Detroit Free Press

March 2001

By: Keri Guten Cohen

 

 

‘The Wrong Show’

 

            “The Wrong Show,” at the Museum of New Art in Pontiac through March 31, features more than 100 high resolution digital printouts of art that might be considered wrong – for any reason.  You’ll see blurred images, politically incorrect images, old and overweight nudes, nude children, religion treated irreverently, sexual taboos.   

            Curator-director Jef Bourgeau even includes music and films that were considered wrong in their day.  He adds a liberal sprinkling of provocative quotations on the walls, and guests are asked to sign a mock legal paper releasing the gallery from responsibility for the hazards of viewing the exhibition.

            Culled from Web sites across the world, the assembled images – mostly photographs – are divided into categories of incorrectness.  Some images are graceful, beautiful and meaningful.  Others are meant to shock; some are difficult to view, and some in a back gallery border on offensiveness.  No labels guide viewers through the images, though Bourgeau – whose own art was considered wrong enough for the Detroit Institute of Arts to shut down a show of his in 1999 – is usually there to provide a dialogue.

            The featured artist is Jeremy Weiss, a Los Angeles artist and Internet disc jockey.  His images combine a sense of humanity with an aloof, isolated edge.  In one piece, titled “Hiroshima,” he captures an Asian girl in mid-scream.  There terror is there on her face, but as we look more closely at the background we see that she is falling at an ice rink rather than fleeing nuclear devastation. 

            Bourgeau says this is MONA’s last show at 19 N. Saginaw in Pontiac before he moves into a 10,000-square-foot space in the Book Building at 1249 Washington Blvd. in downtown Detroit.  He plans a fund-raising auction in the new space May 19 and an official opening in September.