As part of the "Entretiens sur l'art" cycle led by Jill Gasparina at the Fondation Pernod Ricard.
(watch the video)
Boris proposed to meet me in a café at Jaurès, by the Canal de l’Ourcq, to present his project DAMP, Display-Algorithm-Procedural Modelling. When we sat down, as often happens in this kind of situation, the conversation began elsewhere. I can’t recall why it moved towards what we would be doing today if certain events in our lives had turned out differently. (turn diffenrently more)
The word encore, as we co-opt it into the English language, most often refers to the return of a performer after their purported final performance. (more encore)
There are at least two ways to conceive of solitude. There is the solitude that one endures: an unsought loneliness that brings with it feelings of unhappiness. Then there is that very different kind of solitude, which one chooses voluntarily: a desired state, necessary to the process of constructing something, a solitude that indicates a need to dig deep into one’s personal resources – to find willpower and summon up a capacity for action. (read more)
Create unusual forms but without using them to challenge the dominant aesthetic canons, thereby trying to challenge the dominant dichotomies: functionality/ornamentation, curves/right angles, transparency/opacity, nature/artifice, sensuality/reason, subject/object, thought/poetry. Kitsch, as a value, would not be inimical to modernity; it would be consubstantial, like a cursed, or at least hidden, part of it. (z more)
“I don’t know if it’s really a story,” said Witold Gombrowicz about his book Cosmos, “our actions are initially inconsistent and capricious, like grasshoppers. They gradually turn into something conclusive as we come back to them; they claw away as if they had pincers, and they don’t let go – so what can we know?” (know more)
“You know those films or novels in which a character wakes up having forgotten everything about his identity and his life, and has to reinvent and reconstruct everything, all the time. No past, no future, just the present moment.” (present more)
The question of heroism seems a far cry from the world of Boris Achour. In fact, it is a question that just does not come up with him. At the same time, it is equally impossible to describe Achour as an anti-hero, since anti-heroism is really a knowing antithesis to heroism. And yet, B. A.’s artistic world did not come from nowhere. His works teem with figures of artists, who are points of reference for him, heroes of a sort, as long as we divest the word hero of its legendary and mythological connotations and understand it in the sense of an exemplar. (discover extra)
“I started playing tennis again, because in tennis, when you hit the ball to someone, the rule is that they hit it back. Whereas in life nowadays, when someone hits the ball your way, the rule is to keep it. I communicate too much with myself, so I’m trying to go through newspapers, theatre, and the works themselves … I founded a film company, and the only person who agreed to be part of it was Anne-Marie Miéville.” (serve higher)
In Lev Vygotsky’s founding work of constructivist psychology from 1934, Thought and Language, the relation of thought to word is established as a process, not a thing. In the continual movement back and forth between thoughts and utterances, each of these interdependent elements undergo changes as they react to one another in more or less intense ways. (see further)
Among the so-called human virtues, generosity is often conflated with charity, the giving of money without obligation. Both are, arguably, deprioritized in a world that advocates competition rather than cooperation and equality. Yet generosity is not the same as charity, as it can encompass forgiveness, patience, compassion, and self-control. Today’s news is full of acts of generosity... (find out more)
Few questions are more fundamental to art than the question of use (usage). It always crops up. Whether it be from an ontological or a social perspective, it is something of a philosophical revenant, that which always returns, that which haunts art with the accursed vengeance of a Greek tragedy. It is almost as if it were the negative space of art, that thing, or concept against which art takes shape, or better yet, becomes shapeless, and (un)defines itself (for in some ways, it’s easier to say what it is not, rather than what it is). (browse the usage)
This mailing is Jean-Pierre Criqui's contribution to the book ABC B.A. published in 2018 by Dent-de-Leone and distributed by Les presses du réel. This monograph is composed of a collection of texts and critical essays in the form of a abc-book. Based on key words, twelve art critics, curators or writers wrote a text commenting on Boris Achour’s work. The book also includes an iconographic collection offering an overview of the artist’s work. (disclose the missive)
THE ROSE IS WITHOUT WHY, IT BLOOMS BECAUSE IT BLOOMS, IT CARES NOT FOR ITSELF, ASKS NOT IF IT IS SEEN (2013). Stretching the length of a wall in illuminated letters formed from standard fluorescent tubes, in a long public square (during Nuit Blanche in Toronto, 2013), this quatrain by Angelus Silesius is as much about the flower as the poem itself; each is posited as a self-evident, already existing creation. (rose more)
How does one maintain a form of indecisiveness while remaining decisive in one’s work? And what should one do when the general indecisiveness one had previously adopted and that had given us protection is changed into a mild injunction to start showing decisiveness, to be firm? That established, though undefined group, to which we would like to belong – something along the lines of a family with nothing family-like about it, a barely sketched-in father, a mother who would only survive as a smile; a Cheshire-cat of a mother... (discover what follows)
For a few years now, a whole generation of artists, from every field of creation, seems to have been “watching the sky”, in the sense that they imagine a future by generating different worlds. Realizing that the threat is constantly changing, artists have invented a body that no longer has any frontier, or territory, or even language. (consult the rest)
I would argue that Karl Marx’s classical economic theory of alienation—the realization that one is part of a particular class that is being exploited, and the consequent estrangement from the hierarchies of capitalism—has played into numerous literary cases of another kind of alienation—the social sort—that feeling of inadequacy when confronted with the surrounding, and often hostile world. Franz Kafka produced perhaps the most iconic ruminations on meaninglessness, isolation, loneliness, insufficiency, and rejection... (consider continuing)
Everything starts from a sound apparition, a fluid and cavernous sound, which returns in metallic echo and suggests the staggering pitch or the mechanical acceleration of a railway engine. It envelops the first images of the video Conatus, Night of the Dancer (2009) and recalls, following Luigi Russolo, that « the variety of sounds is infinite ». (dance more)
Rambling through the city then uninterruptedly through a gallery – dubiously but gracefully, or maybe awkwardly but decidedly, the way Boris Achour does, dropping his work off without installing it – neither showing nor showing-off – slipping through an artspace (sometimes a place for showing and showing off) like a dancer in a moon mask... (rambling more)
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. (apprehend the exchange)
Sophie Lapalu: Why and how did you decide to leave the studio and make the Actions-peu? 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. Were you familiar with these practices? (discover the answer)
I have to confront this 'Rose without Why'... And try to provide a reason, an explanation, for what from the outset appears to be without reason... I can see the trap into which we can fall. I'll leave aside here the decisive reading of this quatrain by the Rector of Freiburg, because this interpretation leads us to metaphysical shores that I don't want to come ashore on. (rose more)
Conatus - Episode 6: The rose is without a why
Previously on Conatus:
After traversing a disturbing forest, exploring the walls of a cave with pop reflections, founding a masked community in the Lot region that is as psychedelic as it is wild, and running into a tap dancer in the middle of the night, Boris Achour has a mysterious encounter with a 17th-century rose in Reims that, like all true beauties, proclaims its independence. (explore what follows)
"You watch too much television. Good evening!" could be one of the cult phrases of the 1990s, addressed in particular to Boris Achour. A protean artist with pop and conceptual ambitions, he develops a practice with a shifting formalism and a resolutely metaphysical scope. Boris Achour believes in the hypnotic power of the media, in the "guruization" of human relations, and it is in reaction to this daily manipulation - which he seems to abhor as much as it fascinates him - that he works. (want to know more?)
Achour’s work is somehow literary in a way that sets it apart from most of the work that circulates in the contemporary sphere now. (want to know how)
If we have managed to liken the artist to certain artistic approaches advocating discretion, humility, micro-resistance, and even “weakness”, by a minimal interference with signs of the real too numerous and powerful to be grappled with head on (etc, etc), it is probably time to review this position. From his early days, it is with a truly demiurgic posture that Achour has been arranging his pieces (like in a game of chess). (minimal more)
François Piron: So that we can pinpoint the kind of links existing between some of your pieces, we could start in a genealogical way. The obvious thing for anyone seeing your work as a whole for the first time – in this catalogue, for example – is that it has never had any stylistic unity. (unite more)
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. (shop this way)
Éric Mangion and François Piron use a few key words to highlight the complexity and diversity of Boris Achour's work. His work uses uncertainty and dysfunction to question identity, the ways in which it is constructed and the multiple ways in which it is conditioned, all the while willingly playing on paradox and the coexistence of possibilities. (possibly possibilities)
Boris Achour has no intention of placing his work in pre-prepared niches that might make it easier to evaluate and identify. It's a way of escaping the determinisms of society, but also those of the art world, of not bending to the expectations of the moment. Achour makes his own way, traces his own lines of flight, random and diffuse, in a solitude that can only be "held" by everything it feeds on... (determine less)
Numerous empty video cassette cases are placed side by side on a forty-meters long shelf. Inside these two hundred cases are as many film jackets, all entitled Cosmos, all adapted from the novel of the same name by Witold Gombrowicz and all directed by Boris Achour. The whole collection is also called Cosmos. (fast forward)
EG : How would you situate Boris Achour in the generation to which he belongs?
NB : This generation of artists is characterised by two fundamental theoretical elements... (want to know which ones?)