Hans Ulrich Obrist
I'd like to ask you how you got started, if there was some sort of a manifestation or revelation, an artistic vocation so to speak? Or if it was a gradual process?
Hugues Reip
It was pretty gradual, I think. I enrolled in art school, really, because it was a way out for me. I was a terrible student. At the same time, I had a real passion for art. It's a bit of a platitude, but I'd been drawing since I was little. Going to art school for me was a sort of... yes.. a solution. During my schooling it developed more clearly, my desire (to be an artist) really took hold.
HUO
If you had to make a catalog raisonné of your work, where would it start? Which pieces would come first?
HR
That's exactly what I'm doing right now. It's not really a catalog raisonné, but it's a book covering over twenty years of work. I've started with pieces dating from the 1990s, very small, virtually spontaneous sculptures made with whatever happened to be at hand (nails, erasers, paper, bread ...). There are 250 sculptures in all, and the entire series has only been exhibited once, in an abandoned chapel in Sète during my residency at the Villa St. Clair.
HUO
Which artists were you inspired at the time?
HR
I was attracted to artists with very simple practices... I was working on objects of very small dimensions myself, so I was interested in artists whose work had the same initial fragility. Alberto Giacometti's anecdote comes to mind: He didn't have a studio during the war so he made seed sculptures that could be packed into a large match box. So does the Cirque Calder, and the sculptures of Richard Tuttle...
HUO
What will come after the small sculptures? How will the catalog evolve? Can you tell me a little more, about your relationship to drawing in particular?
I can see a drawing with eyes on it, in back of you, I think it is a drawing anyhow...
HR
It's the contour of a map of Africa with, yes, two eyes... the name Picasso instead of a nose and the word Africa for the mouth...
HUO
And who is it by?
HR
Walter de Maria.
HUO
Is it a drawing?
HR
No, I wish it were... it's a lithograph.
But to get back to my relationship to drawing, the sketchbook is my studio in a way. That’s where I keep my ideas, my improvisations, the rough drafts of pieces and new shapes... My work often starts with a drawing.
HUO
Will some of these drawings appear in your book?
HR
Yes, I'm going to include an early sketchbook and another very recent one.
HUO
Are your drawings always notebook size?
HR
I rarely make drawings of set dimensions, but their format is usually scaled to the hand. Sometimes I remove pages from a sketchbook to exhibit them, but in general, it's more like a laboratory of sorts.
HUO
You work with sound as well as drawing. We've run into each other in both of these worlds...
There's your work as a visual artist, but also your work as a composer, an inventor of soundtracks, that is. How did you start working with sound? Was it out of phase with your early work, with the small sculptures series?
HR
It was out of phase... to say the least.
HUO
Sound was first?
HR
The small sculptures were already kind of makeshift. I started making music in the same tinkering kind of way. I was making music even before I went to art school. I had a group in the 80s called Nova Express. We gave several concerts, and there were two or three incredible encounters, including one with Johnny Thunders.
HUO
Was it electronic?
HR
No, it was more like rock. I've been making sound more or less regularly ever since. I still play today with my friend Jacques Julien who founded SPLITt with me. Music is always an underlying presence in my work.
HUO
What are your musical influences?
HR
I listened to the Tinklers a lot. I listen to a lot of musicians that could be considered outsiders, with regards to the music industry. Sexton Ming, Chris Knox, Dennis Driscoll, Stephen Tunney, people who've brought something singular to music, whose sound is extremely particular, a sound that isn't very clean.
HUO
What is your favorite sound?
HR
Storms, I think... thunder.
HUO
And your most dreaded?
HR
A train going through a station without stopping, or a moped without an exhaust pipe.
HUO
Your favorite color?
HR
uh... today it is orange, the color of vitamin C.
HUO
The color that you don't like?
HR
There aren't any colors I don't like.
HUO
Your book will contain drawings, your work as a visual artist... Will there also be texts? Do you write?
HR
I've tried writing short stories, but they're not very convincing. I don't think I'll include them. The people who are going to write for this publication are much more competent than I am.
HUO
This is your first big book. I know you’re interested in graphic design. Are you going to work on the layout?
HR
That is to a large extent why I'm working with Jacques Fournel of the Villa Saint Clair. We get along well, make decisions together. Actually, I could have asked a graphic designer to work on the layout, but as you just said, I'm interested in exploring that side of the project, too.
HUO
Have you ever made any other books, or it this one your first?
HR
No, it isn't. I've made several, but for the most part they are what you would call art books.
HUO
So books play an important role in your work?
HR
Yes, I really like the object itself.
HUO
Which artist books have influenced you?
HR
Hmm... There's a lot of talent in the field... There's Dieter Roth, who's made many...
HUO
And Lawrence Weiner?
HR
Yes, of course. Then there's obviously Ed Ruscha, and Ettore Sottsass, who also made very beautiful books.
HUO
How does the notion of the curator fit in here. Will the book have a chapter on Hugues Reip, Curator?
HR
I don't think so. Curating, in fact, has a purely practical side to it, that is to say that in the context of the 2008 Tokyo exposition, the curator of the MOT had initially offered me a solo show. I wanted to bring other presences into play, to propose a world in which I could call upon a few French and Japanese artists whose work, it seemed to me, entered the thematic framework I had suggested: Parallel Worlds.
I don't know whether my having invited other artists made me a curator. It was more like the opportunity to coalesce different energies. There was also a cabinet of curiosities containing works by Grandville, Emile Bayard and other early 20th century harbingers of science-fiction, as well as Japanese stamps by Kuniyoshi and Hiroshige. It's surprising, for that matter, to find communities of like-mindedness amongst works from such totally different geographic universes.
HUO
Have you curated any other shows?
HR
Once, a long time ago, at a gallery in Paris. I invited Lawrence Weiner, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Didier Marcel, Franck Scurti, Jacques Julien... It was first and foremost the idea of bringing them together. As you know, I’m not a curator, so much so that when I do set my mind to such an exercise, I tend to invite people through affinity. I am not an inveterate talent scout like you are.
HUO
Can you tell me how you’re related to the artists you exhibited with in Tokyo, Michel Blazy, François Curlet, Roland Flexner, Jacques Julien, Mathieu Mercier, Rei Naito, Daniel Guyonnet, Kohei Nawa, Alain Séchas and Yutaka Sone. What’s the connection?
HR
When the list is rolled out like that, it's hard to see, isn't it... (laughter).
First of all, I invited people whose artistic universes I appreciate on an individual basis. Then I let each of them decide which pieces they would show. There was Roland Flexner and his ink drawings that are almost mineral, Jacques Julien who made strange islands of sorts, like giant cereal box toys punctuating the space, Michel Blazy, with his entire universe from seed to decay, and Alain Séchas with his very dark... what I call fog watercolors... Kohei Nawa and his illusionist boxes encasing taxidermied animals, Daniel Guyonnet and his interpretation of classical drawings in a surreal mode, Mathieu Mercier and his morphing of Rorschach tests, Rei Naito with his massive yet fragile installation like a haunted tea house, Yutaka Sone with his folly and marble snowflakes, and François Curlet with his poetic bursts fashioned out of witty remarks. The exhibit was actually like an attempt at freezing the fleeting.
HUO
: At the same time, there is something we find in this exhibition that is present in all of your work... The show that I saw at the Galerie du Jour in 2007 comes to mind. This solo show was closely related to the Tokyo group show. Can you tell me a little more about what you call parallel realities?
HR
If I go back to the beginning... It may come as a surprise to you, but it's has something to do with boredom, in a way. I remember for example that when I was very young, my mother sent me on vacation to my grandparents' house in the mountains. They were both farmers. When you are little, confronted with two adults in a wide-open, virtually wild space, you often don't know what to do with yourself, a sort of boredom sets in.
I remember this boredom becoming a kind of contemplation. That is to say I was able to simply look at a small leaf fluttering in the wind for hours on end, to watch a caterpillar crossing a field, to look at tiny pebbles, to immerse myself in various micro-universes that is. I was forced to become aware of my immediate surroundings. Of course we are not going to spend all our time watching a leaf move, but the whole experience was sort of crystallized upon reading Jonathan Swift, Jules Verne and other authors who call upon our youthful imagination. All of this remained tucked away in a corner of my memory, somewhere, and I think that it has all somehow come back to me now, as if I were attempting to formulate these things somehow. Of course I am also interested in popular science; we've talked about that before. This idea of a laboratory, of a spirit; the idea of a world tangential to our own and, at times, permeable... I am trying in a way to record this.
HUO
How does the viewer come into play? Duchamp was categorical here... The spectator makes half the work...
HR
: I'm not sure, it's perhaps a little naive but I like the idea of art having a somewhat dreamlike dimension, that all of its keys are not immediately given. The notion of a pause or a freeze frame is present in most of my works. For example, I don't know if you remember my neon sculpture of a lightning bolt. What I was interested in capturing was the slowing down of the phenomenal electric shock of which lightning is made. It's not a coincidence that all of my films are animations in which images are in suspended movement, like temporal bugs.
HUO
What would your medium be in light of what Rosalind Krauss calls the Post-Medium Condition?
HR
A scene from Buster Keaton's movie The Cameraman comes to mind.
He is on the phone making a date with the girl he's in love with. After a few seconds of misunderstandings, he drops the receiver, goes out and crosses town, running, in one of the greatest sprints of movie history. The camera, in a tracking shot, follows Keaton's movements to the house of his prospective girlfriend, who thinks he is still on the line. He knocks, she excuses herself and hangs up. When she opens the door, he is there, in front of her... The medium here is desire, a shortcut in time. I quite like the idea.
HUO
That brings us to the question of cinema. As Alain-Robbe-Grillet repeatedly said over the course of our many interviews, if you are novelist, visual artist, scientist, architect... no matter what (creative) field you work in, cinema is an ever-present influence in the 20th century. As a novelist, he couldn't conceive of a novel without taking into account the existence of film. I've always wondered about the influence of film on your work, if you've ever made a movie, if it's possible to talk about movies by Hugues Reip.
HR
: I don't think I've made movies in the loftier sense of the word, like feature films that can be shown in movie theaters. But I've definitely used cinematographic techniques, that is to say I've made a number of film that are all very short, often animated films, at times homages (to pioneering filmmakers such as Norman McLaren, Oscar Fischinger or Len Lye). I recently made a film entitled Fantasy comprised of drawings by Georges Méliès. It is a production in collaboration with the Cinémathèque Française for a Georges Méliès exhibition.
I also just finished a film in homage to Louis Feuillade in which the character of Fantomas is floating, 30 centimeters above floor level, through the attic rooms of the Château de Chamarande.
My work is connected to the movies more by way of the cinematographic experiment than the film scenario.
HUO
What are your film influences?
HR
King Kong! The original version by Cooper and Schoedsack, in 1933 - even if Peter Jackson's version is excellent - summarizes a number of things. Extraordinary surroundings, an island that doesn't exist, a creature that doesn't exist, a love story that doesn't exist, incredible special effects for the era, and one of my heroes, Willis O’Brien, who animated the monkey and worked on movies that I have watched over and over again, including The Lost World. King Kong to me is both a quintessentially experimental film and a blockbuster movie.
HUO
Other films? In France, of course, there is the extraordinary generation of Godard, Resnais, Rohmer, Varda...
HR
Of course I've seen films by these directors, but of all the French nouvelle vague directors, the one I’d most readily mention would be Jean-Pierre Melville.
HUO
We've talked about your recent exhibitions, your curating and your early works, but we haven't talked about the 90s at all. I’d like to know if you belonged to a group then, if you were part of a movement, a manifesto... and also what you did in the 90s, what were the most important moments... Were there any revelations in the 1990s?
HR
(laughter) In all art forms?
HUO
Yes... but in visual arts above all.
HR
My sidekicks at the time, I guess, were artists like Didier Marcel, François Curlet or Michel Blazy, for example... But we never made up a group. More like a community of like-minded people. I did however turn rather quickly to artists who were not from my generation. People like Öyvind Fahlström, H.C. Westermann, Gordon Matta-Clark and Joseph Cornell, to name a few, were important influences. The 90s in my case were musical years. It was during this time that my visual work took shape, but I always had a song in mind, a mental soundtrack, so to speak, punctuated by visual pieces.
HUO
Is there going to be a soundtrack for the book? A CD included? Musical partitions perhaps?
HR
Nothing like that is planned for now. Anyhow, if you saw our musical partitions... I must also say that I've never really linked my music to my visual art, except for film soundtracks. It's a bit schizophrenic all of these activities, but to me it’s more logical to go to a concert in a bar, with beers, than in a white cube. That’s just me, however.
HUO
As David Deutsch said, they’re parallel realities that do not converge but that have certain tangencies. I think that there are tangents in your work; there are the film and exhibition soundtracks, the visual aspects of your concerts. There are zones of contact, so to speak.
HR
Yes, of course. But they are things that rub up against each other without really permeating each other. There are just points of friction among the elements.
HUO
If the 90s were a period during which time you always had a song in your head, today it is 2010, the end of the first decade of the first century of the third millennium. We just entered the second decade, the 2010s. If the 1990s were like a soundtrack for you, how would you describe the 2000s?
HR
It's bizarre because, for many people, the infamous 00s, even if unconscious, were like resetting the counter to zero. I strangely felt like putting things into place that I had not allowed myself to do up til then. After we start working, certain more intimate things, buried deep down, tend to get left aside, in favor of other things that are perhaps easier, through a lack of confidence most likely. Now I don't give a damn (laughter)...
For the past ten years or so, I've felt much more free to do things I didn't allow myself to do before. Maybe because they were more difficult to express, maybe, quite simply, because I've matured. The 00s therefore could be the awareness of a certain kind of maturity? Ouch...
HUO
I'm curious about how you see the future, how do you see the decade to come?
HR
I rarely project into the future because I don't like disappointments. At the same time the future for me is always anterior. Each second is the future. I do not live in anticipation, but more in immediate reaction.
HUO
This brings us to my last question. Like Boetti said, the artist's most astonishing projects are often never accomplished, because artists are invited to do things that are formatted. To exhibit in museums, galleries, art fairs. Public commissions, biennials... Some projects don't fit into such given categories. I’d like to know if you've had projects considered too big to or too small to undertake, or even too politically charged. As it’s often said, the most important projects of the artist or the writer are those that are self-censored, the projects we simply don't dare undertake.
HR
That’s true. And it's surprising you mention Boetti, who did have a strong influence on me, even though I got to know him only a short time before his death. We got to know each other very quickly. We sympathized, as they say, with each other. Alighiero talked to me about his role as an artist, about the way he got together projects, or didn't, about the struggle of such decisions. The stories he told were often ellipses. Perhaps certain roads that are not yet built will lead to the worlds that I spoke of earlier. I would like to be like Gulliver, to make very small things in enormous spaces, enormous things in very small spaces, like in chemistry, to not stop myself from experimenting.
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