Guillaume Bijl :
Sculpture Trouvée auf einem Hügel

At a suitable distance from the Ladendorf Meditation Walkway there is a work by the Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl, who attracts attention with his astonishing transformative scenarios. The pseudo-historical spaces he developed in the 1990s engage ironically with cultural tourism. When Bijl, for instance, reproduces the room where a composer died, a supermarket or an antiques shop on a scale of 1:1 at a museum the viewer is placed in the unfamiliar situation of having to adopt an archaeological view of the present by the alienating experience of having reality duplicated at an unusual location. The presumed past of the present alienates it as a still life and makes it look like a different, surreal reality. Referencing the terminology of Surrealism, Bijl calls his ensembles 'Compositions trouvées'. The timber hut to be seen on the edge of a field in the Wine Belt is a special kind of Objet trouvé that can also be scrutinised through a telescope. The Sculpture trouvée, on a Hill had been planned back in 1988 for the exhibition Das gläserne U-Boot (The Glass Submarine) at the Tabakfabrik Stein. The work has found an ideal location in Ladendorf at long last. Bijl's artistic process combines the Readymade (a prefabricated garden shed from a D.I.Y. store) with a Tableau vivant (people will sit in the sun in front of the door), and classical sculpture with participatory and performative methods. That the viewer with the telescope can not only observe the apparently insignificant shed but also the Buschberg military radar station is an additional subtle joke by this ironic and witty artist.
(Brigitte Huck)