Interview with Boris Achour, April 2010
Why and how did you decide to leave the workshop and to implement actions in urban space without calling anyone? Were you aware of artists like Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader Adrian Piper? I think this work when she walks the streets of New York with a t-shirt where it says "wet paint", and I can not help to make a comparison, even very formal, with Rich women are beautiful.
you familiar with these practices there?
No I do not know them at all times and I discovered later. Cons by quite liked the very first work of Tony Cragg: photographs taken on the beach, sculptural practice with very simple things found, then that agency photography, such as pebbles he places on his forearm. I liked especially much Filliou already, and use direct and poetic his materials, how he has to physically connect disparate elements ... But I never really thought about what might have influenced the Shares little, what are the influences that I read afterwards. At the time I left my degree in Cergy, then my post diploma in fine arts in Paris, and a year in a workshop I had been loaned to Bastille. I worked alone, with few visits old friends from school, I knew hardly anyone in the world of art, I do not know how to show my work or to meet people he would could be interested, and I had no proposal exposure. What is fundamental with little Shares (1993-1997) (1) is that I want my work to be seen, because I think that if my work is not seen, there not.
But it is not only to be seen, because you could not perform the actions in the little shop. I thought it was from you a real desire to leave the studio to go to rub your "real" deal with. In addition, by concealing the artistic status of actions, being "stealth", I thought you were trying to touch the future through so fleeting, to be in a register of discrete and ephemeral ...
If I left the studio and realized the little actions, it was not by desire for stealth or concealment the artistic nature of my work, but rather by a desire and a need for assertion: that my work is seen by viewers, even if they were not aware of his artistic nature, and therefore that it exists, since at that time I had no opportunity to show it. That's why I do not really understand this word "stealth" which seems to indicate a willingness stealth, camouflage, go unnoticed. The "little" bit was quantitative Actions: shortness of life, regardless of effectiveness, few material resources used, but, as noted by William Désanges, the "few" of the title can also be read as a potential deferred: action-can.
I use the term "stealth" in reference to aircraft during the Gulf War: occurrence "stealth" was used to designate the American bombers undetectable by radar. But here, your actions are not detected by radar the field of art, unless they take place in the festivals of course. The term "stealth" to describe how art sometimes gets public spaces and social questions the notion of ideal spectator and waited. Stephen Wright speaks of art as "low coefficient of artistic visibility, and may be more appropriate is it to you.
It was fundamental for me that the works carried out in public space are perceived with the least possible a priori by those who are experiencing, ie with the fewest possible signs identifying them as art and this so that their effects are not possible - or the least possible - parasitized by prejudices, either positive or negative, about their artistic nature. I wanted to meet directly as possible between a person and an object or situation, without preconceptions and without the gate reading "art."
But can it work "work" if it is not seen as such? According to Goodman, it is a concern for implementation of the work. (2) To think these actions there, so that art takes place, do we not know them, collect them as works ?
Our discussion shows how the concept of stealth / low visibility coefficient is complex and how it can be misunderstood. I think it works that I made and could enter the scheme then there are various ways, but what mattered in this work mainly carried out between 1993 and 2000 [Shares little (1993-1997 ) Rich women are beautiful (1996), A sculpture (1996), Confetti (1997), Stopper (1999), Ghosty (2000)] is the encounter between a work and its audience and that this meeting could produce. Therefore, that what was being seen or not seen as art me completely equal. I do not think art depends solely or even primarily from its context of showing or appearance but rather the effects it can generate.
There would be a kind of inherent strength in art?
Someone walking down the street and he noticed a piece of wood stuck to a tree stump or a rock Suchard placed on a cabinet painted brown plaster, or elsewhere, In my opinion, do not notice most of the time ... But for those who encounter these things, something happens. Even if I do not know precisely the extent and nature (surprise, incomprehension, aesthetic emotion, reflections on urban objects, the possibility of dealing with them ...) for this purpose, the important thing for me is that he place. To resume your separation between Goodman realization and implementation, I thought at the time, and even now, that the "implementation" or effectuation of the work takes place even if it is not perceived as being of art Since the meeting between a person and the situation has an effect on the perceiver. This question was such a central sculpture. This work consists of an object resembling a book whose pages are stuck: you can not open it, there is nothing to read except the title "A sculpture" on the cover. The work was placed, with their agreement, in twenty public libraries in Paris, among the works of fiction. This object, formally very close to those around him, but without anonymous code number, is lost among his peers. It is not identifiable as an object of art, unless we consider This slight difference makes him de facto something artistic, but I do not think that this criterion can be sufficient without an art institution. This work, which has deliberately not been photographed there for me artistically in two ways: first because I told you in that time or because he was mentioned in catalogs, magazines or my website, and that therefore this object really exists in the "traditional" or institutional art. But then there are also artistically by the effect it produces, or hope to produce, at his chance encounter with a person discovering it on the shelves of fiction books in a library. It is this aspect that I wanted to highlight in this work: the fact that for the person coming across nothing (or little) does it art, but however, that this object, by its formal characteristics, its offset relative to its surroundings, its ambiguity, can be a support to the imagination, reflection and questioning his presence. I think I wanted to offer a chance meeting between a "spectator" and an object freed up assumptions and traditional codes of receipt of the work.
I love this idea, even if you do not know if it's art, the object surprises, stimulates the imagination. Does it need to be brought into the field of art? I have not decided today. I like to think that we can provide a perception processed materials at all incongruous facts that are crossed. You know the consequence of your "sculpture"? Now I'm going to see the drama department of Paris libraries with special attention. And what happens there in these cases? I could find certainly not your "sculpture", but other unusual things.
However, I also wanted to ensure that these works could exist elsewhere, differently, with a different resonance and other effects, hence my concerns to suggest what I thought at the time being of traces or documentation, but which now seems rather to be another work made from the same object or situation.
As if beyond the gesture or object "low coefficient of artistic visibility, you create the elements that continue to exist as entities. Your photographs seem to acquire a temporality of their own, constructing their story. Moreover, it seems that today, artists are aware of the importance of the exhibition and art market and will create works based, unlike the 1970s. In an interview with Christophe Wavelet in 2003, Vito Acconci, who performed the actions "stealth" in the 70s ( The Following Piece in 1969, for example) explains that the art of those years did the bed which occurred in the 1980s, namely the perversion the situation in the world of art, allowing the market system of art galleries to take precedence over the artistic activity itself, through the fetishization of the productions. The artists of recent decades seem to have full awareness of these data, and anticipated system demand. Would not it be you? Consider the
Stock little example. When I decided to work in the street, I wondered right away if I had to keep track (and if so, what kind). And after hesitating for a split second, I said yes. Do not keep track of these accomplishments have witnessed a romantic conception of art, an art that makes things "pure," separated from the world, and between other aspect of his shop. But the main reason that made me shoot the film and shares little was telling me that someday I could possibly sell them I wanted the relationship to the viewer is at stake in this, when I doing things in the street, and the little life they had to live, but that this relationship may exist later in another form. And the two moments of existence works with both types of apprehension I cared just as much. I never thought the streets against the gallery, but as a space that offered visual features, spatial, social interest me at this time.
Does the act of recording does not also part of the action?
For Stock little by both timidity and want to be quiet, still I managed to do that at times and places where there was hardly anyone. I did not want to come to me asking "What are you doing? What is it? . I did not go directly into contact with people, I wanted to do my stuff, it exists and that's it. I was filming just enough time to achieve, then I left what I had installed, and they lived only time they lived. As for cons Confetti, I chose to shoot in first person by both simplicity but also because the camera gave me some protection. I'm not sure that the reactions would have been the same if I threw confetti in the faces of passers by outside any festive period without the fix with a camera ...
Have you stopped doing the little Stock because you had the opportunity to exhibitions ?
I have not really stopped the Stock bit, I actually wanted to do other things. However, Shares little soon had some success early and I was aware of the stylistic and thematic labels that plate on an artist or the artists themselves put in place for ease of identification. And I soon felt the risk of being typecast as "the guy who does weird things in the street." And so, partly in reaction to a fear of confinement but also because I have always been completely heterogeneous in my practice, I tried other things.
But at the same time, you say you came out of the workshop to be seen, because you were not exposed. Now you stop when you have the opportunity to be seen in galleries.
The late Stock little has in fact coincided with the beginning of my collaboration with the Galerie Chez Valentin in 1997 but continued to produce works that you qualify for "low visibility coefficient artistic "until 2000. It is when I was asked to perform actions on-bit control, through invitations to a festival or an exhibition I went to something else.
Especially if you avoid the most direct contact with passersby.
Hence the fact that I rarely respond positively to an invitation to work in the street. I realized in 1997 a pamphlet deliberately pejorative by reversing the pattern of those of African marabouts at the invitation of Roberto Martinez and Antonio, but have them delegate distribution. There was also Stopper in 1999, which was a wild collage of posters representing me across one thumb up. Last reply Ghosty was (2000) (3), at an exhibition at Enghien-les-Bains
where it was proposed to make an ephemeral work in the street for a month. There was a meeting point, mediators, leaflets with a map of the city were shown the locations of the works. The city as a museum ... I found it at odds with what I wanted: the anonymity, the surprise of the meeting, that the artistic nature of the item offered is not given immediately. I agreed but what I was suggesting was someone who uses the city as a stage set, walking while wearing a mask of his own face. We could not pass by chance. And once again, what interested me was that the people who crossed the man, if they were unaware of the event, he could invent a story, be troubled. Moreover, there have been quite violent reactions.
Really?
Yes. As Ghosty did not respond to inquiries from passers-by, he almost got mugged twice, something I had not anticipated and I absolutely did not want to generate. For me it was someone who had escaped from an amusement park, a Disney character who would wander into a town. Except he had not mask a familiar face, but her own face to him.
One thing I was particularly marked and I find that throughout your work, it is this notion of presence / absence, a game on this duality. In Conatus: A Forest (2008) (4) is particularly marked
with the slideshow that shows the dancers in action in the area has gone through the viewer. It seems to me that it was already Now another way, in Stock shortly. It is also true for Non Stop Landscape (2003) (5). There's this automatic door, Cosmos, which opens there is no one to trigger the opening. It opens with an absence.
True ... I had not thought of that, it opens just as they lack open despite the absence. This piece, I had rather thought of as a haunted and autonomous sculpture, crazy. All my thinking on this work focused on the fact that it opens more independently than from the absence of triggering opening. It makes me think of another piece oldest from 1997, I sympathize so much I find it cumbersome: it's a video where there is a static shot of a hand filled with a plaster form. A monitor is placed on the ground, we see the hand motionless, wide one. The work is called Met. It is both a gesture of request, but as the hand is already full, it is impossible to receive. So an address that prohibits any return. In some ways, much more demonstrative, I think it has to do with the door of the Cosmos.
Does the landscape, recurrent theme in your work, be read as an echo to the fact that you are building parts for the exhibition, in which we enter into such a landscape?
First, they are separate elements that form a whole, the landscape. Then, for me, the term landscape is not understood in the sense of panorama, or point of view ...
For me it is an intellectual construct of space, from a point of view, no?
It is rather a space walk, which induces a temporality, and the fact that we are not faced with something but something within which one moves. So the opposite point of view, which involves a fixity, a single point and ideal. I also like the side of the outdated term.
It also refers to a genre of painting.
Yes, but I do not think it has been important. This term originated in my work with non-stop exposure Landscape in 2003. I was returning from a residence in Japan, I visited many Zen gardens in Kyoto and it was a powerful experience. I myself was there all alone, facing a space very simple, and a mental projection had actually occurred: the gravel is at once an expanse of white stones but also the sea, the rock is both a small dark mass of stone, but c is also a mountain. This dual aspect of the reality of things appears, which is pretty incredible. That's what sparked my interest in this concept of landscape. How, in an exhibition, a sculpture can be there for her even in its autonomy, but also how it can be something else, part of a whole.
Then the public to project this "other thing" to survey the landscape and to the mental projection.
Yes. To me the relationship of the work the viewer is a very important. From the beginning. A viewer does not work without. When I prepare an exhibition or works, I always think of this relationship, whether in the staging of the exhibition or in the nature of the work. For example, for "The Power of Art" in 2009, I realized Conatus: The night of dancing which is a film showing a tap dancer wearing a mask through which light exposure at night , dancing. A viewer who enters the exhibition, there walk, and then see a movie with a character who moves into the environment comes through, maybe it does revalue its own path, how he moved into this space, how this scenery can be seen as a landscape, or as a decoration ... And again it comes to presence and absence of simultaneous ...
There was much talk of collusion between art and life in your work. What do you think?
I discovered the art with the future, when I was in high school. I knew anything about art, contemporary or not, and second a teacher read to us in history class the Manifesto of Futurist Marinetti. It made me upset and it was a revelation. As in all the avant garde, there was this desire to transform the world by combining art with life, not to separate aesthetic experience from life experience. I discovered art as this, with all the enthusiasm of adolescent idealization and emphasis that implies. Then later I discovered Filliou Kaprow, the Situationists, Fluxus, and all these things fed me and touched ... But these questions of overcoming of art, the realization of art in life are issues that seemed to stun me for a long time, especially when they were still highly idealized or injunctive relief as in Debord. When I hear talk of "art and life, it is often to lament that they are not met or confused, or to say they have nothing to do together. Where for me art and life come together, because I think being an artist is making the relationship between self and the world, so the others.
Notes:
(1) "The Stock few are anonymous and ephemeral interventions performed in public with items found on site. The first were photographed and presented as a slideshow. From 1995 they were filmed on video. "
(2) Nelson Goodman, art in theory and in action , Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio tests, p.63
(3) "Ghosty is a fictional character wearing a mask of his own face and wandering for three months in the town of Enghien-les-Bains, on the occasion of the exhibition Architecture and mobility, does not make the word nor meet anyone. "
(4) Exposure Monterhermoso Cultural Center, Vitoria, Spain, May 2008. "The audience is changing within a labyrinthine structure of cardboard tubes (...). This film, as a slide show, five characters are also evolving in the forest (...). "
(5) Exposure to Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, Paris, 2003. "Work-exposure in which the viewer walks in an environment immersed in the darkness where only objects often out of scale - a giant sausage, garden fences, an iceberg, bags, a desk, flower beds - are illuminated so theater. On an overhead screen is projected a film showing five characters methodically manipulating each sculpture (...). The film offers the viewer, who recognizes objects in space, a disturbed relation to temporality: something has occurred or could occur. "
(6) Exposure to Fri-Art, Fribourg, Switzerland, 2003. "Conceived as an animated landscape intermittently by the temporality of the video. (...) The Lambada, whispered by the shape of pink Cosmos driver exposure, determines the beginning and end of the show, 4-minute sequence during which light sculptures (Rock Lake and Fountain) flash, a hanging sculpture (Cosmos) turns on itself, and an automatic door (Cosmos) activated at random. When the song ends, stop or turn off the objects, the exhibition remains at rest about fifteen minutes. (...) "
Why and how did you decide to leave the workshop and to implement actions in urban space without calling anyone? Were you aware of artists like Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader Adrian Piper? I think this work when she walks the streets of New York with a t-shirt where it says "wet paint", and I can not help to make a comparison, even very formal, with Rich women are beautiful.
you familiar with these practices there? No I do not know them at all times and I discovered later. Cons by quite liked the very first work of Tony Cragg: photographs taken on the beach, sculptural practice with very simple things found, then that agency photography, such as pebbles he places on his forearm. I liked especially much Filliou already, and use direct and poetic his materials, how he has to physically connect disparate elements ... But I never really thought about what might have influenced the Shares little, what are the influences that I read afterwards. At the time I left my degree in Cergy, then my post diploma in fine arts in Paris, and a year in a workshop I had been loaned to Bastille. I worked alone, with few visits old friends from school, I knew hardly anyone in the world of art, I do not know how to show my work or to meet people he would could be interested, and I had no proposal exposure. What is fundamental with little Shares (1993-1997) (1) is that I want my work to be seen, because I think that if my work is not seen, there not.
But it is not only to be seen, because you could not perform the actions in the little shop. I thought it was from you a real desire to leave the studio to go to rub your "real" deal with. In addition, by concealing the artistic status of actions, being "stealth", I thought you were trying to touch the future through so fleeting, to be in a register of discrete and ephemeral ...
If I left the studio and realized the little actions, it was not by desire for stealth or concealment the artistic nature of my work, but rather by a desire and a need for assertion: that my work is seen by viewers, even if they were not aware of his artistic nature, and therefore that it exists, since at that time I had no opportunity to show it. That's why I do not really understand this word "stealth" which seems to indicate a willingness stealth, camouflage, go unnoticed. The "little" bit was quantitative Actions: shortness of life, regardless of effectiveness, few material resources used, but, as noted by William Désanges, the "few" of the title can also be read as a potential deferred: action-can.
I use the term "stealth" in reference to aircraft during the Gulf War: occurrence "stealth" was used to designate the American bombers undetectable by radar. But here, your actions are not detected by radar the field of art, unless they take place in the festivals of course. The term "stealth" to describe how art sometimes gets public spaces and social questions the notion of ideal spectator and waited. Stephen Wright speaks of art as "low coefficient of artistic visibility, and may be more appropriate is it to you.
It was fundamental for me that the works carried out in public space are perceived with the least possible a priori by those who are experiencing, ie with the fewest possible signs identifying them as art and this so that their effects are not possible - or the least possible - parasitized by prejudices, either positive or negative, about their artistic nature. I wanted to meet directly as possible between a person and an object or situation, without preconceptions and without the gate reading "art."
But can it work "work" if it is not seen as such? According to Goodman, it is a concern for implementation of the work. (2) To think these actions there, so that art takes place, do we not know them, collect them as works ?
Our discussion shows how the concept of stealth / low visibility coefficient is complex and how it can be misunderstood. I think it works that I made and could enter the scheme then there are various ways, but what mattered in this work mainly carried out between 1993 and 2000 [Shares little (1993-1997 ) Rich women are beautiful (1996), A sculpture (1996), Confetti (1997), Stopper (1999), Ghosty (2000)] is the encounter between a work and its audience and that this meeting could produce. Therefore, that what was being seen or not seen as art me completely equal. I do not think art depends solely or even primarily from its context of showing or appearance but rather the effects it can generate.
There would be a kind of inherent strength in art?
Someone walking down the street and he noticed a piece of wood stuck to a tree stump or a rock Suchard placed on a cabinet painted brown plaster, or elsewhere, In my opinion, do not notice most of the time ... But for those who encounter these things, something happens. Even if I do not know precisely the extent and nature (surprise, incomprehension, aesthetic emotion, reflections on urban objects, the possibility of dealing with them ...) for this purpose, the important thing for me is that he place. To resume your separation between Goodman realization and implementation, I thought at the time, and even now, that the "implementation" or effectuation of the work takes place even if it is not perceived as being of art Since the meeting between a person and the situation has an effect on the perceiver. This question was such a central sculpture. This work consists of an object resembling a book whose pages are stuck: you can not open it, there is nothing to read except the title "A sculpture" on the cover. The work was placed, with their agreement, in twenty public libraries in Paris, among the works of fiction. This object, formally very close to those around him, but without anonymous code number, is lost among his peers. It is not identifiable as an object of art, unless we consider This slight difference makes him de facto something artistic, but I do not think that this criterion can be sufficient without an art institution. This work, which has deliberately not been photographed there for me artistically in two ways: first because I told you in that time or because he was mentioned in catalogs, magazines or my website, and that therefore this object really exists in the "traditional" or institutional art. But then there are also artistically by the effect it produces, or hope to produce, at his chance encounter with a person discovering it on the shelves of fiction books in a library. It is this aspect that I wanted to highlight in this work: the fact that for the person coming across nothing (or little) does it art, but however, that this object, by its formal characteristics, its offset relative to its surroundings, its ambiguity, can be a support to the imagination, reflection and questioning his presence. I think I wanted to offer a chance meeting between a "spectator" and an object freed up assumptions and traditional codes of receipt of the work.
I love this idea, even if you do not know if it's art, the object surprises, stimulates the imagination. Does it need to be brought into the field of art? I have not decided today. I like to think that we can provide a perception processed materials at all incongruous facts that are crossed. You know the consequence of your "sculpture"? Now I'm going to see the drama department of Paris libraries with special attention. And what happens there in these cases? I could find certainly not your "sculpture", but other unusual things.
However, I also wanted to ensure that these works could exist elsewhere, differently, with a different resonance and other effects, hence my concerns to suggest what I thought at the time being of traces or documentation, but which now seems rather to be another work made from the same object or situation.
As if beyond the gesture or object "low coefficient of artistic visibility, you create the elements that continue to exist as entities. Your photographs seem to acquire a temporality of their own, constructing their story. Moreover, it seems that today, artists are aware of the importance of the exhibition and art market and will create works based, unlike the 1970s. In an interview with Christophe Wavelet in 2003, Vito Acconci, who performed the actions "stealth" in the 70s ( The Following Piece in 1969, for example) explains that the art of those years did the bed which occurred in the 1980s, namely the perversion the situation in the world of art, allowing the market system of art galleries to take precedence over the artistic activity itself, through the fetishization of the productions. The artists of recent decades seem to have full awareness of these data, and anticipated system demand. Would not it be you? Consider the
Stock little example. When I decided to work in the street, I wondered right away if I had to keep track (and if so, what kind). And after hesitating for a split second, I said yes. Do not keep track of these accomplishments have witnessed a romantic conception of art, an art that makes things "pure," separated from the world, and between other aspect of his shop. But the main reason that made me shoot the film and shares little was telling me that someday I could possibly sell them I wanted the relationship to the viewer is at stake in this, when I doing things in the street, and the little life they had to live, but that this relationship may exist later in another form. And the two moments of existence works with both types of apprehension I cared just as much. I never thought the streets against the gallery, but as a space that offered visual features, spatial, social interest me at this time.
Does the act of recording does not also part of the action?
For Stock little by both timidity and want to be quiet, still I managed to do that at times and places where there was hardly anyone. I did not want to come to me asking "What are you doing? What is it? . I did not go directly into contact with people, I wanted to do my stuff, it exists and that's it. I was filming just enough time to achieve, then I left what I had installed, and they lived only time they lived. As for cons Confetti, I chose to shoot in first person by both simplicity but also because the camera gave me some protection. I'm not sure that the reactions would have been the same if I threw confetti in the faces of passers by outside any festive period without the fix with a camera ...
Have you stopped doing the little Stock because you had the opportunity to exhibitions ?
I have not really stopped the Stock bit, I actually wanted to do other things. However, Shares little soon had some success early and I was aware of the stylistic and thematic labels that plate on an artist or the artists themselves put in place for ease of identification. And I soon felt the risk of being typecast as "the guy who does weird things in the street." And so, partly in reaction to a fear of confinement but also because I have always been completely heterogeneous in my practice, I tried other things.
But at the same time, you say you came out of the workshop to be seen, because you were not exposed. Now you stop when you have the opportunity to be seen in galleries.
The late Stock little has in fact coincided with the beginning of my collaboration with the Galerie Chez Valentin in 1997 but continued to produce works that you qualify for "low visibility coefficient artistic "until 2000. It is when I was asked to perform actions on-bit control, through invitations to a festival or an exhibition I went to something else.
Especially if you avoid the most direct contact with passersby.
Hence the fact that I rarely respond positively to an invitation to work in the street. I realized in 1997 a pamphlet deliberately pejorative by reversing the pattern of those of African marabouts at the invitation of Roberto Martinez and Antonio, but have them delegate distribution. There was also Stopper in 1999, which was a wild collage of posters representing me across one thumb up. Last reply Ghosty was (2000) (3), at an exhibition at Enghien-les-Bains
where it was proposed to make an ephemeral work in the street for a month. There was a meeting point, mediators, leaflets with a map of the city were shown the locations of the works. The city as a museum ... I found it at odds with what I wanted: the anonymity, the surprise of the meeting, that the artistic nature of the item offered is not given immediately. I agreed but what I was suggesting was someone who uses the city as a stage set, walking while wearing a mask of his own face. We could not pass by chance. And once again, what interested me was that the people who crossed the man, if they were unaware of the event, he could invent a story, be troubled. Moreover, there have been quite violent reactions. Really?
Yes. As Ghosty did not respond to inquiries from passers-by, he almost got mugged twice, something I had not anticipated and I absolutely did not want to generate. For me it was someone who had escaped from an amusement park, a Disney character who would wander into a town. Except he had not mask a familiar face, but her own face to him.
One thing I was particularly marked and I find that throughout your work, it is this notion of presence / absence, a game on this duality. In Conatus: A Forest (2008) (4) is particularly marked
with the slideshow that shows the dancers in action in the area has gone through the viewer. It seems to me that it was already Now another way, in Stock shortly. It is also true for Non Stop Landscape (2003) (5). There's this automatic door, Cosmos, which opens there is no one to trigger the opening. It opens with an absence.
True ... I had not thought of that, it opens just as they lack open despite the absence. This piece, I had rather thought of as a haunted and autonomous sculpture, crazy. All my thinking on this work focused on the fact that it opens more independently than from the absence of triggering opening. It makes me think of another piece oldest from 1997, I sympathize so much I find it cumbersome: it's a video where there is a static shot of a hand filled with a plaster form. A monitor is placed on the ground, we see the hand motionless, wide one. The work is called Met. It is both a gesture of request, but as the hand is already full, it is impossible to receive. So an address that prohibits any return. In some ways, much more demonstrative, I think it has to do with the door of the Cosmos.
Does the landscape, recurrent theme in your work, be read as an echo to the fact that you are building parts for the exhibition, in which we enter into such a landscape?
First, they are separate elements that form a whole, the landscape. Then, for me, the term landscape is not understood in the sense of panorama, or point of view ...
For me it is an intellectual construct of space, from a point of view, no?
It is rather a space walk, which induces a temporality, and the fact that we are not faced with something but something within which one moves. So the opposite point of view, which involves a fixity, a single point and ideal. I also like the side of the outdated term.
It also refers to a genre of painting.
Yes, but I do not think it has been important. This term originated in my work with non-stop exposure Landscape in 2003. I was returning from a residence in Japan, I visited many Zen gardens in Kyoto and it was a powerful experience. I myself was there all alone, facing a space very simple, and a mental projection had actually occurred: the gravel is at once an expanse of white stones but also the sea, the rock is both a small dark mass of stone, but c is also a mountain. This dual aspect of the reality of things appears, which is pretty incredible. That's what sparked my interest in this concept of landscape. How, in an exhibition, a sculpture can be there for her even in its autonomy, but also how it can be something else, part of a whole.
Then the public to project this "other thing" to survey the landscape and to the mental projection.
Yes. To me the relationship of the work the viewer is a very important. From the beginning. A viewer does not work without. When I prepare an exhibition or works, I always think of this relationship, whether in the staging of the exhibition or in the nature of the work. For example, for "The Power of Art" in 2009, I realized Conatus: The night of dancing which is a film showing a tap dancer wearing a mask through which light exposure at night , dancing. A viewer who enters the exhibition, there walk, and then see a movie with a character who moves into the environment comes through, maybe it does revalue its own path, how he moved into this space, how this scenery can be seen as a landscape, or as a decoration ... And again it comes to presence and absence of simultaneous ...
There was much talk of collusion between art and life in your work. What do you think?
I discovered the art with the future, when I was in high school. I knew anything about art, contemporary or not, and second a teacher read to us in history class the Manifesto of Futurist Marinetti. It made me upset and it was a revelation. As in all the avant garde, there was this desire to transform the world by combining art with life, not to separate aesthetic experience from life experience. I discovered art as this, with all the enthusiasm of adolescent idealization and emphasis that implies. Then later I discovered Filliou Kaprow, the Situationists, Fluxus, and all these things fed me and touched ... But these questions of overcoming of art, the realization of art in life are issues that seemed to stun me for a long time, especially when they were still highly idealized or injunctive relief as in Debord. When I hear talk of "art and life, it is often to lament that they are not met or confused, or to say they have nothing to do together. Where for me art and life come together, because I think being an artist is making the relationship between self and the world, so the others.
Notes:
(1) "The Stock few are anonymous and ephemeral interventions performed in public with items found on site. The first were photographed and presented as a slideshow. From 1995 they were filmed on video. "
(2) Nelson Goodman, art in theory and in action , Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio tests, p.63
(3) "Ghosty is a fictional character wearing a mask of his own face and wandering for three months in the town of Enghien-les-Bains, on the occasion of the exhibition Architecture and mobility, does not make the word nor meet anyone. "
(4) Exposure Monterhermoso Cultural Center, Vitoria, Spain, May 2008. "The audience is changing within a labyrinthine structure of cardboard tubes (...). This film, as a slide show, five characters are also evolving in the forest (...). "
(5) Exposure to Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, Paris, 2003. "Work-exposure in which the viewer walks in an environment immersed in the darkness where only objects often out of scale - a giant sausage, garden fences, an iceberg, bags, a desk, flower beds - are illuminated so theater. On an overhead screen is projected a film showing five characters methodically manipulating each sculpture (...). The film offers the viewer, who recognizes objects in space, a disturbed relation to temporality: something has occurred or could occur. "
(6) Exposure to Fri-Art, Fribourg, Switzerland, 2003. "Conceived as an animated landscape intermittently by the temporality of the video. (...) The Lambada, whispered by the shape of pink Cosmos driver exposure, determines the beginning and end of the show, 4-minute sequence during which light sculptures (Rock Lake and Fountain) flash, a hanging sculpture (Cosmos) turns on itself, and an automatic door (Cosmos) activated at random. When the song ends, stop or turn off the objects, the exhibition remains at rest about fifteen minutes. (...) "
