JEF BOURGEAU: A User's Manual

Art Until Now is Jef Bourgeau’s keen, sometimes scathing look at 20^th century art history from a gloriously biased perspective. The bulk of the show is made up of assemblages of found objects with audio and video elements. Although the individual pieces stand alone, they gain strength from each other as elements in an installation that occupies the entire front gallery at O.K. Harris.

This is one show that needs plenty of time to absorb. At its best the exhibit projects a cleanly honed visual intelligence. Each piece requires a careful “reading” because it’s easy to miss a historical peg or one of the artist’s personal interpretations.

Detroit News: ‘Coloring 20^th-century art in an entertaining hue’ by Joy Colby, August 23, p. 5D.

Jef Bourgeau learned to question authority early in life – a theme that has lasted throughout his career in filmmaking, video, painting, writing, music and computer art. Bourgeau manages to pull all of these elements together like an artistic one-man band with a countercultural beat. But maybe the most surprising thing about this highly talented artist is that he is not better known.

The artist’s current display, Renovations, takes his germinal ideas from his last show Art Until Now and inflates them into an extravaganza that begins with the actual construction of a contemporary museum, both fresh and out of touch already, and, over the course of three changing exhibits within three months, ends with a "museum" exhibit that is both cold and iconographic to the extreme, but also a place of reverence, awe and so, ultimately, disconnection. In other words, in these three back-to-back exhibits Bourgeau condenses the entire life of a contemporary museum.

Detroit Magazine: ‘Bourgeau on the Bourgeoisie’ by Veronica Pasfield, November, p. 20.

Jef Bourgeau is attempting the difficult with his wonderful installation at the O.K. Harris Gallery. He’s out to renovate old attitudes about gender, particularly female stereotyping, by setting up a contrast between past and present. Bourgeau has a deft touch. He doesn’t bog down his aesthetics with his message. The two play intriguingly off one another.

Detroit Free Press: ‘Women, then and now’ by Marsho Miro, November 25, p. 12D.

Bourgeau has found a venue at O.K. Harris for his painted ladies with black bars over their eyes, and has used them to lampoon some of the thinking surrounding pornography in art. The artist calls his installation Dirty Pictures because we manage to “estheticize everything from pain to pleasure to pornography.”

Detroit News: ‘Two artists survive a brush with controversy: Jock Sturges and Jef Bourgeau’ by Joy Hakanson Colby, June 11, p. 9C.

1994

Jef Bourgeau: New Work (one person), Zolla/Lieberman, Chicago

60 Rooms with a View, Art Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Vis-à-vis, Focus Gallery, Detroit

New Prints, The Drawing Room, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Homage to Hans Bellmer, Book Beat Gallery, Oak Park, MI

Late in the 20^th Century (one-person), LedisFlam, New York

Jef Bourgeau (one person Gahlberg Arts Center,), Glen Ellyn, IL

Art as Logo (one person), David Klein Gallery, Birmingham, MI

Elvis+Marilyn: 2xImmortal (video installation)l, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston

touring through 1997:

Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, Florida

Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland

The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC

Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston

Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH

San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose

Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa

Tennessee State Museum, Nashville

Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Oregon

Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu

Takamatsu City Museum of Art, Japan

Sogo Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan

Kumamoto Museum, Kumamoto, Japan

Hokkaido Museum of Art, Hokkaido, Japan

Mitsukoshi Museum of Art, Fukuoka, Japan

For Jef Bourgeau’s first show at Zolla-Lieberman Gallery, the artist has contributed works that fall into two camps: three-dimensional mixed-media pieces that utilize found objects and appeal initially to a nostalgic impulse; and two-dimensional works on paper and canvas whose reductive, minimal aesthetic makes reference to art-historical forebears.

Bourgeau is a young artist from the Detroit area. His attitude toward the art of the recent and distant past is oblique and a little puzzling, neither mocking nor reverential.

Chicago Tribune: ‘Bourgeau plays with presence and absence’ by David McCracken, February 4.

This first edition of Art Hotel provides us with a blueprint for future Art Hotels all over the world. It is the first mobile art fair. Because of this it can connect with major cultural events. It uses the infrastructure of a hotel to create communication between artists, gallerists, collectors, critics and everybody involved in art and its market.

Art Hotel: ‘60 rooms with a view’ by Peter Bouhof, Erik Hermida, Johan Jonker, Gabriele Rivet, exhibition February 9-13, catalogue p. 42.

Vis-à-Vis, the Detroit Focus Gallery’s current show includes 100 portraits by area artists of each other. There are maybe six conventional portraits among the lot. The rest are definitely unconventional. Jef Bourgeau saw Spencer Dormizter as a 1950’s foreign movie.

Detroit Free Press: ‘Artists as seen through other artists’ eyes’ by Marsha Miro, March 3, p. 7D.

What we have gathered here are the coins of a realm in which Elvis and Marilyn, multivalent icons, have been peculiarly anointed king and queen, god and goddess, in ways that exceed the sum of our admiration or apprehension, by a broadly diverse group of writers, scholars and artists. Including Robert Arneson, Ashley Bickerton, Jef Bourgeau, Nancy Burson, Christo, Joseph Cornell, William Eggleston, Howard Finster, Peter Halley, Richard Hamilton, Ketih Haring, Robert Indiana, Ray Johnson, Willem de Kooniing, Claes Oldenburg, Joel Otterson, Nam June Paik, Ed Paschke, Richard Pettibone, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Mimmo Rotella, Edward Ruscha, Alexis Smith, Haim Steinbach, Jeffrey Vallance, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, Tom Wesselmann.

ELVIS+MARILYN: 2xIMMORTAL: edited by Geri DePaoli, foreword by David Halberstam, commentary by Thomas McEvilley, a traveling exhibition, catalogue p. 68.

Hans Bellmer created an important body of work outside the mainstream, which has become aetheticized kitsch, gaining continual acceptance and momentum despite his limited output and the lack of a deep critical database about it. Bellmer, who died in 1975, blended a childlike anarchy with a gruesome foreboding knowledge; he sensed the themes of sexual anxiety rooted within modernism and was among the first Western artists to recognize and exploit it. For Bellmer, the doll became a site for this "hidden terror" and he set about to condense ideas within contemporary theater, movement and cinema into an object of surreal, fantastic and extreme fetishistic possibilities.

Homage to Hans Bellmer: with catalogue essay by Cary Loren, ‘On the Continuing Erotic Dissonance of Hans Bellmer’, edition of 100, p. 17.

In his first New York show Bourgeau combines homey antique objects with tiny video monitors that make absurdist commentaries on the vicissitudes of life.

The New Yorker: ‘Jef Bourgeau’, July-August.

The discrepancy between audio and video in A Day in the Life works perfectly. It alone could have been the whole show. Close the Door, Please, a mini-shed with a video mini-man in an endless tunnel, is effective too.

The Village Voice: ‘Voice Choice: Jef Bourgeau’ by Kim Levin, in the first such feature, August 24.

The Gahlberg Arts Gallery will host a comprehensive exhibition of painting and sculpture by Jef Bourgeau from September 16 through October 15, 1994. As Kathryn Hixson writes, “In his sculptural accumulations, Bourgeau juxtaposes compelling objects in simple but jarring ways. Hatrack is the lower half of a child’s mannequin, its underwear gathered around its knees. This potent, yet totally ambiguous composition operates like a filmic montage: disparate images are collaged in sequence to create a resonating unfixable meaning.”

Gallery Guide: ‘On the Cover’, September issue, cover and p. 8.

Like early science fiction novels, Bourgeau accentuates to the hilt aspects of our normal existence to create an atmosphere of the coming fin de siecle, where grueling high-tech futurism messes with a nostalgic yearning for “simple” times. By resoundingly exaggerating the mundanities and endless repetitions of our lives. He tampers with the given, tedious, necessary toil of the world, colluding with the tarrying viewer to create a plethora of meanings. In effect, by sticking to the rules so adroitly, Bourgeau blasphemously mocks those rules, out-mundaning the mundane, turning everything upside down – pulling it out of focus – to reveal the liberating complexity of the real.

Jef Bourgeau: catalogue essay by Kathryn Hixson, for Gahlberg Gallery (Eileen Broido, director), College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, exhibition September 16-October 15.

Wendy McDaris, a curator who lives in Elvis’s hometown, Memphis, has had the clever idea of examining the impact of these two [icons] on the arts in Elvis + Marilyn: 2 x Immortal at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (then traveling to nine cities, including the New York Historical Society next October with a well-illustrated and sometimes thoughtful catalogue from Rizzoli). This very large show includes the work of 107 artists, among them Robert Arneson, Joseph Cornell, Keith Haring and Claes Oldenburg.

Rather arbitrarily divided into images of cultural, heroic, mythic and religious significance, it suffers from the usual problem of theme shows: some work is here simply because it is about the title. But many pieces are smart and amusing, and some are important. In Jef Bourgeau’s You Are the One, Marilyn, in low resolution, tantalizingly, maddeningly blows a kiss over and over on tiny monitors while a scratchy male voice sings.

The New York Times: ‘A Pair of Saints Who Refuse to Stay Dead’ by Vicki Goldberg, Sunday, December 18.

JEF BOURGEAU

photography ‌ painting ‌ sculpture ‌ a user's manual ‌ contents ‌ contact
A User's Manual Throughout his career Jef Bourgeau has fashioned his own identity as one might manipulate an artistic medium, helping to launch a fundamental model of post-20^thcentury theory: not so much preoccupied with the issue of identity as suspending it. In accordance, there is not one Jef Bourgeau but many. Not only has he adopted several post-modernist and more advanced idioms in quick succession, but he has also invented several contradictory alter egos. Bourgeau has presented himself as artist and art dealer, conceptualist and craftsman, pragmatist and dreamer, bully and recluse. He is the ultimate fabulist, challenging our assumptions about art. Yet within all these shifting strategies Bourgeau has set up a powerful negative logic, aimed at questioning the nature of art and art institutions. And, most profoundly, the culture that builds and decides them. So to that end this book would present his work as an on-going narrative, yet without a story. Or, at the least, without resolution. There is a tension in his work that is relentless; like all good art, never entirely allowing the viewer the comfort of seeing it completed. - Jan van der Marck
Maybe it’s just the passing of time, but I’m evaluating people who have touched my life over the years. I must say that Jef Bourgeau has made a dent in my thinking. I always somehow mistrust the word “genius” but I think if I were going to use it for an artist in this place and time, it would be for Bourgeau. I think his ideas and his philosophy need time to reach people, to seep through the armor that walls off our brains. I’ve been in turn annoyed, angry, dazzled, amused, nonplussed, outraged, intimidated, bewildered and a host of other emotions that his work calls up. - Joy Hakanson Colby Biography Jef Bourgeau was born in Detroit in 1950. At the age of thirteen, he began to illustrate and write short fiction. At nineteen, he was invited to create a ten-page layout of block prints for a Canadian art journal. Bourgeau sold his first novel the next year, but, unhappy with this freshman effort, pulled out of the contract and destroyed the manuscript. He spent the next ten years experimenting with his writing and painting, and soon was exploring film and video as well. In 1980 he first encountered the early potential of computers and multi-media art. By 1986, as part of a show dedicated to Diego Rivera in celebration of his 50^th anniversary of the Detroit Industry frescoes, Bourgeau presented three films and ten digital-based paintings at Meadow Brook Art Gallery’s Muscle and Machine Dream. In 1990, Kiichi Usui, that same gallery’s director, offered Bourgeau a solo show (Boxes) of new work generated entirely from computers and video. Having finally developed all these varied mediums into a satisfactory form of installation work, Bourgeau began his gallery career in 1991: first with Feigenson/Preston then next at O.K. Harris Works of Art. Within a few short years of that, his work had been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States, and from Europe through Asia.
Timeline 1991 Magsig/Bourgeau, Feigenson/Preston, Birmingham, MI Art Until Now (one person), O.K. Harris Works of Art, Birmingham, MI Art Until Now is Jef Bourgeau’s keen, sometimes scathing look at 20^th century art history from a gloriously biased perspective. The bulk of the show is made up of assemblages of found objects with audio and video elements. Although the individual pieces stand alone, they gain strength from each other as elements in an installation that occupies the entire front gallery at O.K. Harris. This is one show that needs plenty of time to absorb. At its best the exhibit projects a cleanly honed visual intelligence. Each piece requires a careful “reading” because it’s easy to miss a historical peg or one of the artist’s personal interpretations. Detroit News: ‘Coloring 20^th-century art in an entertaining hue’ by Joy Colby, August 23, p. 5D. 1992 Renovations (one person), O.K. Harris Works of Art, Birmingham, MI The New Real (one person), O.K. Harris Works of Art, Birmingham, MI Jef Bourgeau learned to question authority early in life – a theme that has lasted throughout his career in filmmaking, video, painting, writing, music and computer art. Bourgeau manages to pull all of these elements together like an artistic one-man band with a countercultural beat. But maybe the most surprising thing about this highly talented artist is that he is not better known. The artist’s current display, Renovations, takes his germinal ideas from his last show Art Until Now and inflates them into an extravaganza that begins with the actual construction of a contemporary museum, both fresh and out of touch already, and, over the course of three changing exhibits within three months, ends with a "museum" exhibit that is both cold and iconographic to the extreme, but also a place of reverence, awe and so, ultimately, disconnection. In other words, in these three back-to-back exhibits Bourgeau condenses the entire life of a contemporary museum. Detroit Magazine: ‘Bourgeau on the Bourgeoisie’ by Veronica Pasfield, November, p. 20. Jef Bourgeau is attempting the difficult with his wonderful installation at the O.K. Harris Gallery. He’s out to renovate old attitudes about gender, particularly female stereotyping, by setting up a contrast between past and present. Bourgeau has a deft touch. He doesn’t bog down his aesthetics with his message. The two play intriguingly off one another. Detroit Free Press: ‘Women, then and now’ by Marsho Miro, November 25, p. 12D. 1993 Jef Bourgeau: Beyond Art (one person), O.K. Harris Works of Art, Birmingham, MI Dirty Pictures with Jock Sturges, David Klein Gallery, Birmingham, MI Bourgeau has found a venue at O.K. Harris for his painted ladies with black bars over their eyes, and has used them to lampoon some of the thinking surrounding pornography in art. The artist calls his installation Dirty Pictures because we manage to “estheticize everything from pain to pleasure to pornography.” Detroit News: ‘Two artists survive a brush with controversy: Jock Sturges and Jef Bourgeau’ by Joy Hakanson Colby, June 11, p. 9C. 1994 Jef Bourgeau: New Work (one person), Zolla/Lieberman, Chicago 60 Rooms with a View, Art Hotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands Vis-à-vis, Focus Gallery, Detroit New Prints, The Drawing Room, Amsterdam, Netherlands Homage to Hans Bellmer, Book Beat Gallery, Oak Park, MI Late in the 20^th Century (one-person), LedisFlam, New York Jef Bourgeau (one person Gahlberg Arts Center,), Glen Ellyn, IL Art as Logo (one person), David Klein Gallery, Birmingham, MI Elvis+Marilyn: 2xImmortal (video installation)l, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston touring through 1997: Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, Florida Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa Tennessee State Museum, Nashville Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Oregon Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu Takamatsu City Museum of Art, Japan Sogo Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan Kumamoto Museum, Kumamoto, Japan Hokkaido Museum of Art, Hokkaido, Japan Mitsukoshi Museum of Art, Fukuoka, Japan For Jef Bourgeau’s first show at Zolla-Lieberman Gallery, the artist has contributed works that fall into two camps: three-dimensional mixed-media pieces that utilize found objects and appeal initially to a nostalgic impulse; and two-dimensional works on paper and canvas whose reductive, minimal aesthetic makes reference to art-historical forebears. Bourgeau is a young artist from the Detroit area. His attitude toward the art of the recent and distant past is oblique and a little puzzling, neither mocking nor reverential. Chicago Tribune: ‘Bourgeau plays with presence and absence’ by David McCracken, February 4. This first edition of Art Hotel provides us with a blueprint for future Art Hotels all over the world. It is the first mobile art fair. Because of this it can connect with major cultural events. It uses the infrastructure of a hotel to create communication between artists, gallerists, collectors, critics and everybody involved in art and its market. Art Hotel: ‘60 rooms with a view’ by Peter Bouhof, Erik Hermida, Johan Jonker, Gabriele Rivet, exhibition February 9-13, catalogue p. 42. Vis-à-Vis, the Detroit Focus Gallery’s current show includes 100 portraits by area artists of each other. There are maybe six conventional portraits among the lot. The rest are definitely unconventional. Jef Bourgeau saw Spencer Dormizter as a 1950’s foreign movie. Detroit Free Press: ‘Artists as seen through other artists’ eyes’ by Marsha Miro, March 3, p. 7D. What we have gathered here are the coins of a realm in which Elvis and Marilyn, multivalent icons, have been peculiarly anointed king and queen, god and goddess, in ways that exceed the sum of our admiration or apprehension, by a broadly diverse group of writers, scholars and artists. Including Robert Arneson, Ashley Bickerton, Jef Bourgeau, Nancy Burson, Christo, Joseph Cornell, William Eggleston, Howard Finster, Peter Halley, Richard Hamilton, Ketih Haring, Robert Indiana, Ray Johnson, Willem de Kooniing, Claes Oldenburg, Joel Otterson, Nam June Paik, Ed Paschke, Richard Pettibone, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Mimmo Rotella, Edward Ruscha, Alexis Smith, Haim Steinbach, Jeffrey Vallance, Andy Warhol, William Wegman, Tom Wesselmann. ELVIS+MARILYN: 2xIMMORTAL: edited by Geri DePaoli, foreword by David Halberstam, commentary by Thomas McEvilley, a traveling exhibition, catalogue p. 68. Hans Bellmer created an important body of work outside the mainstream, which has become aetheticized kitsch, gaining continual acceptance and momentum despite his limited output and the lack of a deep critical database about it. Bellmer, who died in 1975, blended a childlike anarchy with a gruesome foreboding knowledge; he sensed the themes of sexual anxiety rooted within modernism and was among the first Western artists to recognize and exploit it. For Bellmer, the doll became a site for this "hidden terror" and he set about to condense ideas within contemporary theater, movement and cinema into an object of surreal, fantastic and extreme fetishistic possibilities. Homage to Hans Bellmer: with catalogue essay by Cary Loren, ‘On the Continuing Erotic Dissonance of Hans Bellmer’, edition of 100, p. 17. In his first New York show Bourgeau combines homey antique objects with tiny video monitors that make absurdist commentaries on the vicissitudes of life. The New Yorker: ‘Jef Bourgeau’, July-August. The discrepancy between audio and video in A Day in the Life works perfectly. It alone could have been the whole show. Close the Door, Please, a mini-shed with a video mini-man in an endless tunnel, is effective too. The Village Voice: ‘Voice Choice: Jef Bourgeau’ by Kim Levin, in the first such feature, August 24. The Gahlberg Arts Gallery will host a comprehensive exhibition of painting and sculpture by Jef Bourgeau from September 16 through October 15, 1994. As Kathryn Hixson writes, “In his sculptural accumulations, Bourgeau juxtaposes compelling objects in simple but jarring ways. Hatrack is the lower half of a child’s mannequin, its underwear gathered around its knees. This potent, yet totally ambiguous composition operates like a filmic montage: disparate images are collaged in sequence to create a resonating unfixable meaning.” Gallery Guide: ‘On the Cover’, September issue, cover and p. 8. Like early science fiction novels, Bourgeau accentuates to the hilt aspects of our normal existence to create an atmosphere of the coming fin de siecle, where grueling high-tech futurism messes with a nostalgic yearning for “simple” times. By resoundingly exaggerating the mundanities and endless repetitions of our lives. He tampers with the given, tedious, necessary toil of the world, colluding with the tarrying viewer to create a plethora of meanings. In effect, by sticking to the rules so adroitly, Bourgeau blasphemously mocks those rules, out-mundaning the mundane, turning everything upside down – pulling it out of focus – to reveal the liberating complexity of the real. Jef Bourgeau: catalogue essay by Kathryn Hixson, for Gahlberg Gallery (Eileen Broido, director), College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, exhibition September 16-October 15. Wendy McDaris, a curator who lives in Elvis’s hometown, Memphis, has had the clever idea of examining the impact of these two [icons] on the arts in Elvis + Marilyn: 2 x Immortal at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (then traveling to nine cities, including the New York Historical Society next October with a well-illustrated and sometimes thoughtful catalogue from Rizzoli). This very large show includes the work of 107 artists, among them Robert Arneson, Joseph Cornell, Keith Haring and Claes Oldenburg. Rather arbitrarily divided into images of cultural, heroic, mythic and religious significance, it suffers from the usual problem of theme shows: some work is here simply because it is about the title. But many pieces are smart and amusing, and some are important. In Jef Bourgeau’s You Are the One, Marilyn, in low resolution, tantalizingly, maddeningly blows a kiss over and over on tiny monitors while a scratchy male voice sings. The New York Times: ‘A Pair of Saints Who Refuse to Stay Dead’ by Vicki Goldberg, Sunday, December 18.