In the mid-1980s, Jef Geys enrolled in the École ABC de Paris, a mail-order drawing course promising to teach perspective and basic form in the popular “School of Paris” style. Geys followed its lessons to the letter, then reproduced the entire curriculum as a series of schematic drawings, publishing the result in 1990. The piece mimics the format of an inexpensive, amateur instruction manual, with its subdivisions by genre and its categories of taste, while quietly mocking the very system of classification and connoisseurship it imitates, one that stood in direct contradiction to the transgressive spirit of the Parisian avant-garde it claimed to teach.

The work is characteristic of Geys’s lifelong practice: made from the periphery (he lived and taught in the small town of Balen for most of his career), skeptical of hierarchy, and committed to using the ordinary structures of pedagogy and bureaucracy as material for conceptual art.