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Goliarda: Do you remember meeting Pierre for the first time?
Liam Gillick: When I first met him, he was very clearly one of the strongest and most vocal people – rejecting certain forms of art. That was just his thing at the time.
I remember talking to him about a work I was doing, and he said, "Why would you do something that people already know?" Which was quite a strong thing to say. We always had a friendly relationship, but it was a quite aggressive response, said with a smile. It was also an anti-Anglo-Saxon statement, meaning against the perceived tendency within conceptual art to point out the obvious, or point towards things, nominate things in the wild and claim them by just showing them to you. I think he was really against that.
He could be incredibly evasive and wry. He was sceptical about almost anything that people were doing, which could be a kind of shyness. I know shy people involved in art who can be complex, because it comes across as a sort of scepticism of all other art.
My abiding memory is often being somewhere and looking around and realising Pierre's standing fifty metres away, smiling to himself, watching – and not necessarily right in the midst of something.
Goliarda: How would you describe Pierre's approach to his practice, and to the world around him?
LG: He always carried the idea that he may have been exposed to theory, or exposed to ideas, or exposed to a complex substructure of political consciousness. He carried it very lightly. He did not constantly go on about it, and thereby he was often acting like a kind of thread, or a ligament, between other people, because he would seem to be wandering between discourses without wanting to fix precisely on anything that would restrict or pin down his activity.
So whereas other people might turn to humour, or architecture, or documentary-making, or feelings or something like that, he was sceptical of anything that would lock or locate his work in a way where you could say the intentions and the results were clear.
And I think I borrowed that – the idea that you should avoid balancing intentions and results. I started to use that terminology as a critique of certain things I knew from, say, Britain, that I found beautiful and elegant, but not that interesting in the end. Where the intention to do something ends up with the intended results. I felt that Pierre was activating a series of potentials without knowing the results. Which is quite dangerous, because people want artists to be a bit more structurally clear.
And it became really evident that Pierre and certain other people, like Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe Parreno and whatnot, were using cinema as a grounding point, as a source for architecture, society, structures, relationships. There's not much really going on at that point that would then become thought of as relational aesthetics. It's actually much more about the space of the exhibition as a reactivated site where characters can appear. It's cinematic.
Goliarda: How did you end up going to Nice, and what role did Pierre seem to play in the group when you arrived?
LG: I knew about the gallery already, as you do when you're 25 or something. You just know things. You just have a feeling, you can sense that this is all right. There was a connection to Esther Schipper in Cologne – who had gone to the Magasin curatorial programme with Florence Bonnefous and Eduoard Merino and Dominique. And Angela Bulloch in London would have known about it.
And I got a card to go to an exhibition called Les Ateliers du Paradise at Air de Paris, and I met Amanda Jenks at a party or something, who had a car, and I asked if she felt like driving to the south of France, which she did.
So we drove to the south of France from London, and we nearly died turning off the Promenade des Anglais into the old town. Amanda looked the wrong way after a thousand miles of driving. She looked left instead of right, and I actually pulled the handbrake to stop our car pulling into the traffic racing down around the bend from the port.
Pierre was the person I spoke to the most at the beginning – he was actually the most fluent in English, which helped. My French has improved a great deal, but it was pretty rough then. I could understand a little bit, but he was very open to having conversations.
He was definitely curious about the arrival of this person who had sort of turned up, and my intention was to write about the project. We talked immediately about things, and there was no clear-cut viewer/public/artist/event relationship, because the whole feeling around Air de Paris was this kind of permanent informality, which meant that the roles were somewhat blurred, even if they were nominally clear – there's the dealers, the critic, the artist, the collectors, whatnot. There was a fluidity around how people were playing with roles that was very striking, and actually matched my desires. So turning up as an artist who was starting to write was seen as a positive, not as a danger or a scariness. In Britain at that time, it was not good to be doing too many things. It was suspicious, a bit continental.
I would say that Pierre was my first guide to the exhibition they were doing together. He was the first person really to try to mediate it to these outsiders, in a way, alongside Florence and Édouard. He was provocative in the sense of intellectually provocative. You know, like: here's a new person, I want to see where they're coming from, and this is what we're doing.
And at that time, the collaborative sensibility that had been happening, or was beginning to happen, between him and Bernard Joisten and Philippe and other people – it was incredibly interesting, because it seemed different to where I came from, from London, where everyone had been working hard to be clear about who they were and how separate they were from each other.
In theory, this was exactly what I'd been looking for, because I could hide within the group, which is something that I found useful, because I wasn't completely clear what I wanted to try and do. So Pierre was a good ally in this sense of suspension of clarity – and the idea of almost spending a life going and watching everything just go off.
Some of this explains why Pierre's work doesn't always fit neatly into the art context. I wouldn't have the patience to be him, I couldn't do it. The impression I got from him at the beginning, those touches of arrogance or challenge – I think he's been proved right over time that – he was right.
Goliarda: How do you think the institutional context in France shaped the kind of work he and the others were making, compared to what you knew from Britain?
LG: He was trying to create a series of provocations within a context in France where just before all of this, there'd been this idea that there's no French art, and there cannot be any French art.
There's an edition of a magazine called Public from 1989, which was ironically titled There Is No "French Art", and it had work by a load of people who were the only French artists at the time in my opinion, and they're doing sort of postmodern, almost commodity art, a bit more sophisticated than that. But then suddenly you have this sudden breakthrough, or at least a challenge, and that challenge is happening at some level among a small group of younger French artists. I only just realised that Bernard Joisten, Pierre Joseph and Philippe Parreno were part of that issue. Alongside Ange Leccia, Philippe Thomas and the others. That was an important document for me – it means I must have been exposed to Pierre at some level before meeting for the first time.
This challenge was also happening in regard to institutions, because institutions in France were really sclerotic. Directors were brittle, and they seemed arrogant, and ripe for being played with. And that's where we found our common ground. In Britain, the tradition of the amateur director – where you weren't even sure if they had a degree, and didn't seem to understand much about art. France was different. It was a place of French directors, and it was hard to talk to them, and sometimes impossible to deal with them. Since then I have realised a lot of them were fighting to defend their autonomy but they would never be able to do that alone.
So a lot of Pierre's work has to be looked at through the lens of trying to disrupt the stability of the institution. That first big show we were all in at the Villa Arson in 1991, No Man's Time, a lot of things Pierre did were to poke and prod at Christian Bernard, who was the director and co-curator, and seemed more than happy to play the game. There was a whole thing going on there too with a Swiss artist named Axel Huber who was the exhibition organiser at the Villa Arson, which meant there were a lot of German and Austrian artists coming through. Kippenberger would be there, Franz West. I met all these people in Nice, lots of people met there. I always liked that this all happened in the south of France.
But what Pierre and the other young French artists and the young co-curators of No Man's Time, Bourriaud and Troncy, were doing at that point, when I turned up, was totally different from these older artists. It had none of that post-Adorno understanding of art as basically an expression of failure – no poetry after Auschwitz. Or the sense that the best art you can make just shows how impossible it is to make art. Pierre and Philippe and Dominique just jumped straight beyond that, using cinematic thinking – we're making an exhibition in real time – going beyond that question of art as a failed object in the face of the unimaginable.
So the artwork as an autonomous object in itself becomes less important. And I think what Pierre was doing at that point was some of the most difficult art to consume, or to read through a standard form. If you could say roughly, Dominique was making installations – it's an installation, there's a room, the light's controlled, there's stuff in there, and it's an experience. Phillipe was putting together objects as narrative. And I'm basically at that point holding back and really working on documentary thinking. Pierre – you never really knew what he was going to do, and it continues to keep shifting in terms of its stability.
So what you have to deal with today is the fact that everything he's doing, it's a bit cagey – meaning I think he's holding back a lot, he's not doing everything that he's saying, and he's also deploying things in the gaps between other things. So that's always really hard to get across in an exhibition.
Goliarda: How would you describe the positioning of Pierre's work?
LG: Despite what I just said. I think his work, at the beginning, is sometimes quite clear. The gesture is quite clear, because it exists within a given context that allows it to have clarity in context. And then it starts to dissipate as time passes, and it's as if he's running in reverse. So as time goes on, the less clear his work becomes. It's supposed to be the other way around. You acquire a style, and you develop, and you have a habitual practice. And it's true, there are certain threads in the work that you could analyse and say, "Okay, this is how it is." But to some extent he has retained this feeling of being just out of reach, because that is the quality of his work. And there are potential problems in that, but I think in the long term it gives it this elusive quality, which is actually a positive thing.
Especially when right now, for example, you get these repeated waves and movements in art – and I'm not talking about economically – but you get these false starts in art all the time, where people say, okay, we've got it, there's going to be this, and then it's like, oh, hang on a second, we've got another wave coming along. And there's a lot of separation as well, of siloing of different types and practices and things.
When we were doing those shows, what you've got to remember is there'd often be older people around who we viewed as allies. There'd be Allen Ruppersberg, who was probably only 40, but seemed infinitely older than us. Franz West again – I did a show with Franz in '92 where we did one each in two adjacent apartments in Nice. But that isn't in the current record of that time, very little of that promiscuity is there. But the same with Pierre, you know, he had definite contacts with older people. We were very conscious of playing with time rather than anything else. Occupying time rather than space as a form of resistance.
By that point, I'd already met Lawrence Weiner, John Baldessari, and worked with some of these people. They were only 45 or something, but they spent a lot of time, pretty much reminiscing and appearing nostalgic to me, because that's what they did – it was like being with my parents, same generation. People used to spend a lot of time double-checking that the past was what they thought it had been, and playing around with origin stories. The big breaks that happened in the 1960s seemed to require endless verification.
So the point about this is – with Pierre and some other artists from around then – is there's no origin, there's no singular point. Maybe there is one somewhere, but it didn't feel like it. And the question might be for us, who stops first, not who started first. If you spent any time with Lawrence Weiner in the late '80s, the facts he would recount were always about who did what first, and I used to say to him, yeah, but the problem with my generation is that the thing is, it's going to be the other way around, because we don't get together and double-check where we all began.
And maybe that changes now, maybe people look at time differently. But I think this time aspect, it would have affected the way Pierre began, because he would be very conscious of these figures in France who were respected but somewhat overlooked by the mainstream and were overshadowed by 1968 – culturally, politically and socially.
Goliarda: How do you see his work in connection to the late '80s, '90s – what was going on politically, culturally, musically, everything in the air?
LG: It was very, very connected to the lived world in general, but with a wink or a self-consciousness. There was a decision to be in the south of France, but not Marseille. Marseille was always a kind of romantic place; Nice had a history of artists but was a kind of static, right-wing town at some level.
I was mainly in London or in Cologne, and in Cologne, which is my other big influence, it was totally different. Artists might go to their studio in their good English or Italian shoes, and they might make the shittiest painting that you could imagine, and then go to a really good bar. In the Côte d'Azur, Pierre might just turn up wearing a red t-shirt and shorts with a new Walkman looking ready for the beach, and you'd literally just hang around and play video games. Or hang out at this place on the private beach in Nice, Castel Plage; normally you'd have to pay to go hang out there, but we didn't have to pay. Philippe Perrin made sure of that.
It was all about not paying, everything was about not paying. We're all going to meet at this hotel pool bar without paying, because we don't have to. It was all about living on the air endlessly, and engaging with the present. So if a bunch of people turned up and they claimed they didn't watch TV and only read books, or they hadn't seen the latest Disney cartoon or video game, then they were a bunch of pretentious losers, because they were not truly engaging with the dynamic changes in the culture of the 1990s.
And it's hard to imagine now, in a world where young people emerge surrounded by artists who have a way of dealing with the recent past or the present in some way – in terms of technology, identity and the reach of popular cultures. It was much less common to have someone dealing with programming, or virtual reality, video games, or just using it as content in their exhibitions. And it could seem, of course, just as superficial as it might today. The 1990s embrace of the contemporary was maybe equally stupid but it was a critique of a new distribution of leisure. It was done with an attitude, right? It was attitudinal and critical, done from a perspective that was a little Godard. You know, it's like you don't shy away from the American influence, you turn it – that affected me as well, a lot.
I did an exhibition ten years ago in Lithuania, at the CAC in Vilnius, titled At the Edge of Town, the Lights Are No Brighter Than They Are at the Centre. It was about those zones of ambiguity. A lot of terminology around the early 1990s was about zones. It was about playing with zones – being invited to play a game – How are you going to behave? What are you going to do? Are you participating? How do you know when the game is over? This was not a situation that really had much to do with the later Claire Bishop sort of Puritan-moralist critique of people turning up and all equally participating in some Habermasian village hall. Playing the game means – How do you walk down the street? How do you encounter a sign? How do you reflect the city in your own sunglasses? How do you refuse to operate within an art context which will only create hierarchies? Are there any hierarchies? This is all there in Pierre's work. It's all part of what he's doing.
But this leads to what Lawrence Weiner said to me around that time. It's like, "You're all sociologists, you're all anthropologists" and this for him was bad. This was a criticism, "Sociology is not art". And till his dying day, he was always concerned about the fact that we all had a tendency towards sociology. But at its hardest end, it's the great French influence – it's not all, you know, Althusser and Deleuze. The sociologists are really important. If you look at Pierre's work, sort of tried to look at it from above as laid out in some vast terrain of ideas, it's sociology, in a sense – advanced applied sociology, at some level, meaning it's analysing and presenting relationships. It's bringing surprising connections. It's sometimes educating, sometimes growing. It's doing all these things.
Goliarda: How do you see Pierre's relationship to documentation and criticism?
LG: These things are always biased by methodology. I think that the way things began, which is not to do with who did what first, makes the origin story that often pins down a narrative about art, or a period, very difficult.
I think part of the reason is that as the curatorial emerges in the 1990s, and as the critic becomes less distant, more intimate, and more connected to people, writing both for commercial things and outside – criticism becomes more promiscuous. The curator becomes the critical double of the artist, who then goes on a journey with them to try and get inside institutions and get things to happen.
What happened is that we all avoided our work being truly written about, in a weird way. So there's a lot of writing about what the work could be, should be, apparently is, but in fact there's very little writing about what it actually is – literally describing it. There's hardly any record. I worked for years with people just speculating on what my work was about, but hardly ever bothering to write about what had been left in the room.
Now, this gave us an extraordinary passageway, because we had gone beyond critique into a new series of collaborative relationships. This was the thing that me and Pierre and Philippe used to talk about – trying to do something that was non-critiquable. So you can't turn around forty years later and complain that no one critiqued it, because you were trying to go beyond that simple relationship. So it just means you've got to look in different places to find the frameworks, because you can't find them in the official record, because the official record talks about effects, ideas and experiences that were being proposed and manipulated but may not actually be present.
And Pierre definitely tried to avoid clarity about the "art moment" – do you have to witness an event for it to be real? Do you have to have been in the room, or is the photograph sufficient? Is an exhibition documentary or fiction? This is something we talked about a lot. And so, for a lot of us, many very serious-minded conceptual art shows were documentaries. Whereas we were making fictions with evidence from the everyday.