REASSEMBLING ART INTO SOMETHING NEW

Building Excitement in Detroit

By Natalie Haddad for the Metro Times, 2004

Perception in general has been problematic regarding contemporary art in Detroit. Without sufficient forums, the orientation of art here remains wedged largely between the historical and the regional. For Jef Bourgeau, the museum is an evolving abstraction; the building is its vehicle. That's the paradox, though: It's an idea that takes some experience with contemporary art theory to absorb, which is precisely what the Museum of New Art (MONA) used its locations to propagate (six within ten years). "Without a building we don't exist anymore," Bourgeau says.

With a renewed locus in Pontiac, the objectives of MONA reemerge, as do the typical challenges of funding and, more surreptitiously, public interest. Bourgeau is approaching them as he has in the past: by means that are unconventional only outside of the edifice of contemporary art. Its first exhibition in its new location is MONA’s Detroit Biennale. Promoted as the Midwest's only biennial, its inauguration is less significant than its currency and the global purview that it brings to the area.

Bourgeau has made cases for creativity through (financial) necessity in the past, most notably with MONA's e-MONA exhibition in 1998, in which viewers were invited to visit artists' studios via the Internet and jpeg-ed prints. Biennale 2004 observes that precedent, first by revisiting e-MONA, which ideally reconciles the practices and philosophies of contemporary art, and, more pragmatically, achieves an otherwise inaccessible index of high-profile artists virtually rather then proposing less germane "live" art as biennial fare. For a culture indoctrinated with museum protocol, e-MONA is an exercise in simultaneous engagement and dis-engagement. The international import of the artists demands consideration to an extent that work by lesser-known artists, which MONA could more easily bring in, would not.

At the same time, the absence of the object (or, rather, the installation of the computer as stopgap between the object and viewer) furthers the dematerialization of art, which conceptual art initiated long before digital technology. Whether or not this becomes an obstacle depends, again, on perception -- art theory can validate it in its idea state -- but if a biennial purports to examine the state of art, it's crucial to select art that represents it. In addition, e-MONA dissects the viewer-viewed dynamic, which can no longer be characterized by simple reciprocity; the viewer is a variable in the art itself.

This thesis is enforced by a series of artists' photographic portraits attributed to a certain Jan de Groot (but all created by Bourgeau), probably the most abstract feature of the biennial. The plan to picture contributors corroborates the postmodern graduation of the artist to celebrity status. Here, though, local viewers were solicited to pose their own digital photo interpretations of the artists. According to Bourgeau, the idea was instigated by his own photograph of Turner Prize winner Martin Creed that came out indecipherably blurred and frustrated his original plan to picture the (actual) artists.

The only issue is of authenticity, and it's obsolete in this era: The anonymity of an artist restores the authority to the art, which therefore alchemizes his celebrity into mythology. The conversion from a non-identity to a false identity, selected by the audience, further mythologizes, and dematerializes, the artist by deriving his form from preconceptions engendered by the art. Moreover, it involves the audience in the communication and implicates them in the art.

Bourgeau isn't proceeding timidly – his museum refutes (inadvertent) provincialism and fosters the intellectual voice of visual art. Better, though, it does so without relinquishing the romantic gesture at its core. As art has proven again and again, beauty without progression is one step away from banality.