Guillaume Bijl
(Antwerp,
1946 )
In 1979, Guillaume Bijl published a fictional pamphlet in which he argued that art has become socially irrelevant. The government should therefore transform museums and galleries into functional spaces. As part of this “Art Liquidation Project,” he creates his first installation: Driving School Z. From a sterile classroom in a “closed” gallery over a supermarket to a studio for a TV quiz: for over forty years Bijl has been transforming banal settings of Western consumer society into museum installations. In their fictional context, these “mirror images” not without irony unmask the fakeness of everyday reality. Bijl also makes contemporary archaeological still lifes, compositions with found objects and installations in which he brings non-reality into reality - in reverse. Examples include the interventions he made at various art fairs in the 1980s, such as the famous “chandelier store” at Art Basel (1984), and a series of works under the title Cultural Tourism in which he questions the authenticity of cultural sites.
