Detroit: the long-awaited post
OK, long hiatus there. I got a bit too comfortable with the luxury of having a break, catching up on sleep, and being mindlessly entertained. But I'm back. So, I've decided to post my interview with Jef Bourgeau, a conceptual/social artist whose Museum of New Art was the focus of my research in Detroit. Rather than editorialize right off the bat, I thought I'd let you experience the story of MoNA, as Jef tells it, for yourself first. Enjoy.
Transcript: Telephone Interview between Jessica D. Brier & Jef Bourgeau, November 1, 2006
JDB: Did you grow up in Detroit?
JB: Yeah, I was born in Detroit.
JDB: Can you talk about what it was like to grow up there?
JB: Probably like any other city in the 60s, urban flight happening, late 50s, early 60s. After WWII, they started building subdivisions outside the city. [My parents] wanted their own home. It was always interesting, we lived 40 minutes outside of Detroit and my Dad would drive in for work. The expressways just accelerated that whole process of moving out of the city. Then the first shopping mall was built in the suburbs. Detroit was perfect, plus the whole car thing. The car companies got together and organized a company to buy up all the streetcars and shut that business down. People would have to use cars to move around. There were streetcars that went from Detroit to all the smaller cities around and all the way down into Toledo.
JDB: You grew up in the suburbs?
JB: Yeah, we moved out there when I was about four years old. Those have changed; we had woods around us and now it’s all built up.
JDB: Which suburb did you live in?
JB: West Bloomfield, but we went to Pontiac schools.
JDB: Was that your original connection to Pontiac [where MoNA is located now]?
JB: Yeah, but that’s now why I’m there. Anyway, with the riots and everything there was bussing. Pontiac was probably even less white than Detroit. They had riots in Pontiac as well. There was a large black population.
JDB: Those also took place in the late 1960s?
JB: Yeah, it’s also a very poor town that had built itself on cars and fallen on hard times. Up until then, we used to drive down to Detroit.
JDB: Do you remember the Michael Heizer piece that was on the lawn of the DIA around the same time?
JB: Yeah, do you?
JDB: No. (Laughter)
JB: I know that everybody got upset because they were ripping up the front lawn. In fact, I think that piece ended up in MoCAD, in the building they’re moving into.
JDB: It’s there now?
JB: No, I think it was before they moved in. A friend who has an art blog had some sort of event over a year ago. They hadn’t done anything to the building. It had been an old car dealership. There was an old piece of machinery in the back that looked like some art. Another friend said it was the Heizer piece. So [the building] was just being used as a storage facility. I don’t know who owns it, probably Manoogian, who’s one of the big art collectors in the area. He’s the one who gave that building to MoCAD.
JDB: The Heizer piece reminded me of what happened at the DIA with your show, Van Gogh’s Ear, in terms of the DIA’s history with censorship.
JB: Well, you have to go back to the Diego Rivera murals. There was a big stink about that, and they shut that down. And then, about six months before they shut my show down, in 1999, they had hung a Kara Walker show and pulled it before it opened.
JDB: What was the reason for that?
JB: It was interesting that it was the Friends of Modern Art who protested it, I don’t know what their official title is, African American or black… One of the women who was on that committee– I spoke to her about it– talked about how it was so strange, and she agreed with me. But then I found out that she was one of the people who protested.
JDB: Did she say why?
JB: No, she never admitted to it. They also had a panel on the topic of black art in Detroit, the history of it. The Kara Walker thing came up and one of the artists on the panel gave the explanation that the people who protested had built careers as artists and had some money now and were middle or upper-middle class and didn’t want to be reminded of this sordid past. Strange rationale. They wanted to be accepted and this [show] disrupted that.
JDB: Can you talk about MoNA’s history and how your show that was shut down at the DIA and at the Oakland University Gallery affected MoNA?
JB: That was actually in Pontiac [not Oakland University]. There was a show I did at Oakland in 1988 or 1989. It was censored in a strange way. One of the governors of Michigan had been an ambassador to Africa for John F. Kennedy, while I was [at the Oakland University Gallery]. He had a huge collection of African artifacts. He donated a lot to the DIA, and he donated the rest to Oakland University, so they were having a big show of that stuff, and I did three video pieces to go with it. One of the video pieces was all text and I think maybe I had music in the background from Africa. The director of the gallery came walking into my house one day. I didn’t really know him. He just walked in and said “Hi there!” Anyway, he walked in and said, “I can’t tell you to change the video, because that would be censorship. But if you don’t, I’m going to pull it from the show.” And I thought, what’s the difference, you know? It was absurd what they wanted me to change. At this point, it was a white middle class University, everybody on the Board was white. He had one of them come and say what he thought might be offensive to black, and that was that on one of the videos I just had the text about things that are unique to Africa—flowers, fauna, flora, animals…and then I included diseases, the good and the bad. There were two diseases. And he said, just remove those. Why? It’s not reflecting on blacks in any way, shape or form, these diseases are passed by mosquitoes like yellow fever or anything. So, I just thought that was strange, and I didn’t [change it]. So what they did is they managed to censor it without really censoring it by saying that they didn’t have enough room so I had to merge the three videos into one, and although that [text] didn’t get cut, people who came [to the gallery] didn’t have time to see it. It didn’t really matter—it just seemed strange.
So in 1995, I had a show in Chicago, and I was driving back. It takes about 4 ½ hours to drive from Chicago to Detroit. And on the way back I was thinking, why do I have to go to Chicago or anywhere else to have an art show? Why can’t Detroit support its artists? Why can’t you make a career in Detroit? One of the puzzle pieces on this long drive home was, well, we don’t have a contemporary museum. It’s probably not the key piece of the puzzle, but without that, you can’t get the energy going, because without that-- A contemporary museum usually stimulates interest in contemporary art, which helps out the gallery system, and it works out well for everybody. So that was in the first two hours. In the next two hours, I thought, What does it take to make a museum? You need a bunch of rich people to be on your board… and then I thought, No you don’t. You need a lot of money, you need this you need that, all the things you supposedly have to have… no you don’t. So I thought, I’ll go back and I’ll start a museum.
So that’s what I did. I came back, and the reason I found Pontiac was, the gallery I was showing at, OK Harris, in Detroit, moved into a smaller space and said that I ought to look for a studio space in Hamtramck, which isn’t anywhere near my house. I drive to Pontiac at least once a week to visit my parents, so I thought, Oh, I’ll look in Pontiac, and that’s how I ended up in Pontiac. This happened kind of organically, I didn’t plot all this out. I started with a gallery called Jane Speaks Modern Art and created this fictional Jane Speaks and did an interview with her in a local arts magazine. I think I created 13 or 15 different images of women, ranging from old to young, Asian to black, caucasian, so that everyone who got a different edition of this art journal would get a different Jane. (Laughter) Some people could say, “Oh, this is some young 20-year old kid”, you know, and others could get a mature woman and say, “Oh yeah, she knows what she’s doing.” So, I did that and I had someone volunteer to go around to the galleries and introduce herself as Jane, and she had a French accent.
JDB: So someone played her?
JB: Yeah, and it was impressive. That was 1996, probably September. By the end of that year, I killed her off. I sent [her obituary] out. Back then I didn’t have email, so I sent a fax, more effective. So, after I killed her off, I visited a gallery for an opening, and someone told me that the woman who ran the gallery was so upset, that Jane Speaks had been so important to the community in Detroit. She never existed! Anyway, so then I had Jane’s supposed husband take over the money from her trust and create a Foundation that would support the museum. And at that time, I hadn’t come up with “MoNA”. I wanted the most generic name possible, so I came up with the “Museum of Contemporary Art”. There are probably the most “MCA”s. So then I founded that in a gallery in Pontiac, in a small walk-in closet without a door. I think, originally, they were going to use it for jewelry or something, but that fell through, so it was this small space that they didn’t know quite what to do with, so I rented it from the guy for a dollar a year and started MoNA there as the MCA and started doing shows. It was effective in the sense that, part of the reason why I did it was to create—you know, I didn’t have any money—to create this museum and say, Is this the best Detroit can do, a walk-in closet? And I was showing artwork that had been pulled from books and magazines, ripped from those, and then well-matted and framed and we—we… I would mount the shows from the floor to the ceiling. And actually it was quite effective.
JDB: Did a lot of people come to see the shows?
JB: Well, since it was built into another gallery, yeah. It was a relief to me, because I didn’t have to be there all the time. So a lot of people saw it, and word-of-mouth got out, but not to everybody. There were a few people who didn’t—But the press was always supportive, but not everyone read the press. There was a story that there were some collectors in Detroit and some of their friends from New York came to town and had heard about it, and they wanted to go see Detroit’s Contemporary museum. So they came down, and I was showing them through the show, you know, all cramped into the closet, and I could tell that the Detroiters were really uneasy, sweating bullets and dying to get out of there. But I hadn’t even finished getting half way through the show and they just ran for the door, literally, I mean they ran and didn’t even say goodbye. And later, I heard from another gallery—I walked in and the guy kind of jumped on me and said, You made us all look like crap, and I said, What are you gonna do about it? So that was that.
JDB: So, at some point the gallery transitioned from this closet to the Book Building?
JB: Well, we transitioned to a larger space, which was probably 800 square feet or something, and I put up a show, the first version of Documenta USA, where I contacted all the galleries. I think there were about 200 or 250 galleries that responded, and I wanted to create—and I redid this when MoNA opened, in a bigger way—but I wanted to create a show based on… Most of everything I’ve done are things that are interactive with people that walk in the door so they don’t feel so intimidated by contemporary art. I had worked at a University gallery when I was a student, and people would stop at the threshold and would even come in because [the artwork] was abstract they said, “Oh, this is stupid.” They didn’t understand it, and there hadn’t been enough exposure here, with the galleries and the museums. And in the school, they’d cut back on the arts… So, that was probably 1997 or ’98– I did that, and all the galleries responded. Essentially what I wanted from them were the materials that most curators use. Most curators can’t run around the world looking for artists’ shows, so they usually curate through slides, so they have a lot of archival material. So that’s what I asked [the galleries] for, so I got, like, 15,000 slides and all these catalogues from all over the place.
JDB: And so you showed the slides and the catalogues?
JB: Yeah I showed the slides, I projected them on the window of the space, it had a big storefront window, and then I also added in that thing called aperto where the artists could walk in—we had set aside a small space where they could hang their painting or a pedestal for a sculpture, and the next artist would walk in and they’d have to take it down. That had a great turn out; I didn’t expect it to. During the day, a few artists came in, stood in front of their piece, got their picture taken and then ran back out because they wanted to add it to their resumé. They didn’t want to stick around. But what happened the night of the opening, the reception, was that the artists stayed. They would hang their painting on the wall, another artist would walk in with another painting, and instead of leaving, they’d take their painting down or their sculpture, and it would slowly build over the night, and the whole place filled up with all these paintings. There’s no space for artists to meet each other in Detroit, so they started talking. In the middle of all this, a curator from the DIA came in, and I heard later that she went back [and said], “It was like a happening. There was so much excitement. How do you do this… how do you do that?” That’s the way it should be.
And that was the stimulus for approaching me to do [Art Until Now]. I think they have like a ten-year waiting period before they bring in contemporary art. When I was setting up the show in the contemporary galleries—this was 1999-- they had artwork that they had bought in the 1990s, but it was all 80s art, like Julian Schnabel, Peter Halley and David Salle, work like that from the 80s. But there wasn’t a single 90s artist. So, it was a good thing—Encyclopedic museums like the DIA or the Met in New York, they’re encyclopedic, but there’s a volume missing, the contemporary volume. [The DIA was] going through a period where they didn’t have a director, so the contemporary curator felt free to approach me to put together a survey of art of the 90s. They gave me three months [for the exhibition], and because it was a small space, it wasn’t a huge gallery, I thought, well, I’ll break it into twelve separate shows, one week each. We had ten years to cover in just one show. That’s what it was going to be. And, included in that, since they were excited about the aperto show, I thought, they’ll never let me do that at the DIA. I had been in a show there before, and they were so sensitive about security. I knew they wouldn’t let all these artists line up with paintings under their arms, walking in and out of the museum, so I developed this other box show where artists could create a piece to go into the box. That way it wouldn’t freak out the security there, and that way we could have Detroit artists finally show at the DIA as well.
JDB: But that never happened?
JB: Well, I told them what I wanted to do, and I said, I know you won’t let me do the aperto because of the security thing, so I’m doing this box thing. And they said, “No, no, no, we’ll do the aperto! That’s what we got excited about.” The curator, of what was called at that time the Department of Twentieth Century Art, said, “I’ll walk down with you personally if I have to.” So, that was on the list, the aperto plus the box show. It was a way of getting Detroit artists’ and artists of the 90s work into the show as well. So the first show was based on the cult of personality and how most of the art now [is about that], like the Young British Artists, like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. Their personalities and their own lives are almost as important or more so, especially with Tracey, than their art and [used to] promote it. So that was what the show was about, and I tried to soften it by creating pieces that weren’t replicas of their work but referenced it. Like, for Serrano’s Piss Christ, instead of taking a crucifix and putting it in urine, I had a bottle of urine with a wall label saying that it was the urine he had used, so it was all kind of referencing the [original artwork]. I had previewed all the shows at the MCA in Pontiac over the two years that I was putting the twelve shows together. And those pieces that eventually were the ones that supposedly shut the show [at the DIA] down were written about in newspapers, so it was no surprise to the curators. It may have been a surprise to the new director. I don’t know how many people were in that show, maybe fifteen.
JDB: I wondered if you could talk about the kaBOOM! show, at MoNA in 2002.
JB: Well, let me finish up with Van Gogh’s Ear. I don’t know if all museums are this way, but there was so much paperwork and the whole premise of the shows I was doing there was that it was [part of] the MCA. My name wasn’t listed anywhere, since I really didn’t exist at the MCA. It was Cesar Marzetti, Richard Mann and Jane Speaks daughter, Christina. But what had happened was the new director had come in a few months before the show opened, and I guess he didn’t sit down with the curators of the contemporary department to find out what was happening. So, it was the second day of the show, and he caught wind of it, and he came down and was kind of rude. He didn’t even talk to me, he just talked to the curator, and it was a small gallery, and I’m standing there thinking, what am I chopped liver? He was talking about what he should do… “I can’t shut the show down, because that would be censorship.” Finally, he turned to me and listed a bunch of things, “Do you mind if we put a sign a sign outside the gallery saying that this is the work of Jef Bourgeau and he’s responsible?” and I said, “Fine.” The next day when I came in, the third day of the show, they called me upstairs to talk to me, but as I was going upstairs, obviously, they were pulling the sliding door to the gallery shut and locking it. And they had locked a photographer inside.
JDB: Did they get any pictures?
JB: They did. In fact, I came back down and said, “What the hell?” and I heard this little voice on the other side saying the same thing. “Let me out!” We had to get somebody to unlock it to let him out. He had taken the pictures, if I ever needed them.
JDB: So, do you have them?
JB: No, I’m sure they were destroyed. So, to get to kaBOOM!, essentially after that [incident] I decided that either I shut down my artist’s project, the MCA, or transform it into something more real, and that’s when I turned it into the Museum of New Art and applied for 501-C3 non-profit museum status. And we formed a Board-- of course you need a board for all that stuff, but with all the right people, I thought, on it: an architect, a lawyer, an art dealer, an accountant, a collector, and the founding director of the MCA in Chicago, so we had a good collection of people but no money. I figured that any project you start, like a museum, should have growth to it, with a timeline and a vision—start with square one and move to something bigger, and that creates a lot of energy. I had functioned for four years without money, and initially we had a little bit of money. We had an auction, which raised about $40,000. That was in Pontiac– we opened in October [2000]. In November, I heard from a woman in downtown Detroit, right in the heart of Detroit, who said that she owned a building and that we could have the second floor. It had been unoccupied for about thirty years, and we could have it for free. We had always wanted to be in Detroit, and there were some people on the Board from Detroit. So it took us till the summer to gut the place and build walls. We opened with a large-scale version of Documenta USA, and we had enough information and slides and catalogues from all the galleries that we could change the show every 90 minutes. The regular Documenta, I think, is 90 days. We condensed it all into 90 minutes so that anybody could come any day and it would be a different show.
So, we opened and kaBOOM! came along. What stimulated it? Alexander Brenner had painted a dollar sign on a Malevich [print], maybe White on White, and it was in a museum in Europe. And some of the art magazines were supporting him and saying that he had the right to do it, so it was kind of a hot topic then. So I thought [we could] do it more. So that’s what we did, and some artists gave us work, like Hans Steinbach…he recreated some pieces, like Man Ray’s “Object to be Destroyed.” At the time he made it, in the 1920s, he had written out instructions on how to go about destroying it, so when we recreated it, we printed out the instructions, so people were able to destroy it. But what’s curious about that story too was that somebody actually did destroy it in the 1960s, so Man Ray remade it; he didn’t like it being destroyed, because it had suddenly become worth thousands and thousands of dollars. So we recreated a bunch of the Duchamp pieces, since none of them have survived. So we filled the gallery and we had some performance artists– one guy sat in a chair and sawed the legs off it at the same time. You wouldn’t think it would be that hard, but there’s all the pressure on [the chair] from sitting on it. And we did a Nam June Paik piece, “Solo for Violin.” So it was a strange and interesting and kind of exciting show. There were people there from New York who said they’d never been to a show that was that exciting and had that much impact. There were people there from Detroit, some of the critics, who literally ran out [of the gallery] with their heads ducked and covered, fear in their eyes…. I stopped them and I said, “Wait, at least talk to the artists and hear their side,” but by the time I brought the artists out, they [the critics] were long gone. There was a kid, probably about seven or eight, who said, “I’ve never had so much fun anywhere in my life!” Some people got carried away; someone lit a Duchamp piece on fire and someone pissed in the urinal…which was good, because when I went to put the fire out there was a urinal full of piss…. So we were able to do shows that normal museums wouldn’t even go near. kaBOOM! was probably the most exciting [show], as far as exploring the whole history of [destroying art]. I think we went back to about 1858, to a group of French artists who put a beard on Venus di Milo, twenty years before Duchamp put a mustache on the Mona Lisa.
JDB: How do you feel about MoNA now? Do you feel it’s been successful as a place for contemporary art in Detroit?
JB: Yeah, when you consider that it never had any funding. One of the last shows we had here was a New York artists, and an Italian artist and Stella Vine, who came to me because they wanted to do a show here, and I had to explain to them, “I don’t have money– I don’t have money of postcards, shipping, anything…” And they all understood that and still wanted to go ahead with the show. So just to see that outside artists want to come to Detroit to do a show [is exciting] especially when you consider that they don’t have money themselves. So I think that proves that we’ve gained recognition outside of Detroit.
JDB: What are your thoughts on MoCAD?
JB: I don’t know, because theirs is the opposite approach from ours– ours is a grass-roots operation. They’re coming from the position of money first; it’s all about money. So the art community here is being locked out. I met with a group of people twice in the past year to try to press the idea that they [MoCAD] include Detroit artists; there’s no good reason not to. I talked to a guy that was on our Board, Jan van der Marck, the founding director of the MCA in Chicago, and asked him if he included Chicago artists when he opened the MCA, and he said, “Of course!” He said that there’s no good reason not to. But of course, their excitement, with the money, is bringing in artists they’ve either collected or that they would like to collect or that theyre excited about from outside Detroit. There are very few collectors of Michigan art. Collectors here will go to Chicago or, especially, New York just for the bragging rights, to say, “Oh, I bought this at Gagosian” or whatever. So, those are the people in control of [MoCAD]. And I said they should have an auction, so local artists can feel like they’re a part of it; we had an auction. Well, they’re going to have an auction in the Spring, but it’s going to be at some rich guy’s house, so the artists are locked out of [the museum] for that too. There’s no sense of inclusion, and I think that’s going to hurt [the museum] initially. I think long-term all that will fall away, hopefully, and they’ll get somebody in there who’s professional enough o realize that the art community has to be a part of it.
JDB: Do you feel like the problem of artists being excluded from Detroit museums is specific to Detroit or part of a larger problem?
JB: I think it’s really specific to Detroit, to this degree. Like I said, the MCA opened up with Chicago artists. There’s a guy named Paul Klein (?) who runs an art newsletter and a gallery in Chicago. One of the points he made in his last newsletter was, to be able to watch an artist’s career from when they’re still in grad school through mid-career and on– it can happen where you can watch an artist, and they don’t leave Chicago. At the same time, he’s trying to start a museum strictly for Chicago artists. At the MCA there were a bunch of artists who fought to have Chicago artists shown there on a regular basis, so they started a program there a couple of years ago called “12 x 12.” Every month they have a different Chicago artist in the gallery. When you walk in, it’s one of the first galleries you happen in on, so it’s a good location. They DIA [tried] that in the late-1980s, and the [gallery] was in a horrible location because it was at the opposite end of the building from the contemporary art. It actually became a locker room after, that’s how great a space it was. They forced Michigan artists out. I think in Detroit it’s more difficult.
JDB: Why is that?
JB: You can’t build a career here. You have to go somewhere else. I think that LA, Chicago, New York…they’re bigger cities, but in the smaller ones even, artists can stay if they want. When the Houston contemporary art museum opened, the director exclusively showed Texas artists at first. He also created a lot of interest and excitement for Texan artists that wasn’t there before. So there’s a lot of give and take. A lot of cities have done it, which is why it’s important that Detroit do it. It’s funny, as much money as is involved with MoCAD, from the Board, they’re not really forthcoming with it. There’s Al Taubman, who built the first shopping mall in the US and the world, and went to prison– his daughter’s on the Board. Manoogian’s on it and the guy who owns Compuware… Any one of them could give money to MoCAD to make it work, and they still seem to be struggling. When they opened up, they hadn’t even finished any of the walls. It’s a strange situation, so we’ll see what happens.
A year ago, last April, they brought a bunch of collectors and builders together at MoNA, because I wasn’t sure what was going to happen at MoCAD, and we had a presentation on this building called “Lodge.” It’s three stories and I think it has two theatres in it, so it was perfect, and it looks like a museum, and it’s in an abandoned area right downtown. Actually the oner of the building owns the building I’m in now, so we’re friends. About two days before the meeting, MoCAD announced that they were going to open within a year, so when we had the meeting, everyone including the architect said, “Well, why don’t we just wait and see what happens with MoCAD?” So what do you do, wait five or ten years?
JDB: So do you see MoNA moving again?
JB: I never wanted to leave Detroit; we were kind of pushed out for a lot of reasons. The city owns the DIA, and the DIA has never been happy with my show or with me. So there’s that. And then the Superbowl was coming to town, and everybody got greedy, so the rent [went up] and we got pushed out. The woman who owned the building we were in was moving out all the tenants and wanted to sell the building. About when I was looking for another building downtown, other landlords were asking ridiculous amounts of money for these abandoned buildings. The building I’m in now, in Pontiac, had all been art galleries– there were seven art galleries– which had been empty for four years, so that’s why we moved out to Pontiac. But yeah, I’d love to be back in Detroit. It’s the heart of the region.
Detroit’s coming back, it really is. My brother works down there [in downtown Detroit] and I visited him and we walked around the same area where MoNA was at, and I know the Superbowl helped accelerate all the development that happened. But there were new restaurants and lofts. Across from where we were, condos were selling for $24.5 million and they were sold out. When [MoNA] was downtown, people would come in and say, “Nobody wants to live in Detroit,” and that was usually someone older. I’d turn to somebody younger and say, “Where do you want to live, in the suburbs or in an urban environment?” They’d say, “We already do.” I think this younger generation wants to live in an urban environment; it’s more exciting. That’s what’s happening now.
JDB: Do you think that’s reflected in young Detroit artists? Is there a lot going on for them now?
JB: No, it’s gotten worse. We’ve lost something like twenty-five galleries over the last ten years. They’re always student-run galleries, but as soon as [the students] graduate, they shut down. Normally, you show your work at the entry level and slowly work your way up through the gallery system, but there is no gallery system here. There are three galleries. There’s [Suzanne] Hilberry, who pretty much spearheaded MoCAD, and there’s Lindberg (?), who been around for a long time, and there are a few Michigan artists showing there, maybe one or two a year. Other than that…I don’t know why I said three. We’re down to the bare bones. I saw this artist’s work, she was graduating from the Center for Creative Studies, and I contacted her and said I’d love to do a show. She said, fine but I’m moving to New York at the end of the week. She just graduated, and she’s already on her way out the door. But we managed to get the show up before she left, and I got a call from a French couple, big collectors from Paris, and they said, “We’re in front of the museum, but it looks like a house.” We’d been at six places in the last ten years, so in gallery guides I always put my home address, so he’d flown into Detroit and had the limo driver drive him all the way out to Rochester. They came downtown [to MoNA] and laughed about it, so I showed them the Detroiter’s show I’d just put up, and they loved it. I could tell they wanted to buy it, but we’re not a selling organization. I tried to sell them two pieces and he said, no, I want the whole show. We tried to set up a dinner that night with the artist to work out the details, and to show you the low self esteem going on with Detroit artists, she was upset that I’d sold them those pieces, and now she’s have to create new pieces to take to New York… And I said, “Hey, listen, these are the biggest collectors in the world and they want to buy your work, so just do it. Just take the money and run with that.” We have a lot of good artists here– some are quite famous right out of grad school, like Dana Schultz, who’s from Levonia, and she has a show right now at the Cleveland museum. She’s also in Saatchi’s “USA Today” show. Another one is Julie Merehtu. And it goes back to people like Mike Kelley, so there’s a tradition of good art here.
JDB: I read that you’re working on a Detroit Codex.
JB: I started to and then I lost energy– there’s no place to research. There’s no archive or documentation of Detroit art. You can’t move ahead if you don’t have references.
Transcript: Telephone Interview between Jessica D. Brier & Jef Bourgeau, November 1, 2006
JDB: Did you grow up in Detroit?
JB: Yeah, I was born in Detroit.
JDB: Can you talk about what it was like to grow up there?
JB: Probably like any other city in the 60s, urban flight happening, late 50s, early 60s. After WWII, they started building subdivisions outside the city. [My parents] wanted their own home. It was always interesting, we lived 40 minutes outside of Detroit and my Dad would drive in for work. The expressways just accelerated that whole process of moving out of the city. Then the first shopping mall was built in the suburbs. Detroit was perfect, plus the whole car thing. The car companies got together and organized a company to buy up all the streetcars and shut that business down. People would have to use cars to move around. There were streetcars that went from Detroit to all the smaller cities around and all the way down into Toledo.
JDB: You grew up in the suburbs?
JB: Yeah, we moved out there when I was about four years old. Those have changed; we had woods around us and now it’s all built up.
JDB: Which suburb did you live in?
JB: West Bloomfield, but we went to Pontiac schools.
JDB: Was that your original connection to Pontiac [where MoNA is located now]?
JB: Yeah, but that’s now why I’m there. Anyway, with the riots and everything there was bussing. Pontiac was probably even less white than Detroit. They had riots in Pontiac as well. There was a large black population.
JDB: Those also took place in the late 1960s?
JB: Yeah, it’s also a very poor town that had built itself on cars and fallen on hard times. Up until then, we used to drive down to Detroit.
JDB: Do you remember the Michael Heizer piece that was on the lawn of the DIA around the same time?
JB: Yeah, do you?
JDB: No. (Laughter)
JB: I know that everybody got upset because they were ripping up the front lawn. In fact, I think that piece ended up in MoCAD, in the building they’re moving into.
JDB: It’s there now?
JB: No, I think it was before they moved in. A friend who has an art blog had some sort of event over a year ago. They hadn’t done anything to the building. It had been an old car dealership. There was an old piece of machinery in the back that looked like some art. Another friend said it was the Heizer piece. So [the building] was just being used as a storage facility. I don’t know who owns it, probably Manoogian, who’s one of the big art collectors in the area. He’s the one who gave that building to MoCAD.
JDB: The Heizer piece reminded me of what happened at the DIA with your show, Van Gogh’s Ear, in terms of the DIA’s history with censorship.
JB: Well, you have to go back to the Diego Rivera murals. There was a big stink about that, and they shut that down. And then, about six months before they shut my show down, in 1999, they had hung a Kara Walker show and pulled it before it opened.
JDB: What was the reason for that?
JB: It was interesting that it was the Friends of Modern Art who protested it, I don’t know what their official title is, African American or black… One of the women who was on that committee– I spoke to her about it– talked about how it was so strange, and she agreed with me. But then I found out that she was one of the people who protested.
JDB: Did she say why?
JB: No, she never admitted to it. They also had a panel on the topic of black art in Detroit, the history of it. The Kara Walker thing came up and one of the artists on the panel gave the explanation that the people who protested had built careers as artists and had some money now and were middle or upper-middle class and didn’t want to be reminded of this sordid past. Strange rationale. They wanted to be accepted and this [show] disrupted that.
JDB: Can you talk about MoNA’s history and how your show that was shut down at the DIA and at the Oakland University Gallery affected MoNA?
JB: That was actually in Pontiac [not Oakland University]. There was a show I did at Oakland in 1988 or 1989. It was censored in a strange way. One of the governors of Michigan had been an ambassador to Africa for John F. Kennedy, while I was [at the Oakland University Gallery]. He had a huge collection of African artifacts. He donated a lot to the DIA, and he donated the rest to Oakland University, so they were having a big show of that stuff, and I did three video pieces to go with it. One of the video pieces was all text and I think maybe I had music in the background from Africa. The director of the gallery came walking into my house one day. I didn’t really know him. He just walked in and said “Hi there!” Anyway, he walked in and said, “I can’t tell you to change the video, because that would be censorship. But if you don’t, I’m going to pull it from the show.” And I thought, what’s the difference, you know? It was absurd what they wanted me to change. At this point, it was a white middle class University, everybody on the Board was white. He had one of them come and say what he thought might be offensive to black, and that was that on one of the videos I just had the text about things that are unique to Africa—flowers, fauna, flora, animals…and then I included diseases, the good and the bad. There were two diseases. And he said, just remove those. Why? It’s not reflecting on blacks in any way, shape or form, these diseases are passed by mosquitoes like yellow fever or anything. So, I just thought that was strange, and I didn’t [change it]. So what they did is they managed to censor it without really censoring it by saying that they didn’t have enough room so I had to merge the three videos into one, and although that [text] didn’t get cut, people who came [to the gallery] didn’t have time to see it. It didn’t really matter—it just seemed strange.
So in 1995, I had a show in Chicago, and I was driving back. It takes about 4 ½ hours to drive from Chicago to Detroit. And on the way back I was thinking, why do I have to go to Chicago or anywhere else to have an art show? Why can’t Detroit support its artists? Why can’t you make a career in Detroit? One of the puzzle pieces on this long drive home was, well, we don’t have a contemporary museum. It’s probably not the key piece of the puzzle, but without that, you can’t get the energy going, because without that-- A contemporary museum usually stimulates interest in contemporary art, which helps out the gallery system, and it works out well for everybody. So that was in the first two hours. In the next two hours, I thought, What does it take to make a museum? You need a bunch of rich people to be on your board… and then I thought, No you don’t. You need a lot of money, you need this you need that, all the things you supposedly have to have… no you don’t. So I thought, I’ll go back and I’ll start a museum.
So that’s what I did. I came back, and the reason I found Pontiac was, the gallery I was showing at, OK Harris, in Detroit, moved into a smaller space and said that I ought to look for a studio space in Hamtramck, which isn’t anywhere near my house. I drive to Pontiac at least once a week to visit my parents, so I thought, Oh, I’ll look in Pontiac, and that’s how I ended up in Pontiac. This happened kind of organically, I didn’t plot all this out. I started with a gallery called Jane Speaks Modern Art and created this fictional Jane Speaks and did an interview with her in a local arts magazine. I think I created 13 or 15 different images of women, ranging from old to young, Asian to black, caucasian, so that everyone who got a different edition of this art journal would get a different Jane. (Laughter) Some people could say, “Oh, this is some young 20-year old kid”, you know, and others could get a mature woman and say, “Oh yeah, she knows what she’s doing.” So, I did that and I had someone volunteer to go around to the galleries and introduce herself as Jane, and she had a French accent.
JDB: So someone played her?
JB: Yeah, and it was impressive. That was 1996, probably September. By the end of that year, I killed her off. I sent [her obituary] out. Back then I didn’t have email, so I sent a fax, more effective. So, after I killed her off, I visited a gallery for an opening, and someone told me that the woman who ran the gallery was so upset, that Jane Speaks had been so important to the community in Detroit. She never existed! Anyway, so then I had Jane’s supposed husband take over the money from her trust and create a Foundation that would support the museum. And at that time, I hadn’t come up with “MoNA”. I wanted the most generic name possible, so I came up with the “Museum of Contemporary Art”. There are probably the most “MCA”s. So then I founded that in a gallery in Pontiac, in a small walk-in closet without a door. I think, originally, they were going to use it for jewelry or something, but that fell through, so it was this small space that they didn’t know quite what to do with, so I rented it from the guy for a dollar a year and started MoNA there as the MCA and started doing shows. It was effective in the sense that, part of the reason why I did it was to create—you know, I didn’t have any money—to create this museum and say, Is this the best Detroit can do, a walk-in closet? And I was showing artwork that had been pulled from books and magazines, ripped from those, and then well-matted and framed and we—we… I would mount the shows from the floor to the ceiling. And actually it was quite effective.
JDB: Did a lot of people come to see the shows?
JB: Well, since it was built into another gallery, yeah. It was a relief to me, because I didn’t have to be there all the time. So a lot of people saw it, and word-of-mouth got out, but not to everybody. There were a few people who didn’t—But the press was always supportive, but not everyone read the press. There was a story that there were some collectors in Detroit and some of their friends from New York came to town and had heard about it, and they wanted to go see Detroit’s Contemporary museum. So they came down, and I was showing them through the show, you know, all cramped into the closet, and I could tell that the Detroiters were really uneasy, sweating bullets and dying to get out of there. But I hadn’t even finished getting half way through the show and they just ran for the door, literally, I mean they ran and didn’t even say goodbye. And later, I heard from another gallery—I walked in and the guy kind of jumped on me and said, You made us all look like crap, and I said, What are you gonna do about it? So that was that.
JDB: So, at some point the gallery transitioned from this closet to the Book Building?
JB: Well, we transitioned to a larger space, which was probably 800 square feet or something, and I put up a show, the first version of Documenta USA, where I contacted all the galleries. I think there were about 200 or 250 galleries that responded, and I wanted to create—and I redid this when MoNA opened, in a bigger way—but I wanted to create a show based on… Most of everything I’ve done are things that are interactive with people that walk in the door so they don’t feel so intimidated by contemporary art. I had worked at a University gallery when I was a student, and people would stop at the threshold and would even come in because [the artwork] was abstract they said, “Oh, this is stupid.” They didn’t understand it, and there hadn’t been enough exposure here, with the galleries and the museums. And in the school, they’d cut back on the arts… So, that was probably 1997 or ’98– I did that, and all the galleries responded. Essentially what I wanted from them were the materials that most curators use. Most curators can’t run around the world looking for artists’ shows, so they usually curate through slides, so they have a lot of archival material. So that’s what I asked [the galleries] for, so I got, like, 15,000 slides and all these catalogues from all over the place.
JDB: And so you showed the slides and the catalogues?
JB: Yeah I showed the slides, I projected them on the window of the space, it had a big storefront window, and then I also added in that thing called aperto where the artists could walk in—we had set aside a small space where they could hang their painting or a pedestal for a sculpture, and the next artist would walk in and they’d have to take it down. That had a great turn out; I didn’t expect it to. During the day, a few artists came in, stood in front of their piece, got their picture taken and then ran back out because they wanted to add it to their resumé. They didn’t want to stick around. But what happened the night of the opening, the reception, was that the artists stayed. They would hang their painting on the wall, another artist would walk in with another painting, and instead of leaving, they’d take their painting down or their sculpture, and it would slowly build over the night, and the whole place filled up with all these paintings. There’s no space for artists to meet each other in Detroit, so they started talking. In the middle of all this, a curator from the DIA came in, and I heard later that she went back [and said], “It was like a happening. There was so much excitement. How do you do this… how do you do that?” That’s the way it should be.
And that was the stimulus for approaching me to do [Art Until Now]. I think they have like a ten-year waiting period before they bring in contemporary art. When I was setting up the show in the contemporary galleries—this was 1999-- they had artwork that they had bought in the 1990s, but it was all 80s art, like Julian Schnabel, Peter Halley and David Salle, work like that from the 80s. But there wasn’t a single 90s artist. So, it was a good thing—Encyclopedic museums like the DIA or the Met in New York, they’re encyclopedic, but there’s a volume missing, the contemporary volume. [The DIA was] going through a period where they didn’t have a director, so the contemporary curator felt free to approach me to put together a survey of art of the 90s. They gave me three months [for the exhibition], and because it was a small space, it wasn’t a huge gallery, I thought, well, I’ll break it into twelve separate shows, one week each. We had ten years to cover in just one show. That’s what it was going to be. And, included in that, since they were excited about the aperto show, I thought, they’ll never let me do that at the DIA. I had been in a show there before, and they were so sensitive about security. I knew they wouldn’t let all these artists line up with paintings under their arms, walking in and out of the museum, so I developed this other box show where artists could create a piece to go into the box. That way it wouldn’t freak out the security there, and that way we could have Detroit artists finally show at the DIA as well.
JDB: But that never happened?
JB: Well, I told them what I wanted to do, and I said, I know you won’t let me do the aperto because of the security thing, so I’m doing this box thing. And they said, “No, no, no, we’ll do the aperto! That’s what we got excited about.” The curator, of what was called at that time the Department of Twentieth Century Art, said, “I’ll walk down with you personally if I have to.” So, that was on the list, the aperto plus the box show. It was a way of getting Detroit artists’ and artists of the 90s work into the show as well. So the first show was based on the cult of personality and how most of the art now [is about that], like the Young British Artists, like Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. Their personalities and their own lives are almost as important or more so, especially with Tracey, than their art and [used to] promote it. So that was what the show was about, and I tried to soften it by creating pieces that weren’t replicas of their work but referenced it. Like, for Serrano’s Piss Christ, instead of taking a crucifix and putting it in urine, I had a bottle of urine with a wall label saying that it was the urine he had used, so it was all kind of referencing the [original artwork]. I had previewed all the shows at the MCA in Pontiac over the two years that I was putting the twelve shows together. And those pieces that eventually were the ones that supposedly shut the show [at the DIA] down were written about in newspapers, so it was no surprise to the curators. It may have been a surprise to the new director. I don’t know how many people were in that show, maybe fifteen.
JDB: I wondered if you could talk about the kaBOOM! show, at MoNA in 2002.
JB: Well, let me finish up with Van Gogh’s Ear. I don’t know if all museums are this way, but there was so much paperwork and the whole premise of the shows I was doing there was that it was [part of] the MCA. My name wasn’t listed anywhere, since I really didn’t exist at the MCA. It was Cesar Marzetti, Richard Mann and Jane Speaks daughter, Christina. But what had happened was the new director had come in a few months before the show opened, and I guess he didn’t sit down with the curators of the contemporary department to find out what was happening. So, it was the second day of the show, and he caught wind of it, and he came down and was kind of rude. He didn’t even talk to me, he just talked to the curator, and it was a small gallery, and I’m standing there thinking, what am I chopped liver? He was talking about what he should do… “I can’t shut the show down, because that would be censorship.” Finally, he turned to me and listed a bunch of things, “Do you mind if we put a sign a sign outside the gallery saying that this is the work of Jef Bourgeau and he’s responsible?” and I said, “Fine.” The next day when I came in, the third day of the show, they called me upstairs to talk to me, but as I was going upstairs, obviously, they were pulling the sliding door to the gallery shut and locking it. And they had locked a photographer inside.
JDB: Did they get any pictures?
JB: They did. In fact, I came back down and said, “What the hell?” and I heard this little voice on the other side saying the same thing. “Let me out!” We had to get somebody to unlock it to let him out. He had taken the pictures, if I ever needed them.
JDB: So, do you have them?
JB: No, I’m sure they were destroyed. So, to get to kaBOOM!, essentially after that [incident] I decided that either I shut down my artist’s project, the MCA, or transform it into something more real, and that’s when I turned it into the Museum of New Art and applied for 501-C3 non-profit museum status. And we formed a Board-- of course you need a board for all that stuff, but with all the right people, I thought, on it: an architect, a lawyer, an art dealer, an accountant, a collector, and the founding director of the MCA in Chicago, so we had a good collection of people but no money. I figured that any project you start, like a museum, should have growth to it, with a timeline and a vision—start with square one and move to something bigger, and that creates a lot of energy. I had functioned for four years without money, and initially we had a little bit of money. We had an auction, which raised about $40,000. That was in Pontiac– we opened in October [2000]. In November, I heard from a woman in downtown Detroit, right in the heart of Detroit, who said that she owned a building and that we could have the second floor. It had been unoccupied for about thirty years, and we could have it for free. We had always wanted to be in Detroit, and there were some people on the Board from Detroit. So it took us till the summer to gut the place and build walls. We opened with a large-scale version of Documenta USA, and we had enough information and slides and catalogues from all the galleries that we could change the show every 90 minutes. The regular Documenta, I think, is 90 days. We condensed it all into 90 minutes so that anybody could come any day and it would be a different show.
So, we opened and kaBOOM! came along. What stimulated it? Alexander Brenner had painted a dollar sign on a Malevich [print], maybe White on White, and it was in a museum in Europe. And some of the art magazines were supporting him and saying that he had the right to do it, so it was kind of a hot topic then. So I thought [we could] do it more. So that’s what we did, and some artists gave us work, like Hans Steinbach…he recreated some pieces, like Man Ray’s “Object to be Destroyed.” At the time he made it, in the 1920s, he had written out instructions on how to go about destroying it, so when we recreated it, we printed out the instructions, so people were able to destroy it. But what’s curious about that story too was that somebody actually did destroy it in the 1960s, so Man Ray remade it; he didn’t like it being destroyed, because it had suddenly become worth thousands and thousands of dollars. So we recreated a bunch of the Duchamp pieces, since none of them have survived. So we filled the gallery and we had some performance artists– one guy sat in a chair and sawed the legs off it at the same time. You wouldn’t think it would be that hard, but there’s all the pressure on [the chair] from sitting on it. And we did a Nam June Paik piece, “Solo for Violin.” So it was a strange and interesting and kind of exciting show. There were people there from New York who said they’d never been to a show that was that exciting and had that much impact. There were people there from Detroit, some of the critics, who literally ran out [of the gallery] with their heads ducked and covered, fear in their eyes…. I stopped them and I said, “Wait, at least talk to the artists and hear their side,” but by the time I brought the artists out, they [the critics] were long gone. There was a kid, probably about seven or eight, who said, “I’ve never had so much fun anywhere in my life!” Some people got carried away; someone lit a Duchamp piece on fire and someone pissed in the urinal…which was good, because when I went to put the fire out there was a urinal full of piss…. So we were able to do shows that normal museums wouldn’t even go near. kaBOOM! was probably the most exciting [show], as far as exploring the whole history of [destroying art]. I think we went back to about 1858, to a group of French artists who put a beard on Venus di Milo, twenty years before Duchamp put a mustache on the Mona Lisa.
JDB: How do you feel about MoNA now? Do you feel it’s been successful as a place for contemporary art in Detroit?
JB: Yeah, when you consider that it never had any funding. One of the last shows we had here was a New York artists, and an Italian artist and Stella Vine, who came to me because they wanted to do a show here, and I had to explain to them, “I don’t have money– I don’t have money of postcards, shipping, anything…” And they all understood that and still wanted to go ahead with the show. So just to see that outside artists want to come to Detroit to do a show [is exciting] especially when you consider that they don’t have money themselves. So I think that proves that we’ve gained recognition outside of Detroit.
JDB: What are your thoughts on MoCAD?
JB: I don’t know, because theirs is the opposite approach from ours– ours is a grass-roots operation. They’re coming from the position of money first; it’s all about money. So the art community here is being locked out. I met with a group of people twice in the past year to try to press the idea that they [MoCAD] include Detroit artists; there’s no good reason not to. I talked to a guy that was on our Board, Jan van der Marck, the founding director of the MCA in Chicago, and asked him if he included Chicago artists when he opened the MCA, and he said, “Of course!” He said that there’s no good reason not to. But of course, their excitement, with the money, is bringing in artists they’ve either collected or that they would like to collect or that theyre excited about from outside Detroit. There are very few collectors of Michigan art. Collectors here will go to Chicago or, especially, New York just for the bragging rights, to say, “Oh, I bought this at Gagosian” or whatever. So, those are the people in control of [MoCAD]. And I said they should have an auction, so local artists can feel like they’re a part of it; we had an auction. Well, they’re going to have an auction in the Spring, but it’s going to be at some rich guy’s house, so the artists are locked out of [the museum] for that too. There’s no sense of inclusion, and I think that’s going to hurt [the museum] initially. I think long-term all that will fall away, hopefully, and they’ll get somebody in there who’s professional enough o realize that the art community has to be a part of it.
JDB: Do you feel like the problem of artists being excluded from Detroit museums is specific to Detroit or part of a larger problem?
JB: I think it’s really specific to Detroit, to this degree. Like I said, the MCA opened up with Chicago artists. There’s a guy named Paul Klein (?) who runs an art newsletter and a gallery in Chicago. One of the points he made in his last newsletter was, to be able to watch an artist’s career from when they’re still in grad school through mid-career and on– it can happen where you can watch an artist, and they don’t leave Chicago. At the same time, he’s trying to start a museum strictly for Chicago artists. At the MCA there were a bunch of artists who fought to have Chicago artists shown there on a regular basis, so they started a program there a couple of years ago called “12 x 12.” Every month they have a different Chicago artist in the gallery. When you walk in, it’s one of the first galleries you happen in on, so it’s a good location. They DIA [tried] that in the late-1980s, and the [gallery] was in a horrible location because it was at the opposite end of the building from the contemporary art. It actually became a locker room after, that’s how great a space it was. They forced Michigan artists out. I think in Detroit it’s more difficult.
JDB: Why is that?
JB: You can’t build a career here. You have to go somewhere else. I think that LA, Chicago, New York…they’re bigger cities, but in the smaller ones even, artists can stay if they want. When the Houston contemporary art museum opened, the director exclusively showed Texas artists at first. He also created a lot of interest and excitement for Texan artists that wasn’t there before. So there’s a lot of give and take. A lot of cities have done it, which is why it’s important that Detroit do it. It’s funny, as much money as is involved with MoCAD, from the Board, they’re not really forthcoming with it. There’s Al Taubman, who built the first shopping mall in the US and the world, and went to prison– his daughter’s on the Board. Manoogian’s on it and the guy who owns Compuware… Any one of them could give money to MoCAD to make it work, and they still seem to be struggling. When they opened up, they hadn’t even finished any of the walls. It’s a strange situation, so we’ll see what happens.
A year ago, last April, they brought a bunch of collectors and builders together at MoNA, because I wasn’t sure what was going to happen at MoCAD, and we had a presentation on this building called “Lodge.” It’s three stories and I think it has two theatres in it, so it was perfect, and it looks like a museum, and it’s in an abandoned area right downtown. Actually the oner of the building owns the building I’m in now, so we’re friends. About two days before the meeting, MoCAD announced that they were going to open within a year, so when we had the meeting, everyone including the architect said, “Well, why don’t we just wait and see what happens with MoCAD?” So what do you do, wait five or ten years?
JDB: So do you see MoNA moving again?
JB: I never wanted to leave Detroit; we were kind of pushed out for a lot of reasons. The city owns the DIA, and the DIA has never been happy with my show or with me. So there’s that. And then the Superbowl was coming to town, and everybody got greedy, so the rent [went up] and we got pushed out. The woman who owned the building we were in was moving out all the tenants and wanted to sell the building. About when I was looking for another building downtown, other landlords were asking ridiculous amounts of money for these abandoned buildings. The building I’m in now, in Pontiac, had all been art galleries– there were seven art galleries– which had been empty for four years, so that’s why we moved out to Pontiac. But yeah, I’d love to be back in Detroit. It’s the heart of the region.
Detroit’s coming back, it really is. My brother works down there [in downtown Detroit] and I visited him and we walked around the same area where MoNA was at, and I know the Superbowl helped accelerate all the development that happened. But there were new restaurants and lofts. Across from where we were, condos were selling for $24.5 million and they were sold out. When [MoNA] was downtown, people would come in and say, “Nobody wants to live in Detroit,” and that was usually someone older. I’d turn to somebody younger and say, “Where do you want to live, in the suburbs or in an urban environment?” They’d say, “We already do.” I think this younger generation wants to live in an urban environment; it’s more exciting. That’s what’s happening now.
JDB: Do you think that’s reflected in young Detroit artists? Is there a lot going on for them now?
JB: No, it’s gotten worse. We’ve lost something like twenty-five galleries over the last ten years. They’re always student-run galleries, but as soon as [the students] graduate, they shut down. Normally, you show your work at the entry level and slowly work your way up through the gallery system, but there is no gallery system here. There are three galleries. There’s [Suzanne] Hilberry, who pretty much spearheaded MoCAD, and there’s Lindberg (?), who been around for a long time, and there are a few Michigan artists showing there, maybe one or two a year. Other than that…I don’t know why I said three. We’re down to the bare bones. I saw this artist’s work, she was graduating from the Center for Creative Studies, and I contacted her and said I’d love to do a show. She said, fine but I’m moving to New York at the end of the week. She just graduated, and she’s already on her way out the door. But we managed to get the show up before she left, and I got a call from a French couple, big collectors from Paris, and they said, “We’re in front of the museum, but it looks like a house.” We’d been at six places in the last ten years, so in gallery guides I always put my home address, so he’d flown into Detroit and had the limo driver drive him all the way out to Rochester. They came downtown [to MoNA] and laughed about it, so I showed them the Detroiter’s show I’d just put up, and they loved it. I could tell they wanted to buy it, but we’re not a selling organization. I tried to sell them two pieces and he said, no, I want the whole show. We tried to set up a dinner that night with the artist to work out the details, and to show you the low self esteem going on with Detroit artists, she was upset that I’d sold them those pieces, and now she’s have to create new pieces to take to New York… And I said, “Hey, listen, these are the biggest collectors in the world and they want to buy your work, so just do it. Just take the money and run with that.” We have a lot of good artists here– some are quite famous right out of grad school, like Dana Schultz, who’s from Levonia, and she has a show right now at the Cleveland museum. She’s also in Saatchi’s “USA Today” show. Another one is Julie Merehtu. And it goes back to people like Mike Kelley, so there’s a tradition of good art here.
JDB: I read that you’re working on a Detroit Codex.
JB: I started to and then I lost energy– there’s no place to research. There’s no archive or documentation of Detroit art. You can’t move ahead if you don’t have references.
posted by Jess Brier at 3:40 PM
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