ALIGNEUR DE PIGEONS (PIGEONS ALIGNER)
1996

The line is one of the recurring forms in Boris Achour’s work, certainly because, in the words of Gombrowicz, it can be likened to an “attempt to organize chaos”. To align is at once to group, arrange and order; it is to create structure where previously disorder prevailed. But far from being a defense and illustration of the regulated and ordered, this figure is always present in his works in the mode of ambivalence: whether creating a short segment of waste (Actions-peu, 1993), arranging nearly two hundred boxes on a forty-meter-long shelf to form a fictional video club (Cosmos, 2001) or making a corporate executive crawl on his back across a huge table in a deserted meeting room (Spirale, 2004), the line always combines antinomic or at least discordant forms. Designed along the lines of old-fashioned before-and-after advertisements, L’Aligneur de pigeons, an A3 photocopy in unlimited print run, presents both a sculptural proposition (since there’s a mold and a print), photographically documents an ephemeral intervention in public space (the very momentary tidying-up of a few Columbia Liva, an animal species found in most major metropolises and a fierce contemptor of statuary) and offers the recipe or instructions for the do-it-yourself realization of this sculpture/intervention. Note that the last photo was taken in the garden of the Palais Royal in Paris, famous for its straight avenues of trees as much as for its proximity to a famous work of art in the public space.