Oakland University Art Gallery exhibits Jef Bourgeau

Tuesday, 25 September 2007 22:44

Rochester, MI - The Oakland University Art Gallery (OUAG) proudly announces the exhibition Jef Bourgeau, a retrospective survey of the artist’s career from its beginnings to the present, on view through October 7, 2007. Curated by Jan van der Marck (most notable as founding director for museums in Chicago and Miami, and his international work as independent curator), the exhibition features some 70 of Bourgeau’s major works in painting, photography, installation and film.

Bourgeau (American, b. 1950) is widely recognized as one of the most adventurous and inventive artists of his generation. As a young teen, he began as a writer and illustrator, then moved into film and painting. In 1980 he first encountered the early potential of computers and multi-media art. Over the next decade Bourgeau developed all these varied mediums into a unique form of installation work, most famously his Museum of New Art.

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.

Jef Bourgeau's last exhibition was seven years ago when he was asked to mount a three month installation at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It was only up three days before the museum director had it padlocked. A tacit ban ensued, and the artist's door received no callers for nearly a decade. Now Bourgeau has been invited to mount a retrospective of all things, under heavy scrutiny by a university gallery. "I could lose my job on this one," the gallery director admitted, but is still moving ahead - albeit with a watchful eye on the selected works.

Joy Hakanson Colby, art critic for the Detroit News, has said: " 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."

 Throughout his career Bourgeau has fashioned his own identity as one might manipulate an artistic medium, helping to launch a fundamental model of post-20th century 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. Bourgeau's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States, and from Europe through Asia.