A RETROSPECTIVE
@
Oakland University Art Gallery
September 8 - October 7
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.
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.
Oakland University
Rochester, Michigan
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