A conversation with Sylvie Eyberg
Agnese Oliveri: 1, 2, 3... Let’s start.
Sylvie Eyberg: Cominciamo.
Oliver Noble: Seeing as we’re doing a show that spans from some of your earliest works of the late '80s up until the 2000s, maybe we should start right at the beginning. What did your mom do again?
SE: She was an accountant. When I was a child, she was working at the house often. She was giving me all the accounting books that were no longer valid, as a place where I could make a drawing or do things, but instead, I wanted to do the same as her; I was imitating writing and numbers, and I was imitating her work.
ON: That's interesting. Your dad was an artist. You would have maybe expected the child to be drawing.
SE: Yes, but it was not so one-sided. I was taking from both my parents. I was drawn to the adult world, seeing it as representing the possibility of making choices and decisions of one’s own.
Later, when it came to deciding about my studies, and after a few experiences in amateur theatre and loving the experience of working 'ensemble', my partner and I both tried to go to the theatre conservatory; we were not selected at the entrance jury though. We then tried to go to university to study the Romance languages. But it was not what we expected, particularly the atmosphere, and also the course of study was not at all what we desired. We left after 3 months.
Waiting for the next study year, we had a lot of time, so we started drawing, and came to love it. The idea was to find work in illustration or graphic design and so on, not to start as an artist. This changed with time and with art school group visits to exhibitions and museums.
ON: And when you arrived at art school, what was it like? What was the vibe?
SE: I discovered a lot at school with my teachers. We travelled a lot, visiting museums and exhibitions; there was a real exchange about what we were seeing. The teachers had ten, twenty, or thirty years of experience. Marthe Wéry and Alain Géronnez were some of those atelier teachers; they were very important – amazing artists and amazing teachers. All of us in my generation at that school had very good teachers, including the theoreticians; they were sensible, curious, and inspiring.
ON: At school, what sort of artist did you want to be? Did you have an idol?
SE: At first, I was painting. At our school, Abstract Expressionism was very in fashion in the eighties – Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman. During the first year, one of the studio teachers who was coming once a week said, "You are following them. It’s not you. You can’t only follow." It was provocative, not aggressive. I needed to resist at that moment in one way or another, to show that there was something from my specific sensibility in my painting technique.
During the next two years of my studies, I entered totally into the world of the notebook. When I started making very small things with pieces of paper in my notebooks, I realised something was already there, because I had done it before, when I was much younger. But my methods had changed because of new experiences and having reflected on my approach, and I remember one day saying to myself, "I desire to do this all my life."
ON: Did you feel there was something particular you needed to say through this work?
SE: No, not something to "say" exactly. But I was very engaged as a woman. I wanted to show, to those who wanted to see it, that I will make things following my sensibility, as sincerely as possible. Even if it is not the best way to be visible, I didn’t care. I wanted to affirm that part of me. I started like that, and I never changed.
ON: Good on you! Outside of school, what shows and artists were influencing you around this period?
SE: There were so many!
The Van Abbemuseum was very important; there we saw Dan Graham, Hanne Darboven, and Donald Judd. The Dutch, Swiss, and German museums were also influential, such as the new Museum Abteiberg and the Halle für Neue Kunst. There was Agnolo Bronzino at the National Gallery in London, the mosaics of Ravenna and elsewhere, and the frescoes by Giotto.
Even without having travelled to New York, I was impressed by many American women artists. First, an older generation, with Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse, and then those emerging in the eighties, such as Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, and Sherrie Levine. I was much more attracted to these artists than to Barbara Kruger; even though she is a great artist, her way of addressing things didn’t touch me in the same way.
I was, and still am, attracted to European women artists too: Hanne Darboven, Rosemarie Trockel…
And then there are also Dan Graham, Richard Tuttle, Lawrence Weiner, Gordon Matta-Clark, and the twentieth-century movements like Constructivism, Dada, and the Surrealists, both the women and men associated with them
I was lucky that, having decided to work with images – and very soon after also with words – I only discovered the work of John Baldessari and Richard Prince at the end of the eighties. Although I felt their approaches were close to my own way of treating images, my use of montage was already there before I saw their shows.
At the time, I thought I should perhaps be concerned about this proximity, but it was not a dramatic consideration. It is good to see it, but maybe better to see it after you have already started on your own path. You begin with the thought that you are perhaps alone in the world in your viewpoint, and later you realise you are not at all. The world is full of people creating before and around you. It is good news; you simply have to continue with that knowledge, which also guides you to define yourself more precisely.
ON: What did it feel like entering the new decade?
SE: I was never a fan of very big, very expensive, or very demonstrative work. In that sense, the ’80s were difficult for our generation. We were coming from the ’60s and ’70s with a certain hope, even if it had already been broken by so many wars. Then the ’80s arrived with their renewed celebration of money.
Our generation felt a bit lost with that new stream in art and in the other fields too. When the ’90s arrived, we hoped for change – something simpler, more contained, less proud about money.
ON: Did you associate that with Americanism?
SE: No, it was not especially American. It was Occidental – America and Europe. Like, “Stop moralising about the stock market. It constructs the world.” It existed before, but now it was celebrated. And that was not really hope for humanity.
ON: Did you want your early work to stand against that – to have its own morality?
SE: No. I never saw my work as directly criticising, like Kruger or Holzer, who do it with a will to persuade. For me, it was about resisting a system of, for example, "the bigger you make, the better it is."
The only clear declaration for me was about the feminine part of my work – the feminist part. Not as a fight, but as a will. I was trying not to be taken in by a more masculine system: to have to be powerful, to be all those kinds of things that men maybe don't want more than women.
There is a beautiful essay, Three Guineas, by Virginia Woolf. She says that maybe if we stopped teaching boys the art of war in our traditional education – the idea that they have to distinguish themselves through heroism – things could change. It is about what we do with the child. I don't want to stigmatise any sex because we know that starting with that, there’s a danger. But Woolf was very precise – we all have both parts. In Orlando, we are both. A man may let his feminine part take place, and a woman her masculine part; history is changing sex, I like that. That’s not duality. It's a.... Woolf says it better.
ON: It’s hard to beat Virginia Woolf.
SE: Yes, but it is not hard to read her. It is a relief. A hope, an act of peace. I love her.
ON: Were feminism and art things you discussed at school, with other students?
SE: Not so much with the other young women in the class, but with my teacher, Marthe Wéry, yes. She was a feminist. There was an exchange with her.
ON: I suppose that links quite nicely to the next question: were you part of a group of artists working around similar ideas? Was there a group who would go to the bar and have five beers and discuss…?
SE: No, not a group as in, “We are sharing the same ideas; we want to do something together.” Not really. We were exchanging with friends, of course. One of them told me, “You have to read Virginia Woolf.” But we can’t say it was a group. It was friends.
If I can say that I felt the image or ambience of a group, it was with my partner, Pierre Lauwers. We understood each other so much. We were really on the same road and helped each other a lot.
With our friends after art school, we tried to stay together through exchanges – not only with studio visits, but also exchanging about other subjects we were attracted to.
ON: For example?
SE: For example, I made a series of slides with fragments of text from Virginia Woolf to project on the wall during a session where friends were present. I asked them to read the passages. Afterwards, there was a discussion about why I chose those fragments and their thoughts about them.
Alain Géronnez very quickly became part of that company of friends. At one moment he said, "It's like a private joke."
ON: Since you mentioned privacy, would you say your work also carries a level of privacy more generally?
SE: Yes. There is a level of privacy. More privacy, maybe than intimacy. I share a lot. If you work with intimacy, it is not often to share – it is intimacy.
ON: It’s interesting. I’ve not thought of it before, the link between privacy and your work, they’re very close.
SE: Sometimes people saw my work as like an intimate book – a young girl or a woman writing a diary, in secret. But for me, the diary is not necessarily something so light or secret. For a lot of people, it is often their route into discovering the need to write fiction, poems, or essays.
ON: Were you always quite a private person?
SE: A very private person? No. I work with privacy, but I am not a private person. If you ask me questions about my life, I will tell you everything. In a way, I have no privacy.
But I work with something that turns around privacy. Like friendship, it can be privacy. Why do you love that friend and not another person? There is something private in that, like in love. I can say I love people in general, but in privacy, I will love some more.
I am not fascinated by the private in the sense of “forbidden to enter”. I am not attracted to that. Maybe there is no difference in English between “private” and “privacy.” In French, if I translate badly, “private” is something you do not share. “Privacy”, you can share. It is like an idea – something moving in your brain – and you can share it. If it is private, it becomes a right, like copyright. That is private. Privacy is not the same.
I prefer to talk about privacy rather than intimacy. I cannot share my intimacy so easily. My privacy, yes.
ON: Coming back to Brussels – what was the atmosphere there in the ’80s and ’90s?
SE: I don’t think Brussels was so different from other cities. I was born there, and I loved my city. I am more and more desperate about what it is becoming. The fact that it became the capital of Europe destroyed a lot of things. Back then, it was more of a city for people, even for people who were not rich. It had a more diverse social structure.
But a city is not isolated from the world. There were big nightmares everywhere – conflicts all around the world. In the ’80s, the atmosphere was heavy, with many fears, with AIDS which destroyed so many lives and freedoms, and there were many anti-nuclear demonstrations. I remember – at the start of the ’80s, a bit before art school – huge demonstrations against nuclear power and all the fears it was causing. That was the ambience of the ’80s – besides the money aspect, the end of many industries, and the rise in unemployment.
In the ’90s, at the beginning, there was a little hope that the ’80s were over. The spirit was turning back to something less about money, less about proving a desire for wealth. For example, the artist-run space Établissement d’en face started then. There was a desire for a different world, where value was not measured by money, for example.
In the ’90s, nothing changed in one day, but it slowly became quieter or more reflective. There was another spirit: “Maybe we have to think a bit about what we are doing”. Not that art changed completely – there were always wonderful old and new artists – but for me, and for people around me, there was hope.
ON: So what was your gallery, Galerie Greta Meert, like at that time?
SE: The gallery started in '88 as Galerie Meert Rihoux. We went to the openings because we were attracted by the artists exhibiting. It was a chance to see exhibitions in Brussels of very important artists. The first time we went, we didn't know Thomas Struth, which was normal; it was not possible for us to have seen his work before.
I met Greta Meert in our first group exhibition – three of us just out of school. It was in a small contemporary art centre linked to the Brussels art schools, and they had selected former students. That was in '89.
ON: The gallery’s early programme was filled with very well-known artists. The show before your first solo there was John Baldessari, the one before that, Donald Judd. Did you ever feel pressure?
SE: On me? No. I felt very lucky. Lucky to be in that gallery, and lucky to see those exhibitions and meet such people. All these great artists – they were generous. None of them ever pushed me back or behaved in a rejecting way.
AO: Looking back to even before you started exhibiting at Greta Meert, there are so many links to collage when looking over your influences. Could you say a bit more about how it first emerged in your practice?
SE: It was because of paper. I was a painter, but even in painting, I could not work without the idea of montage.
I am the daughter of an artist for whom gesture was very important. I am not against gesture, but I felt my hand was not mine. I was naturally influenced by my father’s way of working as a sculptor and as someone who drew. So, to get out of that state of telling myself, “I can’t let my hand go, because it will not be my gesture,” I decided to establish rules: “I will take that piece of wood, cut it there, put it there, then paint.” It was always a process – putting things together, a montage, unfolding in different moments.
In the studio we rented, there were magazines, like the ones that come through the letterbox. I took the paper and started to use it. At first, it was a material I could put on a painting. I made works where I erased part of the printed image. Then I started with the notebook. It was always with the idea of a project for a painting, but I began using the notebook for cut-out objects – each page, one object. At first, very formally: round shapes, lines, things that looked like lines.
Through that attention to what was on the paper, there was a first click. I saw an image – not just an object – that was really mine. It was like a shock: "I want to take this image, this memory". But the notebook was not a painting. I could not give it to people – it would be destroyed through the turning of pages, the manipulating of it. So I began to transfer the image. I took it, placed it on wood, marked with tape what I wanted to keep, and painted around it to make the precise cut. That is how it started.
Then I began looking at images differently. Always with rules. I was – and still am – working with rules: "Take from here to here. It is forbidden to take more”, “Don't lie with your process. If you don't find it, change the process." I started making montages of two images, first in colour, later in black and white. That shift was practical: in reproduction, the colour dots became more visible than the image itself. I wanted people to look at the image, not the dots – even if later people remarked on the dots and then the dots took on their importance.
After a few years of reproducing the double images using photography onto metal, having started on wood, I felt it was enough. When something becomes too easy, you have to change the rules. You know it like the back of your hand. Then you must change. So I decided to work only with one piece of an image, a cut image. The montage was made at the moment of the photographic print, with a mask on the trajectory of the light.
At the same time, even if I wasn't using it yet in reproduction, from the late 80s, I started to make montages of text. At the start, it was like a conversation, taking from what people were saying to me about my work. And I was answering, in a way. I was dreaming of writing. The montage – always the cut and montage of fragments of sentences – was a way of trying to write something, maybe obscure, but it was a way for me. It is still a way for me.
ON: When you started making your works of the late 80s and the ’90s – like those black-and-white ones – did your father come around to them after earlier being unsure about your route? Did he like them?
SE: Yes, yes. My parents bought a work at my first exhibition at the gallery. They bought a work that was destroyed because he put it near his studio. He was using chemical things, and my black and white started to be purple!
But my father was always collecting images, and his father was also collecting images. My grandfather was even collecting magazines – he was classifying them by subject: botany, zoology…
ON: And coming back to the works in the exhibition – which magazines are they from? Are any from Life?
SE: No, no, old issues of Life were among the magazines I bought, but I did not use them much. I was very disturbed by them – the way they put drama on the first page, someone falling from a burning building, things like that.
The magazines I used were often scientific or general knowledge magazines for all types and generations of audience, made to diffuse knowledge to as many people as possible. I also had European magazines and Soviet magazines, as a kind of balance. In the ’80s, before the end of the Soviet Union, it felt important.
For me, it was necessary to create a balance between different kinds of propaganda, because the image is used that way, of course. It also depended on what I found in second-hand bookshops. Sometimes there were many copies of Popular Mechanics or Système D, explaining how to build a box or repair something. There was also a magazine called Lecture pour Tous – not only about reading, but also about making knowledge accessible to everyone.
It was a bit like the start of television. Just after the Second World War, in Europe at least – in France, Belgium, England – there was a real desire to share knowledge and culture. Magazines were like that at their start.
AO: It's interesting hearing you talk about Life magazine and how jarring these pictures were. I also wondered if there was a little bit of anxiety about your own use of images and wanting to protect these images from being exploited in the way they were maybe in the '80s?
SE: I don't think I am working with images at the level to be able to give them another future than exploitation. I'm afraid I'm no more able to do that than anybody else. But what I want for my image is that if I have any doubt about myself, about what I see in it, I can't use it. But of course, if somebody comes to me and says, "But I see this in your image!", each look and each person is different.
ON: Within the printed leporello we’re preparing, we’re including a photograph, taken in your flat, showing your mother’s portrait, a Hanne Darboven poster, and one of your works, all together as you’ve installed them above your bedroom sideboard. Could you speak a little about that image and how you see the connection between them?
SE: My apartment is also my studio. Before, I had a huge studio and lived beside it. At the start, when I was living here, there was none of my work on the walls, because I did not want to live with my work when I was eating or resting.
Then a group of people asked to visit my studio. I said, “My studio is my kitchen. It’s not so big, but okay.” I realised everything was in boxes. I could not take everything out, so I had to put some works on the wall, and I decided to place the photograph on the wooden bibliothèque.
At that moment, the Hanne Darboven exhibition poster was already there. The portrait of my mother was also already there. I simply put things where there was space. Then I realised that the young woman in my cut-out looks like my mother – maybe even from the same time when my mother was drawn by her cousin. The girl in my image was photographed in her bed, reading.
Often, when I am in front of an image – maybe it comes from my animism – I feel the person. I feel she was there. She is there. When I look at my mother’s portrait, she is there.
Because Hanne Darboven was also like a mother in art to me, her presence there felt like a beautiful sign. I once had a conversation with my mother when I was a young art student. My parents realised I was taking another road than my father. He was a little disappointed; my mother wanted to understand. She saw all the books by Hanne Darboven in my apartment and asked, “Why do you love that?”
My mother came from the German part of Switzerland. I told her that when my grandmother (her mother) wrote to me for my birthday, the card had a flower or a bird on the front – that was the image. But when I opened it and read it, the Swiss-German writing inside was also an image for me because I did not speak the language. Except for "Liebe Sylvie," I understood almost nothing. It was an image. My mother had to be the translator.
For many Germanic people of that generation, handwriting was very strict, and if you compare my mother’s writing, my grandmother’s writing, and the rhythm of Hanne Darboven’s lines, it is very close – so to me, it was the same image. When I explained that to my mother, she looked again at the book and said, “Oh yes, I understand perfectly where your sensibility is.”
That is why they are together. Afterwards, I was not able to remove the works. It stayed like that.
That is why I say it is maybe also an installation – maybe one day it could be, though I don’t think so. It is better if it remains an image. In my apartment, it is an installation. I will never change it, if possible. To exhibit it would be another level. We were speaking about privacy. It is another level.
ON: You have very close and sensitive relationships with others – your parents, Alain, Pierre... How does that connect with the animism you mentioned about feeling in relation to the works? Do you feel a similar closeness to the works themselves?
SE: Yes – not as a friend or a lover, of course, not like a human relationship. But I feel the presence of people. Maybe that’s why I am a little animist. I see a soul through the image, in the image.
Now, because I don’t find magazines old enough anymore – time changes – it’s not so easy. I don’t want to go on the internet for that. I don’t have the same connection to it. I love cinema, but I don’t love the screen of the internet – how it appears. Even if I discover many things thanks to it, I cannot find my way there. Maybe one day I will.
When I look at the semi-anonymous images – a woman presenting something, a man showing something – I don’t love people because they are working; I love the devotion they put into their work. That is why I found many images in those situations. I was afraid of the face, also because of recognition. I did not want to disturb anybody. I did not want to take something that could not become mine. I was careful not to show a real portrait, but it was not possible to completely deny the presence of someone.
AO: There are often different framings in your work – hands, or only parts of a body. But in the selection for the exhibition, we noticed many women in sideways profile, looking down, working. It immediately made me think of you – your posture, looking attentively into a book or a magazine. We were curious what you think about this pattern that emerged.
SE: I think it comes from what I saw as a child and what I heard. I saw how my father took images, family films, Super 8, how he was shooting.
AO: And to go back to what we already discussed, there is that sense of being connected to the figures, and wanting to protect them from meanings you might not want to impose.
SE: Yes, yes. I am afraid they will mean something I really do not want. So I am attentive. But I am not the master of the image. Sometimes I can lose my desire. That is why I need my close friends – Pierre, for example – I need their persuasion, their eye. If I show them a project, I need to know what they see.
AO: Having started our chat back in the '80s, we also wanted to touch on the Venice Biennale period of the early 2000s, seeing as the works in the show go up until this moment. Representing Belgium, how did you experience the biennale? Was there a shared generosity between artists, like the relationships you described at Greta Meert before? Or was there more pressure?
SE: I was sharing the Belgian pavilion with Valérie Mannaerts, at the invitation of and curated by Thierry de Duve. There was also a whole group of friends and collaborators who supported us. The pressure was a mix. There was the excitement of the adventure – to be there with another artist, with that curator, the group. But it was also mixed with aggressiveness. The pavilion was called “bad”, “not good”. It wasn’t even precise criticism. It was never clear, or it was more general – "Not the type of exhibition or works for a Biennale”.
We know it was partly because we were not “spectacular”, as Thierry de Duve said. I loved the pavilion, even surrounded by other artists who were much more spectacular than we were. So that question – whether it was “good for a Biennale” – felt strange to me.
ON: Did you also ever feel it was, “They don’t like it because it’s all women”? It was also the first all-female Belgium pavilion.
SE: We tried not to think that, but at some point, yes. But not from everyone.
But because you have friends, because you have people who trust you, your resistance is not affected. I never thought, "I will not work anymore".
ON: And then maybe we can wrap up our chat with a more jolly question - if you could write a book, what book would you write?
SE: Oh, if possible, the same as Virginia Woolf. She’s my favourite. At the same time, she led me to so many other writers – like Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Katherine Mansfield, and also men. She was not only focused on women, even if she focused a lot on women writers because it was necessary at her time, with many of them being unknown. But also many other writers, not just English and not just women.
ON: Okay, it’s now about half past ten. We've talked a lot, and I think it's great. Shall we leave it here for the moment?
SE: Sounds good.