Out in the Sun / Plein Soleil – A Summer in the Art Centres / Un été des centres d'art

Discussion
Boris Achour, Nicolas Bourriaud and Mathieu Mercier
(p. 14-21)


N.B.: Do you think that the density of the art centres network in France represents a specific national situation, and one that influences your work?

M.M.: The centres' most distinctive feature is their decentralisation. When artists are invited to show they don't think about the difference between an art centre, a Regional Art Collection (Frac), a museum or even a gallery. At the most they think about the technical and human resources available. An exhibition is a responsibility you have to go all the way with. And the type of venue doesn't change the content.

B.A.: I agree absolutely with your emphasis on the word responsibility. I bring the same commitment to my work whatever the venue, except of course that there are differences in terms of logistics and resources from one place to another. Apart from the question of their density, the art centres are elements of a broader grid or network, along with galleries, Fracs, museums and community venues. Once again I make no distinction between these different places; what's important for me is the working relationship with specific people each time and the exhibition this relationship is going to generate. You have more or less marked affinities with a given director or curator, but not with an organisation.

M.M.: The responsibility is the same wherever I exhibit. Sometimes the difficulty of getting to art centres raises different issues. It's also very different from working with largescale bodies and lots of intermediaries: in the latter cases you have less contact with the people who actually programme the exhibitions. Art centres also enjoy independence in market terms, as distinct from private galleries, which struggle to survive in regional areas. However, an art centre is dependent on the local political context. I wonder if there are any that were actually created by politicians… Do political figures really support them? What interest can such a centre hold for them? And whatever the case, I don't believe an art scene can be the outcome of political will. In Nantes it happened via community associations. And a scene doesn't exist by calling itself a scene, it's just a living thing. As soon as political will pins it down – an example is the “Active/Reactive: Living Creation in Nantes” exhibition at the Lieu Unique in 2000 – the scene dies. Homing in on it wasn't a good thing, as the scene turned out to be more divided than unified.

N.B.: Can you cite any examples of art centres with close links to a local scene?

B.A.: No, and it's a good thing! The word “close” seems dangerous to me – for artists and art centres alike.

M.M.: It's true that art centres' primary duty is to support artists, but this isn't specific to them. Nonetheless, it seems important to me to maintain the distinction between the Fracs and the art centres. When you look at the Fracs as a whole it's very hard to spot ones that follow a specific programming line: maybe only four or five out of twenty-two.

N.B.: This could be because there's not always a strategy behind the acquisitions, even if you often find continuity in terms of people. I tend to think that an art centre is a place that has to assess its operating context, then follow a guiding principle. And it must do this rather than represent some scene or current trend – even if, as in certain regions, the centre is the sole artistic resource. You have to sift and make choices. You don't programme the same way in Marseille, where several venues coexist, as in Vassivière, where the framework for discovery is the relationship with landscape.

B.A.: It doesn't bother me that the Fracs don't all have a marked identity as long as you've got the art centres playing that role. There's a kind of specialisation in certain art centres, resulting in some cases from specific callings, as at Vassivière, and in others from very narrowly defined programming. Whether in the medium term – the time a director is in post – or over the longer-term life of the centre itself, this principle of a clear line seems to me the best way of developing and firming up experimentation. At present, challenges and specific contextual features also have to be taken into account sometimes.

M.M.: I prefer working with strong personalities; you get more out of it. But it's not always an easy situation: the director has to fight full-time for the survival of his or her centre. And at one time or another just about every art centre has had to face the threat of closure.

N.B.: At the Palais de Tokyo in Paris it was the directors – Jérôme Sans and myself – who determined the challenges at the outset. The first being to establish an institution fundamentally based on pluralism – whence two directors – without laying down an artificial line. Paris needed that at that specific time: needed to transcend the coterie wars and reshape its image. The issues aren't the same in Dijon, Nantes and Paris. But an art centre is built in a context, in relation to local or international questions.

M.M.: You don't often find dead artists being shown in art centres.

B.A.: True. But a counter-example is theVilla Arson in Nice, which is currently showing Gino de Dominicis and Gérard Gasiorowski, two dead artists, together with an exhibition by Saverio Lucarielo. This is an opportunity to discover or rediscover the work of the first two, and look at the links with a living artist.

M.M.: Even so, bringing existing works together and working with artists on the production of new works is not the same thing. At the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art, where I'm currently preparing an exhibition, more is being spent on transport than on the production of new works. This is a kind of retrospective and calls for a method that's more scientific than exploratory.

N.B.: In your experience of working with art centres, can you identify an aspect that seems to you still underestimated or underdeveloped? For example, is there something they lack in terms of their relationship with the public?

M.M.: Time! One day I'd like to have an exhibition using a different time frame – two years' preparation, for example, with regular dialogue.

N.B.: At the Palais de Tokyo we worked with Matthieu Laurette on the idea of bringing in his unfinished work so that he could work full-time on it at the art centre for a year; but the project had to be dropped because of the sheer complexity of the way he wanted to work – and maybe because ultimately he sensed it could turn into a trap.

M.M.: Just now I mentioned having time to think and exchange ideas. Most exhibitions are put together very fast, and I can't see the reason for that, even if they presuppose a close, committed relationship between curator and artist.

B.A.: Absolutely, Mathieu. The time for discussion and interchange is often very short, especially for group shows. And this applies between the artists themselves as well as between artists and curators. That's an aspect I'd like to see developed by the art centres; not so much “focused on” exhibitions, as is so often the case with debates and encounters and so on, but rather before the exhibition or while it's being prepared. And another thing about the time question: as both artist-exhibitor and spectator, I'd like to see temporal cadences and formats that are different from the existing ones. The format and the hanging/ private-view/two-month-exhibition/ dismantling/and-we-start-over sequence could be rethought more often.

N.B.: There's also the question of trust: an artist's work evolves and he can go through blank periods. His work can turn out to be out of synch with a new intellectual orientation. His energy level can drop. In other words there's also a risk for the director of an institution in committing to a young artist over a long period. It's true, though, that this kind of time frame is mostly reserved for established artists.

M.M.: The most interesting exhibition experiences come when I've been able to learn something different myself about my work; when dialogue has brought to light ideas that I couldn't see myself because I was too involved.

N.B.: Might not one of the functions of art centres be to let us see the purely instinctive side of making a work?

B.A.: It ought to be! But once again this brings us back to the idea of a person rather than on organisation, and to the idea of a time frame. You might find it surprising, but it's mainly with my galerists, with whom I'm in regular, long-term contact – ongoing dialogue – that this kind of exchange is most frequent. It happens less with the people directing art centres because the meetings are often more haphazard. What I find interesting and important is encountering people – whoever they are – and discussing things over a period of years.

M.M.: That's not what I want from a gallery. There's also the question of where art is headed because of its media success, because this has caused real changes over the last fifteen years. The art centres have avoided this situation. They make no acquisitions and avoid market pressures. They also avoid the proliferation of intermediaries: their directors are in direct contact with the artists, whereas museums work with artists via a host of middlemen. I'm often more at ease working directly with people who really want to see the birth of an exhibition. Whereas in order to exist, independent curators, for example, often have to align the artistic issues with leisure or media concerns.

N.B.: Even so, independent curators are quite valuable resources for art centres, in the sense that they help bring ideas, projects and new artists. I don't think they represent an ideology as such.

M.M.: I was referring to the ones who set out to present topical exhibitions, in contrast with those who contribute ideas and opt for a form of resistance. The distinctive thing about art centres is the rigorousness of their programming. What really scares me is that the Paris “Nuit Blanche” format might become the model; an operation like that gets so much media attention…

N.B.: Even if I'm in favour of its remaining one of a kind, there can be no denying that the “Nuit Blanche“ is a chance to work on a unique scale – not to mention its media impact. I don't see it functioning as a model, just as I don't see other exhibition models cancelling each other out. Paris's “Nuit Blanche“ has been taken up abroad, but not in contemporary art circles – more as entertainment and live performance.

M.M.: How do you explain to politicians that an art centre that has less than ten visitors a day is playing a vital part, when you compare that figure to the tens of thousands of people this kind of media operation pulls in?

N.B.: But “Nuit Blanche“ isn't comparable to the exhibitions produced by art centres.

M.M.: That kind of operation uses a form of popularisation whose success I see as dangerous.

N.B.: When you read the letter of engagement sent on 1 August 2007 by the newly elected President Sarkozy to her Minister of Culture and Communications, you see a demand for results not readily compatible – if taken literally – with the forward-looking activity of art centres, which are also venues for experimentation.

M.M.: The profit notion is something culture should not give in to. 100,000 entries do not invalidate an exhibition on the Conceptual art of the 60s just because the latter only drew 1000 visitors.

B.A.: Whatever the case, the issue of the recent – in France, at any rate – and increasing media attention to Contemporary art will have consequences going well beyond the art centres. “Nuit Blanche” seems to me to be only one symptom among others of a tendency to confuse artistic creation with its cultural trimmings. You find this tendency, for instance, in the growing importance in recent years of the educational support aspect for exhibitions: the mediators!!! The other major trend is the increasing commercial exploitation of art. The various players – artists, art centre directors, politicians, the public, galerists and collectors – seem to me to have neither the same expectations, nor the same vision of what an art centre can or ought to be. Obviously, then, it can't always be easy for an art centre to take its own stand in relation to these constraints and divergent points of view.

N.B.: But there are other ways of taking a stand: why not try to get through to as many people as possible with an exhibition on the Conceptual artists of the 60s? There are ways of doing it. We mustn't blindly condemn the media, in that they at least make this kind of project visible – which is not to say looked at. But this initial visibility is a prerequisite for everything else: for awareness, education and so on. And that's part of the art centres' task.

B.A.: We know that artists have a strong capacity to react: the more we dislike a situation, the more we strive to come up with alternative ways of working.

M.M.: Right. With Gilles Drouault I set up the Galerie des Multiples as a reaction against the tie-ins and other gadgets you find more and more in museum boutiques.

B.A.: Yes, and when we started Trouble, it was because we weren't happy with what was on offer in the art criticism field.

M.M.: But Trouble has a very low profile compared to any other art review.

N.B.: You can also try to transcend the blinkered view by asking how to go about bringing art to the general public. Ten years ago I had a Contemporary art programme on Radio France Inter at ten o'clock in the morning, and when I talked about an exhibition by Dan Graham or Carsten Höller it had a real effect on attendance; to my astonishment it really brought people along. Once there they have to do the best they can culturally, but the important thing is that they should be able to see things, and end up finding it normal to go and see monochrome paintings or tweaked objects. That's what the media are for in the first instance: to make Contemporary art something as everyday as a book or a film.

MM: That's why communication is essential for small organisations too.

NB: The problem is that if there was no “Nuit Blanche”, for example, the mass media wouldn't talk about art at all. The problem here is the way news is formatted. It's like the book prizes or the big wine fairs, which have the same pernicious effect: each year the time comes round when they get talked about – and then consigned to oblivion. The media have become extremely lazy: they don't produce news any more, they gather it. Real journalism is also what Serge Daney was doing for the cinema in Libération: pointing out particular works, standing up for them, convincing and condemning. In cultural terms that could even mean going as far as inventing the current scene!

B.A.: To come back to the question of what we'd like to find in art centres: for my part I feel a lack of a real confrontation between past generations and those that follow. Imagine something based on a historic figure, as we recently saw with the Steven Parrino exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo: there you saw both the sources of his work and his descendants – the before and after.

M.M.: That seems to me to be the job of the museums – and they do it very little.

B.A.: Why couldn't art centres show Malevich, the way Thomas Hirschhorn did in the “Musée Précaire Albinet” he presented with the Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers? I don't see why art's historic figures have to be restricted to museums. That kind of freedom is a territory art centres could well move into, especially since at present there's a degree of confusion about roles and genres in respect of art fairs, biennials, and exhibitions in museums and art centres. And even if this confusion sometimes takes pretty horrible forms, it can also give rise to interesting challenges.

M.M.: There are plenty of approaches to be invented – or returned to – regarding exhibition models. The art world lacks the kind of memory that allows for renewal and reinterpretation of exhibiting modes.

N.B.: The criteria we're highlighting here – strong artistic personality, personal vision, thinking, etc. – aren't necessarily those seen as important by politicians. That's why, as d.c.a is ensuring, each art centre recruiting jury should include at least one other art centre director and, ideally, more art professionals. In other countries, and Switzerland in particular, art centre directors are recruited more for their artistic vision, and by a jury made up mainly of professionals. Starting with the Palais de Tokyo, we've been asking for equal representation: a jury made up of equal numbers of members of the Visual Arts Delegation and the Palais de Tokyo Association – artists, as it happens – and two members from outside.

B.A.: Recently the Palais de Tokyo asked me to contribute a work to an auction sale. I hesitated a little because I'm not really used to this kind of thing, and then I accepted because it's a simple, concrete way of supporting a venue. I think that this can be part of the necessarily mutual form of commitment we've been talking about since the beginning.

M.M.: I prefer to write the institution a cheque, because I don't want to make my projects dependent on my market value. For an artist the things he produces are part of an economy whose realities mustn't be forgotten. Doubts, successive attempts and sometimes failures are the necessary precondition for the appearance of a work. It doesn't seem to me healthy that here in France we should work the way they do in the United States – where, I'd like to remind you, there's no Ministry of Culture. As for the matter of artists supporting art centres in financial difficulty, obviously we would. The proof is the fact that artists devote six months of their time to a project that's only going to be seen by a handful of people. Artists' commitment is there in the works: we work together with the centres on exhibitions we want to see together. In this sense the centres don't work for the artists any more than the artists for the centres.


This discussion took place in Paris on 8 September 2007