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JEF BOURGEAU’S
LEGERDEMAIN
by Jan van der Marck for the 2007 book JEF BOURGEAU: A User's Manual
An aspiring artist coming of age in the 1970’s is more likely
to paint with ironic distance employing chance methods or
outright subversion than with patiently acquired skill,
Messianic conviction and respect for pictorial tradition.
Those who lived through it consciously will agree that the
70’s were experienced as a tediously prolonged hangover
from the exuberant decade preceding it. Rapid production,
seasonally changing fashion and escalating demand slowed
down and were replaced by stocktaking, retrenchment and
self-flagellation. Broad-stroke pursuits became narrowgauged,
and once fresh ideas were recycled. In a pinched
economy, art as concept stood in for art as object and art
as idea for art as reality. Even as it raised the volume and
level of critical writing, the white cube suffered from
empty walls. The interconnectedness of media and their
spatial merger abolished their one-time hierarchical order.
Pressing everything and the kitchen sink into the service
of art had the blessings of Rauschenberg and Johns.
Appropriating subject matter as well as style had become,
in the world of Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist and
Wesselmann, an artist’s bill of rights. With the very
concepts of authenticity and originality at stake, was it any
wonder that collectors of 1960’s art took a pass and new
ones took fright?
The ‘end of painting’ was declared from many lecterns and
it echoed in artists’ studios. Jef Bourgeau ignored or avoided
the issue by focusing on the power of narrative and the
magic of the moving image, separately or in combination.
He did not endear himself to creative writing and film
history teachers by submitting term papers in the form of
8mm loops composed of the opening credits for a feature
film, or discarded leaders of several films combined.
He shot linear collages of up to two thousand thematically
organized photo-illustrations from books and magazines and then
presented them as a form of cinéma vérité.
The themes Bourgeau tackled in those sequentially mounted
stills, verging on animation, were the rising tide of Nazism in
to the gas chambers of
and the brutality of war whether at
in the streets of
essays presaged this budding artist’sproclivity for themes of violence
and destruction and for subjects considered politically incorrect or
sociallyoff-limits. In those years Bourgeau experimented with film’s
formal properties as well. He boiled down a standard length feature to
just two minutes and reduced his own 30 minute narrative film to seven
small frames mounted over the opening credits while giving each
credit loop a different tonal soundtrack.
In 2006, he took on 1996 Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon and
his slowed-down video presentation of Hitchcock’s thriller,
24 Hour Psycho,
with the premiere screening at the
Art (MONA) of an alleged remake titled One-Minute Psycho. A
News release full of spin and praise credited the original appropriationist
but Douglas Gordon’s dealer was not amused calling it a ‘spoof’.
In response, Bourgeau’s alter ego, Cesar Marzetti, admitted having
made a total fake as he revisited a work that had already
been revisited: “Fast motion is for Keystone Kops, not a
murder in a shower. I wanted it to become more terrifying
as you laugh.” Whether Marzetti is conscious of his
successors or not, film makers like R. Luke Dubois have
gained public attention just this year for digitally
compressing Academy Award movies down to a minute’s
duration.
For students of film in the 70’s, theory ruled and the filter
of semiology was de rigueur. Bourgeau was not enamored
with Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida or Lacan, but tempted
by the aphoristic Roland Barthes and, in particular, by the
provocative Jean Baudrillard. Conveniently, Baudrillard
had drawn upon all of the above to distill his own more
applicable notions of simulation, virtual reality and hyper
reality. “The idea of simulacrum,” he argues, “was a
conceptual weapon against reality, but it has been stolen.
Not that it has been pillaged, vulgarized, or has
become commonplace, but because simulacra have
been absorbed by reality which has swallowed them
and which, from now on, is clad with all the rhetoric of
simulation. And to cap it all, simulacra have become
reality!”1 Simulation, to Baudrillard, is now the dominant form
of culture. It is not difficult to see that Baudrillard’s thinking
permeates Bourgeau’s every idea and action.
As sound is now an incontestable component of film and
as a student of the history of film needs acoustical as well
as visual anchorage, Bourgeau favored electronic music
with a special preference for Karlheinz Stockhausen. He
liked the fact that in this composer’s works elements are
played off against one another simultaneously and successively
to create a sound that moves from isolated notes to
a textured blanket of notes and from punctuation and
differentiation to uniformity. In his Kontakte (1958-60)
for electronic sounds, Stockhausen achieved for the first
time an isomorphism or a one-to-one correspondence
between the parameters of pitch, duration, dynamics and
timbre. In mixing the sounds that accompany his films
and videos, Bourgeau has taken a lead from the German
composer’s operational methodology rather than from the
ends achieved. While electronic music, by definition, borrows
sound not necessarily made by musical instruments,
so Bourgeau, on occasion, borrows parts of sound tracks
much as he lifts images off of the Internet or utilizes found
objects – all that’s fair in war, love and art.
Family responsibilities and the unanticipated vogue of
neo-expressionist painting during the Reagan years, robbed
Bourgeau of a timely opportunity to test his peculiar form of hyperrealism
in the crucible of the market place. He was, and still is, the least aggressive of
human beings in a city with an abysmal record of nurturing the arts.
But, when Ivan Karp’s
beckoned, the 41 year old artist treated himself to a retrospective of unseen
work, Art Until Now; a title re-used eight years hence for his ill-fated
exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts. David Klein, the gallery’s director,
encouraged Bourgeau to transform his space into a rough-and-tumble
environment that echoed the improvisational, part bohemian, part
anthropological installations at the old Trocadero – themselves inspired
by the one time mixing of tribal and Surreal artifacts at
the Galerie Charles Ratton in
forever cognizant of history, opted for this simile complete with
some faux dismantling of walls and ceiling, because the
objects on display hinted at Dogon architecture and
African face-masks mixed in with found and altered
objects reminiscent of Dada and Duchamp, and the lot of
it given a sprinkling of Picasso. If that were not enough,
Bourgeau drafted a declaration (mandatory accompaniment
of a vanguard manifestation) which read Manifesto
for an Anachronistic Futurism and was signed by Cesar
Marzetti, the artist’s first in a series of fictitious personae.
This manifesto at the gallery was accompanied by reprints
of a vicious and ad hominem attack on the exhibition by
Kay Burdell in Slam, as well as an interview with the manifesto’s author
by Peter Krug in Smart Art. “Brilliant,” was Ivan Karp’s comment, “but there
is no need to give copies to our customers.” Why was Bourgeau at
once promoting and shouting down his own exhibition? Because, true to the
early twentieth century model, the buzz thus created was an inalienable part of
the art, raising it to the status of event. With the help of David Klein who gave
him four programmatically organized exhibitions in four consecutive years,
Bourgeau’s
objects cum video
found collectors in the
gallerists from
to exhibit them.
In setting up ‘strawmen’ discussing or attacking his art, Bourgeau opened a
vein soon to be mined for material that allowed him to address and criticize
the very underpinnings of the art gallery and the museum
of contemporary art. As for years he had questioned religious pieties,
racial stereotypes, sexual taboos, political correctness and societal norms,
so in his concept-oriented enterprises following object-centered ones.
Bourgeau kicked the tires of the social vehicles meant to
propel art. Klein moved into a smaller space just as Bourgeau felt the need to
expand the parameters of his activity and to engage his actual
and potential audience in ways and with means inappropriate
for a commercial gallery. This politicizing of art by taking the mask off
its institutions goes back to Courbet and has received periodic reinforcements
in the intervening century-and-a-half, particularly during the reign of Dada
and the generational watershed of the 1960’s. Bourgeau is uniquely political
because rather than storming the ramparts, he attacks (and reforms) from
within.
As art-as-concept-as-art goes, the one work this artist admits to be proudest
of is that of having created a virtual gallery followed by a virtual museum
which morphed into an actual museum for new art (MONA). It is
a matter of speculation whether Bourgeau’s participation, along with
dozens of his colleagues, in the 1995 exhibition Interventions at the
Detroit Institute of Arts (each artist claiming squatter’s
rights in a gallery of his or her choosing) encouraged him
to intervene in the established order on a larger scale. After
keeping an open studio in a
Bourgeau moved into a storefront on
called his new gallery Jane Speaks Modern Art.
Eschewing Perrier and canapés in favor of punch and
cookies, Jane Speaks Modern Art opened its single-panel
storefront door in September 1996. Visitors could pick up
a printed interview with Jane Speaks by Richard Mann
headed by her picture. The interview with Jane never
changed, but her picture showed a different woman from
one week to another. They also met Jef Bourgeau welcoming
them on Jane’s behalf and willing to show them (and
explain, if necessary) his works on exhibition. Where and,
more importantly, who was the no-show host and owner?
Bourgeau claimed to have patterned her on a celebrated
better survival rate than any artist in her stable and captures
as many lines in print, so why not shine the spotlight
on her? The name on the shingle reassures collectors even
if the art within does not. To artists who feel manipulated
or marginalized by their dealers, Bourgeau demonstrates
that the shoe can be put on the other foot. An unstable
identity allows Jane Speaks to become a medium for the
artist to conflate the traditional distinction between maker
and promoter. It also upends the conventional wisdom that
business deals with reality and art with fiction. Walk-in
customers who expect to meet the dealer are perforce
unsettled when greeted by the artist.
Prompted by the necessity of making a living, not just as a
lark, Bourgeau deconstructed the artist-dealer relationship,
as later he would do for the museum and its constituents.
As a rogue operator in a tightly coded world he has
tweaked, confused, challenged and offended those
who stand guard over the proper functioning of art
institutions. A gallery or museum so singularly
focused, however tiny and remote, is liable to cast its
negative shadow over the ‘real thing’. Bourgeau believes
that he or she who owns the gallery today has usurped the
power and authority, innovation and panache that once was
the artist’s. Jane was more idealistic than hard-bitten though:
“I only presume to offer my visitors the chance to see again with
all five senses, so that the installations here both shout and whisper, laugh
and cry, bleed and heal.”
Just three months after her gallery’s opening, Speaks was
involved in a boating mishap off the
Although her body had not been recovered, she was
presumed dead. An obituary that ran
in The
prompted one local gallery owner to chime in with what a
horrible loss it was for the
turned out, she had never met Jane nor had she ever
bothered to set foot in her dead colleague’s gallery. When
Jane’s estate was settled, a generous endowment became the rationale
for converting the gallery into a museum of contemporary art. Few
people knew that Richard Mann had been her husband. Now a
widower, he assumed leadership of the Jane Speaks Foundation and
in 1997 took the helm of the
Marzetti joined his pal Richard as chief curator and Peggy Kerr was
appointed assistant director. Unafraid to stake out their position
with regard to vandalism and art, these two officials engaged in a polemic
with the Editor of Flash Art, Giancarlo Politi. Poor Peggy is blasted
in print: “I shall leave it up to you then, sweet innocent art
bureaucrat, to defend a condition of art and culture that
has only ever existed in romantic fiction and within your
assistant director mentality in
always been in the front line, ready to be sacrificed for her
ideas, not sat behind a desk preparing biographies and
critical notes on works locked in store rooms.” Two months
later, a letter from Peter Krug, President of the Board of
the
Art reporting that Peggy Kerr, crushed by the Editor’s
bewildering response to her letter had resigned her
position, reevaluated her life behind a museum desk, and
decided to step out onto the front line as a radio Shock
Jock in Escanaba. This letter written by the museum’s
highest authority was essentially pooh-poohed by the
Editor who in his equally wordy response concluded that,
“a good DJ is more useful than any art critic with
blinders on.”2
Remarkable about this bizarre exchange not only is that
Flash Art fell for it but that the Editor sounded more like
Jef Bourgeau than his fictional hirelings. Here is the real
enigma: how can a hoax claim its bonafides? Perhaps
Baudrillard will come to the rescue, so it may be useful to
re-read his essay The Illusion of the End: “On the eve of
the 1990s, in the midst of some unexpected events and
with an eye to others just as unpredictable, there formed,
among a number of friends, the idea of an agency which
would itself be invisible, anonymous and clandestine: the
Stealth Agency…for gathering news of unreal events in
order to disinform the public of them.”3 We are in the era
of the first Gulf War, the one that “did not take place,” as
Baudrillard has claimed elsewhere,4 for it was entirely a
media event staged for television. “Simulation,” according
to the author, “is precisely this irresistible unfolding, this
sequencing of things as though they had a meaning, when
they are governed only by artificial montage and
non-meaning.” Baudrillard admired Alfred Jarry, belonged
to the Collegium Pataphysicum (over which his friend
Enrico Baj presided as the Grand Satrap) and doubtless
took his inspiration from Dr. Faustroll’s science of imaginary
solutions. In his Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll,
Jarry argues: “Instead of formulating the law of the fall of
a body towards a center, why not give preference to that of
the ascent of a vacuum towards
a periphery?”
paradox energizes Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis
Borges, relating the story of the author’s search for the
missing four-page signature in volume XLVI of the Anglo-
American Cyclopaedia that deals with the country of
Uqbar, not on any map, its language Tlön, apparently
extinct, and a yet to be written survey of an illusory world
tentatively titled Orbis Tertius.
Are we falling down the
rabbit hole with
Is it any wonder that the DetroitvInstitute of Arts bought trouble
when, innocently enough, itsvcurator of modern and contemporary
art wishing to mark thevend of the century, invited the
twelve one-week installmentsvfrom
small, hence the idea of rotating these thematic exhibitions and
punctuating their Wednesday through Sunday duration with a
reception each Saturday aimed at attracting artists and their friends.
Starting with VanGogh’s Ear (coinciding with Van Gogh: Face to Face,
the blockbuster featured in the museum’s main galleries),
Bourgeau had laid out a series of thematic exhibitions,
each with title and description, but just short of actual
content listings. All pertinent information reached the
Modern and
channels but there was nary a review or response.
Individual titles such as The Wrong Show, Naked in the
Nineties and Closet Art might have raised red flags but since
none were raised, the artist, who for this occasion was recycling
themes tested on his own turf, assumed that the museum’s
curator already had viewed those
works in
not perceived by either party was the forced removal, at the
request of the Friends of African-American Art, of Kara Walker’s
five-panel silhouette of an antebellum plantation scene, just
months before, and four years after its original acquisition.
In a highly polarized city where what is perceived to be a racial
slur is just as inflammatory as the semblance of blasphemy,
Graham Beal, the new director who had just moved there, was caught
between an artist whose work he did not know and a member of his staff who
should have done her homework, i.e. set the bar for what
the institution could permit itself to show and then negotiate
entries and labels accordingly. Van Gogh’s Ear
exposed the cult of personality with allusions to and
similes of the works of Andres Serrano, Piero Manzoni,
Vanessa Beecroft, Janine Antoni, Yves Klein, Tracey Emin
and Damien Hirst, among others. Ninety percent of the
works were bought within a five-mile radius of the artist’s
home at dime stores, gag-and-gift stores and even a fruit
market. A lack of signage, the public being unfamiliar with
vanguard spin, apple cider vinegar looking like urine, red
corn syrup being mistaken for menstrual blood, and a
banker’s rubber thumb protector for a condom, all added
up to the hue and cry of obscenity and not from the mouth
of those who had seen the exhibition, but from those who
had heard about it from others who had heard about it.
The decision to close the exhibition and cancel its eleven part
follow-up was unfortunate. The director put himself on the spot
because he’d overnight made it an issue of censorship.
The artist was disappointed with his work barred from
view, the closing and the alleged censorship, bouncing
back and forth in the press for at least two months, turned
show into event. On the positive side, Bourgeau was “bourght-off”
as a guest curator with a honorarium, which he subsequently
invested as seed money in expanding his operation into a full-scale
contemporary museum – complete with official non-profit status.
What could not be seen in
at the
installments. There is no denying that Jef Bourgeau has presented us
with some wickedly entertaining assemblages that are
difficult to erase from memory: Hatrack, Picasso’s Baggage,
Push me, Daddy, A History of Black People (after Basquiat),
American Beauty (Sleeping), Bathtub Jesus and Blue Judith,
to name a few.
Similarly, he has distilled other artists’ favored subjects to their
schematic essence, presenting them as readily recognizable
black and white ‘logos’: a screw, Mickey Mouse and
clothespin for Claes Oldenburg, a cactus for Georgia O’Keefe, a
pipe for René Magritte, etc. Since Bourgeau believes that
proper ‘branding’ is elemental to the promotion, sale and
recognition of art, he posits and proves that an artist’s
name is more recognizable when set in the type his or her
dealer prefers. For one of his exhibitions he printed up
black and white panels, each with the name of a famous
artist set in the type in use by that artist’s gallery. A little
twist made the point: Baselitz, who favors feet up and
head down portraiture, stood out because his name was
exhibited upside down. He evokes Chappaquiddick with a
red and black take-off on a SLIPPERY WHEN WET road
sign, and Picasso’s
men in suits and fedoras beating each other up.
Good fun as all this is, there is little doubt that Bourgeau
has made his greatest contributions on the conceptual and
ideational levels. Shrewdly having figured out what makes
art people, art institutions and art markets tick, he exposes
with the right indirection, chicanery and befuddlement,
double talk and arrogance, manipulation and profiteering
in the guise and with the voice of characters of his own
invention. He challenged reviewers to write instant articles
with the museum’s help by leaving easy-to-complete forms
at the reception desk. He invited people he admired to
assume directorships of museums-without-walls and
published their names and the cities in which they live in
Art in
through and
Bourgeau organized Shoot! with an invitation to ten
photographers to train their cameras on the visiting public.
He accompanied this with a promise that the results would
be exhibited, giving the subjects of Shoot! an opportunity
to purchase their portraits and the photographers publicity
and potential sales. In what could be seen as a parody
of ‘networking,’ the artist has insinuated himself into the
Internet under different or pseudo-identities and with
fictive art news that tended to take on a life of its own.
These times seem to be rife with rumor and speculation
and artists tend to pick up on that.
On
the New York Times ran an article about an unrecognized,
influential and extremely elusive Minimalist showing his
work at
White Columns in
problem: this brilliant African-American artist, forgotten
since the 1960’s, did not actually exist and had been
invented by
Triple Candle,
an alternative space in
The Wall Street Journal,
on
issue of the invisible artist. Not, however, in this case, the
artist who labors in obscurity, but, the one who adopts a
pseudonym, joins a collective or takes another’s identity.
One artist mentioned in this context, was the Norwegian
photographer Stig Eklund who is none other than Jef
Bourgeau, director of the Museum of New Art (MONA) in
Later in January, that museum would unveil
Picasso’s Camera featuring not only the box camera, an
alleged present from his friend Severini, but prints from a
roll found in that camera and restored with the help of
sophisticated computers. It was discovered that the lens
already had been cracked when the photographs were
taken sometime after 1906, the date of a vintage picture
showing Picasso and an unidentified man sitting behind a
table with the camera in plain view. The story of its
retrieval is worth telling. After Picasso’s death, André
Malraux was asked by his widow Jacqueline to take a look
at some of the late artist’s ‘junk’. In his memoirs, the
writer mentioned having seen a box with an old camera
and some glass plates, ‘diversions’, as he called them, and
not worth keeping. Subsequently discarded, they were
saved by a ragpicker who sold them at the
Mougins flea market to photographer Lucien
Clergue. Eventually they ended up with the well-known Swedish
photography collector Per Hallstrom who paid for the reconstitution of
this invaluable trove now on exhibit at MONA. From all the evidence,
this was a scoop of momentous proportions. The point of this exhibition
was to prove the importance of the camera, not only in Picasso’s own work
but to the birth of cubism. The examples are compelling.
They included a photograph of Manuel Pallares, presumably
taken in May 1909 when the artist passed through
Picasso painted of his friend is now in the collection of the
Detroit Institute of Arts. MONA made reams of supporting
material available to reporters.
The
Hakanson Colby was onto Jef Bourgeau’s game: “It took
real chutzpah to come up with Picasso’s Camera. This
risky project is packed with edgy humor, and it swiped at
scared cows and offers commentary on art world quirks…
Bourgeau demonstrates once more why his one man
museum is celebrating its tenth anniversary…” It is worth
mentioning, as a footnote, that this exhibition predates by
more than a year, the one Arnold Glimcher and Bernice
Rose just recently presented at Pace/Wildenstein in New
Coincidentally, the portrait of Manuel Pallares was one of
many early Picassos the gallery had borrowed.
Resisting the temptation to mention and describe the many
exhibitions that made Bourgeau’s admirers
trek to
to
that the
is Jef Bourgeau’s finest work.
It may not look like a work of art (perhaps, because there are so many
“part”), but it was conceived as one; suffered pain at birth,
traversed it’s awkward stages, needed all the help it
could get, has had a steady father, friends and plenty of
attention from the press. Meant to fill a void, MONA began
as an artist’s concept and evolved into an everyday reality
that has kept the artist tethered. How could he run a
museum without an income stream? How could he operate
rent-free and not give his landlord something? A percentage
of the sales seemed a good idea, but whose sales?
Showing and selling his own work in a not-for-profit,
tax-exempt institution had the makings of a conflict of
interest. Thus entered the doppelgänger. In some form or
other, Jef Bourgeau always has been hiding behind fictitious
characters: the pamphleteer Cesar Marzetti as early
as 1991, Jane Speaks in 1996, the president of his board
in 1999, and Billy Conklin in 2006, to name a few. Or,
putting it more correctly, for the better part of two decades
the artist’s principal working strategy has been to invent
personae, figments of his imagination, yet believable
because they were given faces and biographies to match.
Such alchemic talent was too good, or so it seemed to
Bourgeau, to waste on playing games. Faced with the need
to continue working as an artist, showing what he made
and bringing it to market, and realizing to what degree
MONA had him trapped, Bourgeau secretly tested the
waters with photographs, taken by him and altered in the
computer, or borrowed from the Internet and modified by
him. These photographs favored landscapes and isolated
figures; because of their moody character, somewhat
reminiscent of Northern light, he invented a likely ‘auteur’
by the name of Stig Eklund. In the three years since the
Norwegian photographer has been launched, his photographs
have appeared on the Internet, in group exhibitions
and in more than one local gallery. Those who call them
fabrications should be reminded that all art is a fabrication.
The press acknowledges the existence of Stig Eklund
as Jef Bourgeau’s doppelgänger. Stig Eklund collectors are
let in on the secret, which has not dampened their eagerness
to own a print. The story does not end there. This
catalogue includes examples of the work of no fewer than
seven doppelgängers, all with their distinct identities and
life stories. They are clearly distinguishable, one from the
other. They range from the figurative to the abstract. Who
says an artist cannot create in one or the other style simultaneously?
If the photographer does not exist, what then
bars that photographer from shooting the likenesses of
famous artists, some dead some alive, who never sat or
stood for those portraits? In his latest incarnation as
juggler of identities, Bourgeau, like the juggler of balls and
pins, stands poised for boos when he drops them or cheers
when they remain aloft. We continue to root for the latter.
