If Jef Bourgeau were to lie on the floor and stretch – really stretch – he could almost touch all four walls of his museum, a portable, 8-by-10 fringe institute of shock, sleight-of-hand and slippery enigmas.

Bourgeau, the soft-spoken director of metro Detroit’s only contemporary art museum, will be the first to tell you that size hardly matters. The context, of course, is all about the changing nature of art museums, nothing about rationalizations for intimate performances behind closed doors.

Nothing is as it seems when Bourgeau is in charge.

His museum in downtown Pontiac is more of a concept than the real deal, although a flurry of press releases on museum letterhead has created the perception that Detroit has joined the ranks of other major metro areas with both encyclopedic and contemporary art museums.

Creating an unsettling hall of mirrors is Bourgeau’s style, clearly visible in his video installations and mixed-media works at Cranbrook Art Museum, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. One of his most controversial pieces, American Beauty, depicts a child-manikin with a hammer affixed to its forehead lying on a pillow inside what appears to be the safety of a crib.

The artist lives in an ambiguous world where art is in dire need of an infusion of authenticity, and the greatest affliction is blind acceptance of the status quo.

"Most people live on the periphery of their lives," says Bourgeau. "Art can shake them up and get them to face the really big issues."

In Bourgeau logic, every man is not only an island, but also the curator of his own museum.

Since the museum opened in January 1997, controversial exhibits have included The Wrong Show, which featured a noose around Howdy Doody’s neck and a "Jesus" doll wearing a bank-teller’s finger protector as a condom, and Naked in the ‘90s, a collection of pages torn straight from mainstream art magazines highlighting "shocking" nudity and sex acts.

Bourgeau gets misty-eyed talking about the museum’s founder, Jane Speaks, who was apparently killed in a suspicious boating accident.

Well, sort of killed. Okay, maybe she isn’t dead. Actually, there is no Jane Speaks, just a fabricated legacy that pokes fun at the staid museum world of elitist patrons with rigid sensibilities. "I’ve never thought in small terms," said Speaks in an early museum handout. "The museum of modern art is something of the past. We must create an alternative space for the future."

Initially, Bourgeau expected his art project to last three months. To date, he’s incurred tens of thousands of dollars in expenses and often the wrath of the broader art community, including of late the Guggenheim in New York.

It seems bizarrely poetic that this fall, Bourgeau will become part of the establishment. The Detroit Institute of Arts invited him to develop his own exhibit looking back at the passing century and ahead to the next.

"They asked me if I could put my museum inside of their museum," he says. "Now we’ll see what might happen when two supposed opposites occupy the same space."

Of course, Bourgeau has yet to convince them that size hardly matters.