INTERVIEW WITH ÉRIC MANGION

2004

Published in Semaine magazine, Analogues éditions, 2004.

ERIC MANGION: In a nutshell, you could say that Cosmos is a video store. However, once you pay attention to its form and content, it seems more like a trompe l’oeil or simulacrum of a video store, rather than a « store » as such.

BORIS ACHOUR: The term « simulacrum » bothers me. Firstly, because when it’s used in the field of art, I find it impossible to avoid associating it with the name of Baudrillard, whose theses on the supposed end of the real and of art I don’t share at all. Secondly, and less anecdotally, trompe-l’œil and simulacra refer to appearance, illusion, a hidden reality that is external to the work, if not completely non-existent. However, despite the absence of cassettes in the cases, and therefore despite the non-existence of the films advertised on the jackets, there is absolutely no deception as far as I’m concerned. It’s not a question of making a « fake » video club, nor of displacing a ready-made form in the manner of Guillaume Bijl, but of using and combining forms for their plastic, cultural or symbolic potential. Cosmos is first and foremost an assemblage sculpture, combining various elements. The video club is one of them, and its role is not to represent an object or a place, but to generate plastic and social forms, order and classification.

EM: What do you mean by assemblage sculpture? And what are these various combined elements?

BA: To answer this question, it’s necessary to mention Gombrowicz’s novel of the same name, which is the origin of the Cosmos we’re talking about, and to start talking about the relationship between the two. (For the sake of clarity, I’ll write « Cosmos » as Gombrowicz’s novel, and Cosmos as mine). « Cosmos » is a novel that narrates and, in its writing, experiments with relationships as such, as well as with the impossibility of deducing meaning from them. The author assembles and combines facts, figures, styles, body parts and characters in a text akin to an Agatha Christie-type mystery novel, without ever elucidating or interpreting the world. « Cosmos » (which means « order » in Greek) materializes the end of positivism, the death of God and the impossibility of any synthesis. But it materializes all this with humor, jubilation and ferocity, and by proving, despite this impossibility, that it is conceivable to continue proposing what Gombrowicz calls an « attempt to organize chaos », an attempt that can also be called art. To conclude this aside, I’d like to say that my discovery of Gombrowicz, and particularly of « Cosmos » and « Ferdydurke », resonated with many of my works and concerns. And so, having decided to experiment with what an adaptation of a novel in plastic form could be, it was only natural that the form and method of construction of this adaptation should be linked to that of the adapted object. This is how the term « assemblage sculpture » came about. In fact, it would be more accurate to speak of « copied and pasted », since all these jackets were created using Photoshop and Illustrator software, commonly used by graphic designers, and the images used were almost all found on the Internet. Each dust jacket is therefore an assembly, or copy-paste, of heterogeneous elements (photos of actors, artists, friends, philosophers, musicians, etc., as well as typographic elements, drawings and texts). The covers are then assembled together, creating formal and visual links, and reusing images, motifs and logos. But this notion of assemblage, of « making things go together » is also found in the combination of forms referring to certain minimal or conceptual works with forms from popular culture.

EM: What are these references to minimal and conceptual works, and how does Cosmos echo them?

BA: Cosmos functions in a fractal way, in that certain structural elements of the piece can be found at different scales. For example, an artist like Lawrence Weiner, whose work I love enormously, can be present in different ways. He may be an actor in one of the Cosmos films, the form of his wall writings may be used as the graphic element of a dust jacket, or, as Émilie Renard has analyzed, the very form of Cosmos may be seen as the realization of the Weinerian statement « MANY COLORED OBJECTS PLACED SIDE BY SIDE TO FORM A ROW OF MANY COLORED OBJECTS ». We could always stay with Weiner and say that the potential aspect of Cosmos films refers to his formula that it is equivalent whether the work is realized or not. From a more formal point of view, the long, 40-metre shelf containing the 200 boxes bears a certain resemblance to structures by Judd or Lewitt. But Judd and Lewitt have long since been reinterpreted by clothing-store interior designers and kit-furniture manufacturers. Generally speaking, I don’t work by direct reference to other works or artists, but rather by integration and slow digestion of various elements, of which contemporary art is only one component. I apprehend these very diverse elements with a view to de-hierarchizing not the works or the artists, but the visual and cultural signs they produce along with their works. So, rather than references to this or that minimal sculpture or conceptual proposition, it’s their transformation into cultural signs that Cosmos seems to me to echo. Not so much to deplore it, as to try to go beyond it and play with it.

EM: It’s striking to note that Cosmos focuses on covers rather than content. Is this part of your desire to « de-hierarchize not works or artists, but the visual and cultural signs they produce »?

BA: Indeed, a film is usually considered more important than its poster or the cover of its video box, so there’s an inversion here of the work/packaging relationship. Reversing this also makes it possible, with a great economy of means, to offer potential films. The box and jacket become projective supports for the viewer, objects that allow us to develop our imaginations.

EM: Indeed, we have the impression that Cosmos was conceived as a space of infinite fictional possibilities. A Borgesian video club, in fact. Yet the emptiness (or vacuity) of the content also reminds us that culture can also be a matter of image, casting and trailers – in short, of appearance, rather than strict productions or « creations ». Isn’t Cosmos intended to function as a reflection between these two a priori opposed parameters of culture?

BA: Without sounding too Warholish, I’d say we’ve known for some time that there’s nothing behind the surface of images. So why should there be anything in a box or under a dust jacket? In my work, I try to « deal » with what might be called « dominant cultural forms ». These forms interest me precisely because they are dominant, and therefore shape and fascinate us. They are so powerful and omnipresent that they often present themselves as the only possible alternative, just as liberalism presents itself as the only conceivable form of governance. Debord said that one of the strengths of the Spectacular Society was that it managed to persuade us that, in it, « Everything that happens is good, and everything that is good happens ». And what strikes me as extremely remarkable, far more than the omnipotence of these cultural forms, is the desire for alienation and submission to control that exists in so many individuals in a totally integrated way. So I try to go beyond this stage of fascination and play with this power. We’re back to this desire to propose a « deformed » imaginary, while integrating not only the signs but also the modes of dissemination of what alienates. And if I use the term « dealer », it’s in complete acceptance of the negative connotations that can be associated with it: it’s a slightly rotten market, but one that I don’t think art can escape from if it wants to have anything to do with the world. Not to deny emptiness and appearance, but to integrate them into the work seems to me to be fairer and riskier than ignoring or disdaining them. It’s not a question of saying that Loana is the end of reality, or conversely that the only interesting and valid art form today is reality TV, but rather of dealing with it, at the risk of contradiction and corruption. Once again, it’s all there, Weiner as much as the lame video store down the street that only offers blockbusters. And again, I love Weiner, which doesn’t mean I can’t rent and enjoy some pretty bad movies. Having said that, I also don’t think that the artist is just a manipulator of signs, a navigator in an ocean of cultural forms, but rather that the notion of creation is always being redefined and reinvented. The Greenbergian notion of a self-reflexive, pure and autonomous art is fortunately outdated, and even if the forms created by artists who have stuck to the signs of the dominant culture are regularly caught up and digested by that same culture, it seems to me that it’s a battle worth fighting. And that’s even if there is a soft and poor form of using signs from popular culture, which has already become a new academicism. I sometimes have a rather pessimistic view of art, insofar as it most often ends up devitalized and watered down in Museums and Lagarde et Michard[1]. I think that nothing can fully resist being erased and transformed into a sign or a product, but that despite everything, we have to keep working, simply because we’re alive and we’re now. And of course, Cosmos is also about that.

EM: Isn’t this pessimistic yet realistic vision of art basically a sign of a kind of hypermodernity symptomatic of contemporary aesthetics? I’m thinking in particular of Mike Kelley. Avoiding genres as best he can, he constructs a body of work that ultimately acts as a vast cabinet of curiosities in constant and infinite evolution. « Gothic architecture, cartoons, a strip bar, a Joseph Cornell film and a B horror movie, for example, are not pseudo-trash illustrations for the sake of genre, but elements of the real world that surround him and which he decodes » . The idea of repetition, accumulation or (almost exaggerated) series is important to him. Isn’t this a kind of attitude that goes beyond the fascination or rejection of the Loana syndrome, which he assimilates without complexes or taboos?

BA: Kelley, like many other West Coast artists, constantly analyzes the production of cultural signs as an ideological production. He probes the American psyche and reveals its darkest aspects. Whether he’s working with paintings by serial killers, science-fiction book covers from the 60s or the phenomenon ofrepressed memories, his aim is to delve into the culturally neglected and repressed. So, of course, he decodes, deconstructs and uses « the elements of the real world that surround him ». But what interests me most is what he does with them, because this use of elements that are already there has long been part of twentieth-century art history. And Kelley, like all great artists, is above all an immense producer of forms. There’s a plastic power about him that I admire and envy, combined with a constantly renewed desire to experiment and explore new fields. I’m not sure we in France fully realize what it means to work so close to Hollywood. Loana and the Loft are a lot of fun. Fresh Acconci, which he made with Paul McCarthy, is a sort of Hollywoodized remake of Vito Acconci’s 70s performances, and is a good example of the power of this influence. This video is both an homage and a sacrilege, a kind of « murder of the father », totally unabashed and conscious, since all the Acconcian singularity and pathos are kept at bay by the choice of having these performances performed by actors with porn star looks, in a villa in typical Los Angeles style. Here, the « déjà-là » is twofold. There’s already Acconci, inscribed both in the history of art and in the personal references of Kelley and McCarthy, and there’s already the Californian porn industry, with its smooth, standardized bodies and its nouveau riche decorum, pseudo-mansion villa and Jacuzzi. And there’s a blending, a levelling, and a total assimilation of the elements used, whether they’re art forms inscribed in the history of art or drawn from the most vulgar popular culture. And so, to come back to Cosmos, it’s also the question of what can be done with these elements drawn from multiple, heterogeneous sources that’s important to me. How do you deal with what’s there, how do you try to give a semblance of order to the chaos without being authoritarian, without hindering what’s possible? How do we also deal with the increasing spectacularization of art? And above all, how do we propose an imaginary world that is neither a purely narcissistic emanation of the artist’s ego, nor a complete subjection to the dominant codes?

EM: There are other pieces in your work entitled Cosmos. Is there a formal or conceptual link between them? Can they be considered as a series, or again, as totally heterogeneous elements?

BA: Apart from TV and comics, I don’t really like series. In art, they’re usually strictly declinatory and mercantile, except when they’re totally integrated into the work, as with Warhol of course. I like a certain pop, minimal or conceptual seriality when it challenges the authoritarianism of the Œuvre Unique, which is another form of commercialism. On the other hand, what’s great about TV series or comics, or even literature, is that they allow us to rediscover characters we’ve become attached to, especially when they allow narrative developments that films or full-length albums don’t allow. I love this addiction to TV series that span several years, where you grow old with the characters and become attached to them, even if the quality declines. As far as Cosmos is concerned, I’ve made four of them, all of which have no more connection with each other than the one we’re talking about here and the other pieces of my work. So it’s definitely not a series. The first three were made for an exhibition organized by François Piron in Montreuil. He had invited the same four artists to exhibit three times, for three consecutive months, in the same venue. For the first show, I created a large sculpture hanging from the ceiling, a vague shape of an upside-down pink head, with no eyes, mouth or ears, just a big nose à la Achille Talon, which turned slowly on itself while singing the Lambada. I called it Cosmos somewhat at random, partly because my recent discovery of Gombrowicz’s novel had been a shock, and partly because the shape of this sculpture – and its rotation and its world hit melody – had something planetary about it for me. Secondly, I knew that there were going to be two more parts to this exhibition, and I just decided to call the next two pieces by the same name as the first, feeling that this would create a sufficient link between three pieces that I already knew would formally have little to do with each other. One of the other things that interested and amused me was the slight confusion this common title created. I’m quite fascinated by the power of words over things, and to call three objects by the same name is to make different things partly similar, and thus to create order and disorder at the same time. As for the fourth Cosmos, an automatic supermarket door that opens and closes in a totally random fashion, which was shown at the ARC at the same time as the third Cosmos in François Piron’s Montreuil exhibitions, I also called it that because I couldn’t think of a better idea, and also because it broke the cohesion of the previous three.

EM: Your work is regularly built on paradoxes or slight « confusions ». The things and objects presented seem very obvious at first. Then, very quickly, little random (or at least accidental) mechanisms pervert them in their own functioning, precisely in order to confront what they can produce that is « hazardous ». Is this like Gombrowicz’s aforementioned attempt to organize chaos? Or the logic of Bartleby’s « I would prefer not to »? Or should we conclude that this inclination towards uncertainty is a way of questioning the organizational faculties of the real and the possible?

BA: Uncertainty is above all a way of relating to the world (I can’t find it, I’m looking for it!). It’s a non-authoritarian, non-dogmatic approach that leaves the field of possibilities wide open. For me, uncertainty is not an admission of weakness or retreat, contrary to an analysis that has often been made of my work, of action-peu for example, but simply the result of the choice I’ve made to experiment rather than to ensure. This choice implies imbalance and trial and error, as well as internal contradictions. Hence, for example,Je ne veux tout, a phrase written in luminous diodes on a wooden box, a kind of DIY Jenny Holzer, which for me refers less to Bartleby than to an « oxymoronic » desire for totality: the end of utopias, but the desire to propose imaginations other than the dominant ones. The artists who interest me most are those who work with formats, signs and codes, while genuinely loving the elements they use. When David Lynch made Twin Peaks, it was also because he loved soap operas. When Jim Shaw exhibited his Thrift Store Paintings, it was also because he found them beautiful. And what you call confusion or perverting the work’s functioning surely stems from this aesthetic consideration I have for forms whose ideology I reject. As Thomas Hirschhorn said of the Red Poster, created by the Nazis to discredit Communist resistance fighters: « I don’t understand! I find this poster beautiful! Please help me! Personally, I find the shots in commercials where you see liquid flowing in slow motion, bouncing off the sides of glasses, very beautiful. So I shoot in 35 mm, at 150 fps, Un monde qui s’accorde à nos désirs, where an empty glass slowly fills up with a stream of milk, until it overflows and spills out in a puddle. It’s a prolonged, purposeless commercial that simply goes a few seconds further than we’re used to seeing (the cut before the overflow). A form of formal, erotic time dilation.

 

 

Notes
1-Lagarde et Michard is a multi-volume illustrated textbook of French literature, containing biographies and selected texts by authors, accompanied by notes, comments and questions for students. It has long served as the basis for teaching French in secondary schools in France and other French-speaking countries. (translator’s note)