BORIS ACHOUR

Dorothée Dupuis, 2008

Published in the catalog French Connection, Black Jack Editions, 2008.

« You watch too much television. Good evening! »^[1] could be one of the cult phrases of the 1990s, addressed in particular to Boris Achour. A protean artist with pop and conceptual ambitions, he develops a practice with a shifting formalism and a resolutely metaphysical scope. Boris Achour believes in the hypnotic power of the media, in the « guruization » of human relations, and it is in reaction to this daily manipulation – which he seems to abhor as much as it fascinates him – that he works. The work’s genesis was Actions-Peu (1993), a sort of half-poetic/half-political action of latent shamanism, carried out in urban spaces before the eyes of astonished or indifferent passers-by, in which the artist created formal compositions with innocuous objects – placing Suchard Rochers on brown plastered electrical cabinets (Actions-Peu, 1993), or aligning pigeons with seeds (Aligneur de pigeons, 1996) – sometimes involving his own body – he falls asleep limply on the perfectly trimmed hedges of an American suburb (Sommes, 1999) – or pays an actor to wander around the city wearing a mask of his own face (Ghosty, 2000).

This taste for the « handmade », for manipulation, for an ambiguous but never fixed relationship with the object and its use, for attention to the dreamlike, quasi-spiritual potential of each form, in a creative remix of our environment, runs through Boris Achour’s work, and affirms the importance given to an instinctive relationship with form, going against any imposed cultural formatting. He will also create a litany of « microsculptures », small works that can be arranged like « modules » – a term insisting on the mobility of the works, the possibility for them to escape from any overly fixed use or protocol of monstration that might be assigned to them, in a suspicious relationship to the white cube and the sacralization of the art object. Slow-motion shots of milk glass filling up in a sculptural and sensual manner (Un Monde qui s’accorde à nos désirs, 2000), a hand filled with plaster in an inverted relationship to offering and quest (Rempli, 1997), urban furniture ironically « divinized » by its immaculate ceramic replica (Contrôle, 1997), concealed in bookcases, solid « sculptures » whose shape and volume make them indistinguishable from their surroundings (Une sculpture, 1996); murals recovered from Japanese night-shops, in a nod to the West’s feverish infatuation with a certain form of Eastern wisdom (24/7, 2003)…. These are all pieces which, in contrast to a passive relationship with the world, evoke the possibility of an active attitude towards things, objects and life.

These initially autonomous pieces are increasingly interwoven into complex installations, as in Operation Restore Poetry (2005), whose central figure seems to prefigure some of the elements of the « Conatus » mobiles (begun in 2005), prismatic sculptures often made from transparent or reflective materials assembled with polyurethane foam, the antiform material par excellence. The notion of « Conatus », a Spinozian term affirming desire as the driving force of human activity beyond any moral or political finality, allows Boris Achour to escape certain considerations specific to the art world, to focus on the ways in which this desire appears and how it materializes or vanishes in contact with the realities of the world, whatever their nature (political, aesthetic, spiritual, social). Forms are exploded, and a reflection on their power begins, with a certain taste for simple, colorful geometries, akin to the utopian vision of Piet Mondrian. Language is enigmatically present in the work, where it is used as a plastic material, playing on notions of appearance and disappearance, inventory and sound volume. A discussion of the body, hitherto present in an indiscreet way (notably in Cosmos, 2001, a « vaguely anthropomorphic » mobile slowly turning on itself to the humming tune of the Lambada), becomes central, in articulation with sculptures that have become « props », extensions of the body. The friendly, fluorescent jersey-clad characters of Conatus: A Forest and Conatus: AMIDSUMMERNIGHTSDREAM (2008) perpetuate the artist’s logic of « empowerment » over objects, reconsidering any normative use in the light of inventive, new, « pure » a priori manipulation. Without proposing a definitive political interpretation, the fact is that in the space of fifteen years Boris Achour has moved inostensibly from the city to the forest, the setting for his latest films – an approach comparable to the practices of artists such as Spartacus Chetwynd.^[2] or Heather Peak and Ivan Morison^[3]. Should we see it as an irreversible tendency of our society to fantasize about a certain state of nature? In any case, Boris Achour warns us against equating it with an idyllic genesis: uncanny is never far away, between wood fires and animal masks. It’s at this point that the term conatus takes on a darker aspect, more in keeping with Thomas Hobbes’ use of it as a lucid, stripped-down demonstration of one of man’s cruellest characteristics: his instinct for self-preservation. Where Boris Achour seems to achieve the tour de force of asserting the possible (and utopian) existence of a humanism finally rid of its naiveté.

Notes
1- « You watch too much television. Good eveningr! » was the opening line of Les Guignols de l’info, a very popular French satirical puppet TV show, broadcast between August 29, 1988 and June 22, 2018 on Canal+. A parody of the television news, the show is a caricature of the world of politics, the media, celebrities or, more generally, French society and today’s world. [translator’s note]
2- Born in 1973, Spartacus Chetwynd lives and works in London. She is known for her surreal and baroque performances, which draw on a wide range of figures and images from art history and pop culture.
3- Born in 1973 and 1974 respectively, Heather Peak and Ivan Morison interrogate man’s place in his environment through a variety of media: science-fiction writings, sound recordings, etc., are collected and edited to reveal the essence and particularities of everyday life.