metropolis m

‘Yes, as you rightly point out, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time and secretly, or not so secretly, desiring to do something in a much more traditionally dramatic or narrative medium, such as theatre or film or books.’

‘This is probably changing, but people just assume that if an artist creates a work that is a play, or something else that involves text, that they didn’t write it themselves, because we tend not to consider artists as being primarily literary. But I wanted to make it clear that the text is really important to me. It’s a bit difficult for people outside of the visual arts to understand that visual artists aren’t just painters and sculptors.’

‘I was talking about the artist within the context of contemporary visual art – which in itself, what does that mean? I would say it’s the kind of people whose work is reviewed in Frieze or Artforum. And who makes up this system? The word “artist” is a broad term that means, especially in France, many more things than “visual art”, which is also limited in terms of expectations, of what you can do. That is what is disappointing. For such a supposedly “free” medium, we actually have rather prescribed expectations of visual artists.’

‘That’s the problem. If you raise expectations too much, you’re going to disappoint, but I would hope that…’

‘That’s a good point. I don’t know what they’ll expect. I’ll hope, and there’s no reason at all that I will necessarily be able to deliver this, that it will be an entertaining, thought-provoking, rich theatre experience that doesn’t feel like a visual artist experimenting with the idea of theatre. If I were writing this in an email, I’d put quotation marks around “idea of theatre”. I hope that it comes across as something valuable that a visual artist has done within that field or within all fields. Rather than being seen as an experiment in the form, it would be just a successful instance of that form.’

‘The thing is, we should define entertainment, because it’s a word just like “art”, or “love”, or “virtue”. It is a very broad word. People have often assumed or ascribed to Woody Allen’s films and intentions a very highbrow, very philosophical, intellectual bent. I don’t know if it’s false modesty, but he often says things along the lines of: “My work is already not very philosophically sophisticated. It’s not something in which I’m an expert. I just happen to be interested in questions of life, love and death, as we all are.” He also said that he has always felt that philosophy itself is entertainment for intellectuals. I agree with him quite strongly. It has a spiritual quality to it, but it is essentially a fun intellectual exercise that is more stimulating than a crossword puzzle, but on a similar bent. In that sense, a Woody Allen film is intellectually entertaining in the same way that a Ridley Scott film is viscerally entertaining. Would you agree or disagree with the idea that the philosophy of – I’ll pick two that I happen to like – Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer is entertaining? Is Socrates entertainment?’

‘We’re essentially praising the quality of the writer’s writing. Take someone like Heidegger, whose writing is often incomprehensible – at least to me. Is that a form of entertainment? Because it’s not practical or useful in the way that a scientific tract possibly might be. Unless the subject of a text is, “Here’s how to lift the world with a lever, but first you need a good place to stand!”, it’s intellectual entertainment. But don’t get me wrong. Entertainment is a wonderful thing.’

‘This is interesting! In ancient Greek theatre, the director was called the didaskalos, which means “teacher”, from which we get “didactic”. In The Frogs, Aristophanes says that children have teachers and men have poets. There’s this idea that the tragedian is, in some sense, not moral but gives advice to the citizens of the city and to the city itself as a body. He instructs it on how to behave better. You get that sense also in the comedies: as much as they are about slaves falling on their backsides and farting and the requisite gags with the leather phallus, they are also very much about instructing the city to behave better, to pardon the people who participated in an earlier revolution, and so on and so forth, in order not to pay as much attention to hotheads like Cleon.’

‘Not particularly. I don’t really have a strong political or moral message, but I feel like all artists and artworks are playing with different viewpoints and balancing them. Hopefully, a good artwork shows both sides to a question, but in the end, it has to advocate a position. Most narrative works are about ethical and moral choices, or, in other words: How do you live your life? What is life for? How do we get pleasure from it? What is true happiness?’

‘Yes it has, although it’s very hard to speak now about what I will do in the future. In one of Tom Stoppard’s plays, a character says that the future perfect is an oxymoron. But speaking about the future in an impossible way, I’ve been quite drawn lately to the idea of making visual artworks that are very traditional in the sense that they work within very conventional frameworks, such as busts, for example. I’m making a few busts that are related to the play. I also started making some works that are essentially prints, coloured in with watercolours. I don’t know if the audience will feel the same, but for me they’re inspired by the tradition of 17th, 18th, 19th century European printmaking, of which there are many examples. People like Daumier, Hogarth, Gilray and countless others. Not that my works are in any way as rich or complex, but they operate within a convention. We understand that this thing framed behind glass is speaking to and attempting to interrogate this tradition, allowing the plays and these other works to be rich and complex and letting the visual artworks be, in a sense, very conservative.’

‘Other people might disagree, but I think that the simplest, and perhaps only, way to really create a work of art is to work within a tradition, because otherwise you are expending all of your efforts in reinventing the wheel. It’s like an architect who decides “I’m going to build a house, but I’m not going to use brick, concrete or glass because I want to push the envelope on this one”. I would argue that it will be easier to push the envelope if you use bricks and glass. There are many less problems that you have to fix or solutions that you have to come up with. What’s more, you already have a starting point. I’ll continue my analogy. The architect is asked to make a sports hall, or a stadium. Right away, the building has a function and there’s a tradition. So there’s a visual repertoire to draw upon. He will be able to make an interesting choice based on accepting or rejecting previous decisions made for instance when building the Stade de France in Paris. I think that analogy holds true for most works of art.

I’ve actually found lately that I don’t really read any art criticism or art history criticism, or for that matter, criticism of architecture. Now, I find poetry criticism to be very valuable, because I think poetry and the way people were thinking about poetry at the beginning of the 20th century is very similar to the questions one has when making art in the early 21st century. Especially the work of T. S. Eliot, but all poets really. There was a moment, I guess, in the early 20th century where poetry had many strong traditions that had lasted for thousands of years. Basic formal structures such as meter, rhyme, verse, and then traditions such as the sonnet, pastoral poetry, love poetry, elegiac poetry, the epic, which was wonderfully subverted by Alexander Pope. And then, in the early 20th century, many new possibilities opened up, so people had the opportunity of using free verse, of not rhyming, of not using a verse structure. There was a question as well: If you can do anything, what is the value, what is the point of doing something?

To some extent, we have that in visual art now. What’s attractive to me about plays and films is that they have their own conventions. Take cinema, for example. Usually a film lasts 90 to 120 minutes. It doesn’t have to, but it often has a three-act emotional arc. And it usually has, but not always, characters that are human beings: they walk around, sounds come out of their mouths. They have problems, and the problems are either resolved or not resolved by the end of the film. But when you walk into any artist’s studio anywhere in the world, there’s no expectation of anything. That’s a lot of pressure. So, like Archimedes said, give me a lever and I will move the whole world. But first I’ve got to find somewhere to stand.’