ARTISTIC LICENSE: Jef Bourgeau has been creating artwork under assumed names to make a point and keep a dream alive

BY FRANK PROVENZANO
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

March 11, 2005

Jef Bourgeau tells it like this: A few months ago, a player in the Midwest art scene visited his Museum of New Art in downtown Pontiac. The visitor strolled through the galleries and stood before the stark, existential photography of Norwegian Stig Eklund, raving about the evocative work.

He reacted to Bourgeau with excited surprise: "How did you ever get your hands on an Eklund?'"

The year before, Bourgeau says, he had lobbied for his own artwork to be shown at the visitor's museum. He was turned down.

"I didn't want to embarrass him on the spot," says Bourgeau. "Still, as a colleague, I had to tell him that Stig was me. To avoid any future and more damaging embarrassment."

For most of a decade, Bourgeau has been the best-known gadfly on the regional and world art scene, his self-stated goals being to deflate elitism,   challenge expectations and surprise laypeople and experts alike. He has taken on controversial subjects -- pornography, sex, racism, violence -- and chastised the art world for being more concerned with celebrity than quality.

If nothing else, Bourgeau's revelation that he's Eklund and his story about the museum director (who confirms it but asked that his name not be used) prove he's as hard to pin down as ever.

On Saturday, Bourgeau is acknowledging publicly he's Eklund, one of four artists in "Madness," which is opening at MONA.

The exhibit is inspired by what Bourgeau calls the "staggering worldwide madness" caused by violence, fear, media saturation and religion. In a series of digital images under Eklund's name, he uses cropping and special effects to evoke alienation, mystery and apprehension.

For the past six years, Bourgeau has refused to show his own work at MONA, a space that is more avant-garde gallery than typical museum. To have done so, he said, would have been vanity and a conflict of interests. But that changed during the last year: MONA and Bourgeau have kept a low profile since moving from Detroit to downtown Pontiac a year ago -- and he now needs to sell art to stay open.

And it's been easier for him to sell as Eklund -- not to mention as Japanese digital designer Taki Murakishi and Dutch photographer Jan de Groot -- than as Bourgeau. By revealing his secret now, he puts the finishing touches on the "museum" project he began as an artist nearly ten years ago but which has now morphed into the real thing.

Bourgeau says the pseudonyms were created not only as an effort to finish the living art project he started years ago but also because these artists "sound very important and who come from currently important regions in the art world" and to point out how the art world markets artists, styles and trends, rather than looking at art for its own sake."

Bourgeau has shown a propensity for frustrating the art establishment in and around Detroit. One curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts -- where a Bourgeau show in 1999 was closed after only a few days because of its content -- refused to talk about him.

A handful of art dealers also refused to talk about Bourgeau on the record, perhaps because they didn't want to become an anecdote like the Eklund-loving museum director, perhaps because they were confused and threatened by it all.

One dealer said he would never sell work from an artist using an alias, pointing out that authenticity is a measure of the artist's integrity.

Darlene Carroll, director of the Lemberg Gallery in Ferndale, says no one should be surprised with Bourgeau's latest revelation.

"He's always presented himself as a conceptual artist who plays with people's perceptions," she says. 

With Bourgeau, it's always been about breaking the rules and stretching perceived boundaries.

The prices for Eklund photographs range from $150 to $800. Local collector Stanley Grandon paid $450 for an Eklund photo of a beach scene that glows in the dark. Grandon's collection includes works by Eric Fischel, Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein. He places Bourgeau on the level of pop artist Jeff Koons. "It's impressionistic and part kitschy," he says. "It doesn't bother me at all that Jef is behind Stig Eklund. It's all part of being a conceptual artist and questioning everything."

Bourgeau wouldn't care if someone did object. He says people are buying art, not a personality. He won't give money back to anyone who bought an Eklund. In the end, they bought the art not the man.

"He's been at this for a while now. Putting people on is part of his mysterious, enigmatic persona," says Dennis Nawrocki, an art historian and critic who teaches at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. "He's the teaser, the trickster, trying to get one past us," he says. "Whatever you think of him, Jef is very principled about challenging conventions. He's an artist. He can do anything he wants."

Artists have often used pseudonyms. Marcel Duchamp submitted a porcelain urinal, "Fountain," to a 1917 show. The notorious work was Duchamp's way to protest the lack of forward-looking artists in the exhibit. He signed the work R. Mutt and often used another alias, Rose Selavy.

"I'm not putting whoopee cushions under people's chairs," says Bourgeau. "I'm trying to make a serious point often in a humorous way."

In 1996, Bourgeau created a make-believe museum with an imaginary donor, director and curator. He served as the working staff and filled a small storefront with artwork torn from the headlines, literally cut from art magazines and books, calling it the Museum of Contemporary Art. He gave it melodramatic intrigue by making up stories of a deep-pocket donor lost at sea and nonsensical confrontations between curators.

He later said it was an unsettling way of holding a mirror to the art world and exposing the darker side of things, again with dark humor.

At one point, he hired a museum docent to sit behind the entry counter with explicit instructions to read her romance novel, snap her gum and completely ignore anyone who came in the door or attempted to ask questions.

Exhibits often dealt with hot-button issues like racism, child abuse and the line between erotic art and pornography.

Bourgeau also raised art world questions about the death of contemporary painting.

In founding his museum, Bourgeau drew the curiosity of the Detroit Institute of Arts. They liked what they saw. So much so, that In the fall of 1999, the DIA invited him to put together a museum exhibit looking at the art of the 1990s. Three days into the exhibit, it was abruptly deemed inappropriate and closed by DIA director Graham Beal because of the use of an offensive racial slur and topics like religion.

"He's tweaking those who seek importance or association with a museum," says Jan van der Marck, a former curator of modern art at the DIA and a MONA supporter. "His museum is his greatest achievement as an artist. No one has ever attempted such a project, no one else has done it. There is simply no parallel."

The publicity from the falling-out with the DIA, Bourgeau says, helped transform his museum parody into a legitimate drive to establish the Museum of New Art, a sustainable museum.

He and a group of regional artists, art advocates and collectors established MONA in a downtown Pontiac storefront in the fall of 2000.

The fledgling museum moved to a 10,000 square foot floor of Detroit's Book Building in 2001. When the landlord refused to sign a lease, it moved back to Pontiac. MONA will likely move again when its current site, the Pontiac Arts Building, is sold, says Bourgeau. Over the short life of MONA, the museum has exhibited over 2,000 real artists from 35 countries, many of those artists from the Detroit region.

Without a budget and revenue, the 13,000-square-foot space stays open, he says, because the landlord, Amir Daiza, has generously waived the rent in exchange for a commission on the sale of artwork.

Answers are seldom simple with Bourgeau.

His soft-spoken, shy nature belies a restless and relentless artist who readily recites the esoteric details of the story of the 20th-Century avant-garde along with names of contemporary artists, galleries and museums from Singapore to London to New York.

Those who admire his effort to bring attention to art and those who say he's bringing attention to himself can agree on one thing: He gives ambiguous messages that are equal parts earnest artist and straight-on satirist.

"Contemporary art is a reaction to what's happening in the world," he says. "It exists briefly in our cultural moment, in reaction to it. The audience, the viewer completes it. Only then can it move from the contemporary space to the more traditional museum. The art being created in Detroit doesn't have such opportunities, to be understood or even viewed - not until we create the former such museum."

As simple and complex as that.

With expected attention from "Madness," Bourgeau and longtime supporter van der Marck are trying to point out the need and to attract the financial backers to build a contemporary arts museum in Detroit.

At a time when museums are facing budget crises and struggling to attract donors, talk of starting a new contemporary art museum might seem out of touch.

Not to Bourgeau.

"I'm an artist," he says. "And art isn't about limits. It's about possibilities."

Copyright © 2005 Detroit Free Press Inc.