Interview with Pierre Malphettes
A discussion
SP: To begin, I’d like to discuss the title of one of your works: Strange attractors. I think this term reflects of your work in general, in the sense that one proposition brings together an unquestionable poetic dimension and a reappropriated scientific one (strange attractors is a term you borrowed from modern science).
PM: I’m fascinated by the way scientists name their discoveries or theories. It’s quite literary; they bring to mind the titles of poems. I read a few layman’s books on modern science and I was intrigued both by the phenomena described and, at the same time, the names they are attributed.
SP: Several notions spanning your work, such as stable and unstable, tangible and intangible, indicate the interest and curiosity you show for the poetry of modern science and more precisely all that relates to quantum physics and chaos theory. What can you tell me about your relation to modern science and the distance you often create through absurdity (I’m especially thinking of works like The Garden).
PM: The way science describes the world was a real discovery for me. Notions such as matter in perpetual motion, entropy, the movements of a particle, the arrow of time, changed my way of looking at everyday things and objects. They are open theories that leave room for doubt, they are interpretations which can assimilate new elements at any given moment and also accept that what was true yesterday is no longer true today. Man’s place within this vision is insignificant, but quantum physics includes him nonetheless as a determining element in its observations.
These theories act as a kind of backdrop for my work. I’m more interested in what they suggest, in the imagery and poetry they spawn. I observe what surrounds me, I contemplate it naively and do my best to work it out. I try to create parallels by playing the part of a scientist’s apprentice and starting from scratch: how does a plant grow? My aim isn’t to explain. I want to make the plant grow and present it by introducing my own vision into it. In fact this has more to do with science fiction in the sense that I try to imagine my place within this interpretation of the world.
SP: We could classify the materials you regularly employ into two large families: there are, on the one hand construction materials (conglomerates, rafters, electrical wire, metal, galvanized duckboard, transparent tarpaulin); and on the other, intangible materials that clearly suggest lightness, evanescence (light, wind, water…). Can you tell me about your relation to materials and namely about this interaction between materials and matter which could seem contradictory at first glance?
PM: It’s true that these two families are quite different, but I’m looking for the points they have in common. It might very well be that these intangible materials suggest lightness and evanescence, but on closer inspection they appear above all to be governed by very strict rules. The construction of matter is a bit like architecture. You have to look inside the material, at a different scale. You can also look at the color of a wall as a kind of luminous radiation.
In fact what interest me is the confrontation or the connections between the tangible and the intangible. I like it when two things of a highly different nature resonate together. For example, in No man’s land, there is a strong confrontation between the museum’s architectural space and a gust of wind that causes a transparent plastic tarpaulin stretched over a huge wall to tremble. I’m trying to relativize the wall’s existence and our certainty about it, to grant it a feeling of impermanence. This allows me to play on points of reference and create a disequilibrium that is both mental and physical. I’m trying to create a parallel between the circulation of bodies in space and the circulation of air. Otherwise, in a work such as Partitioning, I cut up the space using transparent tarpaulins so as to define barriers that are physical but not visual.
SP: The same grammar is at work throughout: you use restraint as a powerful stimulant for the imagination. Queneau used to say that an author is a “rat who builds the very labyrinth from which he seeks to escape”…How would you define this dialectic between liberty and restraint, ever so present in your work?
PM: It’s one of the central preoccupations in my work. The desire for liberty, escape, and transgression is inseparable from its very restraint, and both must be contained in the work. This can be found in both Rolling Carpet and Flying Carpet, as well as Tribute to the birds where the plastic bags fly around the display window of a shut-down boutique. It’s true that I want to put things into boxes, frame them. In a certain sense, in order to gain freedom I must understand the restraints.
Queneau’s image is very fitting. I’ve been interested in labyrinths for quite a while, but more through the writings of Borges, or a book such as La maison des feuilles by Danielewski. Philippe K. Dick’s books are also genuine labyrinths. I’m not sure however that the most interesting thing is to escape. There are two visions of the labyrinth: the interior vision where one is faced with the here and now within the maze, with all its surprises and escape attempts, and the overall vision where the path is visualized in its entirety. What interests me is to multiply the points of view and to attempt to project oneself outside, so as to see where one is within this ensemble.
I think that some of my works have a labyrinthine quality and that they are like a parcel of the interior of a larger labyrinth. But its literal representation doesn’t interest me, I prefer laying down the beacons inside my own personal labyrinth.
SP: And yet, through works such as Xspace or Trajectory of a fly, one could be led to think that your aim is to arrive at a literal, quasi-tautological formalization.
PM: I don’t think so. I don’t think that my works are that tautological. They might appear to be so, for I’m always searching for a balance between a content and its form. Perhaps at times this lays the groundwork for a tautology, or gives the impression of something working in a closed circuit. Deleuze used to say that he liked artworks (he was speaking about literature) as full as eggs that leaked from all over. I subscribe entirely to this idea. A work has to impose itself through its presence, and from that point on it leaks all over and touches us in different ways that are intellectual, sensitive, and sensual. A tautological work doesn’t leak, it speaks only about itself, whereas I try to introduce something into a place it doesn’t belong, like using a publicity-oriented urban light to describe a fly’s trajectory.
SP: Your work is always intent on showing the mechanisms or at least the other side of things. Many artists work with an idea of illusion, whereas in your works one always knows where the light and wind come from for example.
PM: There is no magic or illusion. Showing the mechanisms and the techniques used to obtain a certain goal grant that goal importance, or at the very least, valorize it. Understanding how something is made also means understanding what it is. Take The wind in the trees for example. I want to render this simple phenomenon which is the wind blowing through the trees. Materials are very present: the reddish-orange adhesive tape on the window-pane, the pedestals in which the trees are lodged, the fans, the two lamps on the ceiling. I’m looking for contrast and the highly plastic reconstitution of the garden is used to grant more importance to the evanescent, futile, and poetic aspect of the wind blowing through the leaves. The installation enters into a dialog with the Villa Arson’s garden outdoors. It is a site-specific work whose reason to be resides in the elements it makes use of and the place in which it is located.
Exhibition spaces are privileged places for providing things with forms, but the essential takes place outside. By modifying the vision of the garden outdoors and by reconstituting a natural phenomenon indoors, I secretly hope that when the spectator leaves, he or she will observe the wind in the trees with the same attention as in the exhibition.
SP : I like the fact that you use this term reconstitution, whether it has to do with The Garden or Day and night. There is a desire here to make the world enter into the sphere of the intimate. This manner of appropriating the world is certainly not new in your work but it seems as though it is even more present, perhaps more assertive when placed in relation to the intimate. Am I right to say that there’s been a shift, if not a certain evolution in your most recent work?
PM: There is a shift from the general to the specific, towards observations. Today, I’m no longer concerned with details, I wouldn’t go so far as to speak of stories. I no longer say to myself that I have to include everything, that the work has to contain my relation to space and life. I got rid of a lot of stuff to concentrate on the details, like in the drop of water for example. There is definitely a more assertive subjectivity and poetry at work. At the same time however, it’s too recent to speak of evolution. Nonetheless, it’s true that these ideas on the journey, wandering, and the relation to space are present in the work through more personal and intimate visions. I don’t feel a rupture. At a certain point I felt much more free to follow my desires without trying to attach them to a mode of thought, such as an artistic world I’d put together that would allow me to use the same materials and the same idea in a repetitive way.
SP: I’m surprised to see you shun the term “story” to describe your work. As far as I’m concerned, I feel that you’re works “create stories” in the sense that they link together description, explanation, and fiction in the same ensemble, causing them to communicate.
PM When I speak of “story”, I think of narrative. My works are not narrative and I make a distinction with regards to fiction. It’s enough for a fiction to be just an event. I like to use elements that contain stories, without however telling their story.
SP: All the same, The Feast tells a story. This video and journal seem to have a peculiar status in relation to the rest of your work: first you delegated the photography and filming to your closest friends, then you introduced an almost autobiographical touch. How to describe the relation between this work and the rest of your work? How did it come about?
PM: It came out of desire. My first wish was to throw something off the roof of the building I live in. I had no idea as to what. I wanted a fall, something that would shatter. A friend suggested a cupboard. I said sure, but with crockery inside. From that point on, things followed their natural course. The cupboard connotes the idea of moving, which is exactly what I was doing at the time, and notions of sharing, the meal, thus conviviality and the collective. It seemed to me that the most interesting medium for the work was video, so I asked my friends, many of whom are video-artists or photographers, to work with me. Friendship became one of the stakes in this project. All the pieces gradually came together and the project found its reason to be, between the desire to throw something off the roof and the desire to experience an adventure as a group through the shooting of the film.
How does the film relate to the rest of my work? It’s different in that it’s the first time I use video, and do so to document and tell a story which, in fact, becomes a fiction through the editing process. It’s not important to me to try and integrate it into an ensemble. For me, it remains linked to The Garden, for when I was organizing the cupboard’s fall I was also repotting my avocado plants!
SP: What about the title of the work?
PM: A feast is a gathering of people who know each other well and have something in common. It’s also a well-prepared and well-presented good meal. It is however excessive and so gets out of hand. There’s too much drinking, eating, and talking. That’s exactly what we did. The event was organized with great care and precision, but we took it one step further and destroyed everything.
SP: It seems to me that The Feast is also a joyful act of destruction that liberates man (the artist?) from material restraints. This cupboard connotes the domestic, the idea of adopting a middle- class outlook, and the fact that this cupboard clearly alludes to our grandmother’s furniture is certainly not something that was left to chance.
PM: It’s probably no accident, but much of the meaning people read into this video escapes me. You’re right to say that this act of destruction is also a response to personal matters, to a fear of “settling down”, to the anguish triggered by domesticity and immobility. They’re certainly not new questions, but they’re dealt with in a more spectacular, violent, and joyful way than with the Flying Carpet! Let’s say it’s a rite of passage.
SP: I’d like for you to tell me about the rainbow project you’re currently working on which might be presented in Tours in 2004.
PM: It will see the day if I’m able to make it! For the time being, I’m not sure the work is technically feasible…The rainbow is a simple natural phenomenon, it’s also the first manifestation of color. The sun’s rays are reflected and diffracted by drops of rainwater that cause the light spectrum to appear. I want to “sculpturalize” the phenomenon by reproducing it artificially indoors. I’d like to appropriate this natural phenomenon, and understand it by reproducing it. It’s a way of learning about nature. Something else in the project greatly interests me: defining a fixed point of view. The rainbow moves along with us, which means that if we are not in the light’s field of reflection, it simply remains invisible. In the exhibition space, the “sculpture” will only be visible from certain points of view.
SP: What do you mean by “sculpturizing” this phenomenon?
PM: Transforming it into a work of art. In order to do so I have to recreate and displace it, put it somewhere it doesn’t belong. I’d like it to be seen in a totally new way.
SP: It’s a little like a childhood dream?
PM: Right, it’s something like a bet, a childhood dream: make something which is by definition unreachable and intangible one’s own. I also want to keep a tinkered feel to the thing, something handmade, in any case avoid the scientific demonstration. I have a schoolbook that explains how to make a rainbow, but it provides some solutions for projecting it onto a wall.
I’m interested in having it float in space. I don’t want a projection of light, but a physical, sculptural presence….
SP: This notion of the handmade, of tinkering (bricolage), is important to you…
PM: Yes, I do a lot of things myself, but my intention isn’t to dazzle the public with virtuoso execution. I’m not interested in focusing on a certain know-how that I alone would posses. Anyone can grow avocado plants, which doesn’t mean you can’t make an installation with them. If I succeed in making the rainbow, it will just be because I found the right way to project the water, and the right light source and diameter…
SP: I heard you present your work in public several times and what struck me is that you speak about it in a very technical and descriptive way, as if there were a difficulty or refusal to speak about it from a perspective which would underline its poetic dimension…
PM: My work is not univocal. It’s not defined by a process. Each work has its own story, its own set of events. Poetry is something I move towards more and more, but I don’t define my work as being solely poetic. In my works I need to show everything, and when I speak about them, I need to describe everything. The mechanism is the same in both cases.
For example in Tribute to the birds there is the poetic image of the plastic bags flying around as if the city itself had sent them, but there is also the idea that the bags free themselves from the long chain of consumption to which they belong. There are also notions pertaining to order and disorder. There’s the fact that the installation is presented in a store display window and then there’s the technique used to make them fly. I have to speak about all that to make people understand what it’s about. It’s important, in the same way that the pleasure I feel looking at a bag fly through the air is important.