Guillaume Bijl
Guillaume Bijl’s debut at the gallery includes four large wall assemblages that convey his ongoing concern with how a culture selects objects to signify its uniting historical achievements and emotional investments. These meaning-laden objects range from the high-minded (such as his fictitious sunken church tower presented as an authentic excavation at the 2007 Skulptur Projekte Münster) to the trite, as with a vitrine populated by ridiculous ceramic frog figurines in Composition trouvée, 2012.
Throughout this exhibition, he continues mining the mechanisms and formal vocabulary by which select sites and objects are thought to coalesce the disparate polis through dubious commemoration and identification—never mind if these are founded upon artifice and wishful thinking. Bijl has a pronounced old-fashioned European hand as he transposes aristocratic pastimes onto the dreams and aspirations of middle-class teenagers: a shrine to horses for the girls complete with coddling horse treats (Composition trouvée, 2011); a showcase with heads of dummies and of a taxidermied roe deer, alongside a dinghy, for the lads (another 2012 Composition trouvée). The production design of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012) comes to mind.
The occasionally colonialist, dusty, vintage-looking objects, the preindustrial-looking wall taxonomies, and the one floor piece—flea-market bric-a-brac on a blanket—are devoid of the sleekness and mass-production appeal of, say, Haim Steinbach’s shelf pieces. Considering that artists working in this mode nowadays systematically scour eBay for the “right” parts, Bijl’s accumulative practice evokes anachronistic flânerie.
Bijl infers that the history of accumulation and materialist desire in play here usually comes at the cost of others, evident not least in the work Sorry, 2010, a wall piece comprising an oversaturated image—a vista of the Rockies—above a white buffalo head with a dustpan and broom below. The discount literalness and sentimental thinness of the work’s title and components plainly perform the inadequacy of memorial culture and accessorial industries seeking to absorb abstract notions of guilt and horror.
