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Vaillant, Alexis. "Questions for a champion/ Vragen voor een kampionen. An interview with Matthieu Laurette.", Casco Issues (Utrecht), no. 5, (May 1999): 84-93. read original text in French. read Dutch translation.Alexis Vaillant, Questions for a champion(1). An interview with Matthieu Laurette
Applaus (Casco, April 1998) and Free Sample (Galerie Jousse Seguin, September 1998) are French artist Matthieu Laurette's first two exhibitions in his own right.
The blanket term "method-exhibition" might be used to describe them. In each a set of critical practices is deployed relating to the problematic position of the art object today, the mechanisms of production of such objects and the mechanisms by which they are subsequently distributed. Matthieu Laurette's exhibitions play on the coexistence of complementary time-scales, which modify one's customary perception of an exhibition, as well as the conditions in which one apprehends the objects that make them up. Applaus is conceived as a démontage [literally: dismantling] on to which "transfers of funds" are grafted. Free Sample is structured around an interpretative grid fragmented and perverted by the very network of ramifications which underlies its existence as an exhibition.
Alexis Vaillant: You chose to organize a raffle at Casco Projects. Why and how?
Matthieu Laurette: All the invitation cards were numbered. At the private view, the numbers were drawn from an urn. Each card was entered on a list before it was sent. The numbers all had a name against them. Naturally, not all the winners were present that evening. As a result, the Casco team had to send letters to each of them to inform them personally and advise them they would soon be receiving the particular gift allotted. All the prizes were displayed on a podium. In a sense, the exhibition consisted in showing the progressive dismantling of the podium, as the prizes were sent off to the winners or claimed on the spot. All the prizes had been donated by businesses in the city.
AV: What for you were the main issues in this form of reverse restocking?
ML: I wanted genuinely to give something away. But I also wanted to change how the production budgets were applied, to modify them. And to take into account the site's specific processes and economic realities: its place in the city centre, its budget and its staff. To sell, to give away, to construct, to produce a temporary thing which would also exist outside the site in individual samples. It was in fact an exhibition which began before, and finished after the dates stated on the invitation card.The prizes (objects, vouchers, services,...) presented on the podium were there on their own account. They didn't play any additional symbolic role within the exhibition. They were clearly in transit. They had come from outside (from the shopkeepers of Utrecht) and they were on their way to homes as intended (the winners/users in Utrecht, but also in Paris or New York, as the list dictated).
AV: How do you relate what was going on in the Casco exhibition space to what you were putting on at the same time in the Utrecht shopping centre?
ML: Applaus is a truly "commercial" programme. Everything was transformed. There was no fixed status for anything in a to-ing and fro-ing between profit and free gifts, between objects and representations, and between different sites. On two giant video screens in the shopping centre and the station, which show adverts for Levi's, Danone and Mercedes, I recycled some of my "appearances" on public TV. The programmers put in five-second spots between the adverts, doing it in different ways each week. If the users of the places got applause (or was the applause for the adverts?), they could also take part in the show. The tee-shirts sold at Casco ("as seen on TV/gezien op tv") enabled them to become part of it. The buyer could ask for their money back and become the medium. Casco earned money if they sold all the tee-shirts. They became producers again if the buyer asked for his/her money back. Moreover, since we hadn't paid for the prizes we gave away, the production budget was in profit. I decided to make a contribution to the building of the extension to the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. This transfer of public money will be given visual embodiment in the form of a brick engraved with the name of each person who donated a sum of more than 1000 guilders. Each brick is set into the wall of the museum. Mine has now become a signed sculpture.
AV: A year later, you put on Free Sample at the Galerie Jousse Seguin in Paris. What is it?
ML: Free Sample encapsulates the principle by which the things I've done up to now have emerged. That principle is one of connection.
AV: Of a connection between objects, between the ways in which your work exists and is exhibited? Might we not see this linkage as a kind of commentary?
ML: Well, how am I to express these things directly in an interview when commentary is built into my work? In reality, I feel I build the interpretation into the form, together with the commentary itself, which is implicitly contained in the work. Commentary is an aspect of the form (of the work) which operates visibly in the process and the mechanisms. I've tried to give a form to these mechanisms, but also to take these mechanisms as form.
AV: How is the notion of the "free sample" expressed in the exhibition of that name? And, indeed, is that its name?
ML: There is the mix. This is the visible part of the exhibition. The use of this term is perhaps the most metaphorical aspect. There are also the re-mix and the de-mix, which constitute the form, the description: the first of these takes the form of a disk, the second is in book form. The notion of mix has directly musical connotations and allows me to link the overall project to that field. Moreover, this metaphor enriches the listening visually.
AV: Don't you think the mix remains somewhat isolated from the very structure of Free Sample and the potential content of the project? How do Free Sample re-mix and de-mix function in relation to the mix?
ML: All the forms I conceive already in a sense have an end in view. On the one hand, there's a work in progress, made up of documentation, research, materials, concepts and archives. And, on the other hand, I interact with proposals for exhibitions which I receive or decide to undertake. From the conjunction of these two sets of data a type of presentation comes into being at a precise moment. It's a kind of freeze-frame, conveying a moment of visibility and readability. An appearance, a publication or an exhibition. Free Sample is an exhibition in a gallery, but its content - or, rather, its field of action - is already, and still, elsewhere. Four modular tables are placed in a gallery. You find objects on them.
AV: A sort of post-Colette (2) aesthetic? Tables which have become plinths for the occasion?
ML: Yes, post conceptual art. And also a multi-deck mix. As I have already said, the mix is the most metaphorical or analogical part of Free Sample, the metaphor here relating to music.
AV: With Free Sample (mix), you have thought about the way you could put things together. The exhibition as a co-existence of objects? We come back here to the principle of connection which you mentioned earlier..
ML: The question is how you can have several elements co-exist other than by reproduction, or by and in thought. Juxtaposition is only possible mentally; when done in reality, there is a neutralizing effect. I find it impossible to have installations co-existing. Each installation constitutes an exhibition. Otherwise, you're into the business of supermarket shelves or different museums grouped together in a single site. There aren't many people who have been able to present pieces together - except where that's all they've done - when they had nothing to do with each other. Martin Kippenberger always achieved some very lively surprises in that area. The "mix" metaphor allows me to put things together and to achieve a mix, where the notion functions as an "already-there" or "given" of the exhibition.
AV: But it isn't merely elements of the exhibition that are presented on these tables. And surely Free Sample, the exhibition, is after all "something" frozen in time? How do you explain the second occurrence of the projector, which here, literally, we do not see, since it is in its Fnac bag? Does it refer back to its first mode of activation or is it a denial of that mode?
ML: What you have there is a product.
AV: Is that why it's the same, whether it's closed or open? In terms of the principle of connection on which Free Sample is articulated, does this projector operate in relation to its first occurrence or has it become a product ready for sale - in other words, a product which is already packaged? Can you specify the meaning you give to this word in general and in this context in particular?
ML: We're talking about something which is "ready to go", "ready to wear", "ready to bring"!
AV: Is the medal a product?
ML: The mechanism of the medal has, in fact, already been demonstrated. It's contained in the video tape made when the "Je passe à la télé" ["I'm on TV"] (3) programme, which I was a guest on, was broadcast. Its appearance came out of an appearance on television. When I show the medal in the gallery, I don't show the tape. Yet, the tape is important. It was the first programme where I spoke on TV about the "money back guaranteed" products. The programme isn't a game show. The added value to be had from that programme is that there's a medal to be won by the person who talks longest on air. Now that medal, which is struck by the French Mint, is a bronze one. If we reinsert it into the field of art, we can see it as a multiple. But, like all cups and medals, it is a multiple that is unique for each person. It is individuated because each person keeps it on a personal basis as a
token of what it represents. At certain points in the TV programme, the winner in the studio could choose between the medal and a television set. That would have put me in a bit of a quandary personally. It's the only programme on which I've been introduced as a sculptor. The fact that I left with a sculpture accentuated the causal connection.
AV: The medal is more an object than a sculpture, isn't it?
ML: A medal set on a plinth is clearly a sculpture. But perhaps not really so for the winners who display it in their homes. In my view, the field of "art" begins - "takes off" - at the point where form begins.
AV: And yet is it really the context which makes the piece?
ML: This object is a closed one. It so happens that it contains its process. Only this type of object or form which contains its process is of interest today in my view. It's also ambiguous because, confronted with this kind of object, the spectator has a lot of work to do. At the same time all these forms bear within them a primary threshold of visibility. In my eyes the medal here is a sculpture. Moreover, the thing can only exist as work when reinforced by the construction of another context.
AV: For it to function as such, though, you either have to tell its story or see the video.
ML: Like every element in this exhibition, every part of my work generally requires that a story be told. All the objects I (don't) make are several things at once. This isn't a question of a shifting gaze or different point of view, but one of content: what do these objects contain?
AV: Clearly, it's interesting to raise this question, for these sculptures, or rather this sculpture, is a multiple. Is it "sampled" from elsewhere?
ML: Rodin's sculpture exists in multiple editions. The "editions" of Rodin's bronzes constitute modes of production and distribution which have stood as the norm for more than a hundred years. When I put the symbols of Tati Or (4) on a plinth and make a necklace of them which people then see on the shop's bags throughout the month of November, then it's easy to compare the Coca Cola bottle at 250 francs with the star of David at 79 francs. What interest me are the consequences of the forms which result from the montage itself which I make of the forms.
AV: So it's not at all the same as Duchamp?
ML: It has nothing to do with Duchamp. We don't start from the same point and we don't move towards the same end. Our preoccupations aren't the same either. The medal, for example, is a multiple object individuated by each person outside the field of art.
AV: Is the brick from the Boijmans Museum which you had Casco buy and which has been signed with its owner's name - and hence contributes to the extension of that museum - an object or a product? Does it function as a sample if we understand by the term "sample" what you did at the GalÈrie Jousse Seguin?
ML: It's the expression of the money handed over. A sample of the wall and of the "construction." The opposite of a piece of the Berlin Wall for sale.
AV: Yes, but we're talking about a structure on to which you've grafted a content. What does it mean to go back to the BHV (5) at the end of the century?
ML: As we know, there are grafts which take and others which do not. I don't want to show extracts from the video where I'm seen winning the medal alongside the medal itself. That would be like at the BHV: the drill and the demonstration video. If I did that (and that would be the opposite of what is at issue at the BHV!), my work could be said to reside in the object, which is not the case.
AV: Are the notions of entrances and exits, ins and outs, still present in the mechanisms you set up, particularly in regard to the meaning you give to "form"?
ML: I think that these notions are all defined from the outset in the process of realization. Free Sample is revealing in this regard since what you see - or don't see - is structured before the moment of visibility specific to the exhibition, for which the publisher's plates might be said to constitute the matrix and the poster the plan of access. The disk, or remix, is made of real samples and the de-mix happens in its invention within the book. What Free Sample shows, then, is the work of the artist. Free Sample proposes a simultaneous reading of heterogeneous elements, together with readings which contain virtually all the modes of apprehension of the things present. "Sample" here is to be understood in the sense of "sampling" - free style - and as sample - that is to say, the thing itself, but in reduced quantity.
AV: Is this work done beforehand, to be exhibited, or work emerging in the course of its exhibition?
ML: Work emerging in the course of exhibition.
AV: You believe all the elements present in the exhibition contain these notions individually and interdependently?
ML: In the exhibition, you can see elements produced by the external world, but presented in a way that is identical each time (the medal) and the cuttings file (a document which contains newspaper cuttings which are themselves mounted or framed appearances, like TV appearances; that is to say, the cover of the publication is on the left and the press cutting properly so-called is on the right). These pages comment on, formulate and give body to the activity I carried out around the "money back guaranteed" products.
AV: You can get a sense that your two method-exhibitions are completely "sewn-up" from the moment they become visible. And that it is all very measured and proportioned.
ML: Nothing is gratuitous. The things say only what they contain. You can't make them tell some other story afterwards. This perhaps produces the sense of being "all sewn-up." Separately, though, they can exist apart from each other. Hence the sample. The two exhibitions may seem formally austere, but it's when the user takes them over that work begins, that is to say, the dilution, citation and, above all, utilization of the exhibitions (cf. the remix; the objects of Applaus on the podium and the type of thought they produce enable the work itself to function as part of a constant development - hence the term "Free").
translated from French by Chris Turner
Notes:
(1)'Questions pour un champion' is a daily quiz programme on the French regional TV station, France 3, the 3,000th edition of which has just been broadcast.
(2) Colette (213, rue Saint-HonorÈ, Paris 75001) is a "style-design-art-food" shop.
(3) A France 3 programme, which describes itself as being "of public utility", aimed at discovering the talent of the future in a wide diversity of fields.
(4) The jewellery outlet of the Tati chain of department stores.
(5) One of Paris's best known "traditional" DIY stores.
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