Naked in the nineties:

All undressed & nowhere to go

by: Guillermo Franco  1995

 

Guillermo Franco: You spent some time in a mental health facility?

Jef Bourgeau: Three years.  For acute paranoia.

GF: That must’ve affected you deeply.  Was the treatment harsh?

JB: From the first day I was a victim of electrolysis.

GF: You mean shock therapy?

JB: No. (laughter) They took off my beard.  It wasn’t allowed.  But as you can see I’ve grown it back.  I guess that makes me a recovered paranoiac.

GF: Your father was bald, wasn’t he?

JB: No, it was my mother.

GF: Did you hate her?  For having you committed?

JB: No.  Let’s change topics.

GF: I’m sorry.  That was insensitive.  Do you still hate her?

JB: No.

GF: Why not?

JB: Because now I am the dead.  The all-used up.  The corpse.  The theoretical basis for inaction.

GF: An artist?

JB: Exactly

GF: Until recently you were considered a kind of underground artist.

JB: All the connections are there

GF: Has any of it changed?

JB: Face it.  Our roots are at the bottom of the trees.  And up until this moment art has only made its hand print on the cave wall.

GF: So you will still consider yourself and underground artist?

JB:  I’m not sure what that means.  I just play in the mud like everyone else.

GF: But a new century looms!  Doesn’t that excite you?  The end of a millennium! Don’t you want to dig out into the sun?

JB: My guy response is to dig deeper.

GF: You’re overwhelmed by it all?

JB: By melancholy and nostalgia which allows me the talent to be an artist at this point in history and time.

GF: Is that your notion of progress?  To be retrograde and reactionary?

JB: That is what compels me, yes.  And if I have my day in the sun, then it is only because of this compulsion to quote and to misquote.  And so, to erasure.

GF: And when all else fails, to those things scandalous?

JB: Sure.  It’s the last resort of any great talent.

GF:  Which brings us to your new series.  What you call your DIRTY PICTURES.

JB:  Exactly because they are neither “scandalous” nor “dirty.” Yet still some sort of pornography.

GF: Simply because you’ve put black tape over the eyes?

JB: Pornography because we manage to aestheticize everything from pain to pleasure to the taboo.  We make everything pretty.

GF: So in effect you’re saying that today’s artist has been left impotent by the present century and stand before the next “faking it”?

JB: I don’t think that hard.  I’m just saying art has become sex.

GF: It isn’t something you think about then?

JB: It’s just something that has happened.

GF: Sex or art?

JB: Both.  That they both begin with that famous first glance from across a room.

GF: And if the chemistry is right…

JB: If we like what we see, we take them home.

GF: And the morning after? 

JB: Both have become those episodic fragments with which we decorate our lives.

GF: And later still?

JB: We are left with what Barthes called the “punctum,” those salient points worth lingering over.