Curated by Sylvie Turpin
• Exhibition from March 20 to August 14, 2015
• Free admission Thursday to Saturday from 2 pm to 7 pm, or by appointment (except public holidays)
L’association galerie d’artistes, 35 rue Raymond Tellier 45200 Amilly
Tel. : 02 38 85 79 09 07 81 27 36 26
I talk about the seats of art and collective self-portraits
The seats of art
What do we do sitting in this studio? And standing in this gallery …
Guykayser doesn’t just make tractors take off or make a tree speak from a boat as he walks it along the canal; he seats artists—each on their studio chair—and gets them talking, to draw from these interviews delicious little films of about four minutes. Guykayser has been involved with Galerie L’AGART since its beginnings and has become one of its regulars. He himself exhibited his “bordus” there alongside Peter Briggs in 2008. He therefore witnessed the making of an identity, the development of an editorial line, an aesthetic line, led by Sylvie Turpin. And it is this line he wanted to show by materializing it, by revealing it physically. Working with the gallery’s archives, he translated a chronological frieze of each exhibition into visual compositions, UV-printed on white Dibond. The very present colors of the works, in a beautiful matte finish, graphically inscribe a story on the walls (like a mise en abyme of the works they had carried), fourteen years of a volunteer adventure of rare quality. Five tablets on which the studio films can be discovered punctuate this band. The collective self-portrait then begins with the conversations Guykayser starts with twenty artists who answered the call for his project. Twenty artists who have exhibited at the gallery. The editing is structured by an invitation into the studio, inserts, pans, technical notes echoing autobiographical reflections. A lively sound drive sprinkled with bursts and sparkle, heightened by jubilant shots. After the visit, the viewer is seen out to the door of each artist’s studio.
The studio of the seats of art.
“Conversation is at the heart of the collective self-portrait, and each person’s unique voice is its breath.”
The collective self-portrait, visual and sonic, comes into its own when you step through the studio door in the gallery’s second room. A new band accompanies us in the vestibule: it is the graphic transcription of the sound work created by Gérard Parésys. Around the pile of sand, eight distinct sources broadcast a soundscape composed of a text written and read by Jacques Leenhardt, its silences, the words and silences of the twenty artists, the sound of sand—a choir of sounds. You then move around the presence of the studio chairs planted in this impressive pile of sand. (The studio chair as a mute witness to studio hours, but above all as the trigger object for Guykayser’s work, a physical object enabling the interface of his research into the memory of the place, the artists’ memory, individual memory, collective memory). Following a new black-and-white panoramic line (a large montage of twenty details from works by the twenty artists met), you discover the chairs lent by the artists—simple, functional, heterogeneous, predictable in the idea one has of a studio chair, with some lovely surprises nonetheless. It may be the most personal of all Guykayser’s collective self-portraits.
Patricia Reufflet
The sound space of “the studio of the seats of art”
Gérard PARESYS
It is co-directed by Gérard Parésys and Guykayser. The sounds at the origin of the sound space:
A text written and read by Jacques Leenhardt, cut into forty-eight sentences. Words and short phrases taken from recorded conversations with 20 artists who exhibited in the gallery. The previous voices, from which only the “unvoiced” sounds were kept: consonants, breaths, “silences”… Sound recordings of sand (sliding, scraping, throwing …) Real-time synthesized sounds evoking the flow of sand.
Software was designed specifically for the installation. It is based on Argo, by Gérard Parésys. ARGO is made up of real-time sound and visual synthesis and processing modules. It allows the sound space “the studio of the seats of art” to be in perpetual transformation. One of the sound sources used—the speech of 20 artists—was segmented into hundreds of snippets of phrases. The polyphony that results from listening to these fragmented voices simultaneously and successively is never identical to itself, thanks to random processes. The sound result returns to its origin about every 25 minutes, but is different each time. Listening to this polyphony is made easier by diffusion through 8 sources: 8 loudspeakers distributed around the perimeter and at the center of “the studio of the seats of art”.
Text written and read by Jacques Leenhardt on the occasion of the creation of “The Seats of Art”
As if the question of art began with the body, with that physical weight that means every work is first of all a way of doing, an immediate relation to the homo faber who produces it. In Vermeer the painter is seated; in Pollock he is standing, bent over his canvas laid flat. The sculptor too is standing, but not always to attack the material head-on. Rodin already cast fragments of bodies to recompose them afterwards, and César let expanding resins flow. One could multiply endlessly the description of these bodily positions and still have grasped only a moment of that obscure alchemy that is artistic activity. Each of these postures in which the hand-to-hand struggle between the artist and their material is expressed is in fact necessarily interrupted by another, entirely different position—opposed, even. The body straightens and, for a moment, moves away from what it has just done. The eye then takes over; the mind reasserts its rights, relegating for a time the hand and its world of gestures. Activity is suspended so that the distanced gaze can intervene. The eye evaluates, but only after the fact. It is like a second beat that will in turn send the hand back to its task, and so on until the work is judged finished. Yet even before the hand gets down to it, before the brush, chisel, or camera gets going, there is the moment before: that slightly anxious silence that precedes any action and points back to a time when nothing has yet taken form. At this original point, everything is still chaos: a will to do invested with disordered ideas and fleeting visions that no drawing, no script, no sketch could yet materialize. It is the mysterious moment of what we call “creation,” that dawn in the form of a black box from which everything may perhaps emerge. The vocabulary of “creation,” abusively theological, is misleading, as if the artist found themselves in the position of a demiurge god facing matter to which they will give form. Artistic activity borrows very little from the divine—quite the contrary, and in several senses. First, it is work whose rules are learned, where spontaneity itself is educated and controlled. As people often say: “genius is a lot of work.” But more still, artistic activity belongs all the less to the divine because it is radically attached to what keeps us far from it: our human condition. It is as such—absolutely human—that we have the capacity to be artists. It is even this capacity for art, freely developed, that makes us human beings if we exercise it fully. If, as Lautréamont said, “poetry must be made by all,” if we all have an artistic fiber, we must admit we do not all cultivate it equally. Yes, art should be made by all, because it is the form our freedom takes to feel and think beyond what we are. A dream of being, in a way—never realized, yet always rich with all its possibilities. Just as we sit on a chair to write, thus fixing the place we occupy and from which we can see the world, we dream of escaping that place which sometimes imprisons us; we dream of writing a new sentence, of making an unprecedented experience, of fixing in a work the shadow that calls out to us. Perhaps that is why we imagine gods so far from us, and why we also place the artist on the tangential margins of our world. As if there lived in us a nostalgia for being more human than we are, freer and more poetic than we manage to be. A certain chaos of mixed feelings, a will still confused before truly getting down to work—this is what the artist feels on the threshold of any work. Anxiety of the blank page, writers say. In the mind of Frenhofer, the hero of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, the anxiety has, on the contrary, shifted to the end of the process. Frenhofer, the skilled master who commands all the subtleties of his art, knows so well how to treat his subject, his craft is so accomplished, that the whole making of the painting happens as if by itself. It is only at the end, at the moment of the final touch, that the anguishing question arises for him. Seated on his stool, Frenhofer is seized by an ultimate torment: should he add one last brushstroke? And that one which would definitively complete the painting, make it as alive as the model. And one more? Little by little, everything that had been so expertly laid down, lovingly polished and brought to completion is destroyed, sending the painting back to what preceded it: chaos. The finished image blurs at the very moment of its completion. This allegory of artistic work, and the final catastrophe to which Frenhofer’s doubt leads, refers less—as has often been said—to the exhaustion of the classical craft leading to the dissolution of the image in Impressionism and abstraction, than it questions the moment when the work is finished, whatever its medium. Balzac’s story points to the moment when one must let go, let the work move away from the hand and live its autonomy as an artefact. It is a difficult moment when the artist abandons mastery, leaving the work the possibility of living its second life, in the relationship that will henceforth be established with its viewers. Today, artists maintain a relationship to what they produce very different from Frenhofer’s. I am not even sure they would readily use the word “creation” to designate their work, except for convenience. They have acquired a more vivid and strong idea of what is built in the relationship with the Other, with the viewer as Duchamp said—this complementary figure in the artistic process. One senses that a more modest feeling dominates, making the work above all a proposition, an opening, which the attention and imagination of the other will, if not complete, at least extend. Art, as one of the great affairs of our time, thus presents itself rather as a potentially infinite play of dissolutions and crystallizations of which the work is the nucleus, irradiating irradiated. As if the idea of producing an object definitively identical to itself, closed in its perfection, appeared to many as a lost illusion. What nevertheless still gives artistic creation all its meaning today is precisely that a dialogue is established there, that the work becomes an infinitely rich place of encounters to which our imagination and our pleasure are invited.
3D model of the installation
