Interview with Simona Denicolai and Ivo Provoost (ENG)
by Danièle Yvergniaux
by Danièle Yvergniaux
4 February 2006, Brussels
Danièle Yvergniaux: You were invited as artists in residence to the Parc Saint-Léger-Centre for contemporary art in Pougues-les-Eaux in 2002 and 2003. You put forward the idea of working on the conception and the feasibility study of Residenz. At the end of 2003, Residenz became the subject of an exhibition in the art centre. Production work has been suspended for the moment.
Let us remind ourselves of Residenz’s principle: the construction of a habitable sculpture in the park, close to the art centre, an assemblage of different elements provided by the industrial and economic context of the area. Residenz is a public sculpture. It is also a habitation and an independent residence that has been reserved for your use. This structure will be integrated within the artistic project of the centre, but you will be fully responsible for it’s residents.
It should be pointed out that the Parc Saint Léger is the site of a former spa that thrived for a long time, ceasing activity during the 1970s. Traces of this past are still visible: the spa pavilion, the casino is still open (1), the refrigerator, the covered walk way, as well as the old bottling factory and a hotel renovated to house the art centre are all still standing. A sculpture by Xavier Veilhan, the subject of a public commission, has been set at the site of the spring. The park and the buildings which house it are today the property of the Nièvre local council and are classed as listed historical buildings.
Firstly, I would like to re-situate Residenz within the genealogy of your artistic body of work. I see this work as being linked to two other works: 1998 in Nantes, a space which you opened in the city to conduct artistic productions in a prefabricated containers; “Algeco” over one year and later Building/Underwood (2) in the Pyrenees, an open space where you developed a work and living space near a village. 1998 marks your first foray in a public space. Building/Underwood raises, more particularly, the idea of habitation and envisages a collective lifestyle on a strip of wasteland.
Simona Denicolai and Ivo Provoost: Before we talk about 1998 and Building/Underwood, I’ll introduce our idea of play mobils, extending from the piece of work in Saint-Nazaire, Logos. This work dealed with the identity of the city. Selections of six representative elements from the local industry were installed in a place where we felt that city planning gave rise to the developing image of the town. Logos was a play mobil with the town. What we refer to as a play mobil was conceived from existing elements, belonging to the precise context with which we work on at a given moment. It is not about sculptures in themselves, but a sculptural act. We take existing elements to associate and dissociate with them, assemble them against others and formulate a language. Residenz also came from this practice. We identified an articulation of certain elements: a log cabin crosses through a metallic farm shed, penetrated by a tank. A metallic cupboard is positioned a little further away.
There is an image that we are very fond of for play mobils, that of the earthworm, resuming our position. The earthworm needs to absorb its surroundings allowing him to move on, digesting and purifying in order to survive and develop within the environment.
The work 1998, consisted of setting up an exhibition space in the city of Nantes on the "Dan Graham Plaza" (3), creating an addition to the city and which, following a year, could disappear without leaving any physical trace.
I see Residenz as a synthesis of these three ideas. If we look at the chronological order, it is quite clear. Firstly there is 1998, which is an enclosure within the public space; then Logos, which uses existing forms - industrial production of the context as form; and finally Building/Underwood, where private life and habitat is questioned in a space which is, at the same time open to the public as an amusement park.
1998 was very expressive; it was an exhibition space temporarily forced onto a public space.
Residenz was also about creating a private space within a sculpture. We think that it is necessary to consider any space that may receive a potential public as a public space. For there to be a public, something needs to happen, but it is not absolutely necessary. Just one person can form a public. One person is all that is needed to bear witness. Hence the matrimonial bed forming a public space.
DY: The interior of Residenz is therefore in principle a private space that is your own, as you say, potentially endowed with a public dimension.
SDIP: Yes, because from the outside it is a sculpture in a public park, one that speaks and breathes. Our life is the first subject that we have available to us, we function through life. To inscribe it in this way means being able to give shape through sculptural gesture. This life is not only our own. It is full of passages, exchanges, and invitations just as we would experience at home. Ultimately, it is a sculptural subject in the same manner as the shed, the chalet and the tank all are. This seems more abstract, but for us there is little difference between the subject, which constitutes our daily life, and an object also taken from daily life. It is brought into play just as body artists use their bodies.
The form of Residenz comes from the idea of camouflage. We use what is produced there, that grows there, that already exists in the landscape. Our sculpture becomes a frontier between public and private space. However, in certain places, there is porosity between these two spaces. The space between the metallic cupboard (intended for storing material) and the main body of the sculpture which is perhaps considered, for example, depending on one’s point of view, as semi-public or semi-private. There is also a social porosity between the sculpture and its context, according to the people who will temporarily inhabit Residenz: friends, our visitors, guests, neighbours, and ourselves. The interior is conceived as classic private accommodation: two bedrooms, a lounge, a kitchen and a bathroom, as well as an undefined space upstairs, and may punctually become a public space, like any habitation.
DY: You talk of your work in terms of sculpture, and I admit that I am impressed by the formal aesthetic success of what you are exhibiting, whether it is in an exhibition, an intervention in a public space, a painting or a video. You have true visual sculptors’ language, as well as the basis for your work resting on human experience and on social and political questions.
SDIP: As a general rule, we speak more of a sculptural act than of actual sculpture, since the process is the form. In the preparation for Residenz, the mock-ups (4) have their own status as well as being a necessary stage in the development. At each stage the aesthetic choice is simple because the set process grounds the solution. The greater the precision in the form, the more open it is. For Residenz, we looked for structures on a human scale produced or distributed in the region, present in the landscape. The chalet, the shed, the tank, and the metallic cupboard were chosen very quickly.
The Residenz exhibition at the art centre enabled the link with businesses with which we worked visible, and therefore the process. In order to keep this form we combined the codes of commercial exhibition with those of a contemporary art exhibition. Commercial products appeared in the exhibition in the same way as the mock-up, the mock-ups of Residenz, and all the derived products: drawings, videos, worktable, plans, and plants…
In Rennes, we created another sculptural act: Comment faire tenir une forme colorée dans l'espace ? (How to maintain coloured form in space?). A text built on thoughts on public space and on our work was inscribed on site adding lies, quotes, memories, newspaper titles and dreams, all constituting a rough subject in construction, to which were we able to delete from or add to daily. It was this text that led us towards sculpture. These daily readings, broadcast in public spaces gave shape to the sculptural act: an underground car park, Galeries Lafayette, Radio Campus, an ice rink, a theatre hall. We then created a mental form, as much for us as for the occasional listener. All the elements that we used were treated as subjects. Language was the formalising subject that came to mind; moments of reading inscribed in the daily life of the listener became the points of view for observing this subject. The sites of reading formed the support for this subject as well as its design and source of inspiration (5).
DY: In Residenz you give artistic value to elements and make them visible, which constitute the local banal reality and its current economic reality. At the same time, by setting out the principle of the private use of the interior of the sculpture, you go beyond the regular economic exchange of a work created in exchange for a sum of money. You are therefore putting forward the question of the economy of art in terms of what the artist receives in return.
SDIP: Instead of manufacturing forms, which would be recognisable as “works of art” in public space, we prefer that forms emerge as products through the context itself. We work as intermediaries between the different components of a context in order to create a dialogue through the forms themselves.
With Residenz, we invited engineers from three main businesses to find the best means of putting together their respective products. At the same time, the interaction between the park, its history, its users and its owner become the foundation of the sculpture.
In Residenz the following question is asked: to who does the interior of a work of art belong to? We immediately thought that the answer to this question could in reality strengthen the exercise of the moral right of the artist over his work, since the artist inhabits the work permanently.
At this stage we know that it is legally possible: the exterior of Residenz could be a public sculpture, and the interior could be left to the artists through means of a renewable lease of a maximum duration of 99 years.
DY: It seems to me that there is a problem of values here. Is the creation of a form in a public space equivalent in “value” to a living space, which belongs to you in its own right? In general, an artist obtains a sum of money upon the creation of a work. But then it is not money that you are asking for; it is life, the possibility of living somewhere. It cannot be quantified, and therefore it cannot be envisaged, as certain resistances to the project’s creation leads one to think. You emerge from the traditional economic exchange and you are introducing it into life, an immeasurable value that is in principle non-exchangeable.
Value: the desirability of a thing, often in respect of some property such as usefulness or exchangeability: worth, merit or importance. An amount, especially a material or monetary one, considered to be a fair exchange in return for a thing; assigned valuation. (Collins).
SDIP: In economic terms, private life is a “value added” to the sculpture.
Value added: the difference between the total revenues of a firm, industry etc., and its total purchases from other firms, industries etc. The aggregate of values added throughout an economy (gross value added) represents that economy’s gross domestic product (Collins).
DY: Residenz interests me in particular because, among other things, it creates a totally independent residential space under the full responsibility of the artists, in contrast with the programme of residencies at the art centre, placed within an artistic and cultural project and in which the artists are in some sort of “sub-control”. Your idea sets up an opposite relationship and curiously a very unusual one: the institution and public authorities are no longer part of the commission, but placed in the position of responding to an idea put to them by the artists. There we see a total paradox in the way in which art in France functions (but it is also true elsewhere, without doubt). The initial idea never emanates from the artists, but they always respond to a commission. The difficulties that we are encountering in the creation of Residenz are in part down to that.
SDIP: It was your invitation as artists in residence to the art centre that initiated Residenz, placing it within a professional context. From the moment the idea of this construction in the park came about - a public space belonging to the local council, we realised we were no longer working within the usual scenario of setting up art in a public space. As a general rule, the initiative never stems from the artists, whatever the context of a community or government public commission or for example, stemming from the New Patrons of the Foundation of France; it is always taken up by the community which sets it up within a town-planning project, a construction or renovation of a public building.
With Residenz, we want to explore all existential questions relating to the arrival of a sculpture in this public space, and the role given to public authorities in this process. It is a role that induces artistic responsibility. The sculpture’s acceptance and approval (or disapproval) becomes a sculptural and artistic matter. In other scenarios that we are familiar with, when a public sculpture project is launched, its existence is from that moment on, no longer questioned. Thereafter, it is simply a matter of pragmatic questioning, how to do it, at what cost, etc.
The existence of Residenz is constantly called into question. Added to the fact that it is also a proposal of an autonomous residency. What place do artists hold in the city? Could we imagine a reversed system in which public authorities would respond to initatives and projects brought by artists? This conception of public space would completely transform the city.
We want to bring our work into existence in the most meaningful way possible within a context. An idea has to be effectively accepted, not only as an artistic project or as a fantasy, but also as a reality.
We imagined that once we lived in the park, we would without doubt have a very different contact with the inhabitants of Pougues-les-Eaux, they would become our neighbours. Becoming a 1:1 situation. It is about actually living this scenario which is not uniquely a fiction and which is not only a symbolic representation.
Residenz is a sort of declaration of love to this place, which is a complex entity, comprising the park, the local authority, the art centre, the inhabitants, the spa heritage, the region, the country and the French State. But it is also emotional blackmail: ‘Just do it because I love you’.
DY: In the creation of the work, your life is caught up in it, developing emotional dimension. With Happy end (6) running in parallel with Residenz, you have brought into play all the material elements of your life, selling all your personal belongings in one single batch, using the action as a scenario for a film. Hans & Gretel: communauté des biens is an inventory of your belongings (7). Each object is described according to different criterions of their origin, commercial, sociological, aesthetic and symbolic value. A hall of mirrors is set up before the spectator.
SDIP: With Happy end, the economic exchange enables us to transform our material belongings into a fiction. While keeping the same value, we are suggesting a change in state, and therefore in form and content, a change of mind that enables us to transform objects into other objects, a film, carrying the same material value plus an added value. It is a recurrent theme in Vermeer’s work.
In “The Kitchen Maid” for example, the milk slides from one receptacle into another and changes form without changing in substance.
Increasingly our work defines as well as completely influences our way of living, without our lives becoming the subject of our work. This is a means of a possible transformation, which may suggest other modes of achieving reality.
DY: The work that you created during the summer of 2005 at Ypres runs in the same line. You were invited to take part in the group exhibition Tijdelijk Onbewoonbaar Verklaard (Temporarily Deemed Inhabitable) organised by the MTTS association. (8)
SDIP: UMFblyzer was a street which was like a “one-star hotel” in itself; it was the simplest way to obtain an occupied street. The central space was a greenhouse structure with bedrooms around the edges: wooden cabins with an airing vent, a light bulb, a socket, a poster and a double bed. The work was situated at the entrance to the War Museum (Second World War), in the indoor courtyard of the Halles aux Draps, in the town centre. Tourists and visitors visiting the museum created the context for UMFblyzer. The hotel’s entire existence was visible: guests getting up in the morning, showering and eating breakfast, sheets and linen hung up to dry like in a street in Naples - everything you could imagine taking place in a hotel and in a street of a working-class neighbourhood at the same time.
D.Y: One can witness that at many levels. You were living there; there were guests or clients, people who you knew or didn’t and also passers by. The different layers were superimposed and coexisted, from a couple amidst a wave of tourists from all parts of the world to the town’s inhabitants.
SDIP: In Ypres, UMFblyzer was like a bracket positioned upon the flux of tourists who in this defined place, entered into contact with the movement and the time intrinsic to the hotel. At sometimes during one day there were 700 or 800 people. This reality was underlined by the presence of life in another time, at a different rhythm. When people were passing through, we were there. We really had the impression of sculpting the present. UMFblyzer functioned as the interbellum period between World War One and the Iraq War, where we witnessed the Gaza pull out and the destruction of Katrina on CNN, and where at night, under the sheets, we slept under the second layer of pornographic authenticity. “We also f**k each other in reality (Ginger Lynn & Tom Byron)”, “Sleep harder”, “Michael Jackson ≠ Michael Jackson”, “It was you today Katrina”, «La promenade des anglais, nice isn’t it?”, “Future”, “I’m happy to be here”, “Fasta”, “No technical info”, “Moules –50%”, “Ypres was a gas”, “Bientôt des ruines pittoresques” (Soon picturesque ruins), “L’imagination annule l’effort” (Imagination annulling effort).
DY: Getting to the notion of utopia, I have the impression that in the way in which you present it, it is not about creating a utopian society as in the 1960s, but more so about presenting the multiplicity of the world in which we live, through coexistence of different interpersonal levels.
SDIP: It is the position of the intermediary-interpreter, which attracts us the most. If we take into account several components of a given context and that we are setting up meeting points between these entities, this provides a complex organism that can take shape in a situation of certain duration in a defined place. It is more about the idea of temporary occupation, within which lies an ideal model of society. How can we create an environment, a fracture and an appropriation through an act of temporary occupation?
Coming back to the image of the earthworm, the principle of temporary occupation of a space enables us to operate this digestion of reality and its transformation in immediacy. The forms or the elements used for the construction of the space stem from the surrounding context. Other possible appropriations of these forms become clear once they have been separated from their ordinary use. It is possible to make a context ‘speak’ as if like a ventriloquist. We can combine the elements which make the environment ‘live’, making links between the familiar and a more global situation, the small world and the wider world, returning directly to reality. For example, in UMFblyzer, slogans corresponding to television news were written out from day to day, the recent past, or the life of the hotel, as dialectic with the tourist’s perception of the history of the place.
In hindsight, I really had the feeling of what Residenz could be, by injecting the present into a form.
DY: I have the impression that there are two important things in particular for UMFblyzer and for Residenz: the relationship with history, and the relationship with the perception of the present in relation to history.
SDIP: It is important to know that in the city of Ypres there is something quite particular in relation to time. It is a city that was completely blitzed during the First World War. Instead of reconstructing a new city, it was rebuilt identically. Time stands still in a certain way, similar to the park in Pougues-les-Eaux. In Ypres, when you talk of the past, it is always interpreted in relation to the First World War. Pougues-les-Eaux also lives in its spa heritage, in the nostalgia of a flourishing economic period but that has disappeared. The park is registered as a listed historic monument, and it seems that it was rooted in a duty to preserve signs of the past (9). For Residenz, we are going to use products stemming from today’s local economy. One can see Residenz as the memory of a given moment, an economic memory in the same way as, for example, the spa pavilion, which attests to the park’s spa heritage.
DY: The comparison with the spa pavilion is quite right; the park records the different strata of its own history and Residenz bears witness to the current period.
SDIP: Yes, I think that it is really about inscribing the present. It is for this reason that in general we want to use the term “project” because otherwise it would be talking about something that does not exist.
The form is there in the present.
DY: The hotel was temporary, but Residenz is a permanent subject, and that is why its set up seems much more complicated. Beyond the question of funding, the difficulty that we face in moving towards the actual creation of the work is also down to this problem of inscribing the present in public space.
SDIP: We have the impression that, in order to be able to portray the present, it needs to be done on a reduced scale; it is impossible on the scale of the society in which we live. When the present fades away, space remains there as a trace. New York has witnessed modernism, and we get the impression that it is difficult to go beyond this. Today Paris is an outdoor museum. However, in Serbia we found a strong presence of signs of the present linked to capitalism, which have been put up and to which this country cannot escape. Publicity posters are gigantic, while safety standards, dimensions and “good taste” are disregarded. It is a situation which is not necessarily positive nor desirable, but we sense that it is a society which collectively bubbles under the surface, in the process of reinventing itself, and also positioning itself as the “new arrival”, for the moment within a much greater sense of freedom and improvisation. In reality, the whole country is unique in world economic organisation, especially in relation to Europe. Serbia is still on the periphery of Europe. It is in the peripheries that the present can exist, sometimes in a violent way.
DY: There is therefore more ‘possibility’ of invention and creation in these emerging countries. What can ‘western’ artists do today?
SDIP: Continue. The cultural confinement experienced by the artists in the 1970s and which is attributed to the neutralising, inefficient, abstracting, over-protecting and politically lobotomising effect of the museum (Robert Smithson talked about prison, asylum or a cemetery for art) has not had to lose any of its importance until today.
It no longer seems so relevant to continue to blame the white cube and the museum.
On one hand it is the artists themselves, having dialectical method as their work, who accept limits of the professional art world (dependency does not tolerate self-criticism) and on the other hand the museum and the street therefore form part of the same programme – except that the museum attendants are less strict than their colleagues of the street. The street is so institutionalised, correct and conditioned today that the museum, by default, can become the new "underground" of western society. Amen.
Notes:
(1). The casino is no longer in the old building situated in the park and is to be re-housed in a new building on the edge of the city.
(2). Work created with David Evrard, Caudiès de Fenouillèdes, France, summers of 1999, 2000, 2001.
(3). Place du Commandant L’Herminier, set up by Dan Graham in 1994.
(4). Maquettes de principe pour Residenz (play mobils) do not translate the form of Residenz but its sculptural principle by the assemblage of food and other product packaging.
(5). Chantier public #2: group exhibition (8th April – 15th May 2005) organised by 40mcube in Rennes. Commissioning committee: Anne Langlois, Patrice Goasduff. Artists: Ateliermobile, Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Le gentil garçon, Nicolas Milhé, Benoît-Marie Moriceau, Bénédicte Olivier.
(6). The title of the sale is blocked until the sale is concluded.
(7). Audio work for the telephone line of Frac Bourgogne + 33 (0)3 80 67 18 18, commissioned by Frac Bourgogne.
Hans & Gretel: Communauté des biens (August 2004); vinyl record published by Small Noise, Hans & gretel: community of goods – inventory, Small Noise n° 11, 500 copies, 2002.
(8). Tijdelijk Onbewoonbaar Verklaard: group exhibition (15 July – 4 September 2005) organised by MTTS - More Talent Than Space, in Ypres. Commissioning committee: Bram Van Damme. Artists: Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost, Yvan Derwéduwé, Jeremy Deller, Olivier Stévenart T.S.A., Saâdane Afif, Lucie Renneboog, Dettie Flynn, Kosten Koper & Cathérine Vertige, Tony Cokes, Doghotel.
(9). However, the ‘Architecte des Bâtiments de France’ in La Nièvre gave a favourable, consultative opinion to the installation of Residenz in the park.
Danièle Yvergniaux: You were invited as artists in residence to the Parc Saint-Léger-Centre for contemporary art in Pougues-les-Eaux in 2002 and 2003. You put forward the idea of working on the conception and the feasibility study of Residenz. At the end of 2003, Residenz became the subject of an exhibition in the art centre. Production work has been suspended for the moment.
Let us remind ourselves of Residenz’s principle: the construction of a habitable sculpture in the park, close to the art centre, an assemblage of different elements provided by the industrial and economic context of the area. Residenz is a public sculpture. It is also a habitation and an independent residence that has been reserved for your use. This structure will be integrated within the artistic project of the centre, but you will be fully responsible for it’s residents.
It should be pointed out that the Parc Saint Léger is the site of a former spa that thrived for a long time, ceasing activity during the 1970s. Traces of this past are still visible: the spa pavilion, the casino is still open (1), the refrigerator, the covered walk way, as well as the old bottling factory and a hotel renovated to house the art centre are all still standing. A sculpture by Xavier Veilhan, the subject of a public commission, has been set at the site of the spring. The park and the buildings which house it are today the property of the Nièvre local council and are classed as listed historical buildings.
Firstly, I would like to re-situate Residenz within the genealogy of your artistic body of work. I see this work as being linked to two other works: 1998 in Nantes, a space which you opened in the city to conduct artistic productions in a prefabricated containers; “Algeco” over one year and later Building/Underwood (2) in the Pyrenees, an open space where you developed a work and living space near a village. 1998 marks your first foray in a public space. Building/Underwood raises, more particularly, the idea of habitation and envisages a collective lifestyle on a strip of wasteland.
Simona Denicolai and Ivo Provoost: Before we talk about 1998 and Building/Underwood, I’ll introduce our idea of play mobils, extending from the piece of work in Saint-Nazaire, Logos. This work dealed with the identity of the city. Selections of six representative elements from the local industry were installed in a place where we felt that city planning gave rise to the developing image of the town. Logos was a play mobil with the town. What we refer to as a play mobil was conceived from existing elements, belonging to the precise context with which we work on at a given moment. It is not about sculptures in themselves, but a sculptural act. We take existing elements to associate and dissociate with them, assemble them against others and formulate a language. Residenz also came from this practice. We identified an articulation of certain elements: a log cabin crosses through a metallic farm shed, penetrated by a tank. A metallic cupboard is positioned a little further away.
There is an image that we are very fond of for play mobils, that of the earthworm, resuming our position. The earthworm needs to absorb its surroundings allowing him to move on, digesting and purifying in order to survive and develop within the environment.
The work 1998, consisted of setting up an exhibition space in the city of Nantes on the "Dan Graham Plaza" (3), creating an addition to the city and which, following a year, could disappear without leaving any physical trace.
I see Residenz as a synthesis of these three ideas. If we look at the chronological order, it is quite clear. Firstly there is 1998, which is an enclosure within the public space; then Logos, which uses existing forms - industrial production of the context as form; and finally Building/Underwood, where private life and habitat is questioned in a space which is, at the same time open to the public as an amusement park.
1998 was very expressive; it was an exhibition space temporarily forced onto a public space.
Residenz was also about creating a private space within a sculpture. We think that it is necessary to consider any space that may receive a potential public as a public space. For there to be a public, something needs to happen, but it is not absolutely necessary. Just one person can form a public. One person is all that is needed to bear witness. Hence the matrimonial bed forming a public space.
DY: The interior of Residenz is therefore in principle a private space that is your own, as you say, potentially endowed with a public dimension.
SDIP: Yes, because from the outside it is a sculpture in a public park, one that speaks and breathes. Our life is the first subject that we have available to us, we function through life. To inscribe it in this way means being able to give shape through sculptural gesture. This life is not only our own. It is full of passages, exchanges, and invitations just as we would experience at home. Ultimately, it is a sculptural subject in the same manner as the shed, the chalet and the tank all are. This seems more abstract, but for us there is little difference between the subject, which constitutes our daily life, and an object also taken from daily life. It is brought into play just as body artists use their bodies.
The form of Residenz comes from the idea of camouflage. We use what is produced there, that grows there, that already exists in the landscape. Our sculpture becomes a frontier between public and private space. However, in certain places, there is porosity between these two spaces. The space between the metallic cupboard (intended for storing material) and the main body of the sculpture which is perhaps considered, for example, depending on one’s point of view, as semi-public or semi-private. There is also a social porosity between the sculpture and its context, according to the people who will temporarily inhabit Residenz: friends, our visitors, guests, neighbours, and ourselves. The interior is conceived as classic private accommodation: two bedrooms, a lounge, a kitchen and a bathroom, as well as an undefined space upstairs, and may punctually become a public space, like any habitation.
DY: You talk of your work in terms of sculpture, and I admit that I am impressed by the formal aesthetic success of what you are exhibiting, whether it is in an exhibition, an intervention in a public space, a painting or a video. You have true visual sculptors’ language, as well as the basis for your work resting on human experience and on social and political questions.
SDIP: As a general rule, we speak more of a sculptural act than of actual sculpture, since the process is the form. In the preparation for Residenz, the mock-ups (4) have their own status as well as being a necessary stage in the development. At each stage the aesthetic choice is simple because the set process grounds the solution. The greater the precision in the form, the more open it is. For Residenz, we looked for structures on a human scale produced or distributed in the region, present in the landscape. The chalet, the shed, the tank, and the metallic cupboard were chosen very quickly.
The Residenz exhibition at the art centre enabled the link with businesses with which we worked visible, and therefore the process. In order to keep this form we combined the codes of commercial exhibition with those of a contemporary art exhibition. Commercial products appeared in the exhibition in the same way as the mock-up, the mock-ups of Residenz, and all the derived products: drawings, videos, worktable, plans, and plants…
In Rennes, we created another sculptural act: Comment faire tenir une forme colorée dans l'espace ? (How to maintain coloured form in space?). A text built on thoughts on public space and on our work was inscribed on site adding lies, quotes, memories, newspaper titles and dreams, all constituting a rough subject in construction, to which were we able to delete from or add to daily. It was this text that led us towards sculpture. These daily readings, broadcast in public spaces gave shape to the sculptural act: an underground car park, Galeries Lafayette, Radio Campus, an ice rink, a theatre hall. We then created a mental form, as much for us as for the occasional listener. All the elements that we used were treated as subjects. Language was the formalising subject that came to mind; moments of reading inscribed in the daily life of the listener became the points of view for observing this subject. The sites of reading formed the support for this subject as well as its design and source of inspiration (5).
DY: In Residenz you give artistic value to elements and make them visible, which constitute the local banal reality and its current economic reality. At the same time, by setting out the principle of the private use of the interior of the sculpture, you go beyond the regular economic exchange of a work created in exchange for a sum of money. You are therefore putting forward the question of the economy of art in terms of what the artist receives in return.
SDIP: Instead of manufacturing forms, which would be recognisable as “works of art” in public space, we prefer that forms emerge as products through the context itself. We work as intermediaries between the different components of a context in order to create a dialogue through the forms themselves.
With Residenz, we invited engineers from three main businesses to find the best means of putting together their respective products. At the same time, the interaction between the park, its history, its users and its owner become the foundation of the sculpture.
In Residenz the following question is asked: to who does the interior of a work of art belong to? We immediately thought that the answer to this question could in reality strengthen the exercise of the moral right of the artist over his work, since the artist inhabits the work permanently.
At this stage we know that it is legally possible: the exterior of Residenz could be a public sculpture, and the interior could be left to the artists through means of a renewable lease of a maximum duration of 99 years.
DY: It seems to me that there is a problem of values here. Is the creation of a form in a public space equivalent in “value” to a living space, which belongs to you in its own right? In general, an artist obtains a sum of money upon the creation of a work. But then it is not money that you are asking for; it is life, the possibility of living somewhere. It cannot be quantified, and therefore it cannot be envisaged, as certain resistances to the project’s creation leads one to think. You emerge from the traditional economic exchange and you are introducing it into life, an immeasurable value that is in principle non-exchangeable.
Value: the desirability of a thing, often in respect of some property such as usefulness or exchangeability: worth, merit or importance. An amount, especially a material or monetary one, considered to be a fair exchange in return for a thing; assigned valuation. (Collins).
SDIP: In economic terms, private life is a “value added” to the sculpture.
Value added: the difference between the total revenues of a firm, industry etc., and its total purchases from other firms, industries etc. The aggregate of values added throughout an economy (gross value added) represents that economy’s gross domestic product (Collins).
DY: Residenz interests me in particular because, among other things, it creates a totally independent residential space under the full responsibility of the artists, in contrast with the programme of residencies at the art centre, placed within an artistic and cultural project and in which the artists are in some sort of “sub-control”. Your idea sets up an opposite relationship and curiously a very unusual one: the institution and public authorities are no longer part of the commission, but placed in the position of responding to an idea put to them by the artists. There we see a total paradox in the way in which art in France functions (but it is also true elsewhere, without doubt). The initial idea never emanates from the artists, but they always respond to a commission. The difficulties that we are encountering in the creation of Residenz are in part down to that.
SDIP: It was your invitation as artists in residence to the art centre that initiated Residenz, placing it within a professional context. From the moment the idea of this construction in the park came about - a public space belonging to the local council, we realised we were no longer working within the usual scenario of setting up art in a public space. As a general rule, the initiative never stems from the artists, whatever the context of a community or government public commission or for example, stemming from the New Patrons of the Foundation of France; it is always taken up by the community which sets it up within a town-planning project, a construction or renovation of a public building.
With Residenz, we want to explore all existential questions relating to the arrival of a sculpture in this public space, and the role given to public authorities in this process. It is a role that induces artistic responsibility. The sculpture’s acceptance and approval (or disapproval) becomes a sculptural and artistic matter. In other scenarios that we are familiar with, when a public sculpture project is launched, its existence is from that moment on, no longer questioned. Thereafter, it is simply a matter of pragmatic questioning, how to do it, at what cost, etc.
The existence of Residenz is constantly called into question. Added to the fact that it is also a proposal of an autonomous residency. What place do artists hold in the city? Could we imagine a reversed system in which public authorities would respond to initatives and projects brought by artists? This conception of public space would completely transform the city.
We want to bring our work into existence in the most meaningful way possible within a context. An idea has to be effectively accepted, not only as an artistic project or as a fantasy, but also as a reality.
We imagined that once we lived in the park, we would without doubt have a very different contact with the inhabitants of Pougues-les-Eaux, they would become our neighbours. Becoming a 1:1 situation. It is about actually living this scenario which is not uniquely a fiction and which is not only a symbolic representation.
Residenz is a sort of declaration of love to this place, which is a complex entity, comprising the park, the local authority, the art centre, the inhabitants, the spa heritage, the region, the country and the French State. But it is also emotional blackmail: ‘Just do it because I love you’.
DY: In the creation of the work, your life is caught up in it, developing emotional dimension. With Happy end (6) running in parallel with Residenz, you have brought into play all the material elements of your life, selling all your personal belongings in one single batch, using the action as a scenario for a film. Hans & Gretel: communauté des biens is an inventory of your belongings (7). Each object is described according to different criterions of their origin, commercial, sociological, aesthetic and symbolic value. A hall of mirrors is set up before the spectator.
SDIP: With Happy end, the economic exchange enables us to transform our material belongings into a fiction. While keeping the same value, we are suggesting a change in state, and therefore in form and content, a change of mind that enables us to transform objects into other objects, a film, carrying the same material value plus an added value. It is a recurrent theme in Vermeer’s work.
In “The Kitchen Maid” for example, the milk slides from one receptacle into another and changes form without changing in substance.
Increasingly our work defines as well as completely influences our way of living, without our lives becoming the subject of our work. This is a means of a possible transformation, which may suggest other modes of achieving reality.
DY: The work that you created during the summer of 2005 at Ypres runs in the same line. You were invited to take part in the group exhibition Tijdelijk Onbewoonbaar Verklaard (Temporarily Deemed Inhabitable) organised by the MTTS association. (8)
SDIP: UMFblyzer was a street which was like a “one-star hotel” in itself; it was the simplest way to obtain an occupied street. The central space was a greenhouse structure with bedrooms around the edges: wooden cabins with an airing vent, a light bulb, a socket, a poster and a double bed. The work was situated at the entrance to the War Museum (Second World War), in the indoor courtyard of the Halles aux Draps, in the town centre. Tourists and visitors visiting the museum created the context for UMFblyzer. The hotel’s entire existence was visible: guests getting up in the morning, showering and eating breakfast, sheets and linen hung up to dry like in a street in Naples - everything you could imagine taking place in a hotel and in a street of a working-class neighbourhood at the same time.
D.Y: One can witness that at many levels. You were living there; there were guests or clients, people who you knew or didn’t and also passers by. The different layers were superimposed and coexisted, from a couple amidst a wave of tourists from all parts of the world to the town’s inhabitants.
SDIP: In Ypres, UMFblyzer was like a bracket positioned upon the flux of tourists who in this defined place, entered into contact with the movement and the time intrinsic to the hotel. At sometimes during one day there were 700 or 800 people. This reality was underlined by the presence of life in another time, at a different rhythm. When people were passing through, we were there. We really had the impression of sculpting the present. UMFblyzer functioned as the interbellum period between World War One and the Iraq War, where we witnessed the Gaza pull out and the destruction of Katrina on CNN, and where at night, under the sheets, we slept under the second layer of pornographic authenticity. “We also f**k each other in reality (Ginger Lynn & Tom Byron)”, “Sleep harder”, “Michael Jackson ≠ Michael Jackson”, “It was you today Katrina”, «La promenade des anglais, nice isn’t it?”, “Future”, “I’m happy to be here”, “Fasta”, “No technical info”, “Moules –50%”, “Ypres was a gas”, “Bientôt des ruines pittoresques” (Soon picturesque ruins), “L’imagination annule l’effort” (Imagination annulling effort).
DY: Getting to the notion of utopia, I have the impression that in the way in which you present it, it is not about creating a utopian society as in the 1960s, but more so about presenting the multiplicity of the world in which we live, through coexistence of different interpersonal levels.
SDIP: It is the position of the intermediary-interpreter, which attracts us the most. If we take into account several components of a given context and that we are setting up meeting points between these entities, this provides a complex organism that can take shape in a situation of certain duration in a defined place. It is more about the idea of temporary occupation, within which lies an ideal model of society. How can we create an environment, a fracture and an appropriation through an act of temporary occupation?
Coming back to the image of the earthworm, the principle of temporary occupation of a space enables us to operate this digestion of reality and its transformation in immediacy. The forms or the elements used for the construction of the space stem from the surrounding context. Other possible appropriations of these forms become clear once they have been separated from their ordinary use. It is possible to make a context ‘speak’ as if like a ventriloquist. We can combine the elements which make the environment ‘live’, making links between the familiar and a more global situation, the small world and the wider world, returning directly to reality. For example, in UMFblyzer, slogans corresponding to television news were written out from day to day, the recent past, or the life of the hotel, as dialectic with the tourist’s perception of the history of the place.
In hindsight, I really had the feeling of what Residenz could be, by injecting the present into a form.
DY: I have the impression that there are two important things in particular for UMFblyzer and for Residenz: the relationship with history, and the relationship with the perception of the present in relation to history.
SDIP: It is important to know that in the city of Ypres there is something quite particular in relation to time. It is a city that was completely blitzed during the First World War. Instead of reconstructing a new city, it was rebuilt identically. Time stands still in a certain way, similar to the park in Pougues-les-Eaux. In Ypres, when you talk of the past, it is always interpreted in relation to the First World War. Pougues-les-Eaux also lives in its spa heritage, in the nostalgia of a flourishing economic period but that has disappeared. The park is registered as a listed historic monument, and it seems that it was rooted in a duty to preserve signs of the past (9). For Residenz, we are going to use products stemming from today’s local economy. One can see Residenz as the memory of a given moment, an economic memory in the same way as, for example, the spa pavilion, which attests to the park’s spa heritage.
DY: The comparison with the spa pavilion is quite right; the park records the different strata of its own history and Residenz bears witness to the current period.
SDIP: Yes, I think that it is really about inscribing the present. It is for this reason that in general we want to use the term “project” because otherwise it would be talking about something that does not exist.
The form is there in the present.
DY: The hotel was temporary, but Residenz is a permanent subject, and that is why its set up seems much more complicated. Beyond the question of funding, the difficulty that we face in moving towards the actual creation of the work is also down to this problem of inscribing the present in public space.
SDIP: We have the impression that, in order to be able to portray the present, it needs to be done on a reduced scale; it is impossible on the scale of the society in which we live. When the present fades away, space remains there as a trace. New York has witnessed modernism, and we get the impression that it is difficult to go beyond this. Today Paris is an outdoor museum. However, in Serbia we found a strong presence of signs of the present linked to capitalism, which have been put up and to which this country cannot escape. Publicity posters are gigantic, while safety standards, dimensions and “good taste” are disregarded. It is a situation which is not necessarily positive nor desirable, but we sense that it is a society which collectively bubbles under the surface, in the process of reinventing itself, and also positioning itself as the “new arrival”, for the moment within a much greater sense of freedom and improvisation. In reality, the whole country is unique in world economic organisation, especially in relation to Europe. Serbia is still on the periphery of Europe. It is in the peripheries that the present can exist, sometimes in a violent way.
DY: There is therefore more ‘possibility’ of invention and creation in these emerging countries. What can ‘western’ artists do today?
SDIP: Continue. The cultural confinement experienced by the artists in the 1970s and which is attributed to the neutralising, inefficient, abstracting, over-protecting and politically lobotomising effect of the museum (Robert Smithson talked about prison, asylum or a cemetery for art) has not had to lose any of its importance until today.
It no longer seems so relevant to continue to blame the white cube and the museum.
On one hand it is the artists themselves, having dialectical method as their work, who accept limits of the professional art world (dependency does not tolerate self-criticism) and on the other hand the museum and the street therefore form part of the same programme – except that the museum attendants are less strict than their colleagues of the street. The street is so institutionalised, correct and conditioned today that the museum, by default, can become the new "underground" of western society. Amen.
Notes:
(1). The casino is no longer in the old building situated in the park and is to be re-housed in a new building on the edge of the city.
(2). Work created with David Evrard, Caudiès de Fenouillèdes, France, summers of 1999, 2000, 2001.
(3). Place du Commandant L’Herminier, set up by Dan Graham in 1994.
(4). Maquettes de principe pour Residenz (play mobils) do not translate the form of Residenz but its sculptural principle by the assemblage of food and other product packaging.
(5). Chantier public #2: group exhibition (8th April – 15th May 2005) organised by 40mcube in Rennes. Commissioning committee: Anne Langlois, Patrice Goasduff. Artists: Ateliermobile, Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Le gentil garçon, Nicolas Milhé, Benoît-Marie Moriceau, Bénédicte Olivier.
(6). The title of the sale is blocked until the sale is concluded.
(7). Audio work for the telephone line of Frac Bourgogne + 33 (0)3 80 67 18 18, commissioned by Frac Bourgogne.
Hans & Gretel: Communauté des biens (August 2004); vinyl record published by Small Noise, Hans & gretel: community of goods – inventory, Small Noise n° 11, 500 copies, 2002.
(8). Tijdelijk Onbewoonbaar Verklaard: group exhibition (15 July – 4 September 2005) organised by MTTS - More Talent Than Space, in Ypres. Commissioning committee: Bram Van Damme. Artists: Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost, Yvan Derwéduwé, Jeremy Deller, Olivier Stévenart T.S.A., Saâdane Afif, Lucie Renneboog, Dettie Flynn, Kosten Koper & Cathérine Vertige, Tony Cokes, Doghotel.
(9). However, the ‘Architecte des Bâtiments de France’ in La Nièvre gave a favourable, consultative opinion to the installation of Residenz in the park.