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,...

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