Miss Hamburg Wahl 1988. Die Kandidatinnen. Audition: Guillaume Bijl.

Antwerp.: Zeno X Gallery., 1988. Original black cloth, complete with red silk sash obi with gilt-stamped titles. Clear plastic jacket and black cloth-covered slipcase. Fraying to edges of slipcase, otherwise very good.. (34 x 34 cm).. Tipped-in title page & 10 original colour photographs, each mounted individually on sheets of black card. Many of the Transformation-Installations of the Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl place the visitor within a consumer or service-oriented scenario, in which the usual choreography is nowhere to be seen. Bijl’s ‘Art Liquidation Project’ began in 1979 when he wrote a fictional pamphlet stating that the government had deemed art irrelevant for society and therefore spaces devoted to the arts would now be turned into places more blatantly beneficial to society. The first in this series of projects was Driving School Z, set up in Ruimte Z Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium. This driving school set-up was so meticulously staged that passers-by would enter and ask about driving lessons. Bijl’s perfect imitation of reality was now of benefit to society, and the question of the role of art in society was lived out in the installation and the many series to follow. One of these was “Miss Hamburg” a realistic reconstruction of a beauty contest (complete with audience seating and podium), held on the evening of the 28th March at the Messehalle “Forum” in Hamburg. This artist’s book provides seated studio photographs of each of the ten female beauty contest “candidates”. The book was published in an edition of 20 copies, numbered and signed by Bijl on the colophon. Complete with the enclosed large offset-printed folded poster for the installation (59 x 35.5 cm, unfolded).