Ein neuer erfolgreicher Tag / A New Successful Day

It is not just the figure itself, a businessman who performs an exuberant handstand but has first carefully put down his briefcase, but also its location and installation that demonstrate some wry irony. In the Elberfeld pedestrian zone, near the tax office and several banks, facing Kasinostraße, the sculpture found its place on a massive pedestal at a time when the new financial crisis scared the living daylights out of politics and business. Unimpressed, a standard metal plaque announces the title of the sculpture: “Ein neuer erfolgreicher Tag.” Other aspects enhance the absurdity of the representation. The pedestal’s dimensions would have been enough for a monument of a historic figure whose role as an ideal or statesman is now assumed by an anonymous banker. The pedestal is surrounded by a postcard-shaped border with a concrete edge that makes even the red roses planted here look artificial. It is narrow enough to make the pedestal seem bulky but wide enough to keep the viewer at a distance. In 2008, Carmen Klement aptly wrote about this work in the annual report of the Van der Heydt Museum and the Kunst- und Museumsverein Wuppertal: “Bijl’s conceptual game of shifting contexts and meanings to the point of absurdity is characteristic of his work. He takes up an urban situation, considers it as a field of meaning and adds something very closely related, familiar and wittily revealing.” “My practice is critical. I mock institutions, our civilisations, our habits,” the artist said in an interview with Hans Theys in 1998. His works, he added, were a “homage to art or the thinking human being.”