Global Demix iHome Studio / Matthieu Laurette / Press / 2001/
Ricupero, Cristina. “Interview with Matthieu Laurette”, Social Hackers. Exh. Cat. Helsinki: Frame / Nifca, 2001Interview with Matthieu Laurette
Cristina Ricupero:
Your projects seem to explore the boundaries between what is perceived as art and what is not. This is also due to the fact that most of them actually take place outside the gallery space, on TV, magazines, the Internet, in the supermarket. You have directly addressed this issue in Apparitions where the artistic project involved your participation in a series of talk shows on French TV. This was also a way to communicate your project Satisfait ou remboursé (Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back) and to make it function. In these TV shows as well as in the general press, you where often perceived more as a ?social phenomenon? rather than as an artist. Could you comment on this ambiguous role and how you relate to it?
Matthieu Laurette:
Well, I’m trying to find the best ?spots? to develop activities that often interact with different audiences. Using tools that surround us and include their own systems of production and their own audiences, I’m trying to ?hack? or ?hijack? contexts, media, audiences, budgets etc., that produce disjunctions. Disjunctions often generate their own tools, which one can in turn appropriate and use. They are ?forms? made by others, ?products? generated through a context that contains their process... In my view, the field of ?art? starts – ?takes off?– at the point where form begins. The gallery space and its economy is another tool and context I like to use when it’s more effective for what I’m doing. I first appeared on TV in 1993, on the French television game show Tournez Manege (The Dating Game), as just another contestant. When I was introduced to the audience, the presenter asked me what I wanted to become later in life and I answered: ?an artist?. She went on to ask me what medium I worked in? ?painting, sculpture???, to which I answered ?multimedia?. A few days before the program was broadcasted, about 200 people received by mail an invitation sent by me to watch the show. This was the first ?rendez vous? of a series of Apparitions which I made between 1993 and 1995. In this context I was never introduced as an artist. From finding myself among the crowd applauding in TV audiences to being a guest on talk shows I was part of the image, I was what TV calls ?real people?. They were using me, I was using them. I am a product and I am a selfmedia?
In 1996, I decided to merge the mass media Apparitions with the ?money-back products? activities I had been developing for several years. After being selected for the TV show Je passe à la télé (I’m on TV), I started to promote and develop this activity on TV and in newspapers. In a sort of snowball effect, each show or article was generating other invitations and interviews. From trashy prime time TV shows to national evening TV news. My first information website for money-back products, produced initially for an internet show at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon, became very popular, thousands and thousands of people started to visit it every month. Of course it is easy to imagine that only a few of them were people from the art world. The website has been automatically registered in every search engine, probably due to its success? It’s interesting to notice that Yahoo, for example, registered it both in its ?consuming/freebie? section and in the ?artist? section.
I never hid from the media that I was an artist but there was no interest from the media and from myself in focusing on this aspect. The media people were introducing me as an artist according to the 19th century and the Van Gogh cliché: because I was an artist, I was poor and that’s why I had found a solution? Thinking again about art categories most of the time the media never addressed my Apparitions as part of my ?art activities?.
To make it more effective, it was also clear to me that I should use air time and columns in newspapers to communicate my ?money back life? system as a kind of ?How to? method to live for free without explaining why this also was perhaps art? I was not there to comment on my activity, I was there to make it.
Cristina Ricupero:
Your work addresses the question of free access and direct confrontation with the audience involving its active participation. Perhaps you could give some examples as the project you recently did in Bilbao.
Matthieu Laurette:
El Gran Trueque (The Great Exchange), which could be seen on television and in the media in Bilbao region, offered to the audience a genuine process of exchange: a series of ?multiple swaps?. This project puts into practice advertising rhetoric, television formats and marketing strategies. I decided to devote part of the production budget, funded by the Basque Government to Consonni, a Bilbao-based production structure, for the purpose of purchasing a new car, that was then offered in the first Great Exchange. The audience was invited to propose by phone an object they would buy for caring out the exchange. Only the highest offer was selected. The proposed object was purchased and exchanged with the object at stake each week in the Bilbao shops, in front of the television cameras, and the media. The object that had been purchased, and exchanged would then become the Great Exchange of the following week. So, El Gran Trueque began with the exchange of a car worth 1,013,000 Ptas. and ended-up, after about three months, with a set of six blue glasses bought for195 Ptas.
As in many other projects, I was interested in making direct interventions in what is the basic element of the trading system: the regulated circuit of products and values. With El Gran Trueque concept, the purchase of a less valuable object becomes an exchange medium to obtain an object that is worth more. A pamphlet distributed in 150,000 homes, throughout Bilbao, provided all the city residents with information about the project. At the same time, we were producing daily TV spots and a weekly TV program. After a few weeks, by word of mouth, it became a kind of social phenomenon? After discussing with our lawyers, I decided to copyright the concept worldwide so that I could have a real concept for sale, I mean a real product. Consonni and I are now negotiating this concept with different TV companies.
Applaus, another project that took place in Casco Projects in Utrecht in 1998, was also providing objects to its audience. The project consisted in a lottery, in which everyone who received an invitation or who came to visit the place could win prizes that had been donated by shops in Utrecht. The show presented the unembellished principle of the non-commercial exhibition space: the sponsoring was offered directly to the public, without the intervention of an art object. The Casco team had to send letters to each of the winners to inform them personally; to advise them to come and pick up their prizes or to tell them that they would soon receive one of the particular gifts allotted (Haircut vouchers, Calvin Klein Boxers, Gold fish in its bowl, Ikea deck chairs, Dutch Cheese?). 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.
Since I had saved the production budget, I decided to transfer this public money to the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, which was launching a subscription for its new wing extension. Like the other donators, a brick with my name will be set into the wall of the museum. Mine could be, of course, considered as a signed sculpture!
Cristina Ricupero:
The questioning of the value given to merchandise and the creation / proposals of parallel economies or alternative ways of living is also a current factor in your projects. What are your expectations?
Matthieu Laurette:
I prefer “activity” in contrast to “passivity”. For example the big companies and trusts have established money back guarantee offers to sell more in different countries like France, the UK, the United States… because they know that only very few people will really ask for reimbursement. What would happen if every buyer decided not to behave in such a lazy or shy way? I don’t believe in a parallel economy. I think it’s better to be part of the big game and try to be aware of its rules and laws. There is no more outside. You can’t exclude yourself from the world and say: things are not going well there! You have to be part of it to act… I’m now trying to get new citizenships and am also trying to raise money to open an offshore bank to engage in productive acitivities with other people; both projects deal with art and economy and go beyond frontiers…Turning rules and laws, globalisation and commodification inside out, in favour of the individual, also includes providing information as in Citizenship Project where I start by enquiring on how to legally obtain more citizenships than the one(s) you had by birth. At first it’s a database (www.citizenship-project.com), providing information about links on citizenship and immigration resources. I’m also developing these researches in different contexts and according to personal opportunities. Help me to become a US citizen! is a “How to” project, an attempt to first become a US permanent resident and then to be naturalized. Available both at Artists Space in New York last January and still on the web, at www.citizenship-project.com/usa. I used the invitation to the show Really to get adequate living conditions in New York, such as getting a job, an apartment, a decent standard of living and sponsorship. I want to set up financing contracts with collectors, sponsors? it’s a long-term project! Other Countries Pavilion / Citizenship Project developed in Venice for La Biennale di Venezia 2001 works differently. I asked Harald Szeemann in the context of his exhibition Plateau of Humankind to write letters to the Ambassadors/Permanent Representatives to the United Nations in New York of the 112 countries which were not represented in the Venice Biennale this year (neither in the national pavilions and as participating countries nor in the 49th International Exhibition). In these letters Szeemann asked each country if they could provide me with a citizenship if, in return, I represented them in the Biennale.
Websites & Links:
Global Demix iHome Studio <www.laurette.net>
Citizenship Project <www.citizenship-project.com>
Help Me to Become a US Citizen! <www.citizenship-project.com/usa>
The secret of free Shopping <www.moneybackshopping.net>
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