BORIS ACHOUR, ECONOMY OF MEANS
Elisabeth Wetterwald, 2002
Published in Parachute n°106, April 2002, Montréal
Based on encounters and multiplicity rather than exclusion and singularity (« and », « with », rather than « or »), on processes rather than results, Boris Achour’s work is like a rough, chaotic path, always moving and re-configuring. There’s no point in looking for systems, logic or principles; Achour does his utmost to thwart, circumvent and undermine them, in the knowledge that the task is arduous, never-ending and always open to error. There’s no end in sight: experimentation is always in progress.
I would prefer not to
Between 1993 and 1997, Boris Achour, who at the time rarely had the opportunity to show his work, regularly created Actions-peu in urban spaces: minimal, humble and derisory interventions, most often conceived with materials found on the spot. A loaf of bread taped to a lamppost, plastic bags stuck over an air vent, polenta seeds placed horizontally in the middle of an alley so as to line up the pigeons that come to peck at them, three Suchard Rochers placed on the edge of an electrical box. Fragile and precarious, these ‘installations’ were either filmed or photographed. Far from what is usually referred to as intervention art, which is generally targeted and assertive, Achour’s micro-actions were like enigmas in the urban landscape: untimely and anonymous appearances of the incongruous in various forms, impromptu manifestations of signifiers that were nonetheless banal and recognisable, but whose meanings remained, to say the least, uncertain. The artist himself described these actions as « soft guerrilla warfare »: a way of combining silence with discourse, action with non-action, meaning with nonsense. « There is hardly a psychological position that, if taken to its logical extreme, would not command respect. Strength can exist in weakness, security in indecision, coherence in inconsistency, and also greatness in mediocrity; cowardice can be courageous, softness sharp as steel, flight aggressive »[1] wrote Gombrowicz.
Achour’s work is undoubtedly based on this alliance of apparently contradictory notions: it is less a question of choosing (between one attitude, one position, one logic or another) than of composing, even if it means having to accept all the opposites. In the same vein, in 1996 the artist staged a performance in which he stood in front of major hotels and luxury shops, wearing a jacket embroidered with the phrase « Rich women are beautiful ». Once again, the signal is contradictory: it is both an appeal that seeks to play on seduction, and its simultaneous denial, given the coarseness of the message. With Sommes (1999), the provocation is silent and minimal: in the photographs, Achour pretends to be sleeping standing up, resting his head on the meticulously trimmed hedges of posh Los Angeles villas: « Western capitalist society pleases me, and I like it too. Western capitalist society pleases and displeases me at the same time; I reject nothing wholesale. Neither resistance nor blissful acceptance. Les Sommes is the epitome of this attitude.[2]
«I would prefer not to»[3]. Achour se comporte comme Bartleby qui, avec sa formule implacable, ne refuse pas plus qu’il n’accepte. Ni négation, ni affirmation, Bartleby élimine d’un même mouvement le préférable et le non-préférable. Il n’y a pas d’autre issue : dire « oui » ou « non » le mènerait à sa perte. « Je ne veux pas de tout dit Boris Achour (inscription qu’il a créée dans des LED en 1999) : choisir de ne pas choisir ; la certitude dans l’indétermination, ou la détermination dans l’incertitude. Bartleby est quasiment muet, Achour assume une certaine passivité. Mais ni l’un ni l’autre ne s’opposent ouvertement au monde : dans leur retrait obstiné, ils en révèlent les imperfections et les mascarades. Ghosty (2000) : un homme marche dans la rue, vêtu d’une sorte de survêtement et d’un masque moulé sur son propre visage. Il n’y a pas d’affectation particulière dans son attitude, pas la moindre bizarrerie dans son comportement. Le seul trouble vient de la réaction des passants, soudain confrontés à quelque chose d’autre, d’inclassable, d’innommable. « J’essaie de proposer des œuvres qui restent irrésolues, voire contradictoires dans leur forme et leur sens, qui produisent un sentiment de doute chez le spectateur, qui reflètent la présence simultanée de plusieurs possibilités »[4]. More than short-circuits, which induce shocks and ruptures, Achour creates minor malfunctions with indeterminacy, enigma and nonsense as his only weapons, « floating signifiers »[5] that manage to disrupt binary systems, despite the modest means employed. The automatic door (Cosmos, 2001) he installed in the Traversées exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is emblematic in this respect: placed in the middle of an open space, it operates autonomously and randomly, disconnected from the usual presence trigger. The single door can go unnoticed (when it is willing to remain open, particularly at busy times) or suddenly attract attention by closing in the face of visitors (who, perplexed, step back, then move forward again, wait, trample on it, before resigning themselves to circumventing the recalcitrant object). The single door does as it pleases, creating an untimely but discreet constraint on movement in the exhibition space.
He can do nothing for you
Boris Achour is the anti-Promethean artist par excellence: there is no question of challenging anyone, let alone distinguishing himself by any feats. In 1997, on the occasion of an exhibition, he produced and distributed a leaflet in which he extolled his merits and « powers », in the style of the advertising leaflets of African marabouts: « Artist Boris Achour (Unknown throughout the world). HE CAN DO NOTHING FOR YOU. No catharsis. No sublimation. No floating commas. No transgression. No energy transfer () Can line up pigeons () Don’t contact! ». Achour seems to have no illusions about the power and influence of the artist on the workings of contemporary Western society. For a long time now, artists have no longer been the torch-bearers they once were; they have also been freed from the need for novelty and invention, freed from the idea that creation is only of interest insofar as it is part of a progressive history. They are now aware that, in a world full of uncertainties, it is better not to question the finality of one’s actions and to concentrate on the very substance of the present; to work on one’s own limits rather than envisage a totality that is out of reach. Like many artists of his generation, Achour is less settled in a system of belief (in a better, different or future world) than in a willingness to trust (in himself and in this world); a trust based not on (abstract) faith but on constantly renewed experimentation (Deleuzian ‘sympathy’). Agreeing to put ourselves to the test of reality rather than trying to reconcile our convictions. Learning, not knowing. Becoming a fish: « The essential thing is to make yourself perfectly useless, to become absorbed in the common current, to become a fish again rather than a monster. The only profit, I told myself, that I could gain from the act of writing is to see disappear the barriers that separate me from my fellow man », wrote Henry Miller[6]. Boris Achour is an artist in the middle: in the middle of the world and always in between. As Emmanuelle Lequeux remarked after an interview[7], that his favourite expression was « at the same time ». The AND rather than the OR; simultaneity rather than progression; composition rather than exclusion – « Dehors et dedans », « Ici et maintenant » – are significant examples of this in the titles of exhibitions or pieces he has produced. In 1996, one of his first projects was to introduce book-sculptures into the shelves of certain public libraries in the city of Paris: slightly larger than a paperback, covered in grey cloth; no author, no publisher, no call number. Just a title: « A sculpture ». These objects were placed by the librarians among the works of fiction, and could be borrowed like any other book. This was a way of bringing the « work of art » into an environment where it was not intended to be; it was also a way of reconsidering its status, by making it a free common good available to the public. Another play on the artist’s ‘power’ was the performance he put on in Italy. A leaflet was distributed: « Hypnos. On Saturday 12 May 2001, from 10pm to 10.30pm, Boris Achour will telepathically take control of everyone on board the Bazenne. During this half-hour period, all actions carried out by these people will be solely and entirely of his own volition ». Unexpectedly, nothing very spectacular happened at this rendezvous. The text of the trac scrolled across the video screens, like a trailer (which may or may not have been played), while Achour set about hypnotising the audience with fervour, chatting here and there with a glass in his hand, as he would at any vernissage. In the crowd present, some were waiting for something to happen, others were unaware of the affair, and in any case, it made no difference. Because Boris Achour can’t do anything for us. He can only deal with it. And even then, there’s no question of doing anything in the way of relational aesthetics. « I’m a great believer in this notion of the work of art as a meeting with the person who sees it. But let’s just say that I often manage to make these encounters fail, or to postpone them, to move them elsewhere ». Dehors et dedans (Outside and inside), Oui (Yes), Ici et maintenant (Here and now), Regarde-moi (Look at me), I love (I love ): whether in the titles of his exhibitions or in the titles of his works, Achour makes recurrent use of deictics, words that take on meaning only insofar as they establish spatial or temporal relationships around the subject who is speaking. In principle, when a speaker declares himself, he implicates the other person in front of him, eliciting an enunciation in return. But curiously, Achour makes intransitive use of deictics: his formulas do not necessarily imply a return. Scrupule (1997): installed in an exhibition, a sofa designed in such a way that it is impossible to sit on it. Rempli (1997): a video showing a hand filled with a plaster form stretched out towards the viewer. A gesture towards, but one that simultaneously denies itself, since the request cannot be met as the hand is already full. Totalmaxigoldmachinemégadancehit2000 (2000): in a group exhibition, two loudspeakers broadcast recent hits, but each track is cut off after a few seconds: the ear barely has time to recognise a familiar tune before it stops to make way for another, and it obviously proves impossible to dance to it. Achour does not present himself as a conductor of humanity any more than as an initiator of conviviality. Perhaps the whole interest of his proposals lies in this very singular way of going against all ‘expectations’: he establishes forms of appeal with no object or possible response, he poses enigmas, unresolved things, ‘blanks’ that thwart the expectations of exhibition visitors who, according to well-established principles of identification or verification, often come to look for or recognise what they already know. (Boris Achour doesn’t have a career. He does what he can.)
Same Old Song.
In 1999, he put up posters with no text all over Besançon, showing himself, almost life-size, hitchhiking in front of the camera, against the neutral background of a photo studio (Stoppeur). It’s an image that could resemble any number of others (concert posters, adverts), but for which there is no indication; at the same time, it’s an image that necessarily leaves you perplexed: the hitchhiker is in fact caught up in a paradoxical flux that keeps him in place (in an interior space, petrified in the representation) and that nevertheless commands him to « call out » (the gesture of the thumb stretched out towards a hypothetical other). He also sometimes installs illuminated signs in cities, which resemble commercial or advertising signs, but which remain mysterious because they have no voice: they are devoid of any message. In these actions, Achour attempts to remove the « voice-over » – that « authoritative, unadorned voice, which comes from behind or above to say what things are, what they should be » – from structures or images which, without it, lose their meaning; a way of « de-authorising » the spoken word, of getting rid of its injunctions and its watchwords, to finally let things be.
In one of Alain Resnais’s last films, On connaît la chanson [Same Old Song] (1997), the characters express their emotions through excerpts from pieces of music that form part of the popular French repertoire. « Resist, prove that you exist », « I’ve come to tell you that I’m leaving », « Have a good friend », « As time goes by, everything goes away », « The vertigo of love »… Life cut up into stereotypical situations to which it is never difficult to add a refrain you already know by heart. Resnais’s characters are ventriloquised puppets. Their voice can only be passive: they are spoken; they are acted. In the latest version of his installation entitled Générique (2001), Boris Achour invites visitors to stand in front of a camera, wearing an earpiece that speaks a monologue in a neutral voice, which they are invited to repeat. Each scene lasts a few minutes and is edited to follow the others. As in Resnais’ film, the people taking part in the game seem to be driven by a contradictory movement: they are both active and passive. Active because they have decided to « play » in front of the camera; passive because they are subordinate to the device, and because their words are not their own. « We are ventriloquised by society », remarks Achour. Advertising, television, culture, education, mum and dad – the ‘voice-over’ comes from all sides, and can be viewed from either positive or negative angles – Freud’s unconscious, Debord’s monologue of the spectacle, Deleuze and Guattari’s collective agencies of enunciation. In any case, whatever judgement we make about this process, we know that language is neither neutral nor purely informative. Not only is it constituted by, and permeated by, power (the dominant ideologies), but it is itself a form of power. We don’t believe words, we obey them; language as an immense reservoir of performatives. In the face of this, it is nevertheless possible to find lines of escape, by trying, for example, to lead language astray, to confuse it, to twist it, or even to make it grow weeds. This is what Achour did when he created a sound piece with an aphasic person (mmmmmm, 2000). The recording of her confessions (the result of a long interview with the artist) was broadcast by loudspeakers installed in the streets of Cahors. Usually reserved for the smooth, enticing, cordial, well-practised commercial speech that determines our behaviour as consumers, this space was suddenly taken over by troubled, hesitant, stammering speech, punctuated from time to time by a big, jovial laugh. Suddenly, a song we don’t know
Boris Achour has no intention of placing his work in pre-prepared niches that might make it easier to evaluate and identify. It’s a way of escaping the determinisms of society, but also those of the art world, of not bending to the expectations of the moment. Achour makes his own way, traces his own lines of flight, random and diffuse, in a solitude that can only be « held » by everything it feeds on; a porous solitude, not intransigent isolation; a populated desert.
Notes
1- Witold Gombrowicz, Diary, Volume 1, Gallimard, Paris, 1995, p. 3777.
2- Boris Achour, in an interview with Elisabeth Wetterwald, in Parasite, Maison populaire de Montreuil / Miss-multimédia, Paris, 2002.
3- Herman Melville, Bartleby, Flammarion, Paris, 1989. For an analysis of this formula, see Gilles Deleuze’s fine text, « Bartleby, ou la formule », published as a preface to Bartleby (Ibid.) and in Critique et clinique, Minuit, Paris, 1993, pp.89-114.
4- Interview, op. cit.
5- In his « Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss », Claude Lévi-Strauss calls « floating signifiers » signifiers that mark a « blank », a zero symbolic value, which can be placed on any signified to create new words, in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, PUF, Paris, 2001, p.XLIX.
6- Henry Miller, in Crucifixion en rose – Sexus, Buchet-Chastel, Paris, 1968, p.26
7- Emmanuelle Lequeux, in « Boris Achour, Nous sommes tous des Bovary ! « , Aden (Le Monde newspaper supplement), no 116, 19 April 2000.