++++ The director of the Städel School and head of Portikus, Daniel Birnbaum, was a bit scared that he would be made responsible. Someone had written the word Resist on the columns of Portikus, far up, in an anarchist manner in black paint and a quick brushstroke, on each column one letter. After all, it is well-known that he is not very enthusiastic about the announced demolition of his famous art exhibition hall in a container. So now there is this slogan calling on people to resist on those highly desired columns where, at the behest of the City of Frankfurt, a library is once again to be constructed.
When planning this work, Marc Bijl, 28, from Rotterdam and the real author of the slogan, could not have known anything about the current politics of town-planning. The works by Marc Bijl look as if they had a political background, as if he were pursuing an objective which he wanted to support so urgently that he climbed up ladders, committed offences of property damage and also put up with other unpleasant consequences.
But Marc Bijl is not an activist, but an artist, and his interventions do not make any clear statement. Rather, he investigates the mode of functioning of such political statements whose formal appearance is just as important as their content. The fact that he does not make his authorship obvious makes the messages appear like something which is not art. His graffiti on the walls of houses in Berlin calling for class struggle or which refer to "G8 murderers" are indistinguishable from genuine messages on walls.
On the one hand, therefore, he doubles their subversive effect, whilst undermining them simultaneously, on the other. For, who is being more serious, who is concerned with an issue, and what is the issue? "They are one-way street messages which an observer can notice or not," says Bijl. The fact that his work at Portikus really does have a current relevance and an apparently unambiguous message is a coincidence. Marc Bijl does not stand for any ideologies in his works; he only whispers a text which could fit the staging at hand or at the latest could fit once he has arrived. "I regard art as something resembling advertising or political slogans, as pseudo-statements."