- documenta
"In their thematic breadth, my installations not only expose the banal culture of modern mass tourism, they also focus on intellectual themes. I use them to examine the questionable fetishistic approach to historical figures and their ‘legacy’ –composers' mortuary rooms, historical chairs, historical lederhosen." (Guillaume Bijl on the subject of cultural tourism, 1998)
The Belgian conceptual artist Guillaume Bijl died on June 14, 2025 at the age of 79. Typical of the self-taught artist's work is his humorous play with everyday situations, kitsch and museum presentation forms. As a postmodern update of Marcel Duchamp's Objet trouvé, his characteristic object constellations transform everyday spaces into stage-like dioramas and tableaux vivants of absurd poetry.
He realized a special example of his ironic spatial art at documenta 9 in 1992: for the duration of the exhibition, he transformed the display cases in front of the building on the side of the then newly renovated and reopened Sinn und Leffers department store into the display front of an uncanny cabinet of figures. Under the title Die Geschichte der documenta Wachsmuseum/The History of documenta Wax Museum, passers-by were confronted with motionless effigies of historical figures from the exhibition's history: Arnold Bode and his wife Marlou, framed by stereotypical attributes of modernism (a Klee reproduction on the left, an Arp copy on the right); Joseph Beuys in a stiff military pose, with sunken cheeks, fishing vest and hat, accompanied by a fat corner; and last but not least: Jan Hoet, the artistic director of documenta 9 –embalmed as he was during his lifetime, standing next to an exhibition poster, flanked by a stuffed swan. The entire display case was decorated with a historicizing cornice and titled in gold Gothic script. All the framing elements were painted glossy black like a Victorian hearse.
By superimposing documenta and Madame Tussauds, Guillaume Bijl reduced the history of documenta to its lowest denominator in an abbreviation-like manner. Neither caricature nor homage and yet both at the same time, his installation oscillated between comedy and criticism and invited the viewer to deconstruct the documenta myth. In addition to the (self-)historicization of the format, his contribution addressed virulent phenomena such as cultural tourism, event culture and commerce.
Guillaume Bijl's second – lesser-known – contribution to documenta 9 was the bird installation: a total of 15 stuffed birds (crows, starlings, magpies) were placed inconspicuously on and between the buildings of the newly refurbished Königplatz (which has been enriched with a sculptural staircase until further notice); sitting on street lamps and gutters, amidst unsuspecting passers-by and other urban fauna, they blended inconspicuously into the everyday scenery.
From 2001-2011, Guillaume Bijl taught as a professor at the Kunstakademie Münster. It was there that he realized a work from his Sorry Installations series for Skulptur Projekte 2007, for which he staged an archaeological excavation and made a buried church tower (apparently) emerge from the ground.
Bijl's documenta wax museum, created in 1992, later went on an international exhibition tour and is now privately owned in Canada. It returned to Kassel at short notice for the 50th anniversary exhibition of documenta (2005). Twenty years after its “premiere” in Kassel, its cabinet of figures was continued in an exhibition in Knokke, Belgium: this time Harald Szeemann, Bruce Nauman and James Lee Byars made a taxidermic appearance in The History of the documenta Wax Museum 2.
https://www.skulptur-projekte-archiv.de/en-us/2007/projects/130/