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| Interview with Cécilia Bécanovic Cecilia Becanovic : In 2003, you showed a series of photographs, entitled The Shapes of Rest, at the Vasistas Gallery in Montpellier (France). In the press release, the art critic Albert Asthom quotes Borges : « It’s almost to insult the shapes of the world to think we can invent something or even that we need to invent anything ». These words seem to be particularly important to you. Raphaël Zarka : Since Albert came across it (the citation comes from Borges’ discussion with Victor Burgin), it has become something of a motto for me. It seems to me that expression, imagination, are only a matter of editing and collage. I seriously doubt the possibility of creating something out of nothing or, to be more precise, I doubt that it is possible to produce any genuinely original or individual piece of work. If you think you live in a finished world, then the whole number of shapes and possibilities must be finished too. When you look at things in this way, it makes sense that two artists, remote from one another in space and time, might produce similar shapes and thoughts. Let’s play with the things that are already here, already around us, rather than pretend we are inventing something new. That’s not to say that my work is objective in any way. It’s closer to the work of the collector than to typology. I express my subjectivity in the way I select, frame, and edit the world’s fragments. I never try to present reality as it is. On the contrary, I’m stressing the fact that we can only ever see the world from our own particular cultural viewpoint. CB. The Shapes of Rest is a collection of concrete objects that you found isolated in nature or on derelict sites, areas of wasteland. The way you photograph them, these geometrical shapes look like unwilling sculptures, like strange monuments. RZ. Monuments ? Yes they might be. But only if you see them as monuments awaiting signification. Like that flame between two sets of traffic lights just above the Alma Bridge; it didn’t commemorate anything before Diana’s accident. Or monuments similar to those Robert Smithson photographed in Passaic, New Jersey. Monuments that have been produced unwillingly by their environment but that have a strange kind of relationship with it, something paradoxical. I am interested in the gap or the tension between the object and its « scenery ». I look for objects that seem to be on display, abstracted from what I might call the asphalt and concrete continuum of urbanity. CB. These images of yours are not metaphorical. The objects are like signs whose signification has been forgotten. They seem instead to operate on an intertextual level, leading us to other sources, images or texts. Some belong quite clearly to the family of scientific or speculative objects such as the platonic corpses that Kepler used in his cosmology, each a regular polyhedron. RZ. All the photographed objects do not operate on the same level. There are those you just mentioned, which are probably the most intriguing. And then there are those that you recognise immediately, but that are to be read on a different level. I am thinking of the inverted staircases: their distortion reminds me of Piranese’s prisons, those that Borges thought about as he was building his fascinating City of the Immortals (cf The Immortal, the first tale of The Aleph). There is also the triple skateboard ramp; what interests me there is the origin of its shape, the wave, which is now petrified in concrete. CB. Rodney Graham sees his photographs of isolated trees as portraits. The Shape of Rest, half way between sculpture and painting, between volume and one-dimensional image, seem instead to belong to the category of still life. Still lives, that is, on the scale of the landscape. RZ. I’ve always wondered where the border lies between an object and a space. At first I thought it could be to do with motion, the difference between something you can move, like a piece of furniture (in French, « meuble ») and something that cannot move, like a building (in French, « immeuble »), something instead that you move on. I think I’ve now come to consider all that is fragmented, isolated as a kind of object. For instance, take the Aerotrain track. There is no doubt about it, this is a space, it’s 11 miles long. But, at the same time, it doesn’t link anything, it’s just there in the middle of the fields, its extremities finishing in the void. My photograph of the monorail, the one that belongs to The Shapes of Rest series, is really the link, or the interface, between my photographs and my videos, between object and space. I use photography - paying particular attention to scale and the position from which the photograph is taken - to unify very diverse kinds of objects. CB. In the same show at the Vasistas gallery, facing the photographs, you had a sculpture, or rather an object: a wheel cut out of concrete blocks, inspired by the work of the Brazilian artist Iran Do Espirito Santo. This piece of yours is some kind of manifesto: it makes quite clear the mobile-immobile dialectic that is central to your work. This dialectic is also clearly visible in the collaborative Pentacycle project (2002, with Vincent Lamouroux) and, more recently, in the video you shot in an abandoned skatepark built in a particularly dry and wild kind of landscape in the southeast of France. RZ. Before saying a few words about the sculpture you mentioned, I would like to say just one last thing about The Shapes of Rest. To take a photograph is not something that simply goes without saying: the logic of the « decisive instant » is something I am completely unfamiliar with. The only things I allow myself to photograph are objects with such inherent stillness that I naturally see them as photographs. The Shapes of Rest are twice-photographed, then, or photographs to the power of two. The same goes for the wheel made of concrete blocks: it’s a sculpture of a sculpture. As a musician might, I did a cover version of a piece by Iran Do Espirto Santo : a circle cut out from a red-brick wall. I simply changed the material, in the same way as a musician would play music on a different instrument.This piece, along with many others in contemporary art, works like a musical score, or a recipe: if I simply say to you “a wheel cut out of a red-brick wall”, you already have an image in mind. This work is « allographic »: it can be built by the artist or by anyone else. But what actually works in the field of music is mostly theoretical in the visual arts, and I wanted it to make it effective. Yet I didn’t make the piece just to illustrate the theory. Iran Do Esprito Santo’s piece is a work I can really relate to, something I could or should have done… That said, if you look at what seems to be the same piece in the context of one artist’s work and then in the context of another’s, its whole meaning has changed. In my case, the circle is a wheel, not a cut-out, an oxymoron of immobility and movement. That’s why I suggested that Albert cite a passage from Cyrano de Bergerac’s book (A Journey to the Moon, around 1657), where he describes a city on wheels. I focused on this aspect in the video I showed at the Frac Languedoc-Roussillon (Rooler Gab, 2004) as well as in the Pentacycle video. Indeed, the rules underlying the making of the two videos were the same. I don’t just film any kind of contemporary ruin: these are very specific, they are not houses or bunkers, they are spaces dedicated to motion, to speed. The absence, or cessation, of movement makes the immobility of these spaces even more apparent. But in order to record that immobility on video, I needed to establish a standard. And motion is the standard against you can measure immobility. The standard is the Pentacycle, the dog. CB. In your words, the Aerotrain track and the Rooler-Gab skatepark are « fossils of motion on landscape-scale ». It makes me think of what you said about the petrified wave. I think that image describes perfectly this skateboard place on a hill in the middle of nowhere. You say someone walking around there could not even notice the poles of the ski-lift. It’s the ski-lift that gives the project its strangeness: an abandoned ski-lift there in the south of France where it never snows. You first went there to take photographs, and you then investigated and met Gabriel Leuret whose prosaic imagination is at the origin of this strange place. You finally chose to highlight the site’s disjunctions and contradictions by letting a dog guide you through it. RZ. In that video, the dog is the first thing you see; it’s the kind of dog that hunters use in the south of France. At that point there is nothing especially strange. Then, in the countryside, you begin to see aspects of urbanity, then you see the ski-lift and the downhill skatepark, and it is then that you begin to understand the dog might not be the main character. I like putting the main character in the background, filming without filming something, showing something while seeming to show something else. It’s almost like the story of the finger pointing at the moon: the fool looks at the finger. But we know there is no fool in art: you need the finger for there to be a moon. There is something similar going on in Landscape where the wind comes from (2003). I put a tiny video camera on the arrow of a weathercock that I install on the roof of a gallery. It films the landscape in real time, and you can watch the result on a LCD screen inside the gallery space. One way of thinking about it is that the weathercock, that is to say the wind, offers the only way of filming the landscape of our daily lives objectively. Another is that the piece is mainly a self-portrait of the wind, and that the landscape is only what exposes it (in the photographic sense). To me, the interest of the piece lies in the space between the two interpretations. CB. Taking up the second way of looking at the piece, the landscape somehow plays the part of the plaster that you used to cast the holes in a emmenthal cheese. The title of that series, The Eyes (2004), is ambivalent. It can be read pragmatically (cheese makers call the holes in cheese « eyes ») or metaphorically (you are enabling us to see what is usually invisible). RZ. In this new series of photographed objects I come back to the underlying theme of the archaeology of everyday life. The idea comes from the casting technique they used in Pompey; you might remember that famous sequence in Rossellini’s Trip to Italia. I think that’s where I got the idea from. I think a gruyere cheese embodies perfectly the way in which mysteries hide in the most ordinary of things. CB. The heterogeneous aspect of your works, the diversity of the media you use, the fact that you work almost as a collector would, all of this reminds me of a curiosity cabinet. RZ. The collector’s curiosity interests me more than the curiosity of the objects. What is most important to me is what lies in between, in the space that separates one object from another. So my notion of the collection is more dynamic. I am not that interested in the aesthetic of the curiosity cabinet; the important thing is the way in which it does away with useless dichotomies such as geometric/organic, form/anti-form, artefact/natural objects. You could define this kind of space in terms of Roger Caillois’ notion of « generalised poetics » (poétique généralisée), which suggests a unity and continuity between physical, intellectual and imaginary worlds. CB. Borges and Caillois – both have inspired your written pieces. Roger Caillois turns his scientific research into literature; you turn your practice of skateboarding into an short essay titled The forbidden conjunction (La conjonction interdite, 2003). I would like you to tell me about the way you use writing in your work. RZ. The Pentacycle project is composed of an object (a vehicle), a video and a text (a discussion); if we felt the need for this text, it was not because we had something prove. We simply knew that nobody else would be able to describe what we experienced, what we observed. The realisation of project was spread over a period of time, and the discussion is more the story of our trip, like a travel-log, than a theoretical text. In 1999, when I was still a student in England, I wrote an essay on Borges that took the form of a short story. I printed 200 copies of the leaflet on a copy machine. It was the biography of Isidore Thomas Beral, a Swiss painter from the beginning of the twentieth century who managed to paint an inverted perspective in a scientific way. I was thinking that in the context of the total freedom that artists have today, there is still one thing that just cannot be done: that is, to create a piece in the past. Only fiction allows you to do that, which is something that artists shouldn’t just ignore. The forbidden conjunction is something quite different. Skateboarding is a subject as well as an excuse for me to do some research. There are artists who copy the pages of the dictionary when they cannot think of anything else to do; my way of making the most of the times when I have no specific ideas is to gather information and notes on skateboarding; it feeds my hunger for research and speculation. Of course, it is not that there are no links whatsoever between my work as a whole and some aspects of skateboarding, but they are not to be found in some kind of folklore; the relationships are subtle, less explicit.
© Offshore 2004 |
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