This sculpture always makes me smile. If you look closely you’ll notice that all the mussels tumbling upwards out of this heavy cast iron pot are closed. The title tell us so too. As such you wouldn’t want to eat them in real life, but here, in a sculpture it doesn’t seem to matter. Neither does the fact that they are leaping up in a column lifting the heavy iron lid, breaking the laws of thermodynamics, gravity and probably one or two others. Picasso and his collaborator Georges Braque started a trend in modern European art of including objects taken from real life into their artworks. It was picked up and developed by the Surrealists and many others since then, including the Belgian artist Broodthaers. Moules frites are of course a national dish in Belgium. For this work he used the pot owned by his family and mussels purchased from a favourite restaurant. I like the heaviness of the pot and lid, their deep, smooth and somewhat worn, metallic black complemented by the elegantly crumpled iridescence of the shells; the dark colours and the weighty iron belie the comic spirit that has performed this magic culinary trick. Maybe the mussels have come back to life and are making a bid for freedom? Maybe they simply want to be eaten and are throwing themselves at us? Either way there is a discreet joie de vivre about the piece. We only have, on average, 60,000 lunches and suppers which is or isn’t that many, depending on how you look at it – let’s make the most of them and pop off the lids that hold us down while we’re about it.
