” “silence,” “section cinema” — markings which appear enigmatic within the surrounding cramped and blocked space. The site is the basement of Burgplatz 12, Düsseldorf, the year is 2002, and 16 mm color film is the tool British artist Tacita Dean uses to approach the former studio and exhibition-space of Marcel Broodthaers. Thirty years earlier, the Belgian artist had rented and used it in preparation for his show “Section des Figures” at the Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Now transformed into the storage space of the Düsseldorf City Museum (Stadtmuseum), in 1971–72 it had also served as the “Section Cinéma,” as the seventh episode of Broodthaers's twelve-part exhibition project Musée d’Art Moderne. Départment des Aigles, carried out between 1968 and 1972, which the show at the Kunsthalle was part of as well.

In the context of the discourse surrounding the contemporary meaning of the artist's studio, Tacita Dean's 13–minute continuous loop paradigmatically gives rise to the question of what can be seen or shown in the working space of a conceptual artist of the 1960s. What does the image of the studio present to the viewer? What does it represent, and which aesthetic and social functions does it contain? Dean's film Section Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers) (2002) demonstrates that immateriality and process-orientation — key characteristics of artistic conceptual work since the 1960s — transform any attempt to depict or exhibit the procedures and techniques of the actual occurring work into a veiling screen, which in turn is ready to receive and project back to the viewer preexisting notions of the nature of artistic creativity (fig. 2). Camouflaging the activities that lead up to an artistic utterance, conventionally located in the studio, the act of exhibiting focuses instead on those that are mere ciphers.