Guillaume Bijl - 'No liability for wardrobe'

Guillaume Bijl: 'Für Garderobe keine Haftung', 1990.

• Edition of 750 copies
• This copy is numbered 252 on the back of the box.
• Removable object: plate with coat rack and title plate.
• Folder with 18 postcards with images of installations by Guiaume Bijl and an information card.
  
• In original box.

'Irony, unlike parody, makes the function of the author inseparable from the function of the viewer, and vice versa; not because of some form of complicity or understanding, but because of the debate and its outcome. When the When irony speaks about painting it sows doubt, when irony speaks about art and culture it makes the question so hard that one is forced to come up with an answer' (Thierry de Duve in 'Resonances du Readymade, Duchamp entre avant- guard and tradition' / Editions Jacqueline Chambon, Nimes 1989, p, 186).

It is in this sense that the irony speaks, now that Witte de With, a new place, a 'cloakroom' for art and works of art, is opening with an exhibition and an edition of Guillaume Bijl. The Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl (Antwerp 1946) ' For more than ten years now, 'test' has been examining institutions whose name or character is associated with culture for their usefulness as 'places for art'. Or should fragility be written instead of usefulness? In Bijl's case, the question of the After all, the usability of art is a question of the viability of art. And is it still appropriate today to speak of 'places for art'?


Guillaume Bijl undeniably shows the similarities between the display and presentation of 'merchandise', for example in the gleaming villas and illuminated showrooms of the periphery, and the classification and demonstration of the 'bric à brac' in the museums and exhibition initiatives that are everywhere at the same time loom. That in both cases it is about reality is an indisputable fact: nothing and no one escapes expositle-tone and exposition-time. The exhibition effect has made itself the subject and the need for it is real. The question is by whom and what creates that need.
The rawness and multiplicity of Bijl's production shows that, just like the 'merchandise', the fragments and objects on display in museums and exhibitions have become interchangeable. They have become props or decors that can only be used to refer to themselves and only have a right to exist when they are reproduced in the form of catalogues or postcards, preferably in colour.

Guillaume Bijl's projects thus take on the character of ironic comedies in which the viewer is required to respond immediately to the question: who is responsible for the damage caused to, or the loss of, art? 'Für Garderobe keine Haftung', would be could once be the title of yet unknown plays by Thomas Bernhard or Botha Strauss,