The artist was born in 1970, but 38 years later, he is fully occupied with looking back at his early work. This takes the form of reinterpretations in word and sound. He is famous for his largest retrospective to date, shown at the recent documenta, where mechanically driven guitars performed musical interpretations of his earlier sculptures. Several poems by artists and critics also hung on the wall, written in response to this early work. A new interpretation of his work can be admired this summer at Witte de With.
You are currently working on an exhibition that will open in June at Witte de With in Rotterdam. To better understand this project it would be good to look back at the way you work, at the exhibitions that you have had over the last four years. You use terms that are borrowed from music, such as répétition, reprise, variation and interpretation. What is the meaning of the analogy?
‘A reprise is a reinterpretation of a song. You use the text and a segment of the musical theme to work from. You could describe a reprise as the moment when the musician, as it were, plays something he is testing out or creating. But there is also the original meaning of the word, to repeat something.’
You could say that your recent work combines the two practices, reprise and répétition, which in French also means rehearsal. The works in which you use the wooden staffs by the artist André Cadere can be seen as a form of reprise. You replaced the original colours with monochrome variations in black-and-white, while preserving the artist’s working method of using mathematical combinations, including a mistake. Last year in Milan and Miami, under the title La Répétition (2007), you presented variations on the 2005 work, Lyrics.
‘For Lyrics, writers (including Tom Morton and Mick Peter) were asked to write a text for a song using one of my older works as a starting point. These texts were given to composers (including Tujiko Noriko, Portradium, Marcelline Delbecq, Rainier Lericolais, and North) and an album was produced. It is from this collaboration with the musicians that each exhibition is born, using the notion of répétition. The whole of this process works like a resonance box, an amplifier for meaning.’
Black Chords Play Lyrics (2007), a work made up of 11 black guitars on stands, played by a mechanical apparatus, is an interpretation of Lyrics, as if it were a new arrangement, in the musical sense. Most people will recognize the work from the recent documenta. Lyrics was further inspired by the work Power Chords (2005). Power Chords, which used 11 white guitars on stands, was in its turn based on Barres de Bois by André Cadere, for which a colour system was translated into musical chords, more or less following the synthetic experiments of the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century.
‘Power Chords is a mechanical work that causes a group of guitars to play chords, completely automatically. In order to use a guitar as a material, I have to find a score without a melody. Creating a collage of the three or four colours of Cadere’s wooden staffs, and the three or four chords that form the basis of all popular music, was something that evolved on its own.’
The use of musical terminology is not just a question of poetry. It is a cultivation that implies ways of doing things, a particular manner of distributing individual and collective work. This has repercussions in your continued practice of calling upon others, the artists, musicians and art critics you invite to write song lyrics.
‘Yes. I spent a lot of time perched on a stool behind a drum set in a band (even as a pathetic drummer). That experience proved important and probably induced my interest in working collectively. I gladly share my views and the different forms of development in my exhibitions with others, but I still primarily work alone. The areas where others intervene are perfectly defined. That is what I call the ‘studio work’. It is difficult to create a space that gives someone else enough freedom to be able to do something, yet one that remains directed in such a way that whatever happens, it still makes up part of the original work. The names of the collaborators are assimilated into the work. These credits have become a recurring motif in my exhibitions.’
In Lyrics, you proposed that the others interpret your work in the form of songs. The results are not presented, just evoked by the lyrics. Do they form a kind of repertoire?
‘The appearance of text coincided with a desire I had to produce a commentary on my work. But in the end, the lyrics were instinctive developments, responding to friction, opposition or adhesion. The work and the text are two poetic forms that do not respond to direct understanding. It is not possible to explain them. After these experiences, I now realize that it is a metaphor for how we experience art. The process is ultimately about interpretation, the responsibility one has to the work, to this clearly recognizable code: work (subject), text and music. This relationship between the work, the text and the song is a kind of pendant – but in much more lyrical form – to work by the conceptual artist, Joseph Kosuth, which showed the relationship between a chair, a photograph of the chair, and a description of it.’
Is this a way of saying that it is no longer about a sculpture, a text or a melody, but that all of these forms of expression together create the work?
‘The work is a net, whose individual knots can sometimes be read at an exhibition. It may produce a symmetrical effect, but every text can also be read for itself, and every song exists in its own specific atmosphere. In the long run, I hope a lot of music critics continue to give a kind of echo to the work, even from far away. That is part of a kind of repercussion I hope for and try to organize.’
This process seems something of a revolt against autonomy, a desire to break open the self-sufficient uniqueness of the work of art that is scattered into different pieces which become more and more immaterial, until they are pure sensation.
‘For me, it is an analytic process. Even if I try to imitate the process of making a real album, the steps are measured and independent. The texts are written by writers whom I present with a formula, as if it were a game. There is no correct measure. Where that is concerned, I believe that the texts can be seen as texts that stand on their own, that do not depend on being set to music.’
Most of the people who have written these lyrics or music are not professional musicians. From this it seems clear that this project has nothing to do with a pop-like idea of giving an assignment to U2, or whomever. Does this amateur aspect play a role?
‘They are not professionals, but they are very good musicians. It would be ridiculous if the work were to toy with fame. It is not about a commentary on value any more than it is about supporting a system of production, but about its representation. For this reason, it is not about being obstructive, which is an inept concept. This work does not try to step outside of art. It speaks of territory and competencies, and marks the frontiers in order to make breaking through them a possibility. Right from the beginning, I have worked within reach of my own front door, with people in my immediate neighbourhood, people close to me.
There is a double meaning to the French word ‘répétition’. It refers to work in progress and also to the repetition of the same thing, like stuttering. When you use the word, do you want us to believe in a repetition of something that has already been said, that your work from now on should be seen as an enclosed totality, one that looks retrospectively at itself and which is self-contained?
‘There is obviously an ironic dimension in this duplicitous language. In the end, the répétitions are always new possibilities that present themselves in the development of my work.’
Nonetheless, I also see this process as a kind of resistance to new pressure from the project, from the production, which is inextricable from and inherent to the relationship between artists and exhibitions. These interpretations are re-readings of a repertoire. Isn’t this another way of constructing a work, an oeuvre?
‘The simplest answer to your question is that time in a work of art has nothing whatsoever to do with the time-pressure of an event, even when – paradoxically enough – my work is not created in the studio, but is wholly comprised of an answer to the contexts that present themselves. I recently read a text in which arte povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto very poignantly described this recurring phenomenon. He wrote, ‘An artistic action itself contains an individual dynamic system. My idea of actuality is contrary to any notion of opportunity. In this sense, I expect such an action, even one which is original and completely new, to satisfy the expectations of a society that insists on continual renewal of the artistic panorama.’ All these processes of répétition that I have been involved with have produced something very important for me. They multiply the inroads for approaching my work. At a given point, I recognized a certain weakness, a momentary exhaustion, my inability to produce something ‘new’ for every exhibition; simply repeating something for its own sake, without any context, horrifies me.’
So, is it a commentary on that pressure?
‘Not really a commentary, sooner a response that puts me in a position to openly integrate this possibility of repetition and rehearsal, one layer on top of the other, so the work does not dry out. Each new stage may seem like a repetition, but it merely provides new ways of approaching my work. For Witte de With, I have proposed doing my own reinterpretation of an older work, starting from the work they selected. This reinterpretation is based on the list of the technical materials that comprise the work, as a kind of concrete definition of what it actually is. In any case, there is the idea of an ingredient, as in a recipe you can use again. Actually, I would prefer to react against any pre-existing choices that determine that form from any given moment. So I am going to create a new interpretation of the work called Montana Blues, with the subtitle, ‘light boxes, cut-out letters, cables, neon lights and dimmer’. In the ‘original’ work, that meant two light boxes with those two words in them, hung up on the two sides of a door, like signs. One of them is blinking, as though it were not working properly. I found an anagram of those two words: ‘Untamable Son’. ‘Untamable’ will now be put above the door, and the letters from ‘SON’ – ‘sound’ in French – lie on top of each other on the ground, blinking, as if they could be a rearranged at any time.’
That also introduces a relationship to time, to the transformation by memory. This practice seems to me to relate to the ‘individual system’ that Pistoletto wrote about, and machines, a system that allows you to replay, to recombine ideas. I think that every artist tries to develop such a mechanism.
‘I have this perhaps naïve idea of already having dealt, in a more or less obvious manner, with the subjects that exist in my work. These three compositions allow me to make the step from something more or less intuitive to something more affirmative.’
Therefore, for you it is a manner of assuming that ideas are always variations of other ideas, corrections, adjustments, realizations? This is an affirmation that goes against the idea of linear progress.
‘It is also a way of saying that nothing is ever finished, that past, present and possible future all overlap.’
François Piron
Saâdane Afif
Witte de With, Rotterdam
13 June-24 August
André Cadere. Peinture sans fin
Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht
10 June-14 September
Opening
