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Clara Beckmann is the grand-niece of German painter Max Beckmann. She was born outside London in 1978, and has recently served a residency at Detroit’s Museum of New Art. She lives and works between London and Detroit.

Throughout her young life Clara Beckmann has traveled the globe immortalizing art figures of the early 20th century with her camera. In the Face of Art: Famous Dead Artists, Beckmann's lens is focused exclusively on these early innovators of modern art.

Beckmann’s portraits are known for their dark clarity and simple texture. Her lack of personable knowledge and insensitivity toward her subjects combined with her self-taught technical skills allow us to intimately view some of the outstanding personalities of our era. The power of Beckman's portraits lies in the fact that they are memories of our existence. They reveal something of the nature of our age.

Hanne Bloot was born 1980 in Maastricht, Netherlands. She attended art school in Michigan, and currently is living in Detroit with her American husband.

Bloot discovered photography in her early teens, beginning her studies at Ritvald Academy in Amsterdam at just seventeen. By the age of nineteen she was a P.S.1 grant recipient, where her series My Life As A Film (2000) was created and first exhibited.

Alongside her photographic works such as the series Alone And Not Alone (2004-present) and Hidden (2007), over the subsequent years she also made many short films.

Hanne Bloot’s application of light and color in her photography is painterly and yet contemporary at the same time, hinting at dark emotions. There is a sense of forced isolation, of two people sharing space yet disconnected, of a room within rooms.

Her work is a quiet poetry of understatement and misdirection. As our eyes drift across Bloot’s photographs in search of a resting point, we invest the dark spaces between with a symbolic value: the alienation of life in an increasingly urban world.

Billy Conklin is a British artist, one of the so-called second generation Young British Artists (YBAs). Although several early exhibitions caused Conklin to be well known in art circles, he was largely unknown until he appeared before the public on a BBC television program. It was a South Bank production that visited young artist's studios. Conklin was completely drunk at the time, repeatedly saying he wanted his "telly" back and brandishing what turned out to be a starter's gun.

It seems he drunkenly thought the television crew was from his cable company. It all ended with Conklin pushing a grip through a plate glass window. Although no one was injured, the incident secured Conklin's career.

Billy Conklin’s work has an allusive Duchampian wit, a Magrittian mystery, and a diabolic Swiftian mastery. Since narrative plays as a primary means of organizing people's lives and experiences, Conklin has created a long string of art narratives that some critics have described as superfictions. Other critics have suggested that his work is so far beyond what can properly be considered art, that they use the term “postart” to describe it. Yet within all these definitions Conklin has set up a powerful negative logic, aimed to question the nature of art and art institutions. And, perhaps, even the culture that builds and decides such things. And life itself.

If you crossed Sid Vicious with Oscar Wilde, you might get something approaching Billy Conklin; a dissipated, baby-faced punk dandy. He is gangly and ghostly, and speaks quietly and camply. He is wearing his customary black suit and sunglasses, and he is off his head - he can't stand straight and speaks as if through a fog. He doesn't seem to have the energy or concentration for full sentences.

Now that he has a home in Detroit, Billy has only learnt one American phrase so far, a rude one, although the garrulous artist promises to soon be chatting away politely with the locals who inhabit the neighborhood streets. More than merely a means of escaping the British doldrums, the second generation Young British Artist says the decision to move here is motivated by the deep affinity he feels for the darker side of the local culture. He spoke to me in the shabby-chic Detroit house he purchased on his last trip to town. He spoke as somebody who has been through the wringer of public controversy. Outside we had prostitutes standing on our corner, and people crapping round the back alley.

Billy Conklin: Because the Old World charm is still here. (He lets the stained drapes fall back over the barred window.) Yeah, well I suppose the whole thing really is about death.

Billy Conklin: I think that the way that I deal with death is totally American. And Detroit is the picture-perfect city for that, imbued with all that. Not just the Murder Capital of the World thingie that comes and goes, but down to the bricks. It’s in the architecture. The ruins of a once great city and culture. In England people hide or shy away from death and ideas about it, whereas Detroiters seem to walk hand in hand with it. In that way I feel a bit liberated here. I identify with the directness of this tradition of violence, which along with the rust and rot has also permeated Detroit’s artistic traditions.

Q: London has been good to you though? It’s where you made your career. It’s now the capital of the art world. Why abandon that?

Conklin: The art world is not a lot to do with art. It’s to do with money and power and position and control. And if they’ve decided you fit their strict profile, you'll be in. If they've made up their minds otherwise, you never will be. I wanted to find another planet altogether, a livable place beyond any art world. And so, one day I landed happily in Detroit.

Conklin: Yeah. But I think experience will tell these people that the more they try to slag off Billy Conklin and his work, the more the public reaction will grow stronger in the opposite direction. That’s a universal law. And has nothing to do with the quality of me or my art.

Q: Which draws me to my next question: You’ve been described as an arrogant self-promoter. Do you think of yourself as an important artist?

Conklin: Today's artist is of no importance, since he is replaced daily. And no wonder, I'm easily sick and tired of myself. So must the viewers be.

Q: You’ve often been quoted as saying that today’s art is the new readymade. What do you mean by such a disparaging statement?

Conklin: There’s nothing disparaging about it. The art of the 21^st century is the new readymade. A poorly manufactured object transformed by its mere selection and placement in a gallery or museum context. A shallow, unreflective banality motivated only by the desire to become institutionalized. So that putting these mundane objects in the limelight makes them appear extraordinary instead of ordinary. Such placement makes anything on view precious. At least for the near future.

Q: Yet you don’t see this as something bad. Since you obviously embrace and participate in this duplicity by showing your own work in such institutions.

Conklin: Of course I participate. All that today’s museums offer is their institutional authority. So that any visit to one is the ultimate act of deception. And, know it or not, that confronts the current culture full-face. I’m all for that, where everything is hidden by being exposed in plain sight. We live in a world of deliberate artifice compounded by such direct misrepresentations of truth and beauty, and by such cunning indirections of those who decide and are in positions of power.

Q: Did you steal your power to be an artist? You’ve also been accused of being a fake. Or even a forger.

Conklin: The forger's art is simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-effacing, selfish and generous, bold and timid. By taking other artists’ work as my own, dissolves these boundaries of constraints and permits us to push one’s imagination to the limit. To explore every possibility. Someone makes a pretty painting and puts it on the wall, because it can’t stand on its own feet. I give art feet so that it can stand on its own.

Q: And by this action, which some critics have termed superfictions, what do you hope to accomplish?

Conklin: To simply ask those questions this century has already forgotten. What is art? What is the role of the artist? What is the role of the public? A gallery? A museum?

Conklin: No answers. Never. Just data to gather. Then to analyze all that. To analyze the conditions of art production at the start of this new century. And to discover that point where the modern equation between art and truth has lost meaning. And, in so doing, life itself.

*Critical responses to Conklin's influence remain disputed. His output in a short period of five years has produced some of the most virulent anti-icons of contemporary art; the centerfold icon has been much imitated and parodied in books and advertising. However Conklin himself admits that he has had serious drug and alcohol problems for much of these years and much of the work done since 2004 has been argued to be repetitive and reductive. The majority of Conklin's works are made with assistants and other technical supports which some argue makes his authorship questionable. It is argued though his focus on celebrity has contributed to the trivialisation of contemporary culture. If nothing else, Conklin certainly has had a key role in giving the visual arts a continued profile in British public life.

Billy Conklin was born in Leeds in 1976, and currently lives and works between Norwich and Detroit. His work has been exhibited abroad extensively. Conkln received an Arts Council Research and Development Grant in 2004 and is a finalist for the prestigious 2010 Prinzhorn Prize.

Dash Snow's Last Known Shit, 2009 by Billy Conklin *

recovered from Snow’s $325-a-night hotel room the day

after his overdose and preserved by the Manzoni method.

It is hardly unusual for the editor at CIRCA to receive art-news alerts and press releases via e-mail, therefore when we received one from the director of the Detroit Museum of New Art telling us of the tragic death of the young artist Jan de Groot (touted to be exhibiting in the upcoming Piss-Off exhibition with the likes of Sarah Lucas and Sam Taylor-Wood), we believed them, and in a slightly shallow way, mourned his loss. Well, it would have been vulgar not to. The details were mildly gruesome.

AMSTERDAM - The friends of “Grooti” are bewildered. Without warning, Dutch artist Jan de Groot, 37, has jumped from his parents’ apartment and is crushed on the sidewalk below. Later, his parents are discovered chopped to pieces in their beds. Their heads seem to have disappeared completely. The trash is gone through, but nothing of interest is found.

The artist had recently been asked to participate in a museum show entitled PISS OFF! Some friends speculate that he took this commission too much to heart.

“He began to complain about everything,” fellow photographer Frank Yost explains. “Even about the abuse of salmon and other spawning animals. What he began calling the disruption of rhythmic verticality. He became unbearable to us all. And it seemed, more pissed off every day.”

When asked for comment, Jane Speaks, organizing curator for the Detroit Museum of New Art and the exhibition itself, let her public relations department issue a brief epithet: “It may be said that Jan de Groot lived his art to the end.”

Bizarre, bizarre, bizarre. So I googled this unfortunate man, subject to the whim of his artistic temperament to the very end. However, with the exception of the artist's c.v., and some images of his work, both linked to the Museum's website, there were absolutely no other sites offering his profile. The c.v. may well be false; there seems to be no record of the man in the museums in which he supposedly exhibited. And the MONA website itself is littered with anarchic manifestos boasting hoax exhibitions, as well as a 1996 obituary for the one and only (presumably) Jane Speaks. This must be a truly modern establishment. Art mysteries are common as muck these days and to be honest they aren't my cup of tea. So I will open this issue to the floor. Readers: have I wasted three hours of my precious life that I will never regain, or is he dead and if so should I apologise? Did Jan de Groot ever exist, and if not then who bothered fabricating his art? Is the Detroit Museum of New Art a fake institution? Has anybody ever been there, or does it merely exist in the heads of several American art anarchists? And if so, that's a lovely idea folks, really it's so avant-garde, but just so irritating. I am going to home to relax with a cup of Earl Grey in front of a reproduction of Vettriano.

*Circa Art Magazine (Ireland): ‘Murder Mystery: Bad News or Art Sham?’ by Isobel Harbison, September 7.

AMSTERDAM – The Dutch photographer, Jan de Groot, who was reported to have committed suicide last year, has instead been discovered alive and well. The artist was picked up in a routine dragnet of prostitutes operating illegally in Amsterdam’s De Waal or free zone, most of these immigrants. Police told us that de Groot stood out from the other streetwalkers due to his awkward application of lipstick, his wearing out-of-season pumps, and by sporting a heavier than normal moustache.

“He was obviously out of his league,” police chief Pieter Koomens remarked. “Plus we’d received quite a few complaints from his johns: that de Groot, or Bootsie as he was known on the street, was totally inadequate despite his, well, you know.”

Responding to the possibility of prosecuting the artist, Chief Koomens responded that de Groot hadn’t really committed any other crime than unlicensed solicitation. He was fined for that and released.

“Yes, it is a crime to commit suicide. The law is clear on that. But there’s nothing in the books for having faked it,” the chief said, but added with a wry smile: “However, unhappy clients may file civil complaints against Bootsie. Our country has many laws concerning services’ fraud, failure to deliver goods and so on. There may be some redress there, some justice of sorts.”

Going back to life as usual, the artist was located by this reporter working happily in his old studio on his latest series of portraits. When asked why he had faked his own death, he argued that his gallery had pushed him to it.

“They told me my work had gone shit lately. We had a big blow-up and they dropped me. They said I was dead as an artist. To make them feel some regret, I staged my suicide. I thought I'd show them. But, after my death, my prices plummeted even more. Things just don't work like they used to."

As he dried his new photograph of long dead artist Asger Jorn, he talked about recent events: "Now, after my arrest and all the police hullabaloo, my value has recovered. The scandal has put my prices through the roof. All in all, I’m glad I was found out. In season or out, I couldn’t have lasted another day in those heels,. And my gallery has taken me back now that I’ve been charged in my parents’ murders.”

Stig Eklund was born in Bergen, Norway in 1976. He has lived and worked in Detroit since 2004.

An undiagnosed dyslexic, Stig Eklund left Secondary education at the age of sixteen. He spent his remaining teen years working at a cardboard factory in his home town. During that time, utilizing the materials at hand, he began to make and experiment with several pinhole cameras. The work from these rudimentary cameras developed into dark, moody photographs. He has remarked that he can only see "right" through a camera lens.

Eklund's mature camera style is so strong that it can even shroud a street lamp, so that, instead of light, it seemingly emits darkness and shadows. His vision drapes geometrically clashing urban beauty with the sooty persona of its denizens, succinctly captured by a Norwegian artist who spends much of the year in Detroit's glowering twilight.

Ford Wallace Ford was born in 1960 and grew up in Michigan. When he was four years of age Ford's mother, unable to financially care for the child, had the young boy declared a ward of the state. He was interned at the Coldwater State Hospital until he was legally of age, then released to a half-way house in Pontiac (where he has lived off and on for the last six years).

Although no real relation to the automobile family can be proven, Ford’s mother had worked as a seamstress at the family’s Rose Terrace mansion. She was released from the household when it was discovered that she had become pregnant out of wedlock. Destitute, she quickly found herself in a home for teen mothers, through which she subsequently relinquished custody of her infant son. The artist’s name soon took on the double Ford appellation due to a lifetime in institutions, where each morning’s roll call began “Ford, Wallace?” and was responded to: “Present, Wallace Ford.”

It was only at the age of forty-one, while spending hobby time at a drug rehabilitation center, that Ford taught himself to paint. His life has been magical since that discovery of unbounded talent.

In 1991, Swiss artist Riso Mattner co-authored the Museum of New Art as a "fiction of authenticity" in order to redefine the borders of art and to critique dominant modes of presentation. Now, his exhibition BOINK! at the Museum of New Art is a quick and dirty tour of many of these themes.

BOINK! is first and most obviously an esthetic battleground over the image of art, but more pointedly of society itself -- what is permissible to say or to show, and who is allowed to say and show it. The artist/iconoclast abuses and thereby accentuates the basic elements of the chosen art object and its artist to make visible and decode their underlying message.

While the semiotic reading of artworks is the predominant mode of interpretation for Mattner's current œuvre, the special significance of these vandalized art-advertisements seems to lie at least as much in the borrowed iconography of the original material. Mattner believes that too much time is spent picking over the idea of art and placing it within a scheme of art "regimes."

This complex archaeology can be simplified substantially if one realizes that what Mattner is doing is combining, in a clever way, art history with popular history. In his day-to-day world art ceases to be a simulacrum, but at the same time it ceases to be displaced from the everyday. Contemporary art especially can be free of the restrictions of hierarchy and history, because it doesn’t have to be shackled to any particular noble content that distinguishes it from everyday life. And that it can never be detached from the current politics of time and place.

Failing to deal with presumed notions of art skeptically can only make the art world more insular, and more pompous.

"The emptying of art by artists began with DADA," Mattner spoke by telephone. "And was reinvigorated with POP in the 60's, whose spirit continues today - that of formless meaning and meaningless forms, of visual indifference in favor of an idea. Most of these ideas are ordinary, thus transforming any art into the ordinary."

Much like a magician revealing all his magic, Mattner's acts are an artist's betrayal, a revelation of art's negation to its past triumphs, of novelty in favor of the ordinary.

"Art may not be dead," Mattner finished the call, "but the authentic author is."

Taki Murakishi was born in Kyoto, Japan in 1975. He currently lives and works between Tokyo and Detroit.

Taki Murakishi creates portraits of his friends, the music scene and Tokyo, only to twist, layer and rework them into abstractions of his life.

“So-called abstract painting has never been wholly original, has never been its own end. Such creation exists only where art presents images that take nothing from what has been imagined, neither repeating or modifying a particular artist's vision, but inventing its own, liberated from both and all.

One must move toward an art where everything must be sacrificed to the truths and necessities of a new millennium, toward those elements of a pure and eternal art, full and infinitely beyond our known experience. One must move toward the pixel and beyond.”

Karl Strumpf was born in Graz, Austria in 1950 but moved with his parents to England as a young boy. He now lives in works in London.

Upon surveying recent renovation in the basement of his new Chelsea gallery at Sloane Square, influential art collector Charles Saatchi was startled by 56 year-old Karl Strumpf's boiler room walls which were spattered with mud patching and of half-finished drips and rollered paint. "My God, this is what great art should be." said Saatchi. "Something that gives real visual pleasure and makes you sit up and think, not the pseudo-controversial rehashed claptrap that so many actually believe is cutting-edge art."

Strumpf's only formal studies have been at the British Gypsum Drywall Academy training centre at East Leake, in Leicestershire. Several sections of his still fresh walls have already been cut away and mounted on supports, so that they may be exhibited as their own piece under the collective title String Theories when Saatchi’s gallery opens in 2007.

Plenty of people have had the dream of finding a lost or hidden masterpiece in their attic, but how does one respond to what they find a common worker doing in their basement? Mr Saatchi isn’t alone in his convictions of this underground art and its potential on the art market. Such "isolation and visual focus denotes importance: the greater the masterpiece, the greater its separation from other objects that might compete for attention." Victoria Newhouse writes in her book, Art and the Power of Placement.

Strumpf's boiler room art has been likened to the recent discovery of British cave paintings in Church Hole cave in Creswell Crags, Derbyshire. It is that important to Mr Saatchi, who almost never grants interviews or speaks publicly. He has described the fresh drywall work in his gallery's basement as "infinitely more exciting than almost anything seen upstairs in years".

Missy Wiggins was born in Detroit, 1982. Her family moved to London when she was five and where she received her schooling. She currently lives and works in Detroit

Her series of portraits and cityscapes represents the explosive effects of post 9/11 fear and neo-urbanization in the 21st Century, both in our environment and psyche - observed by the artist in Detroit and London.

The topic of racism is often couched in polite silence in the good name of political correctness, letting controversy in the art world more often revolve around matters of morality than matters of conscience.

passing in detroit presents culturally charged portraits which expose the contradictions and tensions of race in America. Issues that have grown up over centuries of lies and insecurities, exploitation and vulnerabilities.

passing in detroit focuses on questions of identity, racism, and social injustice in our current culture and in our nation's recent history.

passing in detroit serves to confront, disarm, and ultimately engage in dialogue all but the most intractable bigots.

Detroit fell, and it fell hard. Two deadly race riots within 30 years had mortally wounded the city's psyche. Overt racial intolerance exploded in the 1960’s and impelled the city's white population to flee to the suburbs by the millions. It was a xenophobic reaction by the whites toward the newly empowered (and justifiably angry) black population. In ten years time, Detroit’s largest tax base had relocated to the suburbs, as did most white-owned businesses, leaving the city a crumbling symbol of industrial obsolescence and racial inequity.

Yet, despite Detroit's socio-economic decline, an exciting and vital cultural renaissance has taken root and thrived amid the post-industrial ruins. Now, after 30 years of crawling from the wreckage, the city is wooing back the sons and daughters of those who left.

passing in detroit is a photographic document of the heirs to this lost white generation and their tentative reappearance into a city that still remains 90% black.

Former lover accuses artist of stealing her ideas

Jack Corley in London
May 22, 2006

The man recently named as the world's most contentious artist has been accused of stealing ideas from former lover Missy Wiggins, herself an internationally thorny figure in the art world.

Billy Conklin is England's most dubious contemporary artist. In 2004 after his sculpture of an abused child, Hatrack, failed to auction at its $1.2m reserve (now £686,000), ArtNow magazine put him at number forty-eight on a list of the art world's VIPs. It was the highest ranking for any artist residing in Norwich.

An inveterate prankster, Conklin once persuaded a museum director to dress up for the sake of art in a white suit out-of-season. But the latest controversy was ignited in an interview published last month by the Italian edition of Splash.

The Detroit-born artist Missy Wiggins - best known for her disturbing installations of art to be destroyed - said she had had an affair with Conklin before either became infamous and that she was the source for many of his ideas.

"It was in 1998," she said. "I was working in a gallery at Millbank. All I really did was unlock and lock the door. One day Billy turned up. I didn't know who he was and he tried to persuade me to steal all the works in the gallery. No luck there, he forced me sexually on the sales counter.

"And so we saw each other for a period. I've always been repulsed by him though. I guess that was the attraction to start. Then he gave me very beautiful presents, objects taken from his mum's flat."

Asked how the affair ended, Wiggins was quoted as replying: "It ended with there being a lot of rivalry between us. Every time that I tell him an idea, he turns it into his own slag."

Conklin's output is varied whereas Wiggins, who has over-sized breasts, has remained obsessed with getting her public to contend its ideas about the female body. Nevertheless, there is a similarity between two series of works the artists produced in 2005, both involving London's July transit bombings.

Confronted with Wiggins' claims this week, Conklin neither confirmed their affair, nor denied specifically the insinuation of plagiarism. Of their alleged romance, he said: "I have the right to remain in silence. Also the best metaphor for our time in the sack."

Asked if he had stolen ideas from Wiggins, he said: "As the prime minister would say, I think my car is waiting."

Pressed on whether he stole ideas from others, Conklin replied: "In today's art, it is always a robbery. All of it. And stolen goods only increase in value. And like the best of thieves, artists never give them back rightfully."

Shen-Ba Wong was born in the Fujian Province in the year of the horse 1978. Wong’s father a Shanghai professor of art and her mother a doctor were victims of the Cultural Revolution, forced to relocate to the countryside as manual laborers in 1967. Her father worked at a farm distribution center, and would bring home broken planks from shipping pallets with which both he and eventually the young Wong would carve their first woodcuts.

Later at Xiamen University, she reacted violently against the Xiamen Dada movement founded in 1986 by embracing still older techniques (the blockprint) combined with newer Western ideas (abstraction). She is now at the vanguard of those younger Chinese artists emerging today.

WASHINGTON (API) - Just as American dealers and collectors are scooping up contemporary art coming out of China, harsh new import bans and restrictions from Washington have now been extended to some of this art, labeling it as toxic and unusable.

Recently, the American government has been chasing claims of lead in toy imports to residual pesticides in food. In 2007 alone, China-related safety issues dominated news headlines when a number of Chinese exports were found to be contaminated, including tainted melamine-laced pet food, toxic toothpaste, unsafe tires, chemical-laden seafood, counterfeit pharmaceuticals and medicines, and millions of lead-painted toys.

“The American government is trying to tell the public that there isn't any difference between a bad can of tuna and a bad contemporary painting,” complained Arthur Grimpson, director of the Store, a commercial arm of Detroit’s Museum of New Art.

"That’s an argument we can win,” said FDA spokesman Phil Burnette. “Especially, when it comes to protecting our citizens from foreign threats.”

Chinese manufacturers still add lead to paint and varnish because it is resistant to wear and to moisture. Artists demand that their materials be archival and, likewise, collectors demand that their acquisitions last for generations.

Last year, in retaliation to lax export oversight, China executed its director of the State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, for accepting bribes, most notably money but also works of contemporary Chinese art. Some of these artworks turned out to be unsafe art and, many of these, paintings by the artist Shen-Ba Wong.

Scheduled to open this Saturday, Wong’s first exhibition in the USA is now all but dead on arrival. The paintings passed through customs last week but are now hanging on the walls of a Detroit gallery that has been ordered not to sell them.

“They’re toxic,” exclaimed FDA’s Burnette. “I wouldn't feel safe in the same room with this stuff, let alone my kid. One square inch of a painting contains enough lead to poison 500 children.”

Grimpson, director of the gallery, plans to move ahead with Wong's opening reception all the same.

“We can’t sell the art. We can’t send it back to China either. And we’ve been fined $600 per painting, irregardless of its scale or quality,” said Grimpson. “And some of these paintings are quite large.”

Working within impromptu guidelines provided by the FDA, the gallery will be allowed to accept a $600 donation for each and every painting, with the advisory that the donor lay another coat of American-made varnish over the foreign-based laminate.

“No one’s making money on the deal,” Grimpson explained. “But at least the fines will be settled. And the art will be deemed safe.”

From the campaign trail in Michigan, John McCain stepped back from a pledge to halt all U.S. imports of Chinese-made art. Instead, the Republican candidate for president reiterated a growing call for warning labels on any Chinese art, whether a real or perceived threat to America.

There is no single U.S. standard for poisonous content in the visual arts, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission primarily works by recalling paintings and sculptures only after they have been found to be unsafe, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. McCain has complained in the Senate that the agency has dragged its feet too long on protecting Americans from imported contemporary art.

Starting in 2006, Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate, has supported legislation that would require the Consumer Product Safety Commission to classify any dangerous work of art, most notably books, as a banned “product” under the Hazardous Substances Act. Her efforts have yet to become law.

In his final remarks at the Michigan rally, McCain said as president he would require independent testing of all art before it reaches U.S. shores.

“Jef Bourgeau mines, archeologist-like, histories of various art objects, movements, moments, in unusual and determined ways. He looks at art, the market, and ways that one often, perhaps always, overwhelms the other. I look at the whole of his work as a love letter to the potential of art made by an artist perched right between his heart and his head.”

… Since he first began exhibiting in the early 1990s, American artist Jef Bourgeau has inspired controversy. His practice, which is considered by some to be a provocation against the art world itself, essentially involves the remaking of art and artists, both imagined and real. Bourgeau has been a vexing figure for many and his “interventions” have continued to be viewed as a subversion of traditional notions of artistic practice and integrity.

Bourgeau’s art exemplifies the post-modern sense of working in a period when the epoch-making achievements of modern art are already matters of recorded fact. To this end, Bourgeau seems engaged with the vicissitudes of the constructed image, that is, the image’s transposition from one medium and context to another and the traces and consequences of this transfer.

What Bourgeau aims to dispel then are the Modernist myths of the original and of originality, and of straight-out artistic freedom against the commodity of art objects: all this, alongside the presumed power-sharing of gallery, collector, and museum over the artist and art trends. Bourgeau’s best known work, the Museum of New Art, has become a broad commentary on the fact that most people don’t actually see “real” paintings, as they are more likely to experience art as a decal reproduction on the side of a coffee mug. Asking isn’t that good enough, after all.

I read on the first page of this summer’s Art Newspaper that the art market has touched bottom and that now it’s certain to start its comeback. Ah, let’s all jump on board again! Just as the big bank managers are restarting their risky speculations again, the art machine is starting to roll itself back on the same tracks too? Only God knows just where the artists, who have always been on the short-end of the money-stick in this gamut, can now suddenly begin to scrape together actual income.

Many of us are living the irreconcilable conflict between a desire to be left in peace simply to make our art: pitted against that desire to share the wealth of it with others for, well, wealth. This dilemma is heightened when the art market pretends to offer us some real means at a living if we just play by its rules, even though by doing so often impels us to censure our more intimate roots of invention.

These rules are the same as a supermarket: the artist must offer produce easily recognizable by its form and content, in

other words, to offer an always distinguishable brand. If possible, it’s best to have every such expectation come neatly packaged and easy to label. Warned off from any accepted criterion that might explore the potential scope of our art, we often must adapt familiar or current formulas to this end product.

From time to time, very rarely, into the pervasive net of this mercantile stamp of approval an authentic product happens to fall, often too late and often only to the benefit of its author’s widow. The other ‘products’ at market remain for the most part calculated, embracing the repressed emotions and transformed ideas dealt out by the critics and the wealthy collectors to whom they cater in order not to seem antiquated.

In this suffocating and deeply boring context, the artist discovers it nearly impossible to work to overcome the forces in power, on the one hand to even be allowed to enter the game while on the other simply to stay in it.

Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus in America, had already defined our age by 1953: “Factors of convenience like the pressures of the market, the emphasis on organized simplification, and financial gain as our only scope of reference, has in effect disabled our ability as individuals to understand and to achieve our deepest potential for life.”

Not so long ago, I wrote in this column about the American artist Jef Bourgeau. I am forced to write about him again because he is indeed a unique and rare phenomenon. Critical, indefatigable, and constantly at war with the status quo, Bourgeau founded Detroit’s Museum of New Art a decade ago, and, much like the city itself, without any money at all.

From among those hundreds of artists exhibited at his museum, he’s not only shown the work of many emerging and established artists, whether regional, national, and international, but he’s also invented a few of his own along the way, or, many times merely presented totally fictitious and unbelievable exhibitions such as the `lost’ photographs of Picasso.

One of my favorites from his imaginary artists is the incomparable Shen-ba Wong. To this artist’s attribution, Bourgeau has created complex and beautiful paintings - all from inside his laptop computer, only later transferring them onto paper or canvas.

Bourgeau recently presented this body of work at the Jane Speaks Gallery (another of his inventions, but with a director seemingly made of real blood and bones, Christina, daughter of the now `deceased' Jane).

These new works are both original and elaborate in form and color as if at the hand of a reborn Picabia, of a sort of Cubism freshly discovered after a century of modern art, but bearing newfound gestural expression while utilizing hi-tech pixelations, making them uniquely intelligent and emotional creations well beyond any possible pseudonym.

DETROIT - According to London's Art Newspaper, what resources do you need to start a pop-up art gallery?

You must have inexhaustible reserves of energy, a large helping of missionary zeal, and a healthy dose of chutzpah. A network of artists willing to help out on a voluntary basis probably helps. Most important, courageous landlords to donate valuable real estate. Surprisingly, though, you don’t need much money.

The original pop-up phenom: Detroit’s artist-run Museum of New Art (MONA) was founded on these principles way back in 1996, and is going as strong as ever: having just announced its first Prinzhorn Prize awarded to six innovative national and international artists - with upcoming exhibitions from winner Nicole Eisenman, and another from Lifetime Achievement recipients Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Over the last decade, the Museum of New Art has swapped homes six times, ranging from a commercial gallery’s walk-in closet to the entire second floor of a downtown skyscraper. And now, to its newest addition: a satellite gallery in Detroit’s Russell Industrial Complex.

Currently, the museum is housed in 7 separate galleries, exhibiting art in spaces ranging from Detroit to the city of Pontiac 25 miles away. It has swelled from that closet museum at its outset to over 40,000 sq. feet by 2003, then back down to its current size of 16,000 sq. feet.

To achieve all this, MONA has always operated at the opposite end of the financial scale from more traditional museums, eschewing questions of finance altogether. This may sound like idealism, but Jef Bourgeau, the museum’s director, sees it as a practical solution to the problem of arts funding: “Working outside the system, we remain untouched by hard times.”

And yet without a running budget the museum has managed some real art coups. Since its inception in September 1996, MONA has become both a playground and springboard for hundreds of artists, both new and established. including such notables as Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono, Simen Johan, Crash, Stella Vine, Haim Steinbach, Liam Gillick, and Olaf Breuning.

As for unique art events, the museum founded and sponsored: the Biennale Detroit; Documenta USA; the Detroit

International Film Festival 1-10; Ground Zero (shortly after 9/11); e-MONA; ArtCORE; Aperto; Moving Walls; and kaBOOM!

In the last year alone, MONA has initiated Detroit artist swaps with four major cities (Chicago; Berlin; Bregenz; Beijing). The Detroit exhibition in Berlin inspired the German television journal Aspekte to produce a segment on Detroit culture; and the Austrian display of Detroiters' art caught the eye of the director of Kunsthalle Wien, who is planning a Detroit exhibition at that museum.

Against all odds, the museum has also compiled its own “portable” but permanent collection (200 works made to fit into small archival boxes) created by artists like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Arman, Peter Halley, Jenny Holzer, and Vito Acconci.

Jan van der Marck* said in a 1998 PBS interview: "I do not see Jef Bourgeau's museum as a satire of the real thing. I see it more of a nudging, a questioning, of the real thing. In that cool Duchampian fashion that has no pathos, that has no big voice, but that is a subtle, unsettling challenge to the institution usually known as the museum of contemporary art and the people responsible for the founding, the running, the financing, and the publicizing of museums of contemporary art. And so, every museum of contemporary art and every institution by that name will find that Jef's little upstart in Pontiac is somehow a challenge, and perhaps, a negative shadow falling over the real thing."

*Jan van der Marck is a former curator at the Walker Art Center, the Dartmouth Museum, chief curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and, founding director of the precursor to the Miami Art Museum, and founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.