Negative Sculpting
Negative Sculpting
A conversation with Cyprien Gaillard
Currently Cyprien Gaillard is on show at Stroom in The Hague. A few months ago Payam Sharifi (Slavs and Tatars) talked to him about their passion for themes such as ‘the state’ and ‘power’ and the way these are manifested through architecture, monuments and history.(info Dunepark – excavated bunker Stroom The Hague
How does violence play a role vis à vis monumentalism for you? Georges Bataille said that the first thing that people do in a time of revolution is attack the buildings.
‘You mean the state buildings?’
Buildings in general, architecture being an expression of the state.
‘But people don’t attack other peoples’ houses, they attack the Bastille, or a castle, which is really interesting: what we now have is an anti-revolutionary system where the state is demolishing the constructions that it built.’
State anarchism.
‘Yes! A double-intrusion. These landscapes are very violent in a way: you had these tower blocks an hour away from Paris that were built in the middle of nowhere, and now they’ve been demolished and processed – these are truly 21st century monuments, honest and actual because monuments are always a kind of intrusion.’
These are 21st century monuments because they are failures. We’re always dealing with the flip side of positivism, but can you imagine a victorious monumentalism right now? In the way that we tell an alternative history, whether through vandalism, monumentalism or humor, it’s not necessarily a history written by the victors.
‘I think the best example of a 21st century monument is Fritz Koenig’s 1981 Sphere sculpture that used to be a fountain at the bottom of the Twin Towers, when they started to clear the rubble away after 9/11 they found the sculpture and decided to move it to Battery Park. It’s beautiful because it’s ruined: it’s been crushed and has big holes and it doesn’t work as a fountain anymore obviously. The interesting thing is the sculpture’s relationship with another example of architectural entropy: Minoru Yamasaki, the Japanese ex-pat architect of the World Trade Center as well a housing project in St Louis called Pruitt Igoe in 1955. And for most American historians of modernism, American modernist architecture died in 1972 when the state decided to demolish Pruitt Igoe, only 18 years after it was built. These are the same 33 buildings you see getting knocked down in the film Koyannisqatsi. And this was the same architect who was commissioned to build the Twin Towers. They fell for different reasons but his buildings seem to have some kind of curse.’
What is the difference in attitudes towards monuments in your travels in the West versus in the East, namely America and the former Eastern Block?
‘No one wants monuments any more. The Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota, next to Mount Rushmore, is a perfect example. Monuments are anti-ecological, they cost money, they take up a lot of space. There is something about the monument that is also a complete intrusion. Crazy Horse was begun in the 1940s by Korczak Ziółkowski, a Polish sculptor, and the story goes that they didn’t have any money but they had the land, so he gave his whole life to making it. It’s supposed to be 20 times bigger than Mount Rushmore, and they say it will take another 80 years to finish. So now Ziółkowski is dead, the Indians are all long gone or alcoholics, and there’s still this big mess right next to Mount Rushmore. Ziółkowski once said in an interview, I am not an Indian-lover, I just care about making a monumental sculpture. And this I like, I like this situation where the sculpture is a monster, it has a life of its own, and the more it goes towards its finishing point the more obsolete it gets and the more chaos it creates. I think that what you like in monuments is how they are now, the story of how we visit a monument, re-adapting to it.’
For us it is the story behind a monument that is interesting, the dizzying mix of scales between the intimate on one side and the political on the other. The Pantheon of Broken Men and Women we’re currently preparing attempts just that: excavating the lives of those who were broken equally by ideas as by love. Not just of people, but of collectives, the Circassians for example, or of nature, the Aral Lake, Sumqayit, etc. How much do you see the personal or rather the accompanying stories, the minor stories, the accoutrements playing a role? I remember that quite early on you were against having to describe all the interesting things around the work, thinking that the work should live on its own.
‘I try to transcribe the story of the monuments through the work. For Crazy Horse I asked Koudlam to collaborate on the music, and what I wanted was for it to transcribe what Native American culture has become today. So we had synthesizers imitating flutes. We actually looked a lot at the opening ceremony of the Salt Lake City Olympics. There were these white men playing music on synthesizers vaguely inspired by Native American rituals and then you had these Indians arriving on concrete horses and dressed in big feathers… and everything in the anachronistic landscape of an ice skating rink!
I try as much as I can to think of art as a language as well and to translate my thinking through it. You have artists where the process of research is amazing, and the stories are so complex, but you shouldn’t forget that in the end, the work of art should be a synthesis. That’s what I do with the Geographical Analogies (2007): I bring everything together on the same level, putting tower blocks from Paris, Aztec pyramids, and Crazy Horse all there in one box.’
You are basically trying to create connections and associations between certain found geographical and geological phenomena and monuments – but do you think that this is about finding convergence or finding divergence? Are we trying to find a link that normally people wouldn’t see, say for you between a baseball mound and a Cyprus tree and land art in general, for us between Caucasian satire, mountain polyglots, and lyrical poetry?
‘All these pictures deal with the idea of decay and degradation. What I try to say with the Geographical Analogies is that to me all is ruined, society naturally produces ruins, and decay is the natural course of things. The only distinction is that there are two kinds of ruins: legal and illegal ruins – or rather official ones that you decide to destroy like tower blocks, or the Wynant house by Frank Lloyd Wright in Gary, Indiana, or all the amazing Victorian houses of downtown Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland… really amazing architecture and probably the oldest architecture in America but that is destroyed because it is decaying, because it is negative.’
I’m kind of getting tired of telling the alternative, ‘unofficial’ story, of the draw towards the melancholic, the losers as opposed to the winners… and I’d like to imagine doing something that is purely of our time, today, somehow inch towards the future again. Obviously, we live in a society obsessed with the past, especially in the West. But our interest in the past is rather particular: we are interested in the anachronisms, the ruptures, that could be equally comfortable in science-fiction as in history.
‘We’re interested in a much more recent past, too – recent history.’
Yes, say the past 30 years. Maybe that’s indicative of our culture as a waning influence? Like in China, India and Brazil, these newly developing countries, I’m sure they are not as interested in the past as we are. They are only thinking about the next 10 years. So whatever really happened to Futurism? Do you ever imagine being able to contemplate things that are going to be in the future as opposed to times passed?
‘I fight nostalgia; I always say that I am so un-nostalgic.’
Fighting it implies that you already are!
‘It’s not that I don’t think we are romantics. But there is also a kind of humor, humor is a way of facing nostalgia, looking at urbanism and saying, “what is that, what were they thinking, who is responsible for this?!” And no one really is.’
Humor is something we’ve been dealing with a lot. We’re working on a project at the moment about Mollah Nasreddin, this old character in Eastern folklore, a sort of wise idiot. Everyone in Russia, the Middle East, Central Asia, Turkey grew up with this character. And it’s a completely first-degree sense of humor. One thing I like about humor is that it’s incredibly generous in a way – I don’t mean the point-and-laugh kind of humor but I mean the kind of humor where everyone laughs with you and it really is side-splitting. When we’ve traveled with you, for instance. But where’s the humor in your work?
‘There is no humor in my work! Or very little. The only time I’ve ever heard anyone laugh at my work was during The Lake Arches (2007), a film I made where my friend Nick dives into a lake surrounded by this amazing architecture and breaks his nose in the shallow water. People really laugh loud and then they see that he’s really hurt and go oh fuck, terrified. And then they see the architecture.’
Why is that, though? You’re not someone who takes himself too seriously…
‘It’s a way of kind of de-complexing the work – you can go to a monument and read about the context in which it was built. My suggestion is to look at how it is now, with everyone that is in the picture. At the pyramids in Mexico you see all these fat, elderly Americans climbing the stairs, and then you have this Mexican guy on the stairs selling flutes, and playing the Rocky theme song on one of them. Which is the truth, the story of the historians or the guy selling the flutes? This is the truth, it’s what it is now.’
Do you think there is a flip side of humor? I hate to come back to Bataille again but he said famously that when you see death, when you are faced with it, the only thing you can do is laugh crazily because it’s the only way to approach the thing you are scared of.
‘Too heavy.’
But you are looking into acts of extreme violence in these buildings, these monuments.
‘If you look at Berlin, I find the shiny glass buildings of Potzdammer Platz much more violent than Treptower Park, or what they’ve done in cities like Newcastle, Glasgow, Manchester, with their plans for a new utopia. They’re knocking down all these buildings, and what are they replacing them with, Olympic villages? How long are they going to last? I think this is more violent, more hypocritical and disgusting in a way than tower blocks. I am not saying they should continue making these buildings but…’
There is an element to state monuments that is not at all elitist—it’s art for the masses, and I think we share an active disinterest in art for art’s sake. It has to talk about reality more than about art. Even in the World Tour T-shirt project we did together, art is passing as something else – you don’t even know it’s art, and there is an element that goes beyond that; it exists as another form of expression itself. Do you think of that as a sort of resistance to the art production or art industry? There is definitely pressure to produce art if you are an artist – isn’t it an active resistance, the idea of traveling to these places and living these experiences and then making sure you do not translate them in a purely artistic medium?
‘It’s more about considering how you are part of the landscape as an environment, and trying to resolve that, not so much an active resistance as an active questioning.’
Slavs and Tatars (Kasia Korczak, Payam Sharifi, Boy Vereecken en Victoria Camblin) is working on a book for onestar press titled A Pantheon of Broken Men and Women.Slavs and Tatars (Kasia Korczak, Payam Sharifi, Boy Vereecken en Victoria Camblin) is working on a book for onestar press titled A Pantheon of Broken Men and Women.
Gyprien Gaillard currently is showing in Fridericianum Kassel and Stroom, The Hague.Gyprien Gaillard currently is showing in Fridericianum Kassel and Stroom, The Hague.
Payam Sharifi (Slavs and Tatars)
