The principle of this meeting was born in the early days of July 2009. It actually began on 10 October with an initial email. It still hasn’t been completed. Perhaps it never will be. It is therefore a long-term project, the aim of which is to take the time to explore several aspects of Boris Achour’s work in greater depth, even if it means stumbling over ideas or repeating questions. It is published as is.
E.M.

 

10/10/2009 : Eric Mangion: Despite its diversity, I’ve always been able to follow your work, seeing it as an interplay of different interpretations. Each of your pieces seemed to me to be singular, while at the same time being marked by the notion of witz, that is to say, by the flash of wit. Your work very often seemed to me to be right and relevant by its very obviousness. What I defined as a kind of recurrence of the right idea. Nevertheless, since 2006 I’ve been rather baffled by the Conatus project you set up at that time. I’m not the only one to be baffled. But at the same time, this Conatus enigma seems to be hiding something that certainly runs deep. You can’t set up a project like this over the long term unless there’s a strong enough motivation behind it. So the purpose of this interview is to take the time to dig a little deeper. For the time being, it has that sole purpose. It is not intended for publication. But I hope it will be. My first question will be basic. How would you define this project in general terms? Then we’ll get a bit lost in the details of this adventure.

 

5/11/09 : Boris Achour : To define the project that is Conatus, I think it’s first necessary to put it in context. I think it’s no coincidence that it began in 2006, immediately after the release of the Unité catalogue (2005), which listed all my work since 1993. Having worked at length on this catalogue and having taken a critical look at all my work, and having discussed it at length with François Piron for an interview, led me to make a number of observations, both positive and negative, and to take stock of aspects that suited me or didn’t, both in the way I worked and in the forms it generated. More than a before/after Conatus, it seems to me that there is a before/after Unité. If I gave this catalogue such a title, it was with a touch of provocation (because it apparently contradicted the image people had of my work at the time) to assert that despite the formal and thematic heterogeneity of my work, there was nevertheless a real unity within this body of work spread over twelve years. This notion of unity, which I was essentially just asserting by choosing a title, I wanted to test its validity, to give it substance, but also to see what a work henceforth envisaged in this light could produce. So the first point was to bring my actions (the forms I produced) into line with what I said (the title of the catalogue).
One of the other reasons that led to the birth of Conatus, and which follows on from the first (either it gives rise to it, or it doesn’t, because it’s not certain that there’s a cause-and-effect relationship between the two), is that I was a bit fed up with replaying everything with each new work. You know the kind of film or novel in which a character wakes up having forgotten everything about his identity and his life, and has to reinvent and rebuild everything at every moment. No past, no future, just the present moment. That’s more or less how I worked from 1992 to 2005, each new work, each new exhibition being a unique, singular proposition, cut off from the previous and subsequent ones. It was exciting and destabilising at the same time, and perhaps also involved a degree of insolence and a desire for heroism that I no longer felt the desire (or the need) for.
The second point, then, is to move from a disjunctive mode to a conjunctive one. And this mode of conjunction (which, incidentally, sometimes existed within a work but not between the works themselves) that is Conatus is itself made up of different related elements: a philosophical concept associated with the format of the television series, a concept which in Spinoza is at the heart of what drives the human being. For Spinoza, the human being strives « to persevere in his being » and therefore to exercise the power of his own nature. The conatus is therefore a dynamic strategy (because to persevere is to be taken in an active and not a static sense) that depends on the degree of activity: everything strives to persevere in its being, i.e. in the direction that is proper to it, in order to increase its degree of existence. To put it more simply, conatus is the idea of desire as a driving force. Naming all my work in this way simply means stating and affirming that what drives it is above all a force of desire. Associating a philosophical term with my work is not (I believe) a way of indexing it to a prestigious form, closed in on itself and sometimes authoritarian, since it is not Philosophy as a whole that is being invoked but the very specific philosophy of Spinoza, a philosophy that is an ethic, an existential philosophy which, in the same way as I envisage art, is a way of constructing and envisaging life. Finally, in my case, Conatus is both a philosophical term and the title of a series, in the sense of a television series, which has been running since 2006. Looking at my work as a whole from this angle means seeing each exhibition as an episode in the series, and the works as its characters. We find them in exhibition after exhibition, modified or not, linked to others or not, in the same way that the characters in a series interact with each other and can kill each other, love each other, leave each other… The postulate of the series therefore makes it possible to unify and develop elements that are always very heterogeneous within a single format. And now we come to the third aspect of Conatus, which is adaptation. What interests me in the notion of format and adaptation is the plasticity, the transposition, the displacement that takes place between separate fields, and the encounters that this allows and produces. With Conatus there is a twofold adaptation, firstly of a philosophical concept into a work of art, since it is obviously not a question of illustrating this concept, but of ensuring that the work itself is desirous, generated by a desire and generative of desire and joy, but also the adaptation of the format of the series into that of an exhibition. In the same way that Cosmos (the video club) was the adaptation of a novel into a sculpture (in the sense that the cinema adapts novels into films), Conatus is the adaptation of a philosophical concept into works and exhibitions in the format of a series. Conatus is perhaps essentially a production machine, a device enabling me to generate forms (the works) belonging to families of forms (series [mobiles, flowers, corals, etc.]) included in other forms (the exhibitions), all these forms now being linked together by references, echoes and articulations that develop from exhibition to exhibition, from work to work.

 

24/01/2010 : EM : If I’ve understood correctly, Conatus was born at a pivotal moment in your work, between the writing of the book Unité, which created a unity where none was needed, and your desire to build a coherent project by combining a philosophical concept with the storytelling principles of a TV series. Before going into detail, could you go back over your earlier work? You say that « each exhibition was a unique proposition ». Why did you work in this way at the time? Was there a specific reason? Is that really true, given that you did develop a project called Cosmos over several years? Finally, I remember this piece called Flash Forward which, if I remember correctly, was already based on the principle of a TV programme.

 

21/02/2010 : BA : When I say that « each exhibition was a unique proposition », this was also true of the works themselves. I was determined to avoid producing an easily recognisable ‘style’ or a ‘subject’ that I had worked on. I saw the very notions of unity, ‘style’ and ‘subject’ as concessions to the reception of the work, both commercially and critically. It was a naïve conception, a kind of purist adolescent reaction of refusal to accept certain rules of an environment (whether they were founded, in whole or in part, or whether I had fantasised about them). The last (?) reason that made me work in this way is perhaps lighter, more ‘neutral’ (by which I mean less charged with affect or intention) if you define it as a kind of curiosity, a desire to try out and manipulate varied, different and sometimes contradictory mediums, forms and ideas without any concern for coherence: a fairly intuitive and free way of approaching artistic practice…
As for Cosmos, it was certainly the beginning of what was to become another way of working. But it remains an isolated example, developed over only a few months rather than several years, linked to the context of a three-part exhibition (from which came the idea of three works bearing the same title, conceived for three exhibitions grouping the same pieces in the same place), even if we can note that the choice of title used, Cosmos, is not insignificant in the context that interests us, since it refers to notions of totality and order.
And for Flash Forward, it wasn’t a reference to the format of a TV programme or series, but to the classic system of cartoon production in which the ‘subjects’ (characters) to be animated are drawn on transparent sheets of celluloid (which I had replaced with glass plates) placed on painted backdrops at the time of shooting. What interested me in this exhibition was the separation of these two elements, subject and background, in the pictorial sense but also in the human sense (the Subject), on the walls of the first room and then their chaotic reconfiguration in a film. But here too, the title of the work was a precursor of certain aspects to come in the work, since flash forward is a term linked to storytelling and narration, often used in film or TV scriptwriting. I was vaguely aware at the time that this exhibition could in some way anticipate my future work, and I remember thinking of it at the time as an exhibition of my future brought into the present, as indicated by the title, which a priori had nothing to do with the content, either formal or thematic, of the exhibition. Which turned out to be partly true, as I subsequently set up Conatus, with its system of narrative development and its indexing on the form of the TV series. Cosmos and Flash Forward can therefore be seen more as foreshadowing of what was to come than as different ways of working from what I was doing at the time.

 

21/03/2010 : EM : The initial aim of this interview was to gain a better understanding of the Conatus project. Then, as we exchanged e-mails, it was the substance of your older work that came to the fore, making me think of things I hadn’t thought of at the time. I’d like to come back to « this fierce determination not to produce an easily recognizable ‘style’ or ‘subject’ in your work ». Don’t you think this determination is a style in itself? And that your style before Conatus was precisely that of not having one. Wasn’t Cosmos based on this paradoxical presupposition? You say it was all naïve at the time, a « kind of adolescent reaction ». But I don’t consider wanting to blur the rules to be naïve. On the contrary, it’s an essential aesthetic subject, one of the most daring, but also one of the most exciting.

 

07/04/2010 : BA : As for the absence of style and subject matter, it seems to me that this was more an attitude than a style in itself. If by style we mean the set of characteristics that define an artist’s production, then yes, you could say that mine was not to have one. On the other hand, and this is how I understand the term, if style is a « very personal way of writing or speaking » (the dico’s definition of literary style), this means that there are artists who use, more or less deliberately, a certain number of visual codes or materials that make their work almost immediately identifiable with them. Hence the signature effect whereby a blurred black and white photograph is immediately associated with Boltanski, a standard fluorescent tube with Dan Flavin, biros and brown tape on cardboard with Thomas Hirschhorn… Another, perhaps less direct and less obvious, way of creating this signature effect is to organise and develop an artistic production under the aegis of a subject, which makes the work easier to read and understand in two ways: On the one hand, the work contains a theme and is therefore easier to assimilate, summarise and mediatise by the artist himself, and by curators and critics when they are particularly lazy (pitch effect), On the other hand, artists who give themselves a subject to work on put themselves in the position of a high-school student writing an essay, in other words they are responding to something external to the work, to an external need, and the work is often no more than the illustration or formalisation of an idea (the subject to which they are responding). Take Bruno Peinado’s Big One World, for example: bonhomme Michelin (= White = advertising object = iconic sign = Franchouillard) + Black Panther (= Black = revolution = iconic sign = USA) = not creolisation, as the artist claims, but rather a sign of creolisation. He turns two signs into a third, easily assimilated and comprehensible, opening onto nothing but himself (autism). Hence, of course, the media fortunes of this work, since it is itself a media sign…
What bothers me about style (in the sense that it produces immediate recognition) is that it seems to me to be a facility and above all that it produces an effect of authority and ownership, two aspects that are incompatible with my conception of art. And so, no, the fact that I don’t have any materials or techniques of choice and therefore avoid the immediate association of my work with myself cannot be described as a style in itself, but, as I said above, seems to me to be more of an attitude. And it’s the fact that this attitude is in opposition to these two ways of working (signature effect and work subject) that made me realise at one point that it was an ‘adolescent reaction’. I realised that I was adopting a negative attitude (refusing to submit to what I considered – rightly or wrongly or naively – to be the Law of the Art World) and that such negativity didn’t seem to me to be very constructive. I’ve always wanted to work in affirmation, to work FOR and not AGAINST (hence the title of my first exhibition at Chez Valentin, which was YES), which is why I realised that these questions of style and subject weren’t so important to me after all, that I’d been tilting at windmills until then, that it was a fairly familiar and easy technique on my part to make enemies in order to have something to fight against (with all that that necessarily entails in terms of a sense of heroism and self-sacrifice). Of course, this whole question takes on a much more important and determined aspect here than it actually did in my work and my reflections, it’s a magnifying effect due to the interview.
Otherwise, perhaps anticipating a future question, I don’t think that, starting with Conatus, I denied what I had previously thought by setting up a subject (the conatus) and a style (colours, shapes, materials): The Spinozist conatus is absolutely not a subject for a formal dissertation that I will develop from exhibition to exhibition, but the starting point of a path that is traced and mapped out as I move forward (unlike the very professorial article that Frédéric Wecker wrote in the last Art21, in which he places himself in a teacher-student relationship and talks for four pages about whether I have understood this concept properly and whether my works illustrate it well. Here we have the typical case of an observer who doesn’t look at the works and tries at all costs to bring them down to his field of competence and knowledge). And this path seems to me to include just as much variety and stylistic heterogeneity as before, except that since 2006 the works and exhibitions have been arbitrarily brought together by a common title, which, even if it federates them, leaves them all their autonomy. For me, Conatus is above all an affirmation of the desire at work in my practice. This desire existed in my work before 2006, before I named it; it is simply pointed out, affirmed and assumed as what unites my work.
And then, to end on an (apparent) contradiction, I love the work of artists whose style is immediately recognisable: Warhol, Hirschhorn…

 

12/04/2010 : EM : From the two exhibitions I saw at the Galerie Vallois in 2006 and 2009, the one at the Grand Palais in 2008, or images from other exhibitions, I don’t get the impression that Conatus has, as you say, « as much variety and stylistic heterogeneity as before ». Obviously, the forms are different and varied. But basically they seem to me to be managed for the most part by a search for elementary form close to a minimalist pop aesthetic, all mixed up with a few enigmatic variables like masks. What’s more, they seem to me to be disconnected from what feeds them, i.e. the notion of desire that is a priori the driving force behind the Conatus thinking And at the same time, what’s troubling is that, at the same time, you’re setting up experiments like those you did for the Force de l’art in 2009, or at the ateliers des Arques in 2008, or The Forest for an art centre in Spain in 2008, which make all this work seem like a search for the origin of art, precisely through the search for the elementary form. But instead of looking for the figures in the prehistoric cave, you’d be digging up the prehistory of another story. Which story? I don’t know.

 

15/04/2010 : BA : My first point is the disconnect you feel between the works and the notion of desire. Once again, desire does not nourish these works, any more than the works illustrate what desire or the conatus is. By grouping my work under this term I wanted to assert its unity and assert that this unity was made under the sign of desire. That’s all there is to it. It’s an assertion, and I don’t think it’s important to try and verify its accuracy, quite simply because art is not a science, and so it doesn’t have to verify the postulates it posits. What F. Wecker has not understood is that he is trying to analyse the degree of my understanding of the conatus (and as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter whether he finds my understanding good or bad, what I find a pity is that he places the analysis on this ground of understanding). There are no more – but no less – explicit links between desire and my work since 2006 than there were before. I think that art is a way of constituting oneself as a subject, and that a subject without desire is a dead subject, or a non-subject, or an unrealized subject. Desire is not an end in itself; on the contrary, it’s a driving force, enabling us to move forward by tracing this path of forms and attitudes (art) that enables us to become subjects. In the end, I could almost say that art and desire are two different ways of naming the same thing.
Second point: I do think I’m looking for something elementary, primordial, fundamental, but more than an elementary form (a notion I don’t believe in, any more than I believe in the notion of an original language from which all others would derive) it seems to me that, as you wrote in your question, I’m looking for the origin of art or the very nature of the creative act (no less!!!). So, yes, this is reflected in the titles or references used in the works, in terms or signs that hark back to very ancient times (the terms Gondwana or Cambrian, for example, or geological strata, or even the negative handprints on posters…), but it’s not the same as a search for the origin of art. ), but it’s not the fact that these elements are ancient that interests me most, but rather the distance and time that separate us from them, and therefore the energy involved between those times and today, and the path we have to travel to connect with them (the telluric energy involved in splitting Gondwana into several continents, the energy that moves rock strata, the time it takes to make a stalactite, the forces and time needed to transform coal into diamonds, etc.).
And if not, I’d really like someone (you?) to explain to me one day exactly what this famous ‘minimal pop aesthetic’ is… I don’t really see how, for example, the branches (reminiscent of antlers or coral) covered in brown adhesive tape are part of this aesthetic. And the white sanitary porcelain bollards from Contrôle dating from 1997, are they minimal pop or not? If so, then they don’t date from Conatus, as far as I’m concerned.
On the other hand, where I’m more inclined to agree with you is on the fact that the forms produced in Conatus are mostly simple shapes, inspired by mineral or plant elements (crystals, diamonds, corals, twigs, stalactites, stalagmites, strata). What all these forms have in common is that they have more to do with growth, development and a long, slow temporality than with being simple or primitive.
As for the masks, I think they are much more than just an enigmatic variable. From a strictly practical point of view, they allowed me at Les Arques to shoot with different actors while still giving the appearance of a group. They also made it possible to formally link projects together, simply by their presence. They provide opportunities for sculptural and colourful experimentation, using motifs, materials and techniques found in other works. They indicate the ritual aspect of the actions carried out with the objects. They are reminiscent of the world of carnivals, festivals, childhood, horror films and so on. In any case, Conatus is undeniably about origin and transformation.

 

30/11/2010 : EM : Unlike Frédéric Wecker, I’m not trying to find a link between your work and Spinoza’s text. I’m simply trying to understand what the term desire means to you. You speak of « the motor that enables us to move forward by tracing this path of forms and attitudes (art) ». You also talk about a « desiring production machine ». But what exactly does that mean? Isn’t it a commonplace to say that art comes from a driving force, a desire that we commonly call creativity? Or maybe I’m wrong and desire has a different meaning for you? You also seem to be saying between the lines that art doesn’t necessarily need explaining. Is this also a misinterpretation on my part or a real thought?

 

09/12/2010 : BA : I think the whole thing is actually quite simple and that we’re gradually getting into something that’s far too confusing, given the distance in time between the questions. And I’m getting the impression more and more that I’m indulging in a learned and sententious tone, as if I had to give you a university lecture, sometimes on my work, sometimes on Spinoza and the conatus. You may take that as a reproach, but it’s a reproach for which we share responsibility. So I’m going to try to conclude with this idea of the conatus, and therefore of desire, around which we’ve been circling for a year and which seems to me to be the tree that hides the forest. So. I don’t attach any particular meaning to the word ‘desire’, but there are two quite opposing conceptions of the term. The first and most commonly accepted and used concept sees desire as an aspiration towards something that meets an expectation and as an attempt to resolve the tension created by this lack. Here, desire is something to which we aspire (an object, a being, a situation [fame, wealth, etc.], etc.), so it is something absent, and it is therefore also something external to the desirer. The second conception, that of Spinoza, posits that there is nothing external to desire, and therefore nothing it lacks. Desire is not linked to an external object that it strives to attain; desire is the essence of Man, humanity itself. So it’s no longer a goal to be achieved, but what motivates us, what moves us, in our very humanity. And contrary to what you say, I don’t think it’s at all commonplace to assert that this idea of desire is at the heart of artistic activity. It may be self-evident in your conception of art, and if so I share that with you, but it seems to me to be very rarely present in what I see most of the time in exhibitions. Of course, I’m not trying to assert that this conception of art as an activity that engages the artist in what is most profoundly human in him is the only one, the true and unique one, but just to say that it’s mine, that I hold to it and that this is how I conceive my practice. Otherwise, as a small semantic detail, I didn’t use the expression « desiring production machine », which sounds a little too For Ever Deleuze, but rather « production machine », which is much less culturally and symbolically charged, and which is another way of describing one of the important aspects of Conatus, which is that of « a device enabling me to generate forms » (in quotation marks, as I quoted myself 5 answers above).
Finally, regarding the last part of your question, of course art doesn’t « need » explanations!!!! And even less « necessarily needs »! What do you think it needs explanations for? Because to say that art needs explanations is to conceive of it as something to be understood, something that would have a meaning that the viewer would have to decipher, sometimes with the need for physical or textual mediation, in cases of « great complexity ». What we can accept is that access to a very specific work is sometimes facilitated by a historical or cultural context, and that the thought produced around or from art is even sometimes interesting, and can even in return nourish the artists’ practice. But this can never cancel out the absolute sovereignty of art. This is why I chose the poem by Angelus Silesius as the title of my exhibition at the FRAC in Reims last year: « The rose is without why, blooms because it blooms, cares nothing for itself, desires only to be seen ». The work of art, art, doesn’t give a damn about being seen, let alone understood: it’s there, it exists, it gives and offers itself as absolute presence, and basta! But that absolutely doesn’t mean that I, as an artist, am indifferent to the encounters, exchanges and debates that the work can provoke, otherwise I wouldn’t be replying to you…

 

23/12/2010 : EM: I must confess that I’m discovering Spinoza’s concept of desire through you, and it leaves me perplexed. How can we create desire if there is no motivation, if nothing is external to desire? For me, desire is not born of lack, but of will. Let me tell you a little story… For years, I used to dream every night as I fell asleep that I was holding a revolver and pointing it at nothing, as if I wanted to aim (and therefore kill?) someone I couldn’t see. I took this as the expression of a form of aggression that lay dormant inside me, until psychoanalyst friends told me it was a textbook case of people obsessed by the desire to achieve something. The gesture is that of aiming at a target, and we call it « will ». But I’m not sure it comes from a lack. It’s just about the pleasure of making and creating, which I think is what many artists think. I still believe that art is above all the fruit of this will, of this desire. Except that the best wills in the world don’t necessarily make the best works. That’s for sure. But let’s leave desire aside. Let’s move on to the question of the « production machine ». We don’t see it formally in Conatus. Which is no fault in itself, of course. But where is it located? In repetition? In this invisible desire? Or is it merely a metaphor? Then we’ll come back to the « sovereignty of art ». But in a subsequent question that I’ll keep under wraps.

 

08/01/2011 : BA : If we consider that desire is in itself and we project it onto an object, doesn’t this resolve this apparent contradiction? A classic example of the conatus is to say that it’s not because a woman is beautiful that we desire her, but conversely that it’s because we desire her that we find her (and therefore she is) beautiful. And you say that for you « desire is not born of lack but of will », which is not far from what I’m talking about, and in any case quite different from the common conception. And further on, when you talk about the « pleasure of making and creating », here too you’re very close to what I mean by conatus. I’m getting the feeling more and more as I observe the form this correspondence is taking that our opinions and conceptions of art and desire are much closer than you imagine, and that it’s the fact that I chose at one point to use a convoluted, Latin philosophical term that made you tick. Voilà!
And now the « production machine »… Back in 2001, when I made the video store version of Cosmos, I noticed how the fact that I’d given myself a framework (designing 200 different covers for 200 films with the same title) allowed me to indulge in the simple, guilt-free pleasure of creating forms. I realized that I was much better at allowing myself freedom within a predetermined framework than outside of it. Nothing very original there, but important for me nonetheless, given my frequent propensity for doubt and blocking. So I’ve tried several times to put this framework or structure back in place. This can be seen, for example, on a small scale in the piece Operation Restore Poetry, in which I produced some twenty posters bearing statements (names of works or other) in very whimsical typos, or in the combinatorial system of the Flash Forward cartoon. By positing that Conatus was a series, in the sense of a television series, I gave myself a framework coupled with a cultural referent that would allow me to develop over time (like the episodes or seasons of a series) and produce works that I consider to be characters in the series, with all that this allows and implies in terms of potential developments. You’re quite right to point out that none of this is formally apparent in Conatus, so of course I agree with you that it’s not a problem because it’s all about internal cooking and not at all a Warholian statement. I don’t want to be a machine, I just sometimes need to set benchmarks to give free rein to my ideas/envisions/desires/imaginings…

 

23/01/2011 : EM : What makes me « tick » (I love this word) is this word « conatus » to express desire when desire is called desire, but above all it’s that desire and art are pleonasms for me. For me, art is the desire to do. That’s why it makes me laugh when people say « anyone can do this work ». It’s not true, because « anyone » doesn’t have the desire to do it, otherwise he’d be an artist (good or bad). But that’s not what I really wanted to talk about. In your penultimate answer, you say that art is sovereign. I don’t believe that at all. Every work needs mediation, be it cultural or contextual, as you say, but also textual, factual or simply oral. This may be due to professional deformation, or to the fact that I was initially self-taught and had to do a lot of research to understand the art of our time and art in general, because at first I didn’t understand anything without reading the explanations in books or magazines. Or maybe it’s because most of the artists I like seem to me to have produced an « open work », to use Ecco’s famous expression, i.e. a work open to multiple interpretation. You’ll also tell me that « interpretation » and « explanation » don’t mean the same thing. I would say that explanation is the figurative version of interpretation. But in the end, if I dwell on this point, it’s because I’m thinking that Conatus is a work that perhaps deliberately wishes to escape explanation, and that it’s perhaps for this reason that we come up against its interpretation? Is this not the key? If that’s true, it doesn’t mean we have to stop talking, but it does mean I have to start asking questions differently.

 

24/01/2011 : BA : Éric, it’s funny how you make me say things I don’t say… Once again, we’ve been circling around this question of desire for quite a while now, and as you say at the end of your email, I wonder if you shouldn’t change your angle and ask the questions differently. Desire is not the same as conatus, otherwise I’d actually use the first term: conatus is the idea of desire as a MOTOR! As a force that moves us, animates us, and this idea is not inscribed in the term desire itself. Desire can be seen in many different ways, as something lacking, or even as something essential, or other things. Spinoza posits that it’s what drives us, beyond, or rather below, our own will.
As for the sovereignty of art, what I mean by this is that there is something in art, in the work of art, that always irremediably eludes explanation and interpretation. This is by no means to say that no mediation is required to encounter a work, and indeed the context in which a work is presented (the fact that it is presented in a given space, with its physical, architectural and cultural characteristics, whether it is part of a given exhibition, group or personal, with a « theme » or not… in short, the context in which it appears) is already in itself a form of mediation. A work of art is never encountered on its own; it is always inscribed both in the viewer’s personal history and in a historical, social and cultural context… So, yes, mediation and explanation can be envisaged, and indeed this is the role of exhibition structures (museums, art centers etc.) and critics, and I’ve got nothing against that (as long as it doesn’t supplant the encounter and interfere with it excessively, as is too often the case, but that’s really another problem). But in any case, it’s not up to the artist to fulfil this function, and on the other hand, once again, a work is never reducible to explanations, interpretations and mediations, whatever their qualities.
I don’t think my work since Conatus is any more concerned with escaping explanation than it was before. Where I can perhaps agree with you is in saying that I hope, more than ever before, that the viewer, in the end, finds himself in his encounter with the work in a face-to-face encounter with himself, beyond knowledge, explanations and interpretations, beyond culture in other words. It’s a wish on my part, something I consider essential in the relationship with art, but in no way something I want to impose. And of course this doesn’t invalidate mediation in any way. I think it just puts things in their proper place, in their respective importance.

 

28/02/2011 : EM : In an earlier reply you suggest that Conatus is constructed as « a series, in the sense of a TV series ». You also say that this is not formally apparent. Nevertheless, can you go a little further in this connection? Why not use examples from the works? Indeed, I’m keen to know how Conatus has evolved since its first episode in 2006 at Galerie Vallois?

 

14/03/2011 : BA : Apart from what I’ve already elaborated on in other answers, one of the reasons I decided to consider and undertake Conatus as a TV series was the simple fact that I’ve long been a big fan. As a child, I used to spend my Saturday afternoons watching a show called La Une est à vous, in which viewers had to vote by telephone for the series they wanted to see. It was there that I discovered what we now call cult series such as The Invaders, Wild, Wild West, The Avengers, Cosmos 1999 and Princesse Saphir. I loved it and, beyond the stories in each episode, I loved seeing the same characters week after week, even if I later realized that the episodes were broadcast in absolutely non-chronological order, and therefore without any concern for possible character evolution. Later came the shocks of The Prisoner, Twin Peaks and Lost. At the same time, I had the same kind of relationship with comics, whether with weekly or monthly magazines, or with albums: there were also characters whose adventures I followed from week to week, month to month, year to year… And so, with Conatus, I wanted both myself and the spectator to establish and propose this same kind of relationship over a fairly long period of time, even though I was well aware that the medium I use doesn’t necessarily lend itself to this. I was interested in considering a piece not only in terms of its relationship to the moment of its public presentation (i.e., its exhibition), but rather as something that is not fixed, not definitive, but that can be modified and evolve over the course of Conatus’s « episodes », as this would allow me to introduce a notion of temporality that extends and develops from exhibition to exhibition.
It was also an assumption that I was undertaking something of which I had no idea the future developments, something with a narrative aspect built in from the outset. When I say that this is not necessarily apparent (and not that it’s not formally apparent), it’s because I’m well aware that viewers’ relationship to the visual arts is not the same as that of viewers to TV series: the frequency of a TV series is much greater than that of my exhibitions, which are more distant in time from one another. In TV series, narrative is one of the main building blocks, with the characters and their stories, adventures and developments much more obvious.
To be more precise, I’d like to take a few examples of works or elements that can be found from exhibition to exhibition: if we take the mobile Conatus: Bande-Annonce, presented at the Palais de Tokyo in 2006, it’s made up of a set of shapes in balance with one another. One of these elements is an assembly of aluminum angles in a shape reminiscent of coral or deer antlers: similar elements can be found in other mobiles in the exhibition Conatus: Pilote at Galerie Vallois the same year, either in the same material, or covered in brown adhesive, or in cardboard tubes, placed on the red mirrored Plexiglas structure Gondwana. In 2008, these coral forms were again featured in the exhibition Conatus: A Forest, still in cardboard tubes, but on a much larger scale, and no longer isolated but forming a sculptural volume within which the viewer could move around. Finally, in 2009, in Conatus: La rose est sans pourquoi, corals were present both in certain mobiles and, above all, on the floor, each in a unique, bright color, and again in different materials (extruded polystyrene + wood + acrylic resin). Here, the analogy with the series is made at the level of recurring characters found from episode to episode, sometimes similar, sometimes modified (size, materials, color, position in space). To think of the works as characters is to insist on a certain continuity that exists from one exhibition to the next. Another example is the cartels and titles of the works. As early as Conatus: Bande-Annonce at the Palais de Tokyo, I insisted on materializing the titles. The first reason was that I find exhibition labels often formally atrocious, but above all unthinking, part of a pseudo-neutral dressing-up of the work and accompanied by text playing the role of mediation elements with often indigent content. I thought that by formalizing the title I could short-circuit the labels and these mediation elements that explain (in fact enjoin) the viewer what he or she is going to feel when faced with the work. Of course, this was not to be. The other reason, surely more important, is my lifelong interest (Les femmes riches sont belles, 1996) in words, in their poetic, enunciative and performative aspects, but also in their formal and typographic aspects. Hence the fact that every episode of Conatus (or almost every episode!) has included materialized titles, be they titles of works or the title of the exhibition itself. Sometimes, as in Conatus: Joie, 2006, there’s even an inversion of size and visual importance (and therefore blurring) between the work and the title. So, just as a character can be recognizable from exhibition to exhibition by its form or material (the corals), so too can it be by its status (the title). That’s how Conatus has evolved since 2006, in terms of its correspondence with TV series.

 

20/03/2011 : EM : If each work is seen as a character, do you see each exhibition as an episode? If so (which I suppose it is), how is this episode constructed? From a plot? A logical sequence of « facts »? On the contrary, a total autonomy of each episode? Or something else?

 

26/03/2011 : BA : The Conatus = series analogy effectively implies that each exhibition is an episode, that each work is a character, and that we follow their evolution from exhibition to exhibition. That said, more than an articulation of logical consequences, I was once again interested in the idea of Conatus as a series as a basic premise, as a possible reading grid and also because it allowed me to envisage an underlying narrative for the whole. From then on, there’s no real plot or « logical sequence of events » from episode to episode. What links each show, beyond the basic premise, is a mixture of autonomy and correlations, formal or thematic. In almost all the exhibitions, for example, there’s this attention to the formalization of titles (the titles of the exhibitions themselves or the titles of the works), which take on a plastic form that I mentioned in my previous answer, or recurring forms. So I’m moving forward a bit like a writer who’s created characters and let them develop as he writes. Hence the importance and recurrence of works that refer directly to the notion of growth or evolution (corals, Sunflowers, stalactites, stalagmites, Stratas…), a notion that necessarily implies another: that of temporality. Temporality can be on the scale of the exhibition (the titles are made up of fluorescent tubes, only one of which is lit on the opening day, and which gradually brighten up as a new tube is lit each day) or on a much larger scale with the Stratas, which symbolically refer to the extremely long durations of geology. That said, if we extend the writer’s metaphor, Conatus: Pilote and Conatus: Timescape may correspond to moments of character introduction, introductory scenes in which formal and theoretical issues and questionings are set out. The other episodes, Conatus: A Forest, Conatus: AMIDSUMMERNIGHTSDREAM, Conatus: The one in the cave, Conatus: Night of the dancer and Conatus: The rose is without why, each have their own characteristics and relative autonomy. They could be seen as isolated chapters, fragments of a larger whole, moments from a larger development from which only extracts are visible. When I speak of their specific characteristics, I’m also thinking of the circumstances in which these episodes were conceived and produced: Conatus: A Forest was designed for a very large space in an art center, Conatus: AMIDSUMMERNIGHTSDREAM was developed during a two-month residency in Les Arques, a small village in the Lot region, where the works were produced and presented in the middle of nature, Conatus: celui dans la grotte [Conatus: The one in the cave] took place at the Vallois gallery, Conatus : la nuit du danseur [Conatus: Night of the dancer] used the scenography and works by other artists from the second edition of La Force de l’Art as a backdrop, and finally Conatus : La rose est sans pourquoi was an exhibition at a FRAC, based on a quatrain by the poet and mystic Angelus Silesius. In each case, the spaces, working conditions and times, and financial resources were very different.
To answer more precisely the question of the construction of each episode, this is of course the result of the common points already mentioned, but also of the specific issues involved in each case. For Conatus: La rose est sans pourquoi, for example, I wanted to create new mobiles that were simpler than the first ones (by which I mean that each had fewer elements), to systematize the presence of a light source in each of the mobiles, to develop the coral shapes, but above all to base the exhibition on Silesius’ quatrain, from a plastic as well as a poetic, spiritual or philosophical point of view.

 

04/07/2011 : EM : This principle of growth is very clear, especially formally when I think back to all the stages I’ve seen, or in relation to the images I’ve just reconsulted on your site. But this requires us to be able to bring together all the stages of Conatus to see the state of its evolution. Is this an option for you? And if so, how would you envisage this exhibition? All the stages together? Or restore each stage as it stands?

 

13/09/2011 : BA : Right from the start, I thought of Conatus as something that would develop over time, over a fairly long period, although not predetermined. The series began in January 2006, almost 6 years ago now… Unlike TV series, which are watched by thousands or even millions of viewers, I’m the only one, I think, who knows about every episode of Conatus. So it’s obvious that the growth and evolution of the various characters, or forms, developed since 2006, are not blatantly obvious to viewers who have only seen a few episodes. To develop the parallel with TV series, at the start of each episode of soap operas (those whose story develops from episode to episode, season to season) there is what is known as the previously, which is a few seconds’ summary of recent developments or the fundamentals of the series. Similarly, on a season-by-season basis, there is the recap, which is an episode broadcast at the start of each new season and which, as its name suggests, recaps the events of previous seasons. For Lost, for example, which ran for six seasons, i.e. six years, it was necessary to wait 6, even 9 months, between the last episode of one season and the first of the next. The recap therefore had the function of putting the viewer back into the swing of things, resituating the characters and the narrative stakes. And as each recap had the classic length of an episode, they became denser and more streamlined with each passing year…
If one day I were to bring together all the Conatus episodes, it could indeed take the form of an exhibition, but also that of a publication. I confess I haven’t yet thought about the form such an exhibition might take, but just off the top of my head, I think I’d opt for a partially chronological display that would synthesize and develop the most important research, with groupings by families of forms and thematic, conceptual and formal echoes. But I also like the idea that works and exhibitions have a life of their own, and that we shouldn’t try to group everything together at all costs. In any case, an exhibition presenting all, or a large part, of the works conceived for, or by, Conatus could never fully account for the project’s temporal development. In fact, I think an exhibition of this kind would have to include both pre-existing works and new works that would deal even more specifically with this question of growth, evolution and development.

 

31/01/2012 : EM : The episode that struck me the most, or at least that I find the most singular, is that of the « dancer », a tap dancer if I remember correctly. It’s a video. Was its production induced by the context of its existence (the Grand Palais in Paris at the time of La Force de l’Art in 2009) or did its profile already exist before you were invited to take part in this event? For my part, I felt that this work was a desire to escape the art world’s great mass, by creating this enigmatic character who wanders around at night amidst other works, each as grandiloquent as the next. Is this it? Or something else? On the other hand, I was totally baffled by another stage of Conatus: the film you made during your residency in the village of Les Arques in 2008. I didn’t understand its pastoral yet grotesque character, with characters strolling through the countryside miming incongruous gestures. Or are these gestures linked to the origin of things and their transformation, as you suggest earlier in our interview?

 

18/02/2012 : BA :The first film you mentioned, whose exact title is Conatus: La nuit du Danseur [Conatus: Night of the dancer], is, as is often the case with me, the result of a combination of a pre-existing idea or desire and a reaction to a specific context. I’d been wanting to film a character moving around an empty museum space at night for a long time. I’d already attempted this with TR1ANGL3, in 2008, a film shot using Dominique Gonzales-Foster’s Cosmodrome exhibition at the ARC as a set or background. It’s a long steadycam sequence shot through the exhibition space, revealing a band playing a song. I don’t really like this film, which I find too illustrative, and perhaps too easy. But the ideas of a nocturnal journey through an exhibition empty of spectators, of a relationship to music, of a dreamlike atmosphere were already there. If we go back even further, these two films have to do with a childhood fantasy, which I think is fairly common, of being locked up in a department store or hypermarket and spending a whole night there alone. I remember as a child I used to love to imagine myself in that situation… Added to all this was the context of La Force de l’Art, « biennale of the French scene », with all that this kind of event often entails in terms of grandiloquence and spectacularity. And it didn’t fail: the exhibition turned out to be an unpacking of works, each one more spectacular than the last, over-produced and oversized, all without any real curatorial thought. I wanted to use Philippe Rahm’s scenography, which was originally intended to be much crazier and more labyrinthine, as a set and have a dancer move among the sleeping works. I wanted the energy of his dance to light up the darkened space. It was the simple idea of transforming a movement (dance) into another form of energy (light). Choosing a tap dancer not only allowed dance and sound to coincide, since it’s his steps that produce the music, but also conjured up the world of Hollywood musicals. So this film is a childhood fantasy + musicals + a character who could come from Feuillade’s Vampires or an episode of Tardi’s Adèle Blanc-Sec + a play on cultural and political context…
Another aspect of this work is that tap is a dance that requires perfect technique and great virtuosity, which is rather antinomic with the rest of my work. And it interested and amused me, especially in the present context, to integrate this dimension into one of my works.
As for the second film you mentioned, Conatus: AMIDSUMMERNIGHTSDREAM, the context is diametrically opposed to the previous one. It was made as part of a two-month residency in a small village in the Lot region of France, for which Claire Moulène and Mathilde Villeneuve invited 6 artists. The financial means were minimal, but the members of the association hosting the residency were very committed and helped me a great deal in carrying out the project. The pastoral character of the film is therefore directly linked to its production context. For me, this film is a form of development of certain aspects already present in Jouer avec des choses mortes (Playong with dead Things, 2003] insofar as a group of people are placed in a given space and manipulate sculptures. What essentially differentiates the two works is that AMIDSUMMERNIGHTSDREAM has a more precise narrative aspect, at least for me. I had the idea of a kind of community, set in an indeterminate temporality, whose members live together in a dwelling shaped like a silver dome and engage in various activities of a playful, dreamlike, erotic and ritualistic nature. It was a kind of staging of the creative act in a film conceived as a fictionalized documentary. I don’t know if their gestures or attitudes are grotesque, but they’re certainly strange and their purposes deliberately unclear. Perhaps it’s the fact that all the protagonists wear masks that makes you use this term. There are several reasons for using masks. Firstly, for practical reasons: the shoot was spread over several weeks, and the actors, who were either friends passing through during the residency or locals, were never available or present at the same time. Having them wear masks gave continuity to the film’s characters, without them being played by the same people. The masks also reinforced the ritual aspect of their activities, and corresponded to a strictly plastic desire to make them. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the use of masks served to emphasize belonging to a group, a community. Even if the masks are not all identical, they belong to the same « formal family » and thus establish a strong visual link between the characters.

 

04/03/2012 : EM : I think what really bothers me about AMIDSUMMERNIGHTSDREAM is this idea of community. I’ve always had a problem with the idea that art should create or be based on communities. It’s pretty hard to explain, but I’m attracted to works that play with the separation between men and men or things or things or men and things and not with their coming together. Art doesn’t create complicity. But that doesn’t mean I like what’s confusing and unapproachable. It’s just a question of distancing ourselves from the content of what’s in front of us. Jouer avec des choses mortes is a film that reveals this ambivalence: what distances us from objects and what separates us from each other? When you look closely at the film, there’s a great loneliness in the relationships between everything that makes up the elements of the choreography, and then this loneliness subsides a little without giving rise to any pastoral, bucolic games. It’s a work that’s sweet and dry at the same time. I don’t seem to remember what predestined its production. All I remember is the coincidental connection between its title and that of a text by Mike Kelley.

 

(à suivre…)