INTERVIEW WITH SOPHIE LAPALU

2010

Originally published on the blog De l’action à l’exposition

Sophie Lapalu: Why and how did you decide to leave the studio and make the Actions-peu [Actions-little]? Did you know artists like Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader or Adrian Piper? I’m thinking of the work where she’s walking through the streets of New York wearing a T-shirt that says « wet paint », and I can’t help but make a connection, albeit a very formal one, with Les femmes riches sont belles [Rich Women are beautiful]. Were you familiar with these practices?

Boris Achour : No, I wasn’t at all familiar with them at the time, and I discovered them later. On the other hand, I quite liked Tony Cragg’s very early work: photographs taken on the beach, very simple sculptural practices with found things that he arranged and then photographed, like pebbles that he placed on his forearm. Above all, I was already very fond of Filliou, and his direct and poetic use of materials, the way he physically links disparate elements together… But I’ve never really thought about what might have influenced the Actions-peu, these are influences I read after the fact. At the time, I’d just finished my degree at Cergy, then my post-graduate studies at the Beaux Arts in Paris, and a year in a studio that the artist Vincent Barré had lent me in Bastille. I knew hardly anyone in the art world, I didn’t know how to show my work or how to meet people who might be interested in it, and I didn’t have any exhibition offers. What’s fundamental about the Actions-peu is that I want my work to be seen, because I believe that if my work isn’t seen, it doesn’t exist.

SL: But it’s not just to be seen, because you couldn’t make the Actions-peu in the studio. It seemed to me that there was a real desire on your part to get out of the studio and confront the « real », to deal with it. What’s more, by concealing the artistic status of your actions, by being ‘stealthy’, it seemed to me that you were trying to reach out to passers-by in a fleeting way, to be in a register of the discreet and the ephemeral…

BA : If I left the studio and produced the Actions-peu, it wasn’t out of a desire for stealth or to conceal the artistic nature of my work, but rather out of a desire and a need to assert myself: that my work should be seen by spectators, even if they weren’t aware of its artistic nature, and therefore that it exists, since at the time I had no opportunity to show it. That’s why I don’t really recognise myself in the term ‘furtive’, which seems to me to indicate a desire for discretion, camouflage, to go unnoticed. The ‘little’ in Actions-peu,was quantitative: it didn’t last long, it wasn’t very effective, it didn’t use a lot of material resources, but as Guillaume Désanges pointed out, the ‘little’ [peu] in the title can also be read as a deferred potential: action-peut[1].

SL: I use the term « stealthy » in reference to aircraft during the Gulf War: the term « stealth aircraft » was used to designate American bombers that were undetectable by radar. In this case, however, your actions are not detected by the radars in the field of art, unless of course they take place in the context of festivals. The expression « furtive » is used to describe the way in which art sometimes penetrates public and social spaces and questions the notion of the ideal and expected spectator. Stephen Wright talks about art with a « low coefficient of artistic visibility », and perhaps that’s more appropriate in your case.

BA: For me, it was essential that the works made in the public space should be perceived with as few preconceptions as possible by the people who come across them, in other words with as few signs as possible identifying them as art, so that their possible effects are not – or are as little as possible – parasitised by prejudices, positive or negative, about their artistic nature. I wanted the most direct encounter possible between a person and an object or situation, without the presuppositions and without the ‘art’ reading grid.

SL: But can a work ‘function’ if it is not seen as such? According to Goodman, it’s a question of implementing the work. In order to think about these actions, in order for art to take place, don’t we have to know them, to perceive them as works?

BA: Our discussion shows just how complex this notion of stealth/low visibility is and how open to misunderstanding it can be. I think the works I’ve made that could fit into this scheme correspond to it in various ways, but what was essentially important to me in these works made between 1993 and 2000 [Actions-peu (1993-1997), Les femmes riches sont belles (1996), Une sculpture (1996), Confettis (1997), Stoppeur (1999), Ghosty (2000)] was the encounter between a work and its viewer and what this encounter could produce. From then on, whether or not what was seen was perceived as art was completely irrelevant to me. I don’t believe that art depends solely or even essentially on the context in which it is shown or appears, but rather on the effects it can generate.

SL: So there is a kind of intrinsic force in art?

BA: Someone is walking down the street and notices a piece of wood taped to a tree stump or a Suchard Rocher on top of a brown plastered electrical cabinet, or in my opinion doesn’t notice them most of the time… But for the person who encounters these things, something happens. Even if I don’t know precisely the intensity and nature (surprise, incomprehension, aesthetic emotion, reflections on urban objects, on the possibility of composing with them…) of this effect, the important thing for me is that it happens. To take up your Goodmanian separation between realisation and implementation, I thought at the time, and still do now, that the ‘implementation’ or effectuation part of the work takes place even if it is not perceived as art, insofar as the encounter between a person and the situation produces an effect on the perceiver. This question was central to Une sculpture, for example. This work consists of an object resembling a book, whose pages are glued together: you can’t open it, there’s nothing to read except the title « Une sculpture » on the cover. With their agreement, the work was placed in twenty public libraries in Paris, among the works of fiction. This object, formally very similar to those around it, but anonymous and without a call number, is therefore lost among its peers. It is not identifiable as an art object, unless we consider that this slight difference makes it de facto artistic, but I don’t think that this criterion is sufficient outside an art institution. This work, which has deliberately not been photographed, exists for me artistically in two ways: on the one hand because I’m talking to you about it at the moment or because it has been mentioned in catalogues, magazines or on my website, and so this object does exist in the ‘traditional’ or institutional field of art. But on the other hand, it also exists artistically through the effect it produces, or that I hope it will produce, when it is discovered by chance in the fiction section of a library. It’s this aspect that I wanted to emphasise in this work: the fact that for the person discovering it by chance there is nothing (or very little) to indicate that it is art, but that nevertheless this object, through its formal characteristics, its discrepancy with its surroundings, its ambiguity, can be a support for the imagination, for reflection and for questioning its presence. I think I wanted to offer the possibility of an encounter between a ‘spectator’ and an object that was as free as possible from the traditional presuppositions and codes of reception of the work.

SL: I really like this idea that, even if you don’t know whether it’s art, the object surprises and stimulates the imagination. Does it need to be brought back into the realm of art? I haven’t made up my mind yet. I like to imagine that we can offer an artful perception to all the incongruous things we come across. Do you know the outcome of your « Sculpture »? Now I’m going to take a closer look at the fiction section of Parisian libraries. And what happens in such cases? I’m sure I won’t find your ‘sculpture’, but other unusual things.

BA: Nevertheless, I was also keen for these works to exist elsewhere, differently, with a different resonance and other effects, hence my concern to offer what I thought at the time were traces or documentation, but which now seems to me to be more like another work made from the same object or situation.

SL: It’s as if, beyond the gesture or the object « with a low coefficient of artistic visibility », you were creating elements that continue to exist as entities. Your photographs seem to acquire a temporality of their own, building their own history. What’s more, it seems to me that today’s artists are aware of the importance of exhibitions and the art market, and will create works based on them, unlike in the 1970s. In an interview conducted by Christophe Wavelet in 2003, Vito Acconci, who created ‘furtive’ actions in the 1970s (The Following Piece in 1969, for example), explained that the art of those years laid the foundations for what happened in the 1980s, namely the perversion of the situation in the art world, by allowing the commercial system of art galleries to take precedence over artistic activity itself, through the fetishisation of production. The artists of recent decades seem to me to be perfectly aware of these facts, and to anticipate the demands of the system. Is this not the case for you?

BA : Let’s take the Actions-peu for example. When I decided to go and work in the street, I immediately asked myself whether I should keep records (and if so, what kind). And after hesitating for a quarter of a second, I said yes. Not to keep any traces of these creations would have been a sign of a romantic conception of art, that of an art made up of ‘pure’ gestures, separated from the world, and among other things from its commercial aspect. But the main reason why I photographed and then filmed the Actions-peu was not because I thought that one day I might be able to sell them: I wanted the relationship with the spectator to be played out in the present, at the moment when I was making the things in the street, and in the little life they had to live, but also so that this relationship could exist later, in another form. And the two moments of existence of the works, with their two types of apprehension, were just as important to me. I never thought of the street in opposition to the gallery, but as a space that offered plastic, spatial and social characteristics that interested me at the time.

SL: Isn’t the act of recording also part of the action?

BA: For the Actions-peu, both out of shyness and a desire to be left alone, I always managed to do it at times and in places where there was hardly anyone around. I didn’t want people coming up to me and asking « What are you doing? What is it? I didn’t want to come into direct contact with people, I wanted to do my own thing, make sure it existed and that was that. I just filmed for the time it took to make it, then I left what I’d set up, and they lived on their own for the time they lived. For Confettis, on the other hand, I chose to film in subjective view, both for simplicity’s sake and because the camera offered me a certain protection. I’m not sure that the reactions would have been the same if I’d thrown confetti in the faces of passers-by outside of any festive period without looking at them with a camera…

SL: Did you stop doing Actions-peu because you had the opportunity to do exhibitions?

BA : I didn’t so much stop doing Actions-peu, as I wanted to do other things. Nonetheless, the Actions-peu, quickly became quite successful and I became aware very early on of the stylistic or thematic labels that people put on artists or that artists put on themselves for ease of identification. And I quickly felt the risk of being labelled as « the guy who does strange things in the street ». And so, partly in reaction to a fear of confinement but also because I’ve always been totally heterogeneous in my practice, I experimented with other things.

SL: But at the same time, you say you left the studio to be seen, because you weren’t exposed. But you stopped when you had the opportunity to be seen in galleries.

BA : The end of Actions-peu coincided with the start of my collaboration with Chez Valentin gallery in 1997, but I continued to make works that you describe as having a « low coefficient of artistic visibility » until 2000. It was mainly when I was offered the chance to make Actions-peu on commission, as part of invitations to a festival or an exhibition, that I moved on to other things.

SL: Especially if you avoided direct contact with passers-by as much as possible.

BA: Hence the fact that I very rarely responded positively to an invitation to work in the street. In 1997, at the invitation of Roberto Martinez and Antonio Gallego, I produced a deliberately depreciatory leaflet, inverting the model of the African marabout leaflets, but I delegated its distribution to them. There was also Stoppeur in 1999, which consisted of a wild collage of posters showing me on a scale of one, with my thumb raised. The last response was Ghosty (2000), at an exhibition in Enghien-les-bains, where people were invited to create an ephemeral work in the street for a month. There was a meeting point, mediators and leaflets with a map of the town showing the locations of the works. The city as museum… I found this to be at odds with what I was looking for: anonymity, the surprise of the encounter, the fact that the artistic nature of the object on offer was not immediately apparent. I agreed, but what I was proposing was someone who uses the city as a stage set, walking around wearing a mask of his own face. You could only come across him by chance. And once again, what interested me was that people who came across this man, even if they didn’t know about the event, could invent a story for him and be confused. In fact, there were some pretty violent reactions.

SL: Really?

BA: Yes. As Ghosty didn’t respond to passers-by, he almost got mugged twice, something I hadn’t anticipated at all and which I absolutely didn’t want to generate. For me, he was someone who had escaped from an amusement park, like a Disneyland character wandering around a town. Except that he didn’t have a mask of a well-known figure, but his own face.

SL: There’s one aspect that particularly struck me and that I find throughout your work, and that’s this notion of presence/absence, a play on this duality. In Conatus: a forest (2008) this is particularly marked, with the slideshow showing the dancers in action in the space through which the spectator has passed. It seems to me that this was already present, in a different way, in Actions-peu. It’s also true of Non Stop Landscape (2003). There’s this automatic door, Cosmos, which opens even though there’s no one there to trigger it. It opens into absence.

BA: That’s true… I hadn’t thought about that, it opens on absence just as much as they open in spite of absence. I’d thought of this piece more as a haunted, autonomous, mad sculpture. All my thinking about this work was centred on the fact that it opens autonomously rather than on the absence of a passer-by triggering its opening. It reminds me of another older piece, from 1997, which I like so much I find it heavy: it’s a video in which there’s a fixed shot of a hand filled with a plaster form. A monitor is placed on the floor and we see the hand, motionless, on a scale of one. The work is called Rempli [filled]. It is a gesture of request, but as the hand is already full, it is impossible for it to receive. It is therefore an address that prohibits any return. In a way, much more demonstrative, I think it has something to do with the door in Cosmos.

SL: Is landscape, a recurring theme in your work, an echo of the fact that you are creating pieces for the exhibition, which we enter as if in a landscape?

BA: First of all, it’s the separate elements that form a whole, the landscape. Secondly, for me, the term landscape is not to be understood in the sense of a panorama, or a point of view…

SL: For me it’s an intellectual construction of a space, from a point of view, isn’t it?

BA: It’s more a question of surveying a space, which implies a temporality, and the fact that you’re not facing something, but in something within which you move. So it’s the opposite of a point of view, which implies fixity, a single, ideal point. I also like the old-fashioned aspect of the term.

SL: It also refers to a genre of painting.

BA: Yes, but I don’t think that was important. The term appeared in my work with the Non stop Landscape exhibition in 2003. I’d just come back from a residency in Japan, I’d visited several Zen gardens in Kyoto and it was a very powerful experience. I found myself alone there, faced with a very simple space, and a mental projection actually took place: the gravel is both a stretch of white pebbles and the sea; the rock is both a small dark mass of stone and a mountain. This double aspect of the reality of things appears, which is quite incredible. That’s what triggered my interest in this notion of landscape. How, in an exhibition, a sculpture can be there for itself, in its autonomy, but also how it can be something else, part of a whole.

SL: So it’s up to the public to project this « something else », to walk through the landscape and make the mental projection.

BA: Yes. For me, the relationship between the work and the viewer is very important. It has been from the start. There is no such thing as a work without a viewer. When I prepare an exhibition or a body of work, I always think about this relationship, whether in terms of the exhibition space or the nature of the work itself. For example, for « La force de l’art » in 2009, I made Conatus: La nuit du danseur [Conatus: Night of the Dancer], a film showing a tap dancer wearing a luminous mask who dances through the exhibition at night. A viewer who enters the exhibition, walks through it, and then sees a film with a character moving through the environment he has just passed through, perhaps makes him re-evaluate his own journey, the way in which he has moved through this space, how this scenography can be seen as a landscape, or as a set… And here again it’s a question of simultaneous presence and absence…

SL: There has been a lot of talk about the complicity between art and life in your work. What do you think about this?

BA: I discovered art through Futurism when I was atin high-school. I knew nothing about art, contemporary or otherwise, and during a history class a teacher read Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. It shocked me and was a revelation. As in all the avant-gardes, there was this desire to transform the world by combining art and life, not to separate the aesthetic experience from the experience of life. That’s how I discovered art, with all the adolescent impetus of idealisation and emphasis that entails. Then later I discovered Filliou, Kaprow, the Situationists, Fluxus, and all these things nourished and touched me… But for a long time I found these questions of how to go beyond art, how to make art a reality in life, paralysing, especially when they were idealised or extremely injunctive, as in Debord’s writings. When I hear people talk about ‘art and life’, it’s often to deplore the fact that they are not united or confused, or to assert that they have nothing to do with each other. Where art and life come together for me is that I believe that being an artist means creating relationships between oneself and the world, and therefore with others.

 

Notes 
1- in French « peu » means little and « peut » means to be able to… (translator’s note)