Windsor Star

 

 

DETROIT GETS CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM

By: Craig Pearson

Star Entertainment Writer

 

After 30 years of dreaming, the Detroit area will finally boast a contemporary art museum. And a hint of controversy along with it. For three decades area art lovers have tossed around the idea of establishing a new art museum to complement the giant, in this case the Detroit Institute of Arts, following the lead of so many cities, from Montreal and Chicago to Cleveland and Los Angeles.

            But time and again big talk produced few concrete results in Motown.  On Friday, however, the doors open for the first time at the Museum of New Art, a non-profit museum based in Pontiac and committed to displaying the latest in visual creativity – rules be damned.

            “Most major institutions are concerned with conserving the past but what we will do here is highlight the present,” says MoNA director Jef Bourgeau, who has been working toward this goal on and off for seven years.  “There has been a lot of effort to get this type of museum going in the area.  I’ve been involved peripherally with a few, but they have all come and gone before they opened.  So we finally just said, if we’re going to do it, then let’s just do it.”

            Bourgeau, who has been running the gallery in spirit and without a permanent home for the last year, fully knows new art, and the controversy it can sometimes spark.  He is a long-time artist himself, running commercial galleries in Detroit, New York, Chicago, and Santa Monica, and has shown around the world.  He earned some local notoriety last November – when he cemented his desire to open a museum of contemporary art – after the DIA asked him to create an exhibition of modern art.

            The dubious result: a show called Art Until Now, which the DIA’s new director Graham Beal closed after three days as a preemptive strike against the “hot button” issues he felt might offend certain visitors.  The infamous show included a work called Bathtub Jesus, featuring an anatomically correct doll wearing a condom, and a work whose title used a racial epithet.

            The ensuing media controversy spotlighted Bourgeau, who addressed censorship and the dream of a new museum.  Yet he soon ran into censorship again, this time in Pontiac, where he staged a show at another space.  In March, Pontiac police raided the so-called Temporary Contemporary Gallery because one of the walls contained a collage of artistic nudes – many famous – created over the years.  Bourgeau was charged with displaying obscene materials, though a Pontiac judge threw the charge out at a pretrial hearing in June.

            Now he will head MoNA, where he might still have to consider police but need not worry about a more conservative boss.  Money is a different issue.  “Most museums begin with large money to invest,” Bourgeau says.  “We’re coming from the opposite end, which is exciting.  We have no money and we will build from there.”

            Housed in a space designed for a restaurant, the MoNA is still on tentative legs.  Some 60 works, half sent via the Internet from across the globe, line the walls.  It has 3,000 square feet compared to the 100,000-plus square feet of exhibition space at the DIA, and has no collection to speak of (the DIA has more than 100,000 works in its permanent collection) MoNA’s premier show Critical Eyes features the personal collections (on loan) of three local critics/curators: Dennis Nawrocki, an art history professor at the Center for Creative Studies; Thomas Wojtas, a freelance art critic; and Hope Palmer, an art essayist and lecturer.  The upstart gallery erupts in color and style, offering a varied look stretching back to the 1800s but concentrating on the present, without any obviously offensive creations.  But who knows for the future?

            “It takes a little daring in the face of relative apathy in this town, and in the face of the very entrenched and powerful position of the Detroit Institute of Arts,” says Jan van der Marck, a MoNA board member who has curated at major galleries across the United States including the DIA.  “The DIA has a respectable (contemporary) collection, but once you get institutionalized, you become less nimble than we can be.  The only place that you can compare to what’s happening there is the Art Gallery of Windsor, where they’re really on top of things.

            “Major art galleries make an effort, but they’re locked into too many checks and balances.  They have to tread very gently in certain terrain where you run into censorship issues and political correctness issues.”