ÉM.
The possible is certainly one of the most deeply rooted reading hypotheses in Boris Achour’s work. In Achour’s case, this means not the dictionary notion of the possible (the conceivable, the admissible or the envisageable), but the more philosophical – and more complex – notion espoused by Musil: « the faculty of thinking what could be just as well, and of attaching no more importance to what is than to what is not ». For Boris Achour, this is characterized by a veritable aesthetic program of choice. Je ne veux tout is its symbol. « Choosing not to choose », as he himself puts it. There’s a very fine phrase by Jacques Bouveresse on this subject in L’homme Probable: « it is wiser to decide nothing than to risk making a decision that is too delicate to be really necessary ». Of course, some may see such indeterminacy as cowardice, but on a more aesthetic level, it can also be seen as a refusal of pre-established certainty, a refusal of the demiurgic so dear to the Prometheans. I find, for example, that the pieces Ghosty (a man walking masked in the street with no particular affectation), Mmmmm (a haunting soundtrack spoken by an aphasic man broadcast in the street in the middle of the Printemps de Cahors festival), or even the one he has just produced at the Frac Languedoc-Roussillon, Plug & Play (a simple games console controller fixed to the wall without a screen) sum up this uncertainty of choice very well. The first questions man’s ability to react sensitively. The second, the power of language and image (especially at Printemps de Cahors!). And finally, the meaning of the exhibition « game », and therefore of its validity and strategic stakes. So, more than uncertainty as such, Boris Achour’s work is about the experimental possibility of questioning reality. The occurrence or non-occurrence of an event is in itself already real, just as the absence of necessity is obviously not the same thing as the absence of reason. Organizing chaos

FP.
Boris Achour’s attention to the possible, as « that which could be otherwise », has little to do with the notion of utopia (too lyrical, too grandiloquent), but deals more with the search for a form to organize the chaos of ideas, to resolve the contradictions inherent in will and desire. At the beginning of his work, organization and chaos appear as irreconcilable instances a priori: he provokes minor disorders in the street with Actions Peu, but also aligns pigeons with a rectangular polenta feeder, and reproduces different types of white ceramic urban bollards, which at once speak of the violence of conditioning, and the fascination for order. Cosmos, a collection of videocassette cases that telescope the most heterogeneous signs (discourses, images and figures), takes a different approach. Cosmos is a machine for producing subjectivity, by reprocessing the disparate elements of a common culture; potentially, everything that interests Achour, in various ways, is usable for this work: cultural and social phenomena, works, characters, models of discourse… The juxtaposition of these elements through quotation, detour, pastiche or parody, is a way of accepting everything, not in the sense of an « everything » that would cancel out all differentiation, but rather as a kind of exogenous self-portrait. A kind of adhesion to the world « as it is » can be read in this piece: each jacket adds to the others, in a cumulative and jubilant expansion, with an all-consuming ambition that reminds me of certain artistic projects that touch on infinity: Douglas Huebler’s Variable Piece #70, Fischli & Weiss’ images of the « visible world », Matt Mullican’s taxonomies or Broodthaers’ Museum of Modern Art… In an exhibition in 1999, Boris Achour showed Brian de Palma’s film Scarface, featuring an object emblematic of the hero’s hubris: a globe on which is written: « The World is yours ». A phrase to be placed in perspective with the one on this illuminated billboard, Je ne veux tout, characteristic of this paradoxical logic that can be analyzed in Freudian terms of identity construction (ego/super-ego), but also as the third term of a dialectic that confines the artist between the ivory tower and unconditional commitment. Boris Achour’s « yes » to accepting the world is, of course, pronounced with distance and irony, a « yes » also to overcoming the critical stage that many artists resort to in order to demonstrate their good conscience. L’évidence de l’œuvre.EM. It’s true that there’s a certain kind of evidence in Boris Achour’s work. By self-evident, I mean something that « imposes itself on the mind ». Indeed, we always have the impression that his work is extremely comprehensible. Which is not to say, of course, that it’s demagogic – on the contrary. There’s something very Duchampian about him. In his mode of intelligence, in his way of going straight to the point. In his economy of thought and space. I’m thinking, of course, of Actions-peu (small objects placed around the urban perimeter, always « working » in subtle ways), or Scrupule (that unusable sofa), but also of more recent pieces such as the randomly operating automatic door (Cosmos) shown recently in the Traversées exhibition at the ARC, or the light box Je ne veux tout, which sounds like a veritable ontological manifesto, clearly stated in any case in its form and in its « first-degree » reading. We can even speak of his wit and fulgurance (speed of thought). On the other hand, unlike Duchamp, Boris Achour in no way cultivates esotericism, the learned control of mystery and revelation. I believe that Boris Achour prefers, as he himself says, the notion of a « rendez-vous », an encounter with the visitor. Hence, perhaps, the simple forms that follow, corresponding to an « instant ». In any case, this disposition sets him apart from the sometimes overly complex devices of today’s art.FP. In Boris Achour’s latest film, Spirale, the plot hinges on a mysterious envelope coveted by two rival factions, each distinguished by the way they move: some in a straight line, others in convolutions. Little by little, these different characters seem trapped in their own unique way of thinking, and freeze one after the other, caught in what might be called a « freeze » of time. Boris Achour’s response to the ideology of linear time has always been negative, rejecting the notion of novelty and the amnesiac positivism it implies (I recall that one of his unrealized projects consisted of « Déjà Vu » in neon letters). However, he does not endorse the fatality of the eternal return of the same, and instead promotes a spiral evolution that reconciles these two conceptions (once again we find this notion of choice by cumulation (« and ») rather than separation (« or ») that weaves Achour’s work). The spiral is a mode of evolution that gives the impression of not being one: a stealthy, surreptitious advance that leaves open the possibility of bifurcations, and does not grant itself the status of a model. When he freezes time, Boris Achour makes a pause, a momentary halt in the circulation of signs. I’m not far from thinking that this idea runs through all his work, and the way he conceives his works as frozen instants, from Stoppeur (a poster on which he poses as a hitchhiker) to Sommes (a series of photographs in which he appears asleep on the hedges of American properties), viaAutoportrait en Coyote, a cut-out of himself that suggests he has embedded himself in a wall. All these works, more or less explicitly, can be read as self-portraits, which might seem paradoxical in the work of an artist who is so averse to any signature effect. For him, self-portraiture is not a narcissistic springboard, nor is it psychological in any way. On the contrary, it’s a way of « physically » engaging with questions that have to do with the construction of identity, and the status of the individual in relation to the collective and the societal. Basically, all these self-portraits reveal the same paradoxes: wanting to be here and elsewhere at the same time, wanting to be « inside » and simultaneously « outside ». Boris Achour, an artist of irresolution? Yes, but an irresolution that he shares with the perplexed viewer, neither satisfying nor provoking, neither fulfilling nor abandoning. Achour’s works, I believe, attempt to convey a cognitive process, based on doubt, « self-doubt », and the hope of a permanent modification of one’s presuppositions.