ON THE USE OF ART , by Jean-Marc Huitorel. Semaine Nicolas Floc’h, le Récif d’if. Chateau d’If / FRAC PACA
One of the major and structural fluctuations of 20th century art, and art right up to the present day, lies in the both complementary and conflict-ing relationship between the formal rigour of a broad geometric abstraction and the claim of organicness, of the expressive and acting body, one of the recurrent forms of which was the performance. In its own way, the circuit of the readymade, from its swift removal from the claws of reality (from the BHV to the museum) to its more or less convincing re-injection into the ebb and flow of uses (Pinoncelli, not to mention the countless bottle racks re-used by artists and designers), creates a permanent echo of the duel between flesh and spirit. The whole oeuvre of Lygia Clark, in a part of the world where the syn-thesis between anthropology and avant-garde art was still possible, attests, in an exemplary way, to the comeback of the physical experience, of a rein-carnation of those forms which Constructivism thought it could raise above contingencies, including in the early days of its work. For some 10 years now, and beyond generational phenom-ena, this multi-faceted tension has enjoyed a resurgence of relevance and fecundity, placing art on the boundaries of its definitions as well as of its exercise, blurring categories, and revisiting areas which ideology had literally frozen. In this context, if there is one artist who concentrates most of these questions, and subjects them to the test of the work, it is indeed Nicolas Floc’h who, in 2004, devised Beer Kilometer, an arrangement of beer cans a kilometre in length, offered to visitors to drink, ending up in the chaos that one can imagine. All of a sudden, Duchamp’s Mètre Etalon/Standard Stoppage and Walter de Maria’s
Broken Kilometer pass beneath the Caudine Forks of moss, excess, burp and drunkenness, the programmed exercise of disorder. A few
years before, the Structures Multifonctions, Frac Lorraine Portable and Portable Art Structures were presented as geometric modules informed by the memory of specific objects and ready to be used here as an office, there as storage, there as picture rails, or parts of sets… that was how they were used. Likewise, by verticalizing dance mats on the wall in the form of pictures, Performance Paintings (2007) illustrated that interest in the back and forth between practicability and repre-sentation. This articulation between form and use constitutes more than ever the nub of the artist’s work, and of this latest project in particular.
In 2008, Nicolas Floc’h discovered the existence of man-made reefs which he described thus: “In the landscape under the sea there are veritable forms of architecture with their city-planning rules. Often constructed with concrete, in just a few years these elements are colonized by flora and fauna, which turn them into living sculptures/architectures. Commonly known as “man-made reefs”, these constructions have developed ever since the 17th century, and particularly in Japan. The Japanese in fact have no major natural resources, apart from those offered by the sea, which they have very rapidly cultivated. They were the first to develop technologies encouraging the life and reproduc-tion of certain species of fish, crustaceans and molluscs, which increased resources without affecting stocks. This practice became increasingly common in the latter half of the 20th century. Undersea “cities”, no less, were thus created by intensive programmes establishing more than 20 million cubic metres (20,000 sites) of reefs in the ocean. They were filled with large numbers of young fish. In this way, in the age of industrial fishing, the Japanese coasts are among the world’s best stocked with fish. These programmes are currently interesting Europeans. Since the 1960s, they have existed in France in the Paca, Languedoc-Roussillon, Aquitaine, Pays de la Loire and Normandy regions.
The forms of man-made reefs are very diverse, at times calling to mind primitive dwellings, at others modern and contem-porary sculpture and architecture.
Nicolas Floc’h’s ambitious project, at the cross-roads of art and science, is what is known as “long term”. An initial stage consists in drawing up an almost exhaustive inventory of these functional structures which nevertheless conjure up archi-tecture as much as sculpture, and which, barely glimpsed at the water’s edge, are immersed, stolen from the gaze and knowledge which ordinary mortals might have of them. Based on these listed types, Nicolas Floc’h creates sculptures on a 1:10 scale in the same material as the model. In one fell swoop, these miniature reefs become sculptures, which he presents on stands and which an absentminded eye immediately likens to some minimalist reminiscence. At a rate of some 30 works a year, the aim is to culminate in a sort of overview of existing types, meaning some 300. At once works of art and fragments of inventories, this potential ensemble forms a rare example where, instead of photography, it is sculpture which represents the documentary testimony. At the same time, the artist has perfected the art of deep sea diving in order to go and photograph and film some of these reefs which, over the years, have shed their constructivist rigour in favour of an organic plant environment which intensifies the seething presence of local fauna. Black and white photographs (colour gradually vanishes as you go deeper into the sea) and videos, set up as exhibition objects, confirm what has always been one of the basic tasks of art: showing. In pursuing his research and his exchanges with scientists, Nicolas Floc’h is embarking on a new stage of his project which consists in producing, in turn, forms which one would initially call sculptures, but which, by being designed in accordance with the demands of their possible functionality, are likely to become man-made reefs, in their turn. So works which one would classify on the basis
of art categories in the geometric, construc-tivist and/or minimalist tradition are called upon, as much as for museum exhibition, to be immersed as reefs designed to accommodate the submarine flora and the fauna attracted by it.
Where sculpture and architecture meet land-scape, photography and scientific research, Nicolas Floc’h’s art also raises more political issues insomuch as they have to do with space and the use people make of it, and ways of acting on reality as much as means of represent-ing it. By wrenching from blind regions useful forms which he assigns to the gratuitousness of aesthetic contemplation, he decides just as much about what may be abstracted from delight and earmarked for the most demanding and unexpected of functions, which art rarely even dares to think about anymore, the function of participating directly in the regeneration of biotopes, otherwise put, the survival of species.
jean-marc huitorel
Rennes. April 2013
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TRUE COLOURS THROUGH TRANSITION, Ann Demeester, In other Words, p3, Ed Roma Publications
I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms, Ovide, Metamorphoses.
Consistent and consequent in content and idea develop-ment yet multifarious and irregular in shape and form, there is no better and more succinct way to describe the work of Nicolas Floc’h. Far from being a one-trick pony Floc’h explores many pathways to achieve the goal he has set out for himself. He combines his fascination for the natural processes of growing and development with a keen interest in the processes of production, distribution / circulation and consumption of fashion and design. This mixed interest has him preoccupied with lines, curves, shapes and formats, and incites him to continuously explore the borderlines between art, crafts and applied arts, artisan techniques, and industrial design.
In essence, it seems as if Floc’h is intrigued by processes of disintegration and regeneration, of decon-struction and reconstruction. As for defining a common denominator for the variety of practices he undertakes it manifests itself in different ways. He researches and analyses the essential characteristics of the age-old disci-pline of painting (Recycled Paintings / Fashion Paintings / Monochromes) and probes the frontiers of sculpture by exploring its functionality (Functional Floor / Multifunction-al Structure). His sculptures are brittle and fragile struc-tures (Pelagic in the Capc, Bordeaux), which are almost immaterial or gradually disappear and decompose, as they are edible or otherwise consumable (Productive Writing / Beer Kilometer). It seems as if every work Nicolas Floc’h produces or realises has a cyclical structure or is a self-contained autonomous system in which processes of transformation take place. It seems as if every installation or sculpture functions as an auto-generative performance. At times, human agents are actively involved as catalysts, at other times, the performance occurs without any human intervention, a simple process of evolution, of coming into being and disappearing again. In everything he does, Floc’h examines the notion of transformation, looks at changes and transitional stages, at how something is translated from one state into another, tries to distinguish between what is ephemeral and what is everlasting, what remains and what disappears after different stages of metamorphosis.
Introduction of IN OTHER WORDS, a catalogue of Nicolas Floc’h produced as a close collaboration between Frac Nord-Pas de Calais, Frac Champagne-Ardenne, Galerie Le Sous-sol in Paris / French ministry of culture and communication, CNAP, John Dory Productions, Roma Publications, Le Confort Moderne and W139 in Amsterdam.
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THE INTRIGUE OF THE BANAL Léa Gauthier, In other Words, p130-133, Ed Roma Publications
When I woke up the next morning, It was still dark. My calves were itching, it was unbearable. I smeared them with a thick layer of antihistamine cream. The tiny black grains had more than doubled in size. Under close scrutiny, I realized that not only had they swollen, but that underneath the black grain was something that had the shape of a stalk. It looked like a soybean sprout, yet thiner. This vegetal feeling worried me and in order to see, I pulled one out. But instead of being detached, it was squashed and secreted a liquid. I examined it with my paperknife’s magnifying glass. It was indeed a plant.
Kobo Abe, Kangaroo Notebook, L’imaginaire, Gallimard, p.13, 1991+
Let’s imagine that words have lost the sensations to which they correspond. Let’s imagine that reality is in a state of cri-sis. That it is so for a single individual. This character knows the social meaning of words, but has lost their sensible corol-lary. A fish would just be something that is eaten or a word placed around a verb and a complement used to communi-cate. Our character would not be ill, quite the contrary. A sick being is no longer efficient. The person who has lost the sen-sible relation is actually of a formidable social productivity: he or she knows the common part of the transaction, only the sin-gular relation has disappeared. So let’s imagine that the char-acter knows fully well what to do with all these words which are no longer sensations. Only an accident, a breach opened by an event can indicate this as a loss. Like in Abe Kobo’s novel, plants would have to take root in the character’s legs for him to experience a feeling. The instance of the process would have to be able to take shape again. This fiction can help develop and clear an interpretative main line into the work of Nicolas Floc’h: the essential part of his approach may concern a questioning of the environment, created by an acci-dent of the word, the gesture or the medium and the aesthetic responsibility of this accident.
Behavioural Fictions
In this work, the accident appears as a way of taking root with sensibility again, to assert an artistic space, a territory of action. It is never tragic, but rather burlesque. It is about a process of logical exaggeration which enables to shift the per-ceptive space and the procedures for the attribution of mean-ing. The artist invents ‘perverse’ processes, which update rhythmic narratives. To do so, he focuses on body motions, a word, an expression, and relies on an almost exaggerated and relentless repetition in order to reveal the construction modes of reality. In the video Anna’s Life, he only uses the way in which a woman goes up and down stairs in a foreign city. These points of view change, the shots sometimes grow wider. Nothing is ever grasped besides this inexorable move-ment, it becomes the argument of a journey, a way of piercing a city’s architecture. The isolated motion is (taken as the word of the image). It slips without any given reason. The image becomes the accident of a body in a city, unless it is the reverse. This obstinate question of a gesture’s meaning can be found in the link that the artist builds with words. The distance between an object and its meaning is probably the inaugural accident of the plastic research of Nicolas Floc’h. The artist refers the object to the word or indicates that the word cannot be assimilated to the object. He plays with this famous dis-tance that amused the surrealists, as well as many mod-ernists: the word “dog” does not bark, and that is something we must accept. Through repetition and insistence, he cap-tures the attention of spontaneous recognition. In Productive Writing, the word befalls at the same time as the object to which it refers to. For example, the word “cosmos” appears when the flowers grow, creating a semantic universe very close to tautology. Using this logical problem of the process of reality, Nicolas Floc’h raises the question of the decoy and pretence, of the malleability of the world. If the object hap-pens at the same time as its nomination, its nomination simul-taneously implies the belonging to a social process: it becomes an object of transaction, acquiring an economic value or a usage value. The productive writing of the word “fish”, plotted using a trawler’s computer system offers fish; the fish is then sold on a market and thereafter consumed dur-ing a meal. Productive writing is an artistic cut into the world’s flux where poetry is constructed in close relation with the most prevalent forms. Therefore, through its name the object finds a place in the social chain. “Objects can only be named. Signs are their representatives. I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are.”, writes Wittgenstein in Tracta-tus Logico-Philosophicus (1). Yet, in this work, Nicolas Floc’h tests the materiality of the verbal language and contradicts the foremost logic of the philosopher. He pushes realism so far into tautology that he paradoxically spreads out the proper space of fiction. In Productive Writing, this space is closely linked to documentary matter. In the exhibition space, the Pro-ductive Writing can only be understood with lacunas. What the viewer can grasp is a trace or a testimony, it is up to him to reconstitute the narrative frame, the potential story of the adventure. The exhibition is but a step in the process, its affir-mation. The open poetic space is not at all that of specific objects: the cosmos flower produced within this framework is identical to any other cosmos flower. The Productive Writing as well as Anna’s Life build much more the fiction of a behav-iour, that of a character who attempts to renew the links between an object and other points of the reality to which it is related. In Garden, Nicolas Floc’h takes on the improbable role of a character who takes care of plastic plants, the height of absurdity for an individual caught in the circle of the world’s lexical dematerialization. Much like a child, the man pretends to be a gardener and in doing so emphasizes subterraneously the total lack of roots. The gesture loses its meaning in com-pulsive repetition. A performative dimension, the heart of the fiction is the body of the artist staged by the processes of the Productive Writing or Garden. Nicolas Floc’h has also tested these behavioural fictions in the works he has done on stage, with choreographers such as Emmanuelle Huynh and Alain Michard. The issues of taking root and environmental implan-tation is then materialised, for example in the relation between the mediatized bodies through the use of stems or sticks. The environment as well as the relationships then define behav-iour and body motions. But if the Productive Writing, Garden or the choreographic incursions designate the physical body as a fictional, narrative space, the work of Nicolas Floc’h has other facets where the objets themselves are in charge of their own stories.
The self-narrative of objects
Nicolas Floc’h creates a series of talkative objects, which take on and offer the physical experience of tautology. Island is a rock on which mussels are attached. The rock is able to articulate its presence and identity through the sound that emanates from itself. The rock suggests the marine world, which then transforms it into an island. Here, it is the actual object that perceptively indicates its raison d’être and offers its own definition to the potential viewer’s sensitive experi-ence. The perverse object puts itself on display. It is the prod-uct of an artistic intervention and its physical inertia is in opposition with its symbolic power. In this piece as in River or Painting, the object offers the dynamic narrative of its own story, the part represents the whole, including itself in a metonymic game. This process can also be seen in Camou-flages where the artist dresses municipal roundabouts with military patterns. But if camouflage is normally used for a strategic concealment in nature, here nature is itself con-cealed by being exposed to the city: the play on words becomes the materialization of the paradox of monstration. Perverting the links between the object and its designation become a way of provoking a crisis within reality whilst reani-mating perception. The talkative objects are often diversions of natural elements. As counterparts they have other objects, this time silent, which instead of including their condition of existence into a movement of semantic expansion, they are brought back to a decontextualised nakedness. This is what we see in the Recycled Painting. In this work, Nicolas Floc’h recycles paintings of living artists, dissolves them and puts them back into paint tubes. The artist’s name becomes a sim-ple brand name and the tubes acquire simultaneously an artis-tic value. Thumbing his nose at the art world, Nicolas Floc’h pushes the logic of quotational art to the extreme. In an ana-logue manner, in the video Painting, the medium of painting is brought back to its basic definition: the initial function of paint is to cover surfaces. Nonetheless, the use of to video brings back to painting what it is lacking: the instance of the process. Nicolas Floc’h also designates what is missing from the self-narrative of objects and attitudes: the dynamic frame of enun-ciation. He creates universes, territories in kit form which he calls Multifunctional Structure, Functional Floor, Portable Art Structure and Portable Museum. They are utilitarian, adjustable structures, spaces that are spread out only because they are inhabited, invested. The gesture that can activate them is their true meaning. These structures are latent spatial fictions. The works of Nicolas Floc’h do not in any way partake in logical formalism, they evidently take root in the field of phenomenological experimentation. They put to the test the postulate which Merleau-Ponty designated as “foi perceptive” (perceptual faith). According to the philosopher, no action can be taken without a naive belief in the efficacy of objects. Yet objects can only exist in a given environment, amid the grid of complex interconnections. In Phenomenology of Perception, he wrote: “The sentient and the sensible do not stand in relation to each other as two mutually external terms, and sensation is not an invasion of the sentient by the sensi-ble. It is my gaze which subtends colour, and the movement of my hand which subtends the object’s form, or rather my gaze pairs off with colour, and my hand with hardness and softness, and in this transaction between the subject of sensation and the sensible it cannot be held that one acts while the other suffers the action, or that one confers significance on the other. (...) Thus a sensible datum which is on the point of being felt sets a kind of muddled problem for my body to solve (...) So, if I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that one perceives in me, and not that I per-ceive. Every sensation carries within it the germ of a dream or depersonalization such as we experience in that quasi-stupor to which we are reduced when we really try to live at the level of sensation.” (2). This confusing issue laid by the sensitive body is at the heart of Nicolas Floc’h’s work. Whether it is about behavioural fictions, latent spatial fictions, the produc-tion of talkative or silent objects, all these works are rooted in this way of taking sensations seriously and trying to exist simultaneously with a grammar which is necessarily inade-quate and damaged.
(1) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tel, Gallimard, p. 39, 1961.
(2) Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, translated by Colin Smith, pp. 214-215, 1962.
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Fragments of an interview with Nicolas Floc’h by Philippe Van Cauteren. Hamburg, 7 August 2004, In other Words, p134-140, Ed Roma Publications
- My first question concerns the idea of translation. Gener-ally speaking, art can be seen as a major translation process. What does this process means to you?
Translation? Yes. I never talk about it, but it reminds me of my initial training. Before my master’s degree in Fine Arts at the Glasgow School of Art, I got a degree in Spanish philology. One of the main elements of learning another language is translation, the passage or transformation from one language to another. With Écritures productives, there’s this tautological relation with the word and the actual thing, the idea of ques-tioning the origin of language in this binary process of image and meaning. The words are not set, and Écritures produc-tives establishes this specific relation to the existence of lan-guage: the word grows, develops, changes and undertakes transformation.
- Quite right, transformation can be synonymous with translation. It’s not a moving element in the sense of mobility, but an object that transforms itself. I see this repeatedly in your work.
First, let’s talk about a project that’s directly linked to translation. For example, the Chicago Épicerie/Portable Store project of 1999, where I decided to plant Productive Writing in English and produce a grocery store at the Temporary Ser-vices gallery. Instead of translation, there was this idea of a bilingual link to things, in this case, plants.
- In what way is this relation bilingual?
It’s the relation to the formation of a word which, depend-ing on its geographic localisation, has a different morphology when it becomes physical. In Productive Writing, I’m talking about a bilingual relation when we have a link with the origin of language. For example, the word Fraise appears in France and the word Strawberry in England. If the Chicago project had occurred the way it was initially planned, we would have had a translation of the Productive Writings, in other words an image of Fraise and Strawberry. There was an attempt to translate, and by taking the word literally, I think that this is the only project that achieved that directly.
- Translation is about shifting something to another place or thought system.
Yes, it’s about displacement. This refers to a way I have of working where very often the pieces are not transfixed. Sculp-ture isn’t positioned, but rather activated, animated. This acti-vation isn’t mechanical, but human. It takes into account the imaginary of the other and lies on an open space. The Multi-functional Structure is an invitation for artists where the object acts as a scenario or partition. With the Beer Kilometer, the audience plays with and transforms the piece. They are ‘performative sculptures’. I lose control of the piece, since it’s about programmed abandon. And I come back here to the idea of translation, where this notion of abandoning the pri-mordial state or thing to someone else’s subjectivity implies an inevitable shift in meaning.
- I have the impression that the everyday relationship you’re preoccupied with in Productive Writing, or in some other way, in the Beer Kilometer and Anna’s Life, is extremely meaningful.
In Productive Writing, everyday life is indeed essential to the extent in which work is a process anchored in everyday life and where it’s not physically modified. I would say that my intervention is like a psychological shift vis-à-vis reality, a change of affect. I’m not talking about a modification of every-day life, but rather of a modification of its reception. Tomatoes are the same as other tomatoes, but the context of their pro-duction is different. This context will change the way we per-ceive the tomato, and this will therefore psychologically modi-fy the way we look at it. That’s what I call ‘affect’. A tomato that I’ve produced does not have the same history as the one which doesn’t come from the word Tomato. What makes it dif-ferent from the other is what I’m saying. The person who will go to the market and buy these tomatoes from me will not pay more for them; they’ll just have a certificate that proves that it’s an art product and a text which will explain the process. A woman asked me if my tomatoes had the same taste as oth-ers, and I answered “no, because we don’t eat them with the same conscience”.
- You usually intervene in a very simple way, through a direct action, almost phenomenological, which actually char-acterised your work.
Indeed, as in the Performance, 21 August 1994 piece, I just wanted to be there, immobile. I wanted to do a performance where I was immobile, where the movement didn’t come from the performer, but rather from what surrounded him. This notion was interesting to me in regards to the actual idea of performance. Another essential element was to get people to look at what they don’t usually watch: we never concentrate for an hour on the ocean’s tide. I wanted these people to watch the appearance and discovery of a landscape. We begin with the surface of two monochromes, the sea and the sky which almost merge together. Slowly, the rocks appear and their volumes pierce the surface. I wanted to simultane-ously be there and not there, to merge with the landscape wearing clothes the colour of the rocks.
- Wasn’t there already an interest in painting in Perfor-mance, 21 August 1994? When I saw the video, I immediately thought of marine paintings and of the relation to nature, to time…
It evokes marine paintings, but my attention isn’t focussed on them. However, time and nature are essential components in my work. In terms of painting, I tend to correlate with mono-chrome and abstract painting.
- You mentioned monochrome, but there’s also water, with its tides, its pictural aspects, its opacity, its reflections. It reminds me of the Monochromes installation, but also of the photograph Scales.
There’s obviously this link with water, to its surface. I spent my entire childhood by the sea and my adolescence on boats. At 17, I was sailor for a year and a half on a trawler. There’s always this relation to the surface of water; it’s this monochrome ‘limit’. At high sea, it’s a completely mysterious expanse, an open surface that provides us with little informa-tion on its depth. The gaze penetrates the density of the colour. When diving, the sensation can be the same when the water is blurred or when we come back up from the depths and look at the surface. For example, Underwater Mono-chrome, a video where I’m filming water, the ‘troubled and aqueous density’ of a pond. For me, monochrome is an open space where one can project something imaginary. The absence of a reference point allows us to penetrate it, dive into it, and float inside. The surface is also the space of this imaginary when one works on a fishing boat. There’s always this excitement of the gold rush, the discovery of unexpected fish, of what we have caught in the net. There’s always this idea of the miraculous catch.
- In your work, collaboration or dialogue is something that’s repeated and noticeable from the beginning.
When it comes to collaborations, I like being in unfamiliar situations. I feel that the inventiveness of the other is interest-ing and important. It can generate developments impossible to realise otherwise. If we take the Multifunctional Structure, it’s interesting in itself as an object, but the process surpasses the object, since it’s more than just a sculpture. The project includes the participation of the other. Every project is autonomous and at the same time, takes on a new meaning when confronted with other interventions. It’s interesting to see how the imaginary can appropriate the same thing.
- But when you developed the Multifunctional Structure, you suggested a framework in which people can evolve. Don’t you have any specific expectations?
Of course, I have expectations, but it can surpass my imagination. The use made of the Multifunctional Structure with Rachid Ouramdane and Christian Rizzo started from a rel-atively minimal structure and arrived at a rather Baroque one. Those shifts could never have been possible without the par-ticipation of other people and without a certain abandon of the piece, a voluntary loss of control. This shift goes both ways. The Multifunctional Structure also modifies the work of the people who intervene by providing some sort of spine to the project. This double shift also exists with the Portable Musée, exposed in a project state at the Galerie Le Sous-sol in 2000. This project, previous to the Multifunctional Structure, has similarities with it to the extent where curators appropriate it. Much like an exhibition space, this structure has a spatial identity but with the particularity of being mobile. The Portable Musée becomes both the support and the constraint of the projects.
- To demonstrate the diversity of the collaborations and the way in which you approach different disciplines, I would confront two projects: the Over the Edge project in Ghent in 2000 with artist and stylist Micha Derrider and the Fashion Paintings, offcuts from Christian Lacroix, Shinishiro Arakawa and Cacharel.
For Over the Edge, I planned to make letters with clothing and then scatter them throughout the city as a potential text. From that point, I called upon Micha Deridder to work with me and together we developed the Abécédaire project. For the Fashion Paintings, it’s completely different. I first obtained the fashion designer’s permission to recuperate offcuts from their collections. The pieces of fabric had to be actually made or have a pattern designed by the couturier himself. I chose and used them as they were. Here, we are closer to the Recycled Paintings where I ask artists for paintings that they keep but don’t show anymore in order to dissolve their paint coats. As far as these collaborations are concerned, it’s more about recycling.
- This notion of recycling also exists with Novo 3/4, which you made based on Jean-Pierre Limosin’s film Novo.
It’s a form of salvaging, recycling a space-time, an off-screen. In Novo 3/4, I was able to obtain unusual images, almost ‘objective’ ones. At no time did I choose what I shot or showed. Three mini DV cameras were attached to the 35 mm camera and followed the same movements. I had the same frame values as the main camera, but with shifted axes of 45° and 180°. I did exactly the same editing, the same sequences and the same takes as those of the film. The editing depends on the ‘original’ film.
- Isn’t this about recycling realities, fragments of life?
Yes. In any case, it’s an image status that doesn’t corre-spond to any image status, as the only choice is the device. But earlier you talked about movement and you mentioned Anna’s Life in relation to everyday life. I believe that this film is a fictional work, since only the images tell us a story. There are no other texts or words than those of the title. This story is open, it’s very close to life: we go up and down stairs, open doors, but we never know what will happen. It’s also about a photographic work of the city of Tokyo, although in this case, it’s almost a documentary: visiting the city through the eyes of a character. When I talk about photographic work, I feel that photography cannot properly render what a city such as Tokyo is like with its flux and constant movements. For me, this is the city, a city where traffic not only happens at street level, but on different levels and layers.
- Did you use Japanese fishing rods for Numéro? Did their origin have any importance in the end?
The only importance in the fact that they were Japanese was their size. When going to Japan, I was sure I would find telescopic fishing rods, which take up less space when folded. French fishing rods are one metre long when folded, whereas Japanese ones are only 30 cm long on average, with a smaller diameter. There is here the same relation to the object as in Habitat or Portable Art Structures, it’s this idea of an object that’s tiny yet can be folded out and take up significant space. These objects show potential mobility and allow for transfor-mations. I used these rods for Numéro, the piece that I pro-duced with Emmanuelle Huynh and for the two performances with Alain Michard in Japan and Dunkerque. I thought of these objects in relation to the performance or dance in terms of their ability to fit into the space of lines, curves and ten-sions.
- I notice that you often refer to sculpture in your work, but even more so to painting. In this sense, can you tell us about next year’s exhibition project at the Confort Moderne in Poitiers?
The exhibition at the Confort Moderne will be entirely about references to painting. I will take another example: the Pélagique piece that I am preparing for the Capc in Bordeaux. I accepted an invitation for an exhibition on food. Of course, I could show Productive Writing, but I decided to take food less obviously and play on the idea of the trap. In fact a double trap: one that allows us to obtain food using a net and another visual part, that of a giant perspective, a trap for the gaze, replacing the object in the context of pictorial tradition. The pelagic net is a functional object. The piece can potentially catch things. The first stitches are gigantic and form a hallway in perspective, so that the net doesn’t suffer from the water’s weight. The colour codes of the first loops of thread, blue, green and red give the fishermen a reference for when they mend the nets. It lies flat on the ground or spreads out and takes shape underwater, but invisible, under the surface, under the monochrome. The perspective is under the mono-chrome.
- Talking about colours: on the contrary there will be in Poitiers an absence of colours…
I want to work on opposites such as black and white by integrating variations of grey. For Poitiers, I’m also working on boat camouflage patterns from World War II, which look like abstract geometric frescos. There’s a second reason linked to a more global and political context. Let’s say that this context appears as a backdrop, but that’s not the issue here. There’s also a fresco which was restored in 1852 by Joly-Leterme, which is in the church Notre Dame La Grande in Poitiers. I plan to reproduce it in the Confort Moderne; it has imbricated black and white crosses painted on a column. When we see them, it reminds us of Sol Lewitt frescos, but also of Malevich, even though this pattern is 1,000 years old. The camouflage that will be reproduced on the façade dates back to World War II. To camouflage implies a danger, and the space is called the Confort Moderne (Modern Comfort). It’s not a very neutral name…
- In a sense, the projects you’re working on now for Ham-burg and Poitiers, such as Splashing Walls, Yagli Güres (Turkish oil wrestling) or Le Grand Splash are related to painting, but there’s also this idea of danger as a backdrop.
There’s both the idea of danger and of underlying violence, but also a burlesque aspect. Opting for painting means recenter-ing around something essential, constituent, common and his-torical. Opting for painting means questioning the source, swimming upstream to understand its extent and origin. It’s about concentration and synthesis. I no longer perceive ancient painting the way I did 10 years ago. The critical look changes, influencing what takes place when you’re working. There’s an interest in various fields and times, there’s no longer a chronological view, but rather a multidirectional one, which means that everything can be taken into account from a contemporary point of view. A painting of the 16th century is just as interesting as an ancient Zen garden, as a fresco of the 12th century or a work from the 1970s.
- In fact, you know that Gerhard Richter was once asked why he started painting grey monochromes. And he answered “At one point, I had no idea what to paint and I started to tell myself I’ll just going to make a grey painting”. And by rejecting a subject, he discovered the varieties or nuances of monochrome and of grey. In your case, in the ear-lier works such as Productive Writing and even the Ghent piece, Abécédaire, there was a very communicative aspect, aimed at an audience. Have you changed your mind today?
Yes, one thing has changed, but I don’t think that’s it. I had a discussion with a friend who was telling me that “the glory days of painting are behind us”. I didn’t agree since that’s not the issue. We can’t say that because it’s neither behind us nor in front of us, or besides us: we don’t care, it’s not an issue! I think that when I stopped painting, since I painted before recycling my own paintings or those of others, I did it as a reaction. I told myself that I couldn’t paint, that I couldn’t paint with what I perceived. I just couldn’t do it anymore, I couldn’t go towards painting, I didn’t think the medium was pertinent any more, and my argument was linear. That’s why I gave up painting. Today, I think that the medium is a tool and that its history can be one too. The idea of being outdated is obsolete to me. I could start painting again and I do and its different. Painting is not a goal, but a means. I can paint just like I shoot film or take photographs. Maybe that’s what has changed!
To come back to the question about audience participa-tion, earlier I called the Beer Kilometer, which I have just pro-duced, a ‘performative’ sculpture. The audience performs. Let’s say that he has the possibility to participate The beer is free, and you just need to pick it up and one mentions that it’s allowed to do so. Doing this modifies the work. I must say that 6,015 well-aligned cans along dozens of metres does make you want to kick them especially if it’s allowed. The Beer Kilo-meter was a highly regulated space, formally strict and at the same time a space of total freedom. The viewer becomes responsible for the piece’s evolution. This relationship with the other that was present in Productive Writing, Beer Kilometer or Multifunctional Structure doesn’t appear in every piece. I don’t want this to be systematic. When it is justified with regard to a work, I implicate the audience.
- I could be mistaken, but wasn’t there a twin and homony-mous project of the Beer Kilometer?
Yes, indeed, from the very start. It’s related to Duchamp’s Mètre Étalon, with the piece of string that forms a curved and random line when one lets it fall to the ground. Here it’s a character who’s walking, who is completely drunk and can’t walk straight. There is a tracking out with a milometer that goes back a kilometre. The shot is done in one camera move-ment. The person stops before the camera does, as he’s already walked the kilometre, his trajectory not being straight.
- It’s like the paraphrase of a work of art, which would be between critical irony and a tribute. Is this something you could develop, since it’s very present in your work and very particular?
As it happens, yes, the Beer Kilometer implies a direct ref-erence, but it’s something completely different. The piece sug-gests and shows what’s happening as well as what has hap-pened during the five to six hours of the public’s performance during the private view. The reactions were totally incredible, both sociologically and humanly. People came to talk to me during the howl evening, some of them felt guilty for having ‘destroyed’ a part of the Beer Kilometer, whilst others were offended by the fact that certain people had kicked these well-aligned rows of beer cans. There was this desire to dis-turb the installation and appropriating it. Some people started to build other things. The piece provoked some rather aston-ishing reactions.
- Like a game of inversion of values?
Yes, absolutely, and then there’s also this game of ‘desacralisation’. It reminds me of Allan Kaprow and a pas-sage from The Real Experiment written in 1983 and compiled in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life: “Artlike art holds that art is separate from life and everything else, while lifelike art holds that art is connected to life and everything else. In other words, there is an art at the service of art, and art at the serv-ice of life. The maker of artlike art tends to be a specialist; the maker of lifelike art, a generalist.”
- In some way you quote several artists at once…
Yes, the Beer Kilometer was copied from Walter de Maria’s Broken Kilometer and there are also references to installations by certain pop artists. In fact, it also reminds me of this piece in Poitiers where there’s this 1,000 year-old fres-co, which isn’t called a work of art at all, but rather a decora-tive pattern in a church that I put back into an exhibition con-text. Nevertheless, it appears as a reference to a clearly sub-sequent art history through the works of Sol Lewitt. These are things I refer to regularly, but it’s also a need for desacraliza-tion, which simply brings us back to Filliou’s statement: “Art is what makes life more interesting than art”.
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Emmanuelle Huynh and Nicolas Floc’h’s simultaneously written answers to a num-ber of questions they had asked them-selves. Angers, 22 October 2004, In other Words, p170-172, Ed Roma Publications
1. How did you end up working respectively in a different discipline, be it fine arts or dancing?
NF: The first memorable experiences in my work are relat-ed to performance or include a performing aspect. Perfor-mance, 21 August 1994 can be described as still presence, a kind of performance where movement is outside the per-former. This extreme gesture from a performance point of view – being motionless – obsessed me for a number of years to the point of not giving a name to the performance. I was just there. With Productive Writing, I continued a way of perform-ing related to everyday matters, an unnamed performance, an essential component of the work, appearing as a backdrop. This practice corresponded to the discovery of new trades: planting vegetables, manufacturing and gathering salt, selling products at the market. It was an everyday exercise. In 2000, when I met Emmanuelle Huynh, I started my work in the field of dance. And I also returned to movement and to a type of practice involving a physical implication.
EH : The first experience was Factory, a collaboration between the choreographer Hervé Robbe, with whom I was working, and the English sculptor Richard Deacon, created at the Ferme du Buisson in 1993. The audience shared the space with the sculptures and the dancers. My conception of space was broadened, and I loved this very direct relation with the audience, generated by the use of Richard’s sculptures. Since 1996, I interpret Frédéric Lormeau’s performance, Vasque Fontaine/Partition Nord. It is a written ritual, very demanding in terms of physical resistance, with a brief moment of improvisation.
Erik Dietman asked me in 1997 to be his hand in “le modèle modèle modèle” tribute to Rodin, and to model/hammer/imprint with my body ten tons of soil spread out into parallelepipeds, cones, igloos, erect phalluses! It was understood that he would sign the pieces which had been randomly imprinted by me and Catherine Contour, who was called in as reinforcement. I recently led a ‘guided visit’ in Fabien Lerat’s monographic exhibition, where I performed and commented on the relation of his objects to dwelling. These experiences represent moments that enabled me to observe the working process of a different discipline from within and the answer to questions such as which ideas cross through such object or which object for which idea? Meeting Nicolas in 2000 resulted in a different kind of collabo-ration. We work together as authors from different disciplines, but common objects.
2. What does confronting each other’s work enable you to do?
NF : Working with someone else allows for displacement, displacement from one’s daily practice, a semantic or physical slide. As for the body, working with dance means placing one-self in time, a progression. A certain dramaturgy takes place, but also space management occurs and it is constantly being redefined. From a visual point of view, working with dance allows me to develop work as a sculptor. To be the sculptor of a shape, which does not exist, for it is reinvented at every moment.
EH : It allows (and forces) you to consider together differ-ent aspects for which I am usually solely responsible for: space, time, relations between objects, and body status. It implies, therefore, a significant shift in your vision. And also, a change in structure: for example, I warm up less, but I look around more!
3. Bord is a play by Emmanuelle Huynh. What are the partic-ularities of a collaboration with and artist, and how is it dif-ferent from working with a set designer?
NF : My work is not that of a set designer for it extends beyond the scenic space. It’s an extension of a practice which is external to this space; it’s a crossing, the space is not delim-ited. A sculpture/structure such as the one in Bord is a poly-morphic object: it is at the same time a changing visual artistic object and the spine of a temporal progression of a space’s occupation.
EH : I’ve never worked with a set designer. When I met Nicolas, I was wondering about a new alliance of body and text. I needed to create a space where this alliance could emerge. I then asked Nicolas to produce tables for us, which we would be able to reconfigure constantly. These have an identity (weight, shape, texture), a presence that induces a specific type of time management, and they are protagonists in the play as much as Christophe Tarkos’ poems or the dancers themselves. They also enjoy an unstable status. They are hiding places, a stage, trenches, a podium, a ladder, a trap door… They transform the space and the movement.
4. Numéro: choreographic or art object?
NF : A hybrid object. Numéro is an object we created together without any of us being truly a specialist. Working the objects in space and time. The tension presented right at the beginning of Numéro through the throwing of green lights (fixed to arrows), sort of lashing laser shots, mark the space. The lines of the rods bend. The line is sonorous, the line is tel-escopic, the line is sharp. Bodies and masses modify the space. The object allows for metamorphosis, the body experi-ences it. Bodies and objects merge and form a common image. Whether it is a choreographic or an art object is not relevant here.
EH : Numéro also has an unstable identity. The starting point is to play together within the space. The ‘poor’ objects which are used (cardboard boxes, fishing rods, sheets of kraft paper) are diverted from their usual functions; we compose with them images which make their original usage/significa-tion slide. The same object changes identity many times: the fishing rod is an arrow that becomes a bullfighter’s banderilla, a giant claw and, finally, a Mikado stick. The human body loos-es its status many times: the box-man or the crawling carpet are physical and semantic slides! Time and space in Numéro were also guided by the realisation that we were performing magic tricks too (this was revealed in the aftermath of the first researches), and that I was a kind of magician’s assistant and that we were presenting playlets: a body appearing/disap-pearing, a pierced box. Artistic dramaturgy predominated.
5. La Feuille, the sequel to Numéro?
NF : La Feuille is the latest ongoing production. Bertrand Godot commissioned this project for the Chapelle du Genêteil in Château-Gontier. The performance should take place in January at Christophe Cuzin’s exhibition. Christophe works with monochromatic surfaces; we therefore decided to work from an element present in Numéro: the sheet of paper. How-ever, this work is much more rooted in a ‘traditional’ aspect of art: sculpture and painting than Numéro was. In La Feuille, the monochromatic surface takes shape, the monochrome spreads out, stands up, runs along the walls and flattens to the floor. The bright red paper resembles a crumpled metal sheet. The metal sheet sets down, deploys, a volume is formed, responding to another. Movement reveals images.
EH : Yes, in the sense that we isolate an element from Numéro, the sheet of paper, and that we exclusively work on this idea. The sheet, an essential object for he who draws, undergoes transformations during the performance and its status changes from monochrome to surface, floor, sculpture and sound. In this play, the human body remains hidden, yet it remains very present at all times.
6. Artist or dancer? Or fuck categories?
NF : Origin is important, but in my opinion, categories are false. We all come from somewhere, in my case fine arts, and the work has various spaces and modes of emergence. The medium is but a means, a tool. Categorising a work limits the way it can be read. More than the medium, it is the reading that creates the category. I very often hear the following when it comes to my work: ‘transgress borders’. Borders mean noth-ing to me and I don’t intend to transgress any with my work, it just doesn’t concern me. Work emerges where it is meant to, so yes, fuck categories.
EH : Fuck categories, absolutely. And fuck those who want to relate them to us! I’m not an artist, Nicolas is not a dancer, but each of our disciplines reach out, into time, space, uses movement and loves the transformation of bodies, things and words. We have a lot of fun doing it together from time to time! I go where my work takes me: in Japan, it is towards chefs, carpenters and Ikebana masters!
One of the major and structural fluctuations of 20th century art, and art right up to the present day, lies in the both complementary and conflict-ing relationship between the formal rigour of a broad geometric abstraction and the claim of organicness, of the expressive and acting body, one of the recurrent forms of which was the performance. In its own way, the circuit of the readymade, from its swift removal from the claws of reality (from the BHV to the museum) to its more or less convincing re-injection into the ebb and flow of uses (Pinoncelli, not to mention the countless bottle racks re-used by artists and designers), creates a permanent echo of the duel between flesh and spirit. The whole oeuvre of Lygia Clark, in a part of the world where the syn-thesis between anthropology and avant-garde art was still possible, attests, in an exemplary way, to the comeback of the physical experience, of a rein-carnation of those forms which Constructivism thought it could raise above contingencies, including in the early days of its work. For some 10 years now, and beyond generational phenom-ena, this multi-faceted tension has enjoyed a resurgence of relevance and fecundity, placing art on the boundaries of its definitions as well as of its exercise, blurring categories, and revisiting areas which ideology had literally frozen. In this context, if there is one artist who concentrates most of these questions, and subjects them to the test of the work, it is indeed Nicolas Floc’h who, in 2004, devised Beer Kilometer, an arrangement of beer cans a kilometre in length, offered to visitors to drink, ending up in the chaos that one can imagine. All of a sudden, Duchamp’s Mètre Etalon/Standard Stoppage and Walter de Maria’s
Broken Kilometer pass beneath the Caudine Forks of moss, excess, burp and drunkenness, the programmed exercise of disorder. A few
years before, the Structures Multifonctions, Frac Lorraine Portable and Portable Art Structures were presented as geometric modules informed by the memory of specific objects and ready to be used here as an office, there as storage, there as picture rails, or parts of sets… that was how they were used. Likewise, by verticalizing dance mats on the wall in the form of pictures, Performance Paintings (2007) illustrated that interest in the back and forth between practicability and repre-sentation. This articulation between form and use constitutes more than ever the nub of the artist’s work, and of this latest project in particular.
In 2008, Nicolas Floc’h discovered the existence of man-made reefs which he described thus: “In the landscape under the sea there are veritable forms of architecture with their city-planning rules. Often constructed with concrete, in just a few years these elements are colonized by flora and fauna, which turn them into living sculptures/architectures. Commonly known as “man-made reefs”, these constructions have developed ever since the 17th century, and particularly in Japan. The Japanese in fact have no major natural resources, apart from those offered by the sea, which they have very rapidly cultivated. They were the first to develop technologies encouraging the life and reproduc-tion of certain species of fish, crustaceans and molluscs, which increased resources without affecting stocks. This practice became increasingly common in the latter half of the 20th century. Undersea “cities”, no less, were thus created by intensive programmes establishing more than 20 million cubic metres (20,000 sites) of reefs in the ocean. They were filled with large numbers of young fish. In this way, in the age of industrial fishing, the Japanese coasts are among the world’s best stocked with fish. These programmes are currently interesting Europeans. Since the 1960s, they have existed in France in the Paca, Languedoc-Roussillon, Aquitaine, Pays de la Loire and Normandy regions.
The forms of man-made reefs are very diverse, at times calling to mind primitive dwellings, at others modern and contem-porary sculpture and architecture.
Nicolas Floc’h’s ambitious project, at the cross-roads of art and science, is what is known as “long term”. An initial stage consists in drawing up an almost exhaustive inventory of these functional structures which nevertheless conjure up archi-tecture as much as sculpture, and which, barely glimpsed at the water’s edge, are immersed, stolen from the gaze and knowledge which ordinary mortals might have of them. Based on these listed types, Nicolas Floc’h creates sculptures on a 1:10 scale in the same material as the model. In one fell swoop, these miniature reefs become sculptures, which he presents on stands and which an absentminded eye immediately likens to some minimalist reminiscence. At a rate of some 30 works a year, the aim is to culminate in a sort of overview of existing types, meaning some 300. At once works of art and fragments of inventories, this potential ensemble forms a rare example where, instead of photography, it is sculpture which represents the documentary testimony. At the same time, the artist has perfected the art of deep sea diving in order to go and photograph and film some of these reefs which, over the years, have shed their constructivist rigour in favour of an organic plant environment which intensifies the seething presence of local fauna. Black and white photographs (colour gradually vanishes as you go deeper into the sea) and videos, set up as exhibition objects, confirm what has always been one of the basic tasks of art: showing. In pursuing his research and his exchanges with scientists, Nicolas Floc’h is embarking on a new stage of his project which consists in producing, in turn, forms which one would initially call sculptures, but which, by being designed in accordance with the demands of their possible functionality, are likely to become man-made reefs, in their turn. So works which one would classify on the basis
of art categories in the geometric, construc-tivist and/or minimalist tradition are called upon, as much as for museum exhibition, to be immersed as reefs designed to accommodate the submarine flora and the fauna attracted by it.
Where sculpture and architecture meet land-scape, photography and scientific research, Nicolas Floc’h’s art also raises more political issues insomuch as they have to do with space and the use people make of it, and ways of acting on reality as much as means of represent-ing it. By wrenching from blind regions useful forms which he assigns to the gratuitousness of aesthetic contemplation, he decides just as much about what may be abstracted from delight and earmarked for the most demanding and unexpected of functions, which art rarely even dares to think about anymore, the function of participating directly in the regeneration of biotopes, otherwise put, the survival of species.
jean-marc huitorel
Rennes. April 2013
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TRUE COLOURS THROUGH TRANSITION, Ann Demeester, In other Words, p3, Ed Roma Publications
I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms, Ovide, Metamorphoses.
Consistent and consequent in content and idea develop-ment yet multifarious and irregular in shape and form, there is no better and more succinct way to describe the work of Nicolas Floc’h. Far from being a one-trick pony Floc’h explores many pathways to achieve the goal he has set out for himself. He combines his fascination for the natural processes of growing and development with a keen interest in the processes of production, distribution / circulation and consumption of fashion and design. This mixed interest has him preoccupied with lines, curves, shapes and formats, and incites him to continuously explore the borderlines between art, crafts and applied arts, artisan techniques, and industrial design.
In essence, it seems as if Floc’h is intrigued by processes of disintegration and regeneration, of decon-struction and reconstruction. As for defining a common denominator for the variety of practices he undertakes it manifests itself in different ways. He researches and analyses the essential characteristics of the age-old disci-pline of painting (Recycled Paintings / Fashion Paintings / Monochromes) and probes the frontiers of sculpture by exploring its functionality (Functional Floor / Multifunction-al Structure). His sculptures are brittle and fragile struc-tures (Pelagic in the Capc, Bordeaux), which are almost immaterial or gradually disappear and decompose, as they are edible or otherwise consumable (Productive Writing / Beer Kilometer). It seems as if every work Nicolas Floc’h produces or realises has a cyclical structure or is a self-contained autonomous system in which processes of transformation take place. It seems as if every installation or sculpture functions as an auto-generative performance. At times, human agents are actively involved as catalysts, at other times, the performance occurs without any human intervention, a simple process of evolution, of coming into being and disappearing again. In everything he does, Floc’h examines the notion of transformation, looks at changes and transitional stages, at how something is translated from one state into another, tries to distinguish between what is ephemeral and what is everlasting, what remains and what disappears after different stages of metamorphosis.
Introduction of IN OTHER WORDS, a catalogue of Nicolas Floc’h produced as a close collaboration between Frac Nord-Pas de Calais, Frac Champagne-Ardenne, Galerie Le Sous-sol in Paris / French ministry of culture and communication, CNAP, John Dory Productions, Roma Publications, Le Confort Moderne and W139 in Amsterdam.
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THE INTRIGUE OF THE BANAL Léa Gauthier, In other Words, p130-133, Ed Roma Publications
When I woke up the next morning, It was still dark. My calves were itching, it was unbearable. I smeared them with a thick layer of antihistamine cream. The tiny black grains had more than doubled in size. Under close scrutiny, I realized that not only had they swollen, but that underneath the black grain was something that had the shape of a stalk. It looked like a soybean sprout, yet thiner. This vegetal feeling worried me and in order to see, I pulled one out. But instead of being detached, it was squashed and secreted a liquid. I examined it with my paperknife’s magnifying glass. It was indeed a plant.
Kobo Abe, Kangaroo Notebook, L’imaginaire, Gallimard, p.13, 1991+
Let’s imagine that words have lost the sensations to which they correspond. Let’s imagine that reality is in a state of cri-sis. That it is so for a single individual. This character knows the social meaning of words, but has lost their sensible corol-lary. A fish would just be something that is eaten or a word placed around a verb and a complement used to communi-cate. Our character would not be ill, quite the contrary. A sick being is no longer efficient. The person who has lost the sen-sible relation is actually of a formidable social productivity: he or she knows the common part of the transaction, only the sin-gular relation has disappeared. So let’s imagine that the char-acter knows fully well what to do with all these words which are no longer sensations. Only an accident, a breach opened by an event can indicate this as a loss. Like in Abe Kobo’s novel, plants would have to take root in the character’s legs for him to experience a feeling. The instance of the process would have to be able to take shape again. This fiction can help develop and clear an interpretative main line into the work of Nicolas Floc’h: the essential part of his approach may concern a questioning of the environment, created by an acci-dent of the word, the gesture or the medium and the aesthetic responsibility of this accident.
Behavioural Fictions
In this work, the accident appears as a way of taking root with sensibility again, to assert an artistic space, a territory of action. It is never tragic, but rather burlesque. It is about a process of logical exaggeration which enables to shift the per-ceptive space and the procedures for the attribution of mean-ing. The artist invents ‘perverse’ processes, which update rhythmic narratives. To do so, he focuses on body motions, a word, an expression, and relies on an almost exaggerated and relentless repetition in order to reveal the construction modes of reality. In the video Anna’s Life, he only uses the way in which a woman goes up and down stairs in a foreign city. These points of view change, the shots sometimes grow wider. Nothing is ever grasped besides this inexorable move-ment, it becomes the argument of a journey, a way of piercing a city’s architecture. The isolated motion is (taken as the word of the image). It slips without any given reason. The image becomes the accident of a body in a city, unless it is the reverse. This obstinate question of a gesture’s meaning can be found in the link that the artist builds with words. The distance between an object and its meaning is probably the inaugural accident of the plastic research of Nicolas Floc’h. The artist refers the object to the word or indicates that the word cannot be assimilated to the object. He plays with this famous dis-tance that amused the surrealists, as well as many mod-ernists: the word “dog” does not bark, and that is something we must accept. Through repetition and insistence, he cap-tures the attention of spontaneous recognition. In Productive Writing, the word befalls at the same time as the object to which it refers to. For example, the word “cosmos” appears when the flowers grow, creating a semantic universe very close to tautology. Using this logical problem of the process of reality, Nicolas Floc’h raises the question of the decoy and pretence, of the malleability of the world. If the object hap-pens at the same time as its nomination, its nomination simul-taneously implies the belonging to a social process: it becomes an object of transaction, acquiring an economic value or a usage value. The productive writing of the word “fish”, plotted using a trawler’s computer system offers fish; the fish is then sold on a market and thereafter consumed dur-ing a meal. Productive writing is an artistic cut into the world’s flux where poetry is constructed in close relation with the most prevalent forms. Therefore, through its name the object finds a place in the social chain. “Objects can only be named. Signs are their representatives. I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are.”, writes Wittgenstein in Tracta-tus Logico-Philosophicus (1). Yet, in this work, Nicolas Floc’h tests the materiality of the verbal language and contradicts the foremost logic of the philosopher. He pushes realism so far into tautology that he paradoxically spreads out the proper space of fiction. In Productive Writing, this space is closely linked to documentary matter. In the exhibition space, the Pro-ductive Writing can only be understood with lacunas. What the viewer can grasp is a trace or a testimony, it is up to him to reconstitute the narrative frame, the potential story of the adventure. The exhibition is but a step in the process, its affir-mation. The open poetic space is not at all that of specific objects: the cosmos flower produced within this framework is identical to any other cosmos flower. The Productive Writing as well as Anna’s Life build much more the fiction of a behav-iour, that of a character who attempts to renew the links between an object and other points of the reality to which it is related. In Garden, Nicolas Floc’h takes on the improbable role of a character who takes care of plastic plants, the height of absurdity for an individual caught in the circle of the world’s lexical dematerialization. Much like a child, the man pretends to be a gardener and in doing so emphasizes subterraneously the total lack of roots. The gesture loses its meaning in com-pulsive repetition. A performative dimension, the heart of the fiction is the body of the artist staged by the processes of the Productive Writing or Garden. Nicolas Floc’h has also tested these behavioural fictions in the works he has done on stage, with choreographers such as Emmanuelle Huynh and Alain Michard. The issues of taking root and environmental implan-tation is then materialised, for example in the relation between the mediatized bodies through the use of stems or sticks. The environment as well as the relationships then define behav-iour and body motions. But if the Productive Writing, Garden or the choreographic incursions designate the physical body as a fictional, narrative space, the work of Nicolas Floc’h has other facets where the objets themselves are in charge of their own stories.
The self-narrative of objects
Nicolas Floc’h creates a series of talkative objects, which take on and offer the physical experience of tautology. Island is a rock on which mussels are attached. The rock is able to articulate its presence and identity through the sound that emanates from itself. The rock suggests the marine world, which then transforms it into an island. Here, it is the actual object that perceptively indicates its raison d’être and offers its own definition to the potential viewer’s sensitive experi-ence. The perverse object puts itself on display. It is the prod-uct of an artistic intervention and its physical inertia is in opposition with its symbolic power. In this piece as in River or Painting, the object offers the dynamic narrative of its own story, the part represents the whole, including itself in a metonymic game. This process can also be seen in Camou-flages where the artist dresses municipal roundabouts with military patterns. But if camouflage is normally used for a strategic concealment in nature, here nature is itself con-cealed by being exposed to the city: the play on words becomes the materialization of the paradox of monstration. Perverting the links between the object and its designation become a way of provoking a crisis within reality whilst reani-mating perception. The talkative objects are often diversions of natural elements. As counterparts they have other objects, this time silent, which instead of including their condition of existence into a movement of semantic expansion, they are brought back to a decontextualised nakedness. This is what we see in the Recycled Painting. In this work, Nicolas Floc’h recycles paintings of living artists, dissolves them and puts them back into paint tubes. The artist’s name becomes a sim-ple brand name and the tubes acquire simultaneously an artis-tic value. Thumbing his nose at the art world, Nicolas Floc’h pushes the logic of quotational art to the extreme. In an ana-logue manner, in the video Painting, the medium of painting is brought back to its basic definition: the initial function of paint is to cover surfaces. Nonetheless, the use of to video brings back to painting what it is lacking: the instance of the process. Nicolas Floc’h also designates what is missing from the self-narrative of objects and attitudes: the dynamic frame of enun-ciation. He creates universes, territories in kit form which he calls Multifunctional Structure, Functional Floor, Portable Art Structure and Portable Museum. They are utilitarian, adjustable structures, spaces that are spread out only because they are inhabited, invested. The gesture that can activate them is their true meaning. These structures are latent spatial fictions. The works of Nicolas Floc’h do not in any way partake in logical formalism, they evidently take root in the field of phenomenological experimentation. They put to the test the postulate which Merleau-Ponty designated as “foi perceptive” (perceptual faith). According to the philosopher, no action can be taken without a naive belief in the efficacy of objects. Yet objects can only exist in a given environment, amid the grid of complex interconnections. In Phenomenology of Perception, he wrote: “The sentient and the sensible do not stand in relation to each other as two mutually external terms, and sensation is not an invasion of the sentient by the sensi-ble. It is my gaze which subtends colour, and the movement of my hand which subtends the object’s form, or rather my gaze pairs off with colour, and my hand with hardness and softness, and in this transaction between the subject of sensation and the sensible it cannot be held that one acts while the other suffers the action, or that one confers significance on the other. (...) Thus a sensible datum which is on the point of being felt sets a kind of muddled problem for my body to solve (...) So, if I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that one perceives in me, and not that I per-ceive. Every sensation carries within it the germ of a dream or depersonalization such as we experience in that quasi-stupor to which we are reduced when we really try to live at the level of sensation.” (2). This confusing issue laid by the sensitive body is at the heart of Nicolas Floc’h’s work. Whether it is about behavioural fictions, latent spatial fictions, the produc-tion of talkative or silent objects, all these works are rooted in this way of taking sensations seriously and trying to exist simultaneously with a grammar which is necessarily inade-quate and damaged.
(1) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tel, Gallimard, p. 39, 1961.
(2) Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, translated by Colin Smith, pp. 214-215, 1962.
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Fragments of an interview with Nicolas Floc’h by Philippe Van Cauteren. Hamburg, 7 August 2004, In other Words, p134-140, Ed Roma Publications
- My first question concerns the idea of translation. Gener-ally speaking, art can be seen as a major translation process. What does this process means to you?
Translation? Yes. I never talk about it, but it reminds me of my initial training. Before my master’s degree in Fine Arts at the Glasgow School of Art, I got a degree in Spanish philology. One of the main elements of learning another language is translation, the passage or transformation from one language to another. With Écritures productives, there’s this tautological relation with the word and the actual thing, the idea of ques-tioning the origin of language in this binary process of image and meaning. The words are not set, and Écritures produc-tives establishes this specific relation to the existence of lan-guage: the word grows, develops, changes and undertakes transformation.
- Quite right, transformation can be synonymous with translation. It’s not a moving element in the sense of mobility, but an object that transforms itself. I see this repeatedly in your work.
First, let’s talk about a project that’s directly linked to translation. For example, the Chicago Épicerie/Portable Store project of 1999, where I decided to plant Productive Writing in English and produce a grocery store at the Temporary Ser-vices gallery. Instead of translation, there was this idea of a bilingual link to things, in this case, plants.
- In what way is this relation bilingual?
It’s the relation to the formation of a word which, depend-ing on its geographic localisation, has a different morphology when it becomes physical. In Productive Writing, I’m talking about a bilingual relation when we have a link with the origin of language. For example, the word Fraise appears in France and the word Strawberry in England. If the Chicago project had occurred the way it was initially planned, we would have had a translation of the Productive Writings, in other words an image of Fraise and Strawberry. There was an attempt to translate, and by taking the word literally, I think that this is the only project that achieved that directly.
- Translation is about shifting something to another place or thought system.
Yes, it’s about displacement. This refers to a way I have of working where very often the pieces are not transfixed. Sculp-ture isn’t positioned, but rather activated, animated. This acti-vation isn’t mechanical, but human. It takes into account the imaginary of the other and lies on an open space. The Multi-functional Structure is an invitation for artists where the object acts as a scenario or partition. With the Beer Kilometer, the audience plays with and transforms the piece. They are ‘performative sculptures’. I lose control of the piece, since it’s about programmed abandon. And I come back here to the idea of translation, where this notion of abandoning the pri-mordial state or thing to someone else’s subjectivity implies an inevitable shift in meaning.
- I have the impression that the everyday relationship you’re preoccupied with in Productive Writing, or in some other way, in the Beer Kilometer and Anna’s Life, is extremely meaningful.
In Productive Writing, everyday life is indeed essential to the extent in which work is a process anchored in everyday life and where it’s not physically modified. I would say that my intervention is like a psychological shift vis-à-vis reality, a change of affect. I’m not talking about a modification of every-day life, but rather of a modification of its reception. Tomatoes are the same as other tomatoes, but the context of their pro-duction is different. This context will change the way we per-ceive the tomato, and this will therefore psychologically modi-fy the way we look at it. That’s what I call ‘affect’. A tomato that I’ve produced does not have the same history as the one which doesn’t come from the word Tomato. What makes it dif-ferent from the other is what I’m saying. The person who will go to the market and buy these tomatoes from me will not pay more for them; they’ll just have a certificate that proves that it’s an art product and a text which will explain the process. A woman asked me if my tomatoes had the same taste as oth-ers, and I answered “no, because we don’t eat them with the same conscience”.
- You usually intervene in a very simple way, through a direct action, almost phenomenological, which actually char-acterised your work.
Indeed, as in the Performance, 21 August 1994 piece, I just wanted to be there, immobile. I wanted to do a performance where I was immobile, where the movement didn’t come from the performer, but rather from what surrounded him. This notion was interesting to me in regards to the actual idea of performance. Another essential element was to get people to look at what they don’t usually watch: we never concentrate for an hour on the ocean’s tide. I wanted these people to watch the appearance and discovery of a landscape. We begin with the surface of two monochromes, the sea and the sky which almost merge together. Slowly, the rocks appear and their volumes pierce the surface. I wanted to simultane-ously be there and not there, to merge with the landscape wearing clothes the colour of the rocks.
- Wasn’t there already an interest in painting in Perfor-mance, 21 August 1994? When I saw the video, I immediately thought of marine paintings and of the relation to nature, to time…
It evokes marine paintings, but my attention isn’t focussed on them. However, time and nature are essential components in my work. In terms of painting, I tend to correlate with mono-chrome and abstract painting.
- You mentioned monochrome, but there’s also water, with its tides, its pictural aspects, its opacity, its reflections. It reminds me of the Monochromes installation, but also of the photograph Scales.
There’s obviously this link with water, to its surface. I spent my entire childhood by the sea and my adolescence on boats. At 17, I was sailor for a year and a half on a trawler. There’s always this relation to the surface of water; it’s this monochrome ‘limit’. At high sea, it’s a completely mysterious expanse, an open surface that provides us with little informa-tion on its depth. The gaze penetrates the density of the colour. When diving, the sensation can be the same when the water is blurred or when we come back up from the depths and look at the surface. For example, Underwater Mono-chrome, a video where I’m filming water, the ‘troubled and aqueous density’ of a pond. For me, monochrome is an open space where one can project something imaginary. The absence of a reference point allows us to penetrate it, dive into it, and float inside. The surface is also the space of this imaginary when one works on a fishing boat. There’s always this excitement of the gold rush, the discovery of unexpected fish, of what we have caught in the net. There’s always this idea of the miraculous catch.
- In your work, collaboration or dialogue is something that’s repeated and noticeable from the beginning.
When it comes to collaborations, I like being in unfamiliar situations. I feel that the inventiveness of the other is interest-ing and important. It can generate developments impossible to realise otherwise. If we take the Multifunctional Structure, it’s interesting in itself as an object, but the process surpasses the object, since it’s more than just a sculpture. The project includes the participation of the other. Every project is autonomous and at the same time, takes on a new meaning when confronted with other interventions. It’s interesting to see how the imaginary can appropriate the same thing.
- But when you developed the Multifunctional Structure, you suggested a framework in which people can evolve. Don’t you have any specific expectations?
Of course, I have expectations, but it can surpass my imagination. The use made of the Multifunctional Structure with Rachid Ouramdane and Christian Rizzo started from a rel-atively minimal structure and arrived at a rather Baroque one. Those shifts could never have been possible without the par-ticipation of other people and without a certain abandon of the piece, a voluntary loss of control. This shift goes both ways. The Multifunctional Structure also modifies the work of the people who intervene by providing some sort of spine to the project. This double shift also exists with the Portable Musée, exposed in a project state at the Galerie Le Sous-sol in 2000. This project, previous to the Multifunctional Structure, has similarities with it to the extent where curators appropriate it. Much like an exhibition space, this structure has a spatial identity but with the particularity of being mobile. The Portable Musée becomes both the support and the constraint of the projects.
- To demonstrate the diversity of the collaborations and the way in which you approach different disciplines, I would confront two projects: the Over the Edge project in Ghent in 2000 with artist and stylist Micha Derrider and the Fashion Paintings, offcuts from Christian Lacroix, Shinishiro Arakawa and Cacharel.
For Over the Edge, I planned to make letters with clothing and then scatter them throughout the city as a potential text. From that point, I called upon Micha Deridder to work with me and together we developed the Abécédaire project. For the Fashion Paintings, it’s completely different. I first obtained the fashion designer’s permission to recuperate offcuts from their collections. The pieces of fabric had to be actually made or have a pattern designed by the couturier himself. I chose and used them as they were. Here, we are closer to the Recycled Paintings where I ask artists for paintings that they keep but don’t show anymore in order to dissolve their paint coats. As far as these collaborations are concerned, it’s more about recycling.
- This notion of recycling also exists with Novo 3/4, which you made based on Jean-Pierre Limosin’s film Novo.
It’s a form of salvaging, recycling a space-time, an off-screen. In Novo 3/4, I was able to obtain unusual images, almost ‘objective’ ones. At no time did I choose what I shot or showed. Three mini DV cameras were attached to the 35 mm camera and followed the same movements. I had the same frame values as the main camera, but with shifted axes of 45° and 180°. I did exactly the same editing, the same sequences and the same takes as those of the film. The editing depends on the ‘original’ film.
- Isn’t this about recycling realities, fragments of life?
Yes. In any case, it’s an image status that doesn’t corre-spond to any image status, as the only choice is the device. But earlier you talked about movement and you mentioned Anna’s Life in relation to everyday life. I believe that this film is a fictional work, since only the images tell us a story. There are no other texts or words than those of the title. This story is open, it’s very close to life: we go up and down stairs, open doors, but we never know what will happen. It’s also about a photographic work of the city of Tokyo, although in this case, it’s almost a documentary: visiting the city through the eyes of a character. When I talk about photographic work, I feel that photography cannot properly render what a city such as Tokyo is like with its flux and constant movements. For me, this is the city, a city where traffic not only happens at street level, but on different levels and layers.
- Did you use Japanese fishing rods for Numéro? Did their origin have any importance in the end?
The only importance in the fact that they were Japanese was their size. When going to Japan, I was sure I would find telescopic fishing rods, which take up less space when folded. French fishing rods are one metre long when folded, whereas Japanese ones are only 30 cm long on average, with a smaller diameter. There is here the same relation to the object as in Habitat or Portable Art Structures, it’s this idea of an object that’s tiny yet can be folded out and take up significant space. These objects show potential mobility and allow for transfor-mations. I used these rods for Numéro, the piece that I pro-duced with Emmanuelle Huynh and for the two performances with Alain Michard in Japan and Dunkerque. I thought of these objects in relation to the performance or dance in terms of their ability to fit into the space of lines, curves and ten-sions.
- I notice that you often refer to sculpture in your work, but even more so to painting. In this sense, can you tell us about next year’s exhibition project at the Confort Moderne in Poitiers?
The exhibition at the Confort Moderne will be entirely about references to painting. I will take another example: the Pélagique piece that I am preparing for the Capc in Bordeaux. I accepted an invitation for an exhibition on food. Of course, I could show Productive Writing, but I decided to take food less obviously and play on the idea of the trap. In fact a double trap: one that allows us to obtain food using a net and another visual part, that of a giant perspective, a trap for the gaze, replacing the object in the context of pictorial tradition. The pelagic net is a functional object. The piece can potentially catch things. The first stitches are gigantic and form a hallway in perspective, so that the net doesn’t suffer from the water’s weight. The colour codes of the first loops of thread, blue, green and red give the fishermen a reference for when they mend the nets. It lies flat on the ground or spreads out and takes shape underwater, but invisible, under the surface, under the monochrome. The perspective is under the mono-chrome.
- Talking about colours: on the contrary there will be in Poitiers an absence of colours…
I want to work on opposites such as black and white by integrating variations of grey. For Poitiers, I’m also working on boat camouflage patterns from World War II, which look like abstract geometric frescos. There’s a second reason linked to a more global and political context. Let’s say that this context appears as a backdrop, but that’s not the issue here. There’s also a fresco which was restored in 1852 by Joly-Leterme, which is in the church Notre Dame La Grande in Poitiers. I plan to reproduce it in the Confort Moderne; it has imbricated black and white crosses painted on a column. When we see them, it reminds us of Sol Lewitt frescos, but also of Malevich, even though this pattern is 1,000 years old. The camouflage that will be reproduced on the façade dates back to World War II. To camouflage implies a danger, and the space is called the Confort Moderne (Modern Comfort). It’s not a very neutral name…
- In a sense, the projects you’re working on now for Ham-burg and Poitiers, such as Splashing Walls, Yagli Güres (Turkish oil wrestling) or Le Grand Splash are related to painting, but there’s also this idea of danger as a backdrop.
There’s both the idea of danger and of underlying violence, but also a burlesque aspect. Opting for painting means recenter-ing around something essential, constituent, common and his-torical. Opting for painting means questioning the source, swimming upstream to understand its extent and origin. It’s about concentration and synthesis. I no longer perceive ancient painting the way I did 10 years ago. The critical look changes, influencing what takes place when you’re working. There’s an interest in various fields and times, there’s no longer a chronological view, but rather a multidirectional one, which means that everything can be taken into account from a contemporary point of view. A painting of the 16th century is just as interesting as an ancient Zen garden, as a fresco of the 12th century or a work from the 1970s.
- In fact, you know that Gerhard Richter was once asked why he started painting grey monochromes. And he answered “At one point, I had no idea what to paint and I started to tell myself I’ll just going to make a grey painting”. And by rejecting a subject, he discovered the varieties or nuances of monochrome and of grey. In your case, in the ear-lier works such as Productive Writing and even the Ghent piece, Abécédaire, there was a very communicative aspect, aimed at an audience. Have you changed your mind today?
Yes, one thing has changed, but I don’t think that’s it. I had a discussion with a friend who was telling me that “the glory days of painting are behind us”. I didn’t agree since that’s not the issue. We can’t say that because it’s neither behind us nor in front of us, or besides us: we don’t care, it’s not an issue! I think that when I stopped painting, since I painted before recycling my own paintings or those of others, I did it as a reaction. I told myself that I couldn’t paint, that I couldn’t paint with what I perceived. I just couldn’t do it anymore, I couldn’t go towards painting, I didn’t think the medium was pertinent any more, and my argument was linear. That’s why I gave up painting. Today, I think that the medium is a tool and that its history can be one too. The idea of being outdated is obsolete to me. I could start painting again and I do and its different. Painting is not a goal, but a means. I can paint just like I shoot film or take photographs. Maybe that’s what has changed!
To come back to the question about audience participa-tion, earlier I called the Beer Kilometer, which I have just pro-duced, a ‘performative’ sculpture. The audience performs. Let’s say that he has the possibility to participate The beer is free, and you just need to pick it up and one mentions that it’s allowed to do so. Doing this modifies the work. I must say that 6,015 well-aligned cans along dozens of metres does make you want to kick them especially if it’s allowed. The Beer Kilo-meter was a highly regulated space, formally strict and at the same time a space of total freedom. The viewer becomes responsible for the piece’s evolution. This relationship with the other that was present in Productive Writing, Beer Kilometer or Multifunctional Structure doesn’t appear in every piece. I don’t want this to be systematic. When it is justified with regard to a work, I implicate the audience.
- I could be mistaken, but wasn’t there a twin and homony-mous project of the Beer Kilometer?
Yes, indeed, from the very start. It’s related to Duchamp’s Mètre Étalon, with the piece of string that forms a curved and random line when one lets it fall to the ground. Here it’s a character who’s walking, who is completely drunk and can’t walk straight. There is a tracking out with a milometer that goes back a kilometre. The shot is done in one camera move-ment. The person stops before the camera does, as he’s already walked the kilometre, his trajectory not being straight.
- It’s like the paraphrase of a work of art, which would be between critical irony and a tribute. Is this something you could develop, since it’s very present in your work and very particular?
As it happens, yes, the Beer Kilometer implies a direct ref-erence, but it’s something completely different. The piece sug-gests and shows what’s happening as well as what has hap-pened during the five to six hours of the public’s performance during the private view. The reactions were totally incredible, both sociologically and humanly. People came to talk to me during the howl evening, some of them felt guilty for having ‘destroyed’ a part of the Beer Kilometer, whilst others were offended by the fact that certain people had kicked these well-aligned rows of beer cans. There was this desire to dis-turb the installation and appropriating it. Some people started to build other things. The piece provoked some rather aston-ishing reactions.
- Like a game of inversion of values?
Yes, absolutely, and then there’s also this game of ‘desacralisation’. It reminds me of Allan Kaprow and a pas-sage from The Real Experiment written in 1983 and compiled in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life: “Artlike art holds that art is separate from life and everything else, while lifelike art holds that art is connected to life and everything else. In other words, there is an art at the service of art, and art at the serv-ice of life. The maker of artlike art tends to be a specialist; the maker of lifelike art, a generalist.”
- In some way you quote several artists at once…
Yes, the Beer Kilometer was copied from Walter de Maria’s Broken Kilometer and there are also references to installations by certain pop artists. In fact, it also reminds me of this piece in Poitiers where there’s this 1,000 year-old fres-co, which isn’t called a work of art at all, but rather a decora-tive pattern in a church that I put back into an exhibition con-text. Nevertheless, it appears as a reference to a clearly sub-sequent art history through the works of Sol Lewitt. These are things I refer to regularly, but it’s also a need for desacraliza-tion, which simply brings us back to Filliou’s statement: “Art is what makes life more interesting than art”.
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Emmanuelle Huynh and Nicolas Floc’h’s simultaneously written answers to a num-ber of questions they had asked them-selves. Angers, 22 October 2004, In other Words, p170-172, Ed Roma Publications
1. How did you end up working respectively in a different discipline, be it fine arts or dancing?
NF: The first memorable experiences in my work are relat-ed to performance or include a performing aspect. Perfor-mance, 21 August 1994 can be described as still presence, a kind of performance where movement is outside the per-former. This extreme gesture from a performance point of view – being motionless – obsessed me for a number of years to the point of not giving a name to the performance. I was just there. With Productive Writing, I continued a way of perform-ing related to everyday matters, an unnamed performance, an essential component of the work, appearing as a backdrop. This practice corresponded to the discovery of new trades: planting vegetables, manufacturing and gathering salt, selling products at the market. It was an everyday exercise. In 2000, when I met Emmanuelle Huynh, I started my work in the field of dance. And I also returned to movement and to a type of practice involving a physical implication.
EH : The first experience was Factory, a collaboration between the choreographer Hervé Robbe, with whom I was working, and the English sculptor Richard Deacon, created at the Ferme du Buisson in 1993. The audience shared the space with the sculptures and the dancers. My conception of space was broadened, and I loved this very direct relation with the audience, generated by the use of Richard’s sculptures. Since 1996, I interpret Frédéric Lormeau’s performance, Vasque Fontaine/Partition Nord. It is a written ritual, very demanding in terms of physical resistance, with a brief moment of improvisation.
Erik Dietman asked me in 1997 to be his hand in “le modèle modèle modèle” tribute to Rodin, and to model/hammer/imprint with my body ten tons of soil spread out into parallelepipeds, cones, igloos, erect phalluses! It was understood that he would sign the pieces which had been randomly imprinted by me and Catherine Contour, who was called in as reinforcement. I recently led a ‘guided visit’ in Fabien Lerat’s monographic exhibition, where I performed and commented on the relation of his objects to dwelling. These experiences represent moments that enabled me to observe the working process of a different discipline from within and the answer to questions such as which ideas cross through such object or which object for which idea? Meeting Nicolas in 2000 resulted in a different kind of collabo-ration. We work together as authors from different disciplines, but common objects.
2. What does confronting each other’s work enable you to do?
NF : Working with someone else allows for displacement, displacement from one’s daily practice, a semantic or physical slide. As for the body, working with dance means placing one-self in time, a progression. A certain dramaturgy takes place, but also space management occurs and it is constantly being redefined. From a visual point of view, working with dance allows me to develop work as a sculptor. To be the sculptor of a shape, which does not exist, for it is reinvented at every moment.
EH : It allows (and forces) you to consider together differ-ent aspects for which I am usually solely responsible for: space, time, relations between objects, and body status. It implies, therefore, a significant shift in your vision. And also, a change in structure: for example, I warm up less, but I look around more!
3. Bord is a play by Emmanuelle Huynh. What are the partic-ularities of a collaboration with and artist, and how is it dif-ferent from working with a set designer?
NF : My work is not that of a set designer for it extends beyond the scenic space. It’s an extension of a practice which is external to this space; it’s a crossing, the space is not delim-ited. A sculpture/structure such as the one in Bord is a poly-morphic object: it is at the same time a changing visual artistic object and the spine of a temporal progression of a space’s occupation.
EH : I’ve never worked with a set designer. When I met Nicolas, I was wondering about a new alliance of body and text. I needed to create a space where this alliance could emerge. I then asked Nicolas to produce tables for us, which we would be able to reconfigure constantly. These have an identity (weight, shape, texture), a presence that induces a specific type of time management, and they are protagonists in the play as much as Christophe Tarkos’ poems or the dancers themselves. They also enjoy an unstable status. They are hiding places, a stage, trenches, a podium, a ladder, a trap door… They transform the space and the movement.
4. Numéro: choreographic or art object?
NF : A hybrid object. Numéro is an object we created together without any of us being truly a specialist. Working the objects in space and time. The tension presented right at the beginning of Numéro through the throwing of green lights (fixed to arrows), sort of lashing laser shots, mark the space. The lines of the rods bend. The line is sonorous, the line is tel-escopic, the line is sharp. Bodies and masses modify the space. The object allows for metamorphosis, the body experi-ences it. Bodies and objects merge and form a common image. Whether it is a choreographic or an art object is not relevant here.
EH : Numéro also has an unstable identity. The starting point is to play together within the space. The ‘poor’ objects which are used (cardboard boxes, fishing rods, sheets of kraft paper) are diverted from their usual functions; we compose with them images which make their original usage/significa-tion slide. The same object changes identity many times: the fishing rod is an arrow that becomes a bullfighter’s banderilla, a giant claw and, finally, a Mikado stick. The human body loos-es its status many times: the box-man or the crawling carpet are physical and semantic slides! Time and space in Numéro were also guided by the realisation that we were performing magic tricks too (this was revealed in the aftermath of the first researches), and that I was a kind of magician’s assistant and that we were presenting playlets: a body appearing/disap-pearing, a pierced box. Artistic dramaturgy predominated.
5. La Feuille, the sequel to Numéro?
NF : La Feuille is the latest ongoing production. Bertrand Godot commissioned this project for the Chapelle du Genêteil in Château-Gontier. The performance should take place in January at Christophe Cuzin’s exhibition. Christophe works with monochromatic surfaces; we therefore decided to work from an element present in Numéro: the sheet of paper. How-ever, this work is much more rooted in a ‘traditional’ aspect of art: sculpture and painting than Numéro was. In La Feuille, the monochromatic surface takes shape, the monochrome spreads out, stands up, runs along the walls and flattens to the floor. The bright red paper resembles a crumpled metal sheet. The metal sheet sets down, deploys, a volume is formed, responding to another. Movement reveals images.
EH : Yes, in the sense that we isolate an element from Numéro, the sheet of paper, and that we exclusively work on this idea. The sheet, an essential object for he who draws, undergoes transformations during the performance and its status changes from monochrome to surface, floor, sculpture and sound. In this play, the human body remains hidden, yet it remains very present at all times.
6. Artist or dancer? Or fuck categories?
NF : Origin is important, but in my opinion, categories are false. We all come from somewhere, in my case fine arts, and the work has various spaces and modes of emergence. The medium is but a means, a tool. Categorising a work limits the way it can be read. More than the medium, it is the reading that creates the category. I very often hear the following when it comes to my work: ‘transgress borders’. Borders mean noth-ing to me and I don’t intend to transgress any with my work, it just doesn’t concern me. Work emerges where it is meant to, so yes, fuck categories.
EH : Fuck categories, absolutely. And fuck those who want to relate them to us! I’m not an artist, Nicolas is not a dancer, but each of our disciplines reach out, into time, space, uses movement and loves the transformation of bodies, things and words. We have a lot of fun doing it together from time to time! I go where my work takes me: in Japan, it is towards chefs, carpenters and Ikebana masters!