Guillaume Bijl - "Voting booth museum" - offset print - Sold

The installation ‘Voting Box Museum’ is a typical example of the type of works that Guillaume Bijl categorises within his oeuvre under ‘Cultural Tourism’. It fits in with his interest in the cliché values and standards that civilisation imposes on us, such as the phenomenon of cultural tourism, about which the artist expresses himself in an ironic-critical manner. Or as he himself puts it: “We belong to a generation that on the one hand goes to travel agencies, fitness centres and casinos, and on the other hand builds nuclear shelters. We spend our weekends visiting ‘interesting’ historical sites. By means of this category of works I question on the one hand the artificial values of our Western consumer society and on the other hand the way in which history and culture are presented.” In ‘Voting Box Museum’ Bijl no longer focuses on the broad social reality, as was the case in his ‘transformation installations’. He focuses on a partial aspect of it, namely the art and cultural world and its tendency towards formalised and clichéd presentation. Here he mocks what art can or could be and the urge of this world to present art in the straitjacket of so-called ‘theme exhibitions’. Bijl’s ‘museum installations’ perfectly demonstrate how artificial the exhibition of cultural objects is. Not only within his installation itself, but perhaps even more so within the ‘real’ museum that has this work in its collection.