Works by the self-defined “extemporary artist” are currently on show at Monaco’s Nouveau Musée National, alongside those of Berger & Berger, Patrick Corillon, Félix Dol-Maillot and Michel Blazy, for an exhibition interrogating the role and the future of the museum as an institution.
“My first reaction was to go back to the idea of museum itself as the home of the Muses, the mythological daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (memory personified). I began thinking about the representation of memory, and how we as individuals can interact with the images of memory”.
What place does memory hold in a society where information is always at hand, constantly accessible through a screen?
Philosopher Michel Serres described the externalization of memory, which will make room for the development of other imaginative and intellectual skills, creating a new lever of action for artists.
Very much like Ancient Greek orators, who managed to remember long speeches by associating sculptures or frescos in their field of vision to a passage of their discourse, we are witnessing the birth of mental spaces that could be defined as “memory museums”.
The kakemonos, the comic strips, as well as the video contribute to the creation of a mental space bringing together all the different elements of my work.
In his interviews with Francis Bacon, writer Michel Archimbaud asked the artist what he was trying to represent. Bacon told him: “I begun by painting a butterfly, which later turned into a gorilla and then into… this”. The work is all about the creative process.
Where did you start from for this show?
I started by thinking about the relationship that Marcel Duchamp had with Monaco, and more specifically with the work he presented here. How are the artist, the man, the time, the work and the creation space still relevant today?
In a world where Facebook’s News Feed as well as the media are only showing us what we want to see, I have tried to create the opposite: an “anti-newsfeed” of sorts.
There’s a beautiful description of time in tantric philosophy. Time is represented as a demon spitting in man’s direction. The past is not behind us; it springs towards us. The anti-newsfeed establishes a more tantric relationship with time.
If we no longer need a part of our memory, why did you choose to represent it in a museum?
The less memory is linked to our biological capacities, the more we need to represent it in order to be able to make sense of it. The bigger Wikipedia gets, the more space we have. The more memory becomes externalized, the greater the danger that it will fossilize. Far from disappearing, memory is changing shape, it is in a state of permanent mutation. Since the Enlightenment, we have represented knowledge, inspired by the model of the Encyclopedia. There’s a great satisfaction in realizing that memory is plastic, and that it can be moulded. However, the ever-increasing amount of knowledge at our disposal forces us to rethink this model. Within this context, museums take on a mnemonic dimension, and they become theaters of memory, constantly changing, no longer spaces of preservation, the notion of which is bound to disappear.
In British museums — such as the Victoria & Albert Museum — chronology is already a thing of the past. In Paris, Jean-Hubert Martin has also opposed this notion with the exhibition “Carambolages”, presented at the Grand Palais. He has arranged works according to sensorial — rather than temporal or geographical — analogies. In the future, museums will not exclusively rely on technology, but will focus on it helping us finding new models of thinking.
What is the relationship between your work and new technologies?
For me, their relationship is primordial, although the majority of my work is very low-tech: I create mostly with pen and paper. Reading Norbert Wiener’s “God & Golem, Inc.” radically changed my relationship to the world and to my own practice. Wiener posits that cybernetics will create a world of golems, and that in their search for safety, people will create monsters that will eventually turn against them. Wiener offers two solutions: either using cybernetics to augment the human body, or to step back and adopt more a philosophical view, one where humans investigate the nature of the forces of good and evil, in constant opposition.
Garage 2 : Décollages, 2017 encre sur papier
Do you think that in the coming years there will be as much space for the low-tech?
In museums the world over, culture is becoming increasingly “bunkerized”. In concrete terms, this translates to hoards of tourists willing to travel thousands of kilometers in order to take a picture of an artwork that they will never look at again… This vision of the museum will become increasingly predominant.
"I do not believe in the social function of art but in the social responsibility of the artist."
Your work could come across as quite violent...
The process does sometimes involve a degree of violence. During a recent exhibition, a woman came forward and asked me if I was okay, referring to the perceived violence of some of my works. I told her that drawing helps me channel this violence, to “express it”. She was surprised by my answer. I believe that filmmakers such as David Lynch are talking about the same thing when they speaks about holding a mirror up to society.
What is the “tone” of this Monaco exhibition?
I wanted to create a work about a subject that has been niggling at me for a long time: the relationship between space and time. Before then, my characters were somewhat suspended in non-spaces, in allegories. This time, I wanted to place them in a “theatre of memories”, and create an architecture for them.
The development of knowledge is not an excuse for its fragmentation. There is no known physical limit to knowledge. In fact, there is almost a sensual pleasure in satisfying one’s intellectual curiosity. At a time when technology has brought down all barriers limiting access to knowledge, the role of the museum of tomorrow is to become THE space for all types of curiosities, almost like an eighteenth-century curiosity cabinet, bringing together anything from natural sciences to anatomy to humanities, from butterflies to sea shells, from physics to philosophy. The museum has to be a place open to all kinds of knowledge, to both individual and collective inspiration.
By Henri Robert
