Global Demix iHome Studio by Matthieu Laurette / /Press/ 2006 /
Sans, Jérôme. 'GUY DEBORD IS SO COOL! Matthieu Laurette interviewed by Jérôme Sans'. Uovo (Milan), No. 11 (June 2006): 52-75.
GUY DEBORD IS SO COOL!
MATTHIEU LAURETTE interviewed by JÉRÔME SANS
How would you define your work?
I don’t have a visual brand. Each of my projects is formally different. The process of the project generates the medium and shape. I’m not particularly looking for new shapes; instead I try to manipulate and change already existing ones. I’ve never tried to exclude myself from society; on the contrary, I’ve always wanted to be part of it in an atypical way, developing certain excesses and holding back other ones. I speak about real things, but I create not only material shapes.
Yet, in 1993, the date you started the projects Apparitions and Produits Remboursés (Money-Back Products), you declared you were a multimedia artist.
In 1993, I still was at the art school; I sort of believed working only within an arts academy was relatively fruitless. I had no studio practice and didn’t want any. I spent my time talking in hallways and reorganizing the library with the help of the librarian and others, ordering more and more books to inject further information into the school. When I was not at school, I worked several days a week at Magasin, the Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble, to pay for my studies; every day there, I saw the rules and methods of institutions, the press, and market with all their qualities and of course also all the problematic aspects. I believed school didn’t allow taking real risks, while in theory education should be chance to experiment. All of a sudden, I realized I was possibly doing things just to convince or provoke professors and other students. At a certain point, I thought it was time to steer my activities towards the outside world and to take other audiences into account. And to deal with the outside world, it seemed clear to me I needed to start directly from it and not merely by simulating or representing reality. Practically speaking, I asked myself a certain number of questions and tested them on a 1:1 scale in the outside world… How to appear in the art world? How to draw up a résumé? What is the artist’s place in the media? What is the individual’s place? How to establish artistic autonomy? All these questions took concrete shape on the outside.
Around that time I decided to appear on television broadcasts.
My first Apparition (in french “apparition means both “apparition” and “appearance”) was on the TV show Tournez manège on TF1, a game show based on the American idea of “Blind Date”; two teams, one of three men and the other of two women (or vice versa), were physically divided by a partition and had to choose a partner without seeing them. (This sequence was in fact called “Choisissez-moi!”, “Choose Me!”). At the beginning of the broadcast, each participant introduced himself/herself and answered questions from one of the presenters. She 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”. In a context like that, the word I used was completely enigmatic. It probably had no meaning for the general public. In 1993, this word was exclusively used in the art world and not yet with computers, video games, etc. This episode was my artistic birth certificate!
Like Marcel Broodthaers, “I asked myself if I could also make something.” This Apparition was my first exhibition.
Between 1993 and 1995, I continued to explore the mass media in an attempt to understand possible types of Apparitions within that world (television, newspapers, magazines, etc.), that was before the beginning of what has been called ”real TV” but they were already calling us “real people”.
What did you do in order to alert the art world to your artistic practices?
As for an exhibition at a gallery or an institution, I would send an invitation (with the broadcast title, date, time, etc.) to prominent figures in the art world to watch the broadcasts. First, my mailing list was deliberately addressed to those who knew me; then I expanded it based on the different Apparitions and their relative themes. Since 1993, my Apparitions have represented a new category and I have added them to my résumé, traditionally built around personal or group shows.
As well as being on television, what was your objective?
What to do after conceptual and pop art? Is it possible to reconcile these two legacies? I wanted to identify the different possibilities of Apparitions. Like I said, we still had no “Reality TV” at the time. In France, the “real people” phenomenon was still at its beginning; there was an interest in interviewing “normal” people to hear their life stories and experiences as well as develop an audience. “An appearance is the observable manifestation of a person or being whose presence couldn’t be explained by the natural course of things” (Larousse Dictionary). An appearance refers not only to what already exists, but can also be considered a way of bringing together the conditions at the basis of the appearance.
Consequently, I attended TV broadcasts, first as part of the audience in cultural programs (Cercle de minuit) or prime time variety shows; in this case, my role was just to cheer, listen, and applaud in a sort of living wallpaper. Then my role broadened out and I started being invited on television to make statements. For instance, following a notice by Canal +, I was invited to talk on a program with the topic “I don’t leave home.” There, I spoke about the possibility we have today to do everything we want in our apartments and I described my way of acting in this sense. Yet, the word “art” was never used.
Unlike many artists from your generation who have tried to do television projects (Pierre Huyghe, Fabrice Hybert) but without all its means, you entered the world of mass media to intervene from the inside.
What I wanted to do was work on the image from inside what is by definition the most inaccessible communications media, using production methods not belonging to the art world.
Actually, I belong to the generation with access to home video. After the video art of the ‘70s, I saw other trends developing: self-recording, TV parodies, videos simulating cinema or television though neither one nor the other, narrative videos, artistic documentaries, etc.; but in the end, the questions are always the same: who produces them, for whom, and above all with what means of communication. After all, the result is constantly more images; but to be shown where and to whom? In the end, this result disregards the request. For this reason I decided to develop my work by accepting those “invitations” to TV programs and create a work using the technical and financial means this medium offered, working from inside the images rather than creating them from scratch. The series of Apparitions was born that way, by asking myself how I could produce something with little financial means and no demand, working with what already exists, inside spaces that can be “filled,” that need content. I decided on television because it was possible to produce something here. TV already has everything an artist needs: the necessary elements for production, the place for communication, and an audience. Economically valuable material can be created using few means. Appearing on TV is really easy; the only thing you have to do is follow its rules.
Students and artists often complain about the lack of a means of production. Being myself with few, I decided, on the contrary, to create something using someone else’s power and financial means.
Obviously, TV is one of the media most maligned by the art world and at the same time a place where artists have little room for expression.
In the ‘70s, the art world considered television the absolute evil of society, though it may have been a utopian source of creation. In the ‘80s, it was only a means of communication and not production. Then, in the ‘90s, a generation of artists arrived who wanted to eventually make their own television but without its means of production. I have doubts about this production compared to the production of the world of television and cinema that already were a critique of the medium, deviating from the codes in an infinitely more intelligent manner with respect to attempts made by certain artists. So, if you are interested in television, why not work with the real thing. And though you consider it an adversary, you can use it anyway.
Instead of criticizing it, I felt the most interesting thing to do was to understand it from the inside. I wanted to tackle it.
So, I used it as both a work-tool and a work-place with already an audience of its own. The art world pretends not to watch television. I’ve learned since then that it’s often quite the opposite.
What relationship does this project have with “Produits Remboursés”?
In 1996, I brought together the two projects I had produced since 1993, Apparitions and the Produits Remboursés (Money-back Products) series, a method of consuming products with offers like “first purchase reimbursed” and “satisfied or your money back” that you usually find in supermarkets. I started using this method on myself. Then I promoted it personally to broaden the audience more and more. I organised meetings like Tupperware parties at people’s places to explain the Money-back method to them. I also handed out flyers, organized conferences (Comment faire vos achats remboursés? / How To Do Your Money-back Shopping? 1997/1998), guided tours of supermarkets, and I opened temporary showrooms (Mangez Remboursés, 1997; Vivons Remboursés (1997-2001), set up a popular website (Le Web des produits remboursés, / Money-back Website, 1997), and began doing it on TV as well. Everything started with my Apparition on the show Je passe à la télé (I’m on TV), an uncanny broadcast where anyone can appear on the screen after being selected by the producers. A type of program called a “Talent Show” in the TV world where common people show their talents for singing, dancing, or a particular hobby (cooking, collecting buttons and badges, eating live insects, etc.). No one wins anything on these sorts of shows but just makes an appearance. Je passe à la télé, is a “talent show” where a live audience of one hundred people voted for the performing guest who, seated on an ejection seat on a rail, could be sent backstage if the audience wasn’t satisfied. The guest has five minutes to persuade them. I went on stage live with a supermarket cart full of products and explained how I basically lived on “money-back” products. I lasted five minutes and won a bronze medal engraved with the words “Je passe à la Télé,” (“I’m on TV”) my first bronze sculpture!
This Apparition and its subject had such a great response that a competing channel invited me some weeks later to a broadcast called J’y crois, j’y crois pas (“Believe it or not”) about “extraordinary French people.”
Within a year, day after day, between the broadcast of Je passe à la Télé on May 16, 1996, the front page article in Le Monde, and two reports the same day on the TV news at 1 p.m. and 8 p.m. on national television France 2, May 16, 1997, I became an object of real media exposure that continued long after. I went from an anecdotal story on an afternoon television program to the front page of a highly regarded newspaper. After having appeared on the front page of Le Monde, it spread across Europe: British tabloids, Finnish ecology newspapers, French magazines, German newspapers, Belgian TV, Swiss TV, etc. Many covered the story of the Frenchman who lived on “money-back” products.
I became the subject of brief news items in many worldwide press agencies, as well as reports in several big photo agencies.
All these elements generated many Apparitions over which I have lost control, at times even ignoring their existence.
How did you feel about this enormous promotion through the media? Didn’t you feel you would get lost?
While my first Apparitions allowed me to remain anonymous, after the broadcast of J’y crois, j’y crois pas I couldn’t go anywhere without being known or pointed out for at least a few days. From that moment on, I decided to become myself “a product” and accept for a while all invitations from the media and, as a consequence, their rules.
Did the media and the art world understand your approach?
I think television, far from despising me, did not understand that mine was the work of an artist and the art world did not really understand the reason why I was on TV.
At least for the media it was clear my story drew an audience!
What were the limits of you becoming a media product? And why didn’t you continue the process until the end?
Why didn’t I continue to the end? Hmm… I think I did go to the end. I made the decision not to actively participate in the process anymore when I found myself playing my own role in a short film. It was a fictional documentary where I was supposed to perform my own original texts, re-written by the director in the form of dialogue. The scene took place at my apartment; an actress in the short film played the role of a maid serving my “money-back” products cooked for dinner. I was at home, trying to act as myself with a film crew, kilowatts of lighting, and several cameras on a stage set of my own environment. All of a sudden, reality and fiction were superimposed.
In 2001, on the invitation of Harald Szeemann to the Venice Biennale, I completed the “Money Back Products” project with a site-specific installation. But how could I present that project to an audience who lacked the key to understanding it? I decided setting up a new stand showing the Money Back Products, integrated with a retrospective of a selection of my television Apparitions together with a selection of some French and English press articles.
The direct speech of the TV interview enabled me to directly address each visitor though I was physically far away.
I also commissioned a team from the Musée Grévin wax museum in Paris (the French equivalent of Madame Tussauds) to make a life-size, hyper-realistic sculpture of me, a static image of “Matthieu Laurette pushing a shopping cart full of money-back products.”
This was a way of giving back the image people had of me, as well as a kind of reference to Pop Art and Duane Hanson.
When did you stop buying those money-back products?
That project has still a life of its own, although I have stopped buying those products since 2001.
Having for years almost exclusively used money-back products (food, clothes, etc.) without spending any money, was this a way for you to thwart consumer society and benefit from its mistakes?
It was what I called “sécurité sociale alimentaire” a sort of “welfare food.”
How do you consider yourself with respect to Guy Debord, the “Society of the Spectacle”, and Andy Warhol?
As far back as my first Apparition, I referred to Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame.” When the anchorwoman of Tournez manège asked me, in 1993, “Which artist would you have liked to be?” I replied “Andy Warhol.”
The art press has often mentioned Warhol and Debord when speaking of me, something that has always amused me. In 1998, I decided to have a media encounter with Guy Debord when a satellite TV channel contacted me to promote the works of contemporary artists that recalled May ‘68. I did not wish to broadcast some Apparitions that had already had their time in that media and asked them to give me a camera crew specialized in man-in-the-street interviews at cinema and theatre performances. We went along the Champs Elysées asking passers-by and tourists to read, without comment, a selection of key phrases by Guy Debord I had chosen. Debord’s book and film are a rereading of Marx’s Das Kapital. After that he published Commentaries on La société du Spectacle. Asking tourists along the Champs Elysées to read sentences by Debord, pretending to know them by heart, was my own way of commenting on how the media and art world makes use of Debord today.
I once again referenced Debord in 2004. I joined the audience of The Today Show, one of the oldest morning broadcasts in the United States, recorded every morning at Rockefeller Center.
There are hundreds of people in their outdoor audience with “goofy” signs. They all want to go on television and circulate their messages (Hello Mom!, Happy New Year, Go Patriots, We Love You Val, Look Here Look Here We Want To Be On TV etc.). They want their sign to appear for at least a quarter of a second. The camera shot with the anchormen showed my sign in the background stating “GUY DEBORD IS SO COOL!” for 59 seconds. Though a certain American art scene seems recently to have rediscovered Guy Debord, most of the audience could not have got my message.
What motivates me now is how to bridge the great gap between conceptual art, pop art, and contemporary society, how to combine such heterogeneous fields.
You often mention rumor as one of your work methods.
Yes, one of the means I use is rumor. These rumors may be created, fabricated, controlled or not. One of my most recent projects for the Baltic Triennial was nothing but the production of a rumor.
For Hollywood Is calling (2005), I asked the three curators of the Baltic Triennial (Sophia Hernandez, Raimundas Malaskauskas, and Alexis Vaillant) to have my project done by an agency based in Hollywood. This agency employs B-movie actors: Lou Ferrigno, the actor from the Hulk TV series; the Barbie Twins, models in the world’s best-selling pin-up calendar; and other TV actors. We asked them to have these celebrities deliver a live voice message to some international art world personalities’ cell phones (critics, curators, collectors, etc.).
Have you often been considered the heir of Marcel Duchamp?
I don’t feel like the heir of Marcel Duchamp, any more than of Warhol or Debord, but you do have to take their legacy into account. You can’t deny their existence and influence on the world. Yet the Ready-Made issue has never been of too much concern to me. However, when Duchamp says “the art work is an appointment,” I feel a bit involved and I would ironically add that you’d better not miss it! Apparitions and many other projects possess a live dimension in real time. These projects are conceived as appointments… The conventions of “look-alikes” I have been organizing since 2000 are also a clear appointment, arranged for a group of individuals within a pre-existing artistic event.
How did you organize your Déjà Vu project, the International Look-Alike Convention (a series of events at openings and performances where you mix star “look-alikes” with the audience) based on your concept of appointment and your work in general?
Since 2000, I have been exploring the territory of “mass mediazation” and celebrities who flock to opening events, who surround themselves with art, and gather at soirées.
The Look-Alike Conventions (Déjà vu, The International Look-alike Convention 2000 – in progress) represent a sort of integrated Institutional Critique that has led me to collaborate both with curators and communication and press departments of art institutions with whom I create these events. These public events raise the question of the opening reception, the mediation of the artist and art; to me this means inviting “look-alikes” to a “professional” event. These Look-alike Conventions take place at the same time as exhibit openings. At the Centre Pompidou for instance, for the first edition in 2000 during the opening of the exhibition Au delà du spectacle (Let’s Entertain) I put together more than fifty look-alikes, among them Sean Connery, Queen Elisabeth II, Salvador Dalí, Richard Gere, and Woopie Goldberg. Press and TV were present at the event. The next day the newspaper Le Parisien published a picture of the look-alikes posing as if they were on Broadway, moving past the golden pearl curtain of Félix Gonzales Torres. For that newspaper, that picture and a short description were enough to announce the opening of the exhibition. One year later, Jeffrey Deitch invited me to take part in an exhibition at Castello di Rivoli, I repeated the event that has now become an even more important “media event.”
That time we chose the “best” ten Italian look-alikes for Liz Taylor, Mister Bean, Marilyn Monroe, etc. They gathered at the opening event and posed for press and photographers in front of art works by Mariko Mori, Vanessa Beecroft, Pierre Huyghe, John Currin, etc. at the exhibition Forms Follows Fictions and also for television, in front of the masterpieces of arte povera shown at the museum.
All these look-alikes are professionals who may at times become famous and earn a lot of money. They have some codes in common with the art world. I need several months of work to organize those events that, on the contrary to regular exhibitions, will last no more than a few hours. Of course you need to get in touch with them, make a selection, and take them to a different environment. The media involved in the opening event should already know the look-alikes. The fact that the media are there adds some spectacle to the show itself.
Seven Look-Alike conventions have been organized till now. All of them except the last one have been at the same time as art openings such as: CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania (2003); ICA, London (2003); PICA, Perth, Australia (2002); Artsonje Centre, Seoul, Korea (2002); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2001); and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2000).
Each event has its own peculiarity: in Seoul, look-alikes for the North Korean dictator and the South Korean president participated in the opening and reproduced their handshakes, the historical gesture the whole media had been showing some weeks before. At the London ICA, I gathered more than seventy look-alikes including the queen who cut the ribbon and inaugurated the show, Prince Charles, Camilla, the Blairs, Lara Croft, James Bond’s Pierce Brosnan & Halle Berry and many more who drew the attention of the press and more than forty press photographers. The day after an entire page with a picture of the look-alikes and a report on the event appeared in the Evening Standard tabloid. In Vilnius, Lithuania, Boris Yeltsin and Lenin look-alikes stood next to a Julia Roberts look-alike.
Lynne Cooke commissioned the most recent Convention for the New York Dia Art Foundation’s Thirtieth Anniversary Fall Gala. This time it wasn’t an opening event but a cocktail reception for an important fundraising dinner during which philanthropist guests donated $ 800.000 to the Foundation. For the first time, the Look-alike Convention was not announced in advance. None of the important guests were aware of the look-alikes. Little by little the look-alikes mingled with the guests. Robert de Niro, Rod Stewart, Harvey Weinstein, Angelina Jolie, Woopie Goldberg, and Eddie Murphy look-alikes (to name a few) found themselves beside uptown/downtown celebrities such as rock star Lou Reed, actress Lauren Hutton, fashion designer Helmut Lang, Chairman of Barnes & Noble Leonard Riggio, nightclub entrepreneur Ami Sacco, the artists Lawrence Weiner, Pierre Huyghe, Andrea Fraser, La Monte Young, and Robert Ryman (to name but a few), or next to art dealers Larry Gagosian, and Marian Goodman, or museum directors and art collectors as well as multimillionaire New Yorkers.
After each event of this kind, I commission a renowned local graphic designer to make a poster. These posters represent “credits” in a way and at the same time a “remix” of the event from a graphic-designer perspective, following the event itself. The graphic designer is only aware of the event through press pictures I gave him.
Some events have led to “The Making of…” videos somewhat like those nowadays systematically added to DVD film editions, as if it were always necessary to include new points of view and further information. In glass wall cases at exhibitions like the one I did in 2004 at Yvon Lambert (Paris), I display pictures taken by press photographers that recall those found in many art books: Warhol posing next to the celebrities in his circle or critics or art collectors posing with this or that artist both for the posterity and their ego. These glass wall cases also recall the way pictures are displayed at the entrance to cinemas and above all those restaurant pictures where the owner poses next to important people who have eaten there.
Is this a mise en abîme of the exhibit and the social event? Balanced between true and false, your work seems to investigate the show system of these events and the relationship between the art world and celebrity events.
Yes, I explore the social dynamic of the Spectacle and celebrity. Today the latter more and more pervades art protocol, accenting the obsessive relationship of society with celebrity and commodification.
For the Frieze Art Fair, you took this game to extremes to the point you analyzed the way visitors, art dealers, and artists were dressed. Did you mean to describe in more detail the dress codes at these events?
Polly Staple, curator of the Frieze Projects, invited me to design a project in the form of a guided tour. (The same proposal was made also to Martha Rosler, Richard Wentworth, Jay Chung, and Q Takeki Maeda.) The fact few art fairs commission projects that are not for sale made this interesting to me.
After analyzing this specific fair, I selected a group of international fashion experts to lead, one by one, a guided tour for that day’s audience. These visits were titled “What Do They Wear At Frieze Art Fair?” Instead of commenting on the displayed works, the experts focused on visitors and art dealers and their relationship with fashion. The experts became both guides and performers; their distinct personalities and abilities created a special atmosphere through fashion’s highly specific vocabulary and a sense of occasion that shaped the artistic vision of the artwork.
Visits were accessible to all visitors who booked on the day at the information desk, although groups were limited to thirty people. We almost came close to a revolt as there were not enough tickets for all the people who wanted to attend the tours…
Every “fashion expert” had his own peculiarities and ideas about the visit.
The first day Peter Saville, one of the most important graphic designers and art directors around today, highly appreciated for his legendary designs for Factory Records (Joy Division, New Order…) and more recently Pulp, as well as having created the graphic image for Yohji Yamamoto, chose to interview three art dealers at their stands: Darren Flook from Hotel (London), Martin Klosterfelde from Klosterfelde (Berlin), and Nicky Verber & Ash L’Ange from Herald St (London). Peter Saville asked them to give their impressions on their own fashion styles and what they think about what the artists and collectors were wearing.
The Saturday afternoon tour was led by fashion guru Isabella Blow, fashion director for the Conde Nast magazine Tatler and British famous fashion icon, well-known for her incredible mises and eccentricity, and above all for having discovered the fashion designer Alexander McQueen and being the muse for the milliner Philip Treacy. She commented on the most remarkable outfits or the outfits she was most interested in along the path between the fair entrance and VIP Lounge. Drawing a crowd of fans and the curious, and risking a riot, she didn’t hesitate to at times interrupt a sale or an important discussion between art dealers or collectors in order to ask them whose fashion designer had made that skirt or that pair of shoes and provide a short comment. The third day the couple Kira Jolliffe and Bay Garnett, vintage experts (Cheap Date fanzines) and stylists for several international magazines such as Vogue UK, brought their group and suggested them not to pay attention to the art during the tour, but just to concentrate on people. They persuaded them to study and stop people they met to ask them what criteria they had in choosing what they were wearing at the fair.
Of course, to me the purpose of these visits wasn’t really an analysis of fashion but a comment on the Frieze Art Fair, its peculiarity, and the codes of dress involved.
These fashion experts are famous in their world for different reasons. In a way, I tried to steal something from their image to blend with the fair itself. Of course they also probably gained some more credibility themselves. I was interested not only in the terms of the various tours, but rather the results of mixing the two ingredients present at this fair more than others.
According to your principle of overturning rules and laws, you initiated the Citizenship Project in 1997 in which you started investigating how to get different citizenships in order to obtain as many different passports as possible. Was this a way of eluding your identity in an age of globalization?
This issue came to light from a range of information on the Internet, in magazines, and from conversations with attorneys. I explored this territory with no pre-existing skills and the minimum number of prerequisites.
There are specialized attorneys whose job is legally providing people with new or supplementary nationalities. Nevertheless, citizenship is, in theory, not a product; you cannot legally buy or sell it.
To me, this was not a matter of collecting citizenships, but rather a way of comparing information and practically realizing its consequences. Although I predict that, as with cosmetic surgery, changing citizenship risks becoming a “pointless” luxury in a few years time.
To me, the Citizenship project was a way of looking at the consequences and advantages as well as contradictions related to citizenship laws and the fact that today this is definitely linked to the world economy.
You find the same issue in the artistic field. This is what I wanted to emphasize when I decided to investigate the question of “official” and national representation of the artists listed by country in catalogues, Biennials, and international exhibitions.
When Harald Szeemann invited me to the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001, I compared the official UN country list and the list of the countries of artists participating in the Venice Biennale. 112 countries were not represented either by the national pavilions or the international exhibition. I felt it would be interesting to ask curators and the Biennale to send out 112 identical letters, signed by Harald Szeemann from the Venice Biennale, to the omitted countries, proposing that I represent them in exchange for their citizenship.
Like many other projects of mine, I am not the only person involved and although I accept contacting a dictatorship or being considered a post colonialist, everybody gets directly involved and takes responsibility. Harald Szeeman signed the letters and the Biennale president supported the project. This way the project overlaps other fields and has a different duration compared to the actual exhibition.
On the other hand in 2000 you started working on the project Laurette Bank Unlimited (1999 – in progress) to start an off shore account. Was your intention to highlight the market system and the diversion of capital?
Yes, there was certainly a link between the Association pour la préfiguration de la Laurette Bank Unlimited (Association for the Foreshadowing of the Laurette Bank Unlimited,) the international movement of capital, and tax havens.
This project began with an invitation from Nicolas Bourriaud to take part in an exhibition titled Le Capital. Entrance for this exhibition at the CRAC in Sete (France) was free. I suggested setting an entry fee of 10 francs (1.50 euros). Since this was illegal, a specific legal defense had to be planned. I set up a nonprofit organization called Association pour la préfiguration de la Laurette Bank Unlimited (the title of the association itself contradicted the association articles). I also meant to bring into question the role of the curator and his writings (cf. l’Estétique Relationnelle/ Relational aesthetic). I asked Nicolas Bourriaud, with whom I exhibited for the first time, to become the president and take on the responsibilities of this project. For my part, I assumed the role of secretary treasurer of the association.
The first action of the association was to print tickets with an optional entry fee and install a cashier inside the exhibition hall. The fact that we installed a cashier’s desk a few meters after the entrance to the exhibition, that then became an artwork itself within the exhibition, and asked for an optional entry fee allowed us to do all this legally.
As yet, we haven’t earned enough to open this offshore account, but the association hasn’t dissolved yet, so this project is still open.
What are your projects for the future?
I always have several projects going on at the same time; some need time to be completed, while others are short term. I have just finished editing for my show at Blow de la Barra (London) a video called Slapstick # 1 (Money), shot via a hidden camera with a TV crew (in exchange for an interview I gave them) at the National Modern Art Museum/Centre Pompidou.
I catch museum visitors with an old popular Candid Camera TV gag. I put bank notes on the floor and we film people picking them up.
During the editing, I dubbed some laughs over the images, like on sitcoms and Candid Camera. I hope this project becomes the first in a “Slapsticks” series, confronting through burlesque the relationship between art, entertainment, images, “Spectacle”, concepts, and Institutional Critique as developed by Andrea Fraser and Hans Haacke.
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