Goliarda

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Goliarda: Do you remember your first meeting with Pierre?

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: I met Pierre at the Beaux-Arts in Grenoble, and that was already in, I think, '84, or something like that.

I remember very clearly that the first thing that impressed me (also because I really liked that sort of music) – I don't know whether he still considers it a work or not – but in any case, it was that experiment with a speaker and the track Pop Corn by Hot Butter (1972). When the music is played, it produces waves, it goes ‘pop pop’. And so, I remember (though I think, afterwards, maybe it's a false memory, that's possible too), that on the part of a speaker that puts out the sound, he had put popcorn kernels, so the kernels jumped with the sound of the track.

We talked a lot because he's someone very cerebral. That's my memory, and that's what he still is. Someone cerebral. And I think, maybe compared to Philippe Parreno and me (the three of us were at the same art school at the same time), I think he was also very minimalist and radical. That is, with a force of thought and a precision. I think that's what struck me.

That's my first precise memory of him – maybe at the Beaux-Arts I'd come across him before, but that's when I approached him, and he became someone who intrigued me. It really was around that work.


Goliarda: What did Pierre's work represent, in your eyes, at that time?

DGF: To begin with, I think it's always very particular, at least for me, when you know each other that young, because you really see the work appear. So that, already, creates a particular fascination.

I have that experience above all with Pierre and Philippe. That closeness of having seen the beginning, and that luck of seeing right up to now. So that gives me a particular attention. I have a particular wonder for the Personnages à réactiver, I find it really a very beautiful invention.

What I like a lot about his work is that it's almost always quite dry. That is, at the minimum, as close as possible to the thing. That, I think, is a very strong quality: having such precision and also building works out of notions like memory, or notions that aren't necessarily… aesthetic – mapped as artistic.

There's nothing tied, I think, to the idea of impressing, or of pulling off a feat. And so, there's a force of resistance. Keeping a radicality across the years, on works that don't unfold into repetition or into excess, which can happen with artists after 20 or 30 years: either using virtuosity, or using repetition, or overdoing it. I don't have that feeling. And that, I think, is a quality: keeping a force of resistance like that. It's something that impresses me.

And I think that's his strength. It's also something that can isolate him a bit. He's maybe closer to a philosopher. It's an almost philosophical practice that goes through tools and visual forms, but which seems to me very philosophical.


Goliarda: How did you perceive Pierre's role within the group and in your collaborative work?

DGF: I admit I've never conceptualised that. For me, Pierre is Pierre, with his character. I think I'm not much of a psychologist, in fact. Anyway, I think what was good about how we worked is that we'd found a way for each of us to manage to exist in their own way. And that, I find, was already quite particular because that's always the complexity of the collective. Does everyone agree on one idea? That's a bit like when we did Vidéozone. There, we do finally find a common form. In the same way, I couldn't say for Bernard Joisten and Philippe Parreno either. What does each one bring that's more particular? Apart from the fact of being their own specificity?


Goliarda: What did you talk about outside of art – literary, television or musical references?

DGF: For example, I remember the Nirvana cover, the first Nirvana record. Our magazines, they were i-D and The Face. That was really the base, that's what we looked at a lot. Then, I think Pierre and Philippe were more MTV than me. I don't really have memories of discussions about literature with Pierre. Maybe I've forgotten them, that's possible. It's not what's stayed with me... Rather discussions about images. Photography, images, where images come from... A lot of things about images, but not necessarily the sacred images of mainstream art history. All images.

It was before the Internet, don't forget. It was only just starting, we barely had access to computers. The collective project Hyper Hyper, what's funny is that there were already a few prefigurations of hypertext. There are files, it adopted the beginnings of a computer aesthetic.


Goliarda: What was your relationship to money?

DGF: We didn't have any! We were really broke. I think up until the mid-90s it was really hard. We really lived on very little. None of us was wealthy. We were all middle class, and we all had to do jobs: graphic design, gallery invigilator...

I still remember when we were in Vienna in '91, we really were counting. There weren't yet, I think, credit cards; we waited to get our ‘per diem’. We were really broke. Until I started being a teacher in Bordeaux, in '93 or '94, which stabilised me a bit. Honestly, the relationship with money is that we were broke. There are no other words.


Goliarda: How would you situate Pierre's work and the group's in relation to previous generations?

DGF: To begin with, in Grenoble we were in a particular context. It was a city with a whole scientific campus. And our references (and that's what united us when we did those collective projects) were more scientific, cinematographic, the magazines... We didn't situate ourselves at all in relation to art history. And that, I think, was at once specific to Grenoble, because it was a ‘modern’ city, in quotation marks. I don't know if the 90s were a reaction to all that 80s painting. It's a particular time all the same, that period before the year 2000.

It's a time where, at once, I think, we were in the 90s, there's a bit of a return of the 70s, that is, in the experimental dimension, and at the same time a rejection of the 80s. We were arriving into a situation that already seemed very institutionally frozen, and we had to invent our tools. So, for example, the magazines. Me, I was in the group that did Purple, and exhibitions like L'Hiver de l'amour, and then at the same time, there was Traffic at the CAPC and Documents.

We tried to create our spaces. Le Consortium, at the start, wasn't interested at all. In fact, at the start, there are actually a certain number of older artists who thought we were really just messing around, that it was very superficial.

Like that sport that Pierre and Philippe had invented, Try Snaking. I think loads of older artists found that totally superficial. And there were quite a lot of curators who were of the same opinion too. It was a bit of a paradigm shift when, in '94 or '95, Le Consortium started showing our generation. Of course, Éric Troncy and Nicolas Bourriaud at the Villa Arson in No Man's Time, and obviously Air de Paris. But you mustn't think that straight away everyone thought it was great. On the contrary. We were really an irritation. And it's interesting to keep that feeling of something that appears and irritates, because it doesn't work the same way, because these are other references, because it isn't at all constructed within the mainstream genealogy of art history.


Goliarda: How did you perceive the group and Pierre's work in relation to the changes and social movements of the 1990s? Was that something you had in mind?

DGF: I think that, since we were really inside it, it's very difficult... I also think (and this is something I see now) that there was an artistic radicality, that's for sure. That is, works that aren't necessarily attractive to a basic collector.

But politically, I think the notion of radicality has completely changed in 30 years. And the relation to the political too. I think we'd had the luck to live with the political gains that came from our parents. Apart from the fact that we occupied the school to get a second cycle, I'd say in hindsight that we were politicised in our artistic radicality, but that we weren't politicised socially.

Then, little by little, maybe certain works of Pierre's more than others contain a form of political questioning, that's for sure. But our way of being political was, I'd say, 100% artistic and not socially articulated. For example, I had an admiration for Group Material (which Félix González-Torres and Julie Ault were part of), and there it was political in another way entirely. I'd find it hard to say we had a political radicality in the sense we understand it now. But on the other hand, I'm convinced there was an artistic radicality. In the aesthetic, in the way of thinking the work, it's a radicality, but it isn't in the sense of being connected to forms of action or activism.

Maybe Ozone was collectively our most political work, because there was an ecological and reflective dimension, at that time not yet very common. We were in our artistic world. Our most radical thoughts concerned the exhibition and the place of spectators. It's all of that, really, that produced what Nicolas Bourriaud called ‘relational aesthetics’.


Goliarda: Looking back, what do you think of that position?

DGF: When I think of Pierre, I think of Jacques Rancière. I think of that relation to ‘who teaches us what?’ or ‘how do we learn?’. But also to the circulation of signs, and to the fact of not having ‘high’ or ‘low’ culture. Of really being in something very horizontal.

Ads, for example, when I think of the little Kodak children... they appear just like that, and there, there's a new way of bursting in. For us, that was very political, because we had the impression of really having to fight against a whole set of works. We had the impression of doing something different. But I have the impression that in our radicality there was also a ‘blind spot’. In fact, it's almost one of the things that interests me most about those 90s: what was radicality for us at that moment? What, conversely, did we not see? Where did we draw the line?

For example, when I see 90s artists for whom the body is very present... I always see us, a bit, as almost prudish people. Sexualities weren't present. The body was fairly invisible... Anyway, not at all like other artists who went full tilt into all that. There's always a distancing. I think we weren't really conscious of it, that we were in fact very cautious on certain subjects. To look at everything that wasn't there can also offer leads.