From 1975 to 1978, the Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl produced a set of designs on paper, titled Treatments. Treatments took on “Church, Education, Army, Traveling, Building, Craving for Recognition, Sex, Psychiatry, Everyday Routine of a Worker’s Life.” These projects, aiming to “interact directly with reality through art” by “guiding” viewers through “staged settings” and making them thereby undergo “a kind of social-structure or stages-of-life treatment in just a few hours,” were not carried out.1 Instead, in 1979, Bijl gathered the kinds of objects together that were then commonly found in Flemish driving schools to build the appearance of a driving school in the commercial art gallery Ruimte Z in Antwerp.2 Bijl thereby created his first Transformation Installation.The gallery, where nonfunctioning objects are sold that we call “art,” was thereby—symbolically—replaced by a nonfunctioning driving school, reduced to its decor, as driving classes were not taught there, as no instructor was present to deliver such classes. Bijl’s selection and arrangement of ready-made objects to construct the likeness of a driving school was based upon a stereotype lodged in his mind, and not upon any one existing prototype.3 Driving School Z (1979) constitutes in Bijl’s words,A reality within a non-reality (assuming that a place of art is “unreal” or “functionless”). In 1979, I wrote a fictitious pamphlet in which the government writes off art as superfluous because of its supposedly non-functional nature. The pamphlet specified that all art spaces were to be closed and transformed into “useful” social institutions. My installation Driving School Z was the first in this series.4Guillaume Bijl’s key contribution to contemporary culture lies in his Transformation Installations, which since 1979 have taken on a wide variety of subjects exposing many of the dominant values in our Western capitalist societies, as well as a surprisingly broad range of moods and themes. Bijl’s Laundromat (Galerie Andata Ritorno, Geneva, 1985), for example, touches upon cleanliness and commerce, is dreary, and takes on the theme of mechanization (i.e., machines—pure, unquestioning, and unfeeling functionality and efficiency), a modernist leitmotif par excellence.5 Almost all of Bijl’s Transformation Installations explore consumerism, either through the sale of goods (Staircase Store, Galerie Schmela, Dusseldorf, 1987) or services (ARC Hairdressers, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Biennale de Paris, 1982), or the usage of equipment (Fitness Center, Cultureel Centrum “De Beyerd,” Breda, 1985). Exceptions are, at first glance, the settings for competitions (Miss Hamburg, Forum, Art Fair, Hamburg, 1988; TV Quiz Decor, Biennale de Lyon, 1993), political meetings (A New Politician, Kunstverein, Kassel, 1988), military recruitment (Army Information Center, Ghent University, 1987), or medical care (Psychiatric Hospital, Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels, 1981)—to limit the examples to four categories—that is until we remember that all of these phenomena tied to power, authority, and control are almost invariably coupled to consumption and material gain. Everything is for sale, and every service can be delivered—provided the price is right.The Belgian artist reported an early interest in Pop Art, and one of its protagonists, Andy Warhol, proclaimed, “Good business is the best art.”6 Whether Bijl knew this well-known quote or not, Warhol’s statement, which his career eventually sought to exemplify, says a lot about the increasingly intimate ties between art and money—ties that were taken to an entirely new level during the 1960s. Warhol’s declaration casts interesting light upon Bijl’s decision to install make-belief businesses or service centers in art galleries. Significantly, Bijl’s highly deceitful simulations introduce notions of fakery, forgery, and fraud, which give a particularly haunting spin to the whole.Bijl’s installations remind us of how dependent we are upon others for our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. The originals lurking behind this artist’s deliberately bland environments invite conformist responses. We are shown, or told, what to like, buy, dream, think, and how to behave.7 However, we who are constantly purchasing, and—metaphorically—buying into things, are also always trying to sell something, and market ourselves. The line separating the client from the merchant is blurred, as is the gap between art and life in Bijl’s work—to paraphrase Robert Rauschenberg’s famous dictum.8The settings Bijl assembles with the help of assistants expose the vacuous packaging, and remind us that the world is a stage upon which we each play our assigned parts, or not. However, Bijl is no dry preacher, or moralist, or pontificating artist-sociologist. One of the tools that raises Bijl’s work above the level of theoretical statements is his keen sense of humor and mischievous delight in the absurd. The prehistory of Bijl’s perfectly on-target selections and recontextualizations lies in Marcel Duchamp’s commonplace urinal purchased from a hardware store and displayed both signed and dated on top of a pedestal, like an everyday piece of sculpture, in an art exhibition organized in 1917—a revolutionary action, like so many others of the avant-garde, that constitutes a bad-boy prank.9The Belgian artist’s work is visually compelling, profound, and extremely funny. The latter is insufficiently emphasized in the literature—as if humor were deemed inappropriate in the context of art, which is astonishing considering its lauded antecedents throughout the history of culture. Stepping into an art gallery seemingly transformed into a psychiatric ward shocks; one does a double take. Next, one wonders where one has gone wrong, or where one has taken a wrong turn. Then—once one notices that no one else is present (except, perhaps, for one or more flabbergasted, or amused, additional viewers)—one realizes that one has unwillingly become an actor in this deceptive setting (more likely a patient, or visiting family member, or friend, than a doctor or nurse). One has become a subject within an environment that implies something about one’s present condition, hovering between tragedy and comedy. This type of alternate reality—which takes on new meaning in our era of alternate facts—can stir us in ways that many paintings and sculptures cannot, for in Bijl’s trompe l’œil environments, we often find ourselves in the work, and not merely looking at it from the outside.One parallel for this type of unsettling encapsulating experience can be found when we stand in an interior that lies beyond our everyday experiences, such as that of the Pantheon in Rome, Amiens Cathedral in France, a laboratory, or factory. Another lies in the (transposed and tweaked) period rooms of, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, or in the remarkably preserved (or reconstructed) professionally oriented or domestic historical interiors, still situated in their original locations, which are found in many places in Europe, such as the Plantin-Moretus Museum and the Rockox Huis in the city of Antwerp where Bijl lives and works.10 These mixed-media environments, which once constituted contemporary realities—long since unmoored from our continuously changing world—take us back to a different time, in the way that Bijl’s earliest extant Transformation Installations already do, and all of his Transformation Installations eventually will.It is worth underlining that the representation of what are, to our eyes, credible interiors—admittedly in paintings, sculpture, drawings, or prints—is a Renaissance development with roots in classical precedent, and that what we came to call, in the nineteenth century, a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, in which different media come together to create an all-encompassing effect, is a Baroque phenomenon with roots in classical and Renaissance precedent. Furthermore, trompe l’œil approaches, which Bijl swears by, were developed and praised in antiquity. Witness the story, told by Pliny the Elder, of the grapes painted by Zeuxis, which deceived birds, and the curtain painted by Parrhasius, which deceived Zeuxis himself.11 Also, witness the surviving simulacra of inlaid marble panels and of window openings purportedly offering views of adjacent buildings, in Pompeian fresco paintings.12 As Alfred Frankenstein stated: “Our pleasure in trompe l’œil arises from the realization that our œil has been trompe’d.”13Bijl’s desolate spaces, in which all meaning is delegated to things placed in a particular relationship to one another, make us long for actors—in other words, bodies that will activate certain among these objects as well as the surrounding space.14 Thus, Bijl takes on the history of sculpture—whose subject is, traditionally, the human body—indirectly, as well as the history of painting. When we see Bijl’s Fitness Center, I suspect that many among us imagine ourselves, or other people, working out on those contraptions, and suddenly, the physical exertions of the men in Michelangelo’s lost cartoon for the Battle of Cascina (1504), Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of St. Matthew (1599–1600), Rubens’s The Elevation of the Cross (1610), or Rembrandt’s Deposition from the Cross (1634) might come to mind. The idealized athletes, soldiers, heroes, and gods of Greek sculpture have all worked out hard in Bijl’s gym, and some of the veristic men appearing in Roman sculpture would do well to do so.Bijl’s Private Tanning Booth (Galerij Lumen Travo, Amsterdam, 1988) drags in the Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, say by Titian (1548–c. 1557) or Agnolo Bronzino (1569), and the reclining female nude, say by Diego Velázquez (c. 1648–52) and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1814), or the reclining male nude by Jacques-Louis David (1817, with accompanying sleeping female) and Alice Neel (1972). It also evokes the stunning carved marble Sleeping Hermaphrodite (150–125 BCE) at the Musée du Louvre, Paris. The latter brings up the subject of the figure who is more or less stretched out horizontally, and asleep—or dead.15Bijl’s New Supermarket (Galerie Littmann, Basel, 1990) harkens back to the market scenes painted by Pieter Aertsen, Joachim Beuckelaer, and Vincenzo Campi. In fact, all of Bijl’s Transformation Installations take on genre, i.e., scenes from everyday life—which subject matter was developed during the Hellenistic age and made a lasting comeback during the Renaissance—minus the actors, in Bijl’s case.Bijl’s clothing stores (Fashion Boutique, Galerie Lucien Bilinelli, Brussels, 1985; Menswear, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 1986; Formal Wear Rental, Koury-Wingate Gallery, New York, 1990) take the mind back—when one thinks in art historical terms—to portraiture, in which the sitters so frequently show off their Sunday best. The settings for beauty pageants (Miss Hamburg, Forum, Hamburg, 1988; Miss Flanders Beauty, S.M.A.K., Ghent, 2008; Miss Christchurch, Scape Biennial of Art in Public Space, 2008; Miss Copenhagen Beauty, Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen, 2016), a subject Bijl returned to, unusually, several times, also evoke other forms of competition, including among artists, from antiquity to the present—whether set up by equally competitive patrons, or not—to produce the most successful image, monument, or building possible. Bijl’s simulacra of fitness centers and beauty pageants also playfully reference ideals of beauty and, consequently, questions having to do with taste, which are central to the history of art.As it happens, the Transformation Installations, Situation Installations, Cultural Tourism Installations, Sorry Works, and Compositions Trouvées—which, in the majority of cases, are devoid of either illusory or actual actors (except for the occasional ambulating viewer)—constitute still-lifes.16 The latter is yet another genre that was developed in antiquity and was lost with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, was rediscovered during the Renaissance, and has remained a staple of artistic expression ever since, although in painting and other two-dimensional media (eventually including photography), until Pablo Picasso changed the rules of the game in 1909 with his first Cubist still-life sculpture.17 Bijl’s works place our material culture front and center, thereby reminding us (as vanities will) of the passage of time, thus of transience, and making us wonder if life has meanings that transcend the products and (implied) services Bijl puts on display. The silence is deafening.It is worth noting that Bijl—who started off as a self-taught painter in the 1960s—is keenly aware of the history of art. The Belgian agent provocateur has also tackled the subject of art and its history directly in works belonging to his Cultural Tourism Installation series. Witness his mock exhibitions titled Four American Artists (Galleria Grazia Terribile, Milan, 1987) and The Chair in Art in the Flemish Ardennes from 1980 to the Present (Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Sint-Maria-Horebeke, 2006). Witness his display of hyperrealist wax effigies, commissioned from other artists, of Arnold Bode (the organizer of the first Documenta exhibition, accompanied by his wife), German artist Joseph Beuys, and Belgian museum director Jan Hoet, who curated the Documenta in which this installation was first featured (Documenta, The History of the Wax Museum, Documenta IX, Kassel, 1992). Witness Bijl’s videos inspired by the elderly figure of the great Belgian modernist painter James Ensor (James Ensor in Ostend, ca. 1920, 2000) and by a picture by the seventeenth-century Flemish artist Adriaen Brouwer (Adriaen Brouwer anno 2018, 2018).18 His Auction House (Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 1992) belongs to the category of Transformation Installations. The list goes on.Both the oeuvre of the artist and the literary or artistic statements it alludes to, provokes, or parallels cast light across a vast range of societal activity and expression. This is unsurprising, as Bijl takes on big themes—social, economic, political, historical, art historical, cultural, religious—in a highly idiosyncratic way. While writing this introduction, George Perec’s lovely novel Les Choses (Things, 1965) came to mind, as did the bleak, deserted interiors with the things that occupy these, built of colored paper and cardboard, created from 1993 onward by Thomas Demand in order to be photographed and then destroyed—the sleek, large-scale photographs constituting the intended works of art.19 (When focusing upon photography and the moving image—movies, television series, video—we rapidly find countless instances of Bijl-esque scenery; more so even than Robert Rauschenberg, whom he admires, Bijl puts his stamp across the everyday.) In the case of Bijl, the—most often evanescent—sculptural totality is the end goal, and the photograph that records it constitutes mere documentation of a situation by now locked in the past.20 Considering the artistic antecedents mentioned both in this article and in other essays and interviews focusing on this Flemish artist, and our inexorable capitalist milieus, which endlessly ply us with goods and services, it is unsurprising that other artists are deploying strategies that are somewhat akin to Bijl’s. These include the much younger Justin Lowe and Omer Fast, who through their respective installation sculptures Helter Swelter (2006) and August (2017), took on issues having to do with, among other things, race, ethnicity, and class (i.e. identity), the latter artist stoking considerable controversy along the way.21Guillaume Bijl has produced much more than Transformation Installations and Cultural Tourism Installations. The interview published here also touches upon those other series—which grew out of ideas and processes used in the Transformation Installations. This interview was conducted in Dutch during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020) via email from Rochester, New York, with the artist, who is based in Antwerp.22The Situation installations constitute another important part of my output. I made a series of interventions within the public realm that I conceive of as fiction embedded in reality. For example, I installed about ten stuffed seagulls in the popular small picturesque port of Hoorn in Holland in 1990, thereby accentuating artificiality within artificiality. Another example of an almost overlooked visual situation was achieved by installing No Camping, including tents and beach chairs, in a park with a large sign stating in Dutch: “VERBODEN TE KAMPEREN” (CAMPING IS FORBIDDEN)—my way of startling the passerby (Gemeentepark, Bornem, 1989). These Situations set up in public spaces have both an irrational and irritating component to them—all in good cheer.