01/01/2024
Full Moon Over Lake Arcadia, 2023
Jef Bourgeau
(Born 1950)
Jef Bourgeau is an American photographer, painter and conceptual artist who has become notorious through his sculptures, photography and curatorial work. The most famous and ground-breaking of Bourgeau's work plays on the relationship between iconic imagery and irreverent materials, together forming a new context often drawing upon current controversies and, perhaps, the willfully provocative.
Most notable to date are his censored works 'Ni**er Toe' and 'Bathtub Jesus', as well as several seminal exhibitions in which he both curated and participated: 'Fear No Art' which was raided by police and brought Bourgeau to trial on obscenity charges, 'Van Gogh's Ear' which was padlocked by the Detroit Institute of Art after only its third day, and 'kaBOOM!' an exhibition where all a contemporary museum's artwork was destroyed on the spot by its patrons and visitors.
An undiagnosed dyslexic, Bourgeau never finished his education. He spent his teen years working at a box factory in his home town of Detroit. During that time, utilizing the materials at hand, he began to make and experiment with several pinhole cameras. The early work from these rudimentary cameras developed into dark, moody photographs and paintings. Bourgeau has since remarked that he can only see 'right' through a camera lens.
Jef Bourgeau is the founding director of the Museum of New Art (MONA), of Detroit's artCORE (empty storefronts to galleries), and co-founder of the Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography.
Since he 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. For Bourgeau, technology acts as a filter to dissect and rebuild random or banal images culled not only from the art world, but from such diverse sources as mass market catalogues, advertisements, cinema, and the Internet. By isolating and emptying out these disposable, commonplace representations, Bourgeau reinscribes them with a new essence, and in effect, completes them by converting such images into a charged narrative. As such, the mimicking of a second or third-generation "original" is tantamount to a kind of newfound legibility, resonance, and meaning. Art is used as a mediation filter, as a proposition about the act of perception itself.
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.
- Jan van der Marck