(translated from French)
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Goliarda: Do you remember your first encounter with Pierre?
Marie de Brugerolle: I first heard about his work from friends who were students at the Villa Arson while I was studying at the École du Louvre, in 1991, Éric Troncy's exhibition NO MAN s TIME was fundamental for my generation. That's where Pierre showed the first Personnages à réactiver, which would work their way into the thinking I would go on to do and which would lead to the elaboration of the Post-Performance Future. I then heard about him in Grenoble when I was in charge of exhibitions at the CNAC Magasin in 1996. The École des Beaux-Arts in Grenoble was foundational in the 90s for a generation of artists like Bernard Joisten, Philippe Parreno, Pierre Joseph, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Pierre Joseph immediately struck me as the "brains of the gang". The subtlety of his thinking, his sense of anticipation continue to make him a major artist for me.
I really met him in 2004 for the exhibition La Table sans nom at the Salle de Bains in Lyon. It was a matter of making a table whose model was generated by 3D modelling. The thinking had to do with a speculative form of research: What is a table? Pierre had started from a crumpled paper tissue that would be the top of a meeting table. The whole thinking had to do with the translation of the idea, the technique, the material. The final choice was wood. We had an interesting debate about the notion of production and of fabrication. The table’s standard dimensions were slightly modified. 5 cm wider, 5 cm taller. Its symbolic use didn’t get in the way of its functionality. It was the only object in the exhibition that kept its function as a table. You could gather around it, and set the publication down. That publication consisted of an interview with the conservator Claude Wrobel.
One sentence of Pierre's stayed with me from that conversation: "what is the duration of eternity?"
Goliarda: What did Pierre's work represent, in your eyes, at that time?
MdB: A profound change in the modes of operation, a thinking-through of time, the sciences, value (his artist's project Map of Japan, 1997) and the intuition of calling into question the post-Marxist notion of production. It was the beginning of what Nicolas Bourriaud called relational aesthetics but for me Pierre's work, particularly with the Personnages à réactiver, anticipated the notion of delegated performance that Claire Bishop talks about. Artists like P. Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon founded the “Association des temps libérés" in 1995, Liam Gillick wasn't far away.
The notion of value and of ownership of the tools of production, in the post-Marxist line, permeated the debate. Later at the exhibition at the Salle de Bains, the notion of fabrication emerged again, hence the choice of artisanal woodwork.
For me, Pierre Joseph is always a step ahead, particularly in relation to the living and to memory. His exhibition at the CRAC in Sète in 2004 renewed the approach to memory, to the body; it was a matter of drawings made by his class at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier. The exercise consisted in drawing from memory the map of their neighbourhood, their town, then their genitals. And the further you went into the intimate the further the representations were from the real. For me, this work, at once collective and singular, is one of the first situated works from before Me Too. Later while I was on a 1% committee, a public commission was given to him for enamel plaques taking up this typology of representation.
Goliarda: Looking back, how do you situate Pierre's practice within the social context of the 1990s and the early 2000s?
MdB: It's a practice that would lay down the markers for a good many lines of thinking taken up and carried by others. On ecology and the economy of means and of practices. A constant curiosity and innovation in materials, a remarkable commitment to intellectual rigour and a poetry of forms.