Between 1991 and 2003, Pierre Joseph declared that art centres had a lunar gravity, that artists had to compete with James Cameron, that precarity was the issue of the age, and that he didn't have much to sell. In 2026, we asked him to reread himself and tell us what was at play back then.
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You can swipe sweets, crush people with steel plates. Kill and stuff animals, exhibit cocaine or play Russian roulette. Throw blood on the walls. Do graffiti, cycling, skateboarding in a public building without being apprehended. Wear trainers or arrive on horseback. You can make holes in the walls, slits, trenches in the floor. Burn canvases. Fire a machine gun.
Listen to music very loud. Drink whisky and smoke. Break expensive stuff. Kick footballs. Fire a rifle. Grow grass. Paint swastikas. Masturbate. Be a satyr.
Shoot at planes. Spy on the planet. Paint everything blue. Take up all the space. Appropriate images and music. Throw your wife out of the window. Work on Sundays...
Thinking back over all that, you might think we're being offered places for simulating freedom and virtual experiences. A seventh continent, a world apart, a representation we move about in.
Art centres have a gravity different from that of the outside world. A kind of weightlessness: people and objects don't behave the same way there. Like on the moon
No Man's Time catalogue, Nice, Villa Arson, 1991.
This text appears with the development of virtual reality, its first beginnings and all the imaginary that goes with it. The white cube is envisaged there as a space of simulation, while the works become real virtualities. But it's a kind of headlong rush forward, in which I wonder how far we can go.
When Jean-Christophe Averty invents contemporary television, the television of the music video, backed by special effects, he says to his technicians: "There, I want this singer's image to multiply itself infinitely!". Since he's told it can't be done, he invents the process, the technology that makes it possible. It's a kind of seizure of power, a hostile takeover of representation. Ditto Jaron Lanier, who penetrates into still digital images. With a headset. Here's virtual reality...
For me, these are the adventurers of art. They ask themselves how best to make people, things, concepts appear. To bring them to a certain visibility. Television is visible, cinema is visible, books are readable and academic paintings are too, because we reproduce them in series. They're operative mediums, which are in dialogue with the real.
Contemporary art doesn't have a monopoly on representation and, because it has no weapon, isn't even in the avant-garde of anything whatsoever. Making art ought to mean comparing yourself with the work of James Cameron, with that of Les Nuls or the group Kraftwerk, competing with them. We're in the provinces, in the countryside, while everyone else works in the city. We need to construct a space for the fairies.
Il faut construire l'hacienda catalogue, Tours, C.C.C., 1992.
At that point, the context is one of a contemporary art that is largely under-represented. It's almost absent from the media, even if the Frac and the art centres are already in place. The public doesn't know it — or barely, it isn't fashionable yet. As for young artists, they're seen more as a nuisance than as a force to be supported. Let's not even get started on women artists, who are largely underrepresented.
Works are now asked to "function" not only as neatly tied-up concepts, but just as much in the relations they maintain with society or the economy.
Artists today are patching things back up: it's a challenge, you have to keep the ease of expression of the 70s while repressing the utopian feelings that make you lose sight of reality. In short, nothing is valid but what adapts perfectly to the world, as it is.
'Art: recherche et création', round table, first interprofessional congress of contemporary art, Tours, 31 October 1996.
All these texts are for me a kind of "mantra": programmatic writings, at once driving and structuring, that accompany me and allow me to move forward.
History only exists to the extent that it is frequently called up by the news. Just as the flicker of the images of a film gives us the illusion of movement, the frequency with which a subject appears in the light of the news allows us to believe in its durable existence.
As an artist, you have to work with this dimension. We must be able to interact with the news, as surely as previous generations secured with another ideal a trace, a history, sometimes a utopia. In the news, you leave no traces. You leave it available for others. When you look for a job, it isn't to make a career, but to eat. You no longer inscribe yourself in time and in society in the same way. The shortening of working time (unemployment included) pushes us to relativise our contribution to history and to leave an imprint on it. Odd jobs, fixed-term contracts have become a way of life whose meaning we have to find. Precarity has become a stake in the realisation of our own identity. With all due respect to Nietzsche, for whom, I quote: "a man without a plan is not a man".
Mémoire disponible, 'La mémoire des œuvres: de l'œuvre éphémère au monument', text of the lecture of 28 August 1996, XXXth AICA-France congress, Rennes.
It's degrowth! Room for the ephemeral — some will speak of "ultracontemporary art". The question of the news also takes me back to sitting my DNSEP: the panel assured me at the time that the artist was entitled to work with the past or, on the contrary, to imagine the future, but that he built nothing with the present or with the news, which don't offer the necessary distance… (necessary for what, exactly?)
You get the impression that it's less and less necessary to keep traces of works, of the operations you may have carried out here or there.
It's as if there were an automatic backup programmed by the host institution, or as if in any case the recording of a past action is no longer of any use to us. We don't so much need all these catalogues and all these photographs, there are already far too many museums for artists to feel the need to keep archives. Perhaps we should move about without a criminal record and without a curriculum vitæ either. Like routers or gliders. Sooner or later someone else will take it upon themselves to reactivate your proposal of yesteryear, with the ease of ingenuousness. To make it current. Traces will become immaterial, like spirits, like waves that some will manage to pick up. You won't be able to feel guilty any more, because someone will have told you "that's already been done". In the logic of a leisure society, that really isn't the problem. It isn't a matter of inscribing a gesture in history but, like these new pop bands, of seizing hold of sounds and styles and why not behaviours, of letting them invade you, saying: "now it's my turn to live them".
I don't give a damn that it's already been done since I'm the one doing it now, and I don't know what it's like to do it! Which is to say that it's important to experience a duration where History, memory, brings back to us moments that we haven't lived. A kind of endless learning, making the present its sole horizon and its economy.
Mémoire disponible, 'La mémoire des œuvres: de l'œuvre éphémère au monument', text of the lecture of 28 August 1996, XXXth AICA-France congress, Rennes.
No comment. That is indeed what came about, but in a distinctly less disinterested way than I imagined: to the benefit of the market, of course, with art history ending up becoming something of a nuisance, even downright counter-productive…
I also want to set images of earlier works alongside images from films that directly inspired me, and whose influence you can see, formally: I like showing that "ideas" are often only "collages", and that anyone, with a bit of preparation and learning, can do the same.
Interview with Alain Dister, L'Œil, February 1998.
You should read "What Is Art" by Joseph Beuys in the first year of art school or even at secondary school.
P.J.: These are questions I've asked myself in relation to knowledge: from the moment you don't have the model or the reference, what are you liable to know by yourself?
Conversation with Arlette Farge, Les Inrockuptibles, June 2000.
That's still the case, with A.I.!
P.J: … But you have to accept the side effects: I don't have much to sell!
Mehdi Belhaj Kacem: What struck me about Pierre is that he's more interested in the beginning of things than in their development.
P. J.: I'm always fascinated by people who go deep into things, who develop a subject all the way, right to the end.
I'm incapable of doing it, because it bores me deeply.
Interview with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Numéro, November 2003.
No, that's not true, I've got loads of things to sell!