Bourgeau has entered the building

Shouting art's equivalent of "Fire!": Are we all clowns stuffed into an under-sized culture?

by Christina Hill
Metro Times - 10/3/2007

What becomes a legend most?

In the case of Detroiter Jef Bourgeau, a full-scale retrospective at Oakland University Art Gallery.

During the last decade and a half, Bourgeau has coaxed the media into printing press releases, biographies, interviews and obituaries for people he's invented. He's pointedly befuddled audiences and critics by lately exhibiting his own work under assumed names. And among these he's asserted that portraits of locals, such as Oakland University gallery director Dick Goody, are of well-known 20th-century artists.

Bourgeau assumes the freedom to appropriate and even to fabricate, inspiring both admiration and outrage, depending on your sensibilities. However, concerning everyday life and the art world, his art has never failed to ask this pivotal question: What is reality?

Thus the more you know him and about his art the less real even Bourgeau himself seems.  A string of small exhibitions promised to him at the Detroit Institute of Arts was abruptly shut down by director Graham Beal, just three days after the first one opened in 1999. So abruptly so, that the museum photographer was padlocked inside.

Having created a "Bathtub Jesus" and exhibited fake menstrual blood and piss, Bourgeau intentionally riffed on the infamous "Young British Artists," whose work at the Brooklyn Museum's Sensation show also in 1999 (including Chris Ofili's black Madonna, cobbled with elephant shit) sparked an international controversy. "I never understand censorship when it happens," he states simply. His philosophy remains, "Art can be anything you want." His current solo retrospective at Oakland University Gallery, which includes work by his "doppelgängers," is proof of that.

Bourgeau conceives nihilistic work inspired by dada and fluxus art, work meant to jolt assumptions about what constitutes an artist, an artwork, a gallery, a museum and life. Often his art is about art itself, but he has taken on popular culture too, aiming to rock the boat to its tipping point. At the gallery, the iconic American ventriloquist's dummy so beloved by baby boomers, Howdy Doody, hangs himself in a piece first exhibited at Bourgeau's 2002 kaBOOM! show. Howdy's bright orange smile remains intact as the dummy dangles above an overturned stool.

And in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp painting a moustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa, Bourgeau also messes with the masters. In "Chest (Donald Judd)," he compares the minimalist's iconic work to a commonplace chest of drawers, since the furniture's volumes are likewise arranged in horizontal stacks. Another piece of painted white text on a black background reads "An Object Like a Painting," recalling Magritte's "This is Not a Pipe" by questioning what constitutes a work of art. And his copy of Man Ray's "Object to be Destroyed (with instructions)" was smashed with a hammer at the exhibit's opening by an over-willing member of the audience.

In a fake press release for his Picasso's Camera show last year, Bourgeau, a lover of gothic narrative, concocted a convoluted story about a newly found box camera with a cracked lens and roll of film once owned by Picasso — a camera that, Bourgeau would have us believe, was accidentally responsible for cubism. In his "Lost Picasso" portraits here, such as "Carlos Valentin 1906," Bourgeau patches together disjointed faces to emulate rebellious modernist experimentation.

Whether in a satiric spoof on iconic art or the tragic lampooning of a pop culture hero, Bourgeau's work consistently explores the theme of corrupted innocence, juxtaposing what's idyllic and distressing. "Blue House on the Moon," a model of an ordinary home painted a brilliant blue, displays in each of its five front windows -- instead of Christmas candles? -- blue middle “swear” fingers (molded rubber) that read as outsized obscenities and as violence impinging on the clueless commonplace.

Other work with this goal to rattle include "A Boy's Life," in which a young blond boy, seen only from the back, watches an endless parade of tanks outside his train window.

In the excellent catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, Jef Bourgeau: A User's Manual, former DIA curator Jan van der Marck writes that "Bourgeau kicked the tires off the social vehicles meant to propel art." Of course, Firesign Theatre long ago established that "we're all bozos on this bus" — so kick away.

Jef Bourgeau: A Retrospective runs through Oct. 7, at Oakland University Art Gallery, 208 Wilson Hall, Oakland University, Rochestser; 248-370-3005.