(translated from French)
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Goliarda: How would you describe Pierre, and what memories do you have of him as a student?
Georges Rey: I can note three aspects of him that seem interesting to me. First, his discretion. He's a discreet character, he never puts himself forward despite the fact that he's an important element in the group. He's very discreet, but he has worked with a lot of artists. He's part of a group and I think he's accepted because he has a lot of ideas. He's someone who never stops imagining things. In fact, in the Jacuzzi at the beginning of the video I made – Les Enfants gâtés de l'art – he gets interrupted, but even so, he has an impish [espiègle] side to him; he accepts being cut off, but for him it changes nothing, he keeps talking.
There's also, after the discretion, a playful side to him. He wants to get people taking part. For example, the trampoline piece where he invites the public to jump and try to catch objects hanging from the ceiling. He invents games, reactivates characters and imagines set-ups that are interactive, popular and horizontal, like the questionings of the public where the public intervenes in the works. There's no hierarchy between the artists, the visitors and the art professionals. There, he's very, very close to Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics.
In addition, what's interesting is that he's always calling the norms of art into question. He's always inventing set-ups that disturb the order of contemporary art a bit; well, of the contemporary art of his time. I think he still does that.
There's a third aspect: I find that he resembles the Buddha. The image where he's sitting on a globe. He's a bit of a thinker and a modest guide. He does nothing but imagine set-ups. I think the others (Philippe Parreno and Philippe Perrin) followed him a great deal in what he proposed. He has an omniscient, visionary posture. He has an overall vision and plays with things much bigger than himself.
Goliarda: How would you describe your way of teaching?
GR: It was particular. The classes lasted four hours. I would project an image onto the wall and the students had to speak about that image. They had to bring elements to the class themselves. It lasted about an hour, and I would start from what they said in order to tell the artist's story.
For example, the best moment was with Mondrian. After an hour, there's someone who says: "But they look like prison bars, those black bars of Mondrian's." And in fact it was true, since he was under the yoke of Calvinist culture and when he went to New York, he got rid of the bars. There, you could sense a great liberation.
I also did another experiment: I had them listen to Wagner's La mort d'Isolde. It's in German. I'd asked them what they had felt, what had made an impression on them. And what was curious is that their responses were exactly what Isolde says. So I tried to arrange it so that they were the ones determining things. Me, obviously, I was the teacher so I had to tell them something, and so afterwards, for Mondrian, I'd give a class on him but with the additions of what they'd said.
I wanted not to be there only to say things, but for us to be there to live the lessons together. And from the moment they took part, they were involved in the class. It was Pierre Joseph who, in a magazine, said that he had liked the "cours lumineux". For example, a class I'd given on Joseph Kosuth, I'd said in conclusion that Kosuth had a "crystal brain". Which is to say that in fact there was no barrier anywhere. When you put a glass against a wall, it's glass against a wall. The One and Three Chairs, it's the same. This conceptual art of Kosuth's means that he sets up a mechanism that exists by itself, and he himself has nothing to do with it. He manages to be completely detached, almost, from what he does. Me, I couldn't believe having got there, and it's thanks to the students that I arrived at that conclusion. There you go, that was it, my classes.
Goliarda: What memories do you have of Pierre and his friends' way of working together, of the collective dynamic that characterised them?
GR: There's an anecdote – at the Villa Arson, I had a flat that was next to Joseph, Perrin and Parreno's. They talked all night. Non-stop, they were talking about their projects, calling art into question, imagining other things. It was quite extraordinary. They were constantly in action.
Even in the gallery, the idea of that exhibition, Les Ateliers du Paradise, was the congés payés. They stayed and lived for a month in the gallery, as if they were on paid holiday. And since they were constantly there, sometimes they'd go to the beach and they'd put on the door: "Come and join us at the beach." They considered people as friends. That was extraordinary.
Goliarda: Do you perceive a political dimension in their approach to collaboration?
GR: Me, I didn't feel it, but maybe it existed. The politics, that was the fact when they announced the project as being the congés payés. There, there was a political side to it all the same. Then again, when they tell how they took the title, which was similiar to a nightclub in Monaco, that wasn't very political. At the time, I find people weren't politicised at all. The students, unlike now where in all the schools they're all politicised, at the time, they weren't, in Nice or anywhere else.
Goliarda: Do you perceive links between your work — or that of your colleague Ange Leccia — and Pierre's practice at that time?
GR: Them, they were very, very close to Ange Leccia. What Ange Leccia put forward, they adopted. For example, Ange Leccia had made a work about the Top 50. Which is to say the slightly star side of it, what everyone likes, what you have to be looking at at a given moment. That's what Ange was showing, and them, they were very close to that. It impressed them a great deal.
But I don't think they knew my work. I never showed it at the school. I was a teacher of general culture, I wasn't an artist. I never talked about what I did myself. Maybe that was a mistake, but I always talked about others and never about myself. I regret it now, but there we are…
Goliarda: How would you describe the relationship you had with your students?
GR: The relationship I had with the students didn't seem to me to be of the order of teacher to pupil. The relationship I have with Pierre Joseph now is the same as the one I had at the school. For me, it's a human relationship. There's no authority, there aren't people who are "better" than another. We were equals.