A brief look at a contemporary multimedia artist by Jacques Leenhardt
Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Honorary President of the International Association of Art Critics.

How powerful is the image of the artist in their studio. It carries with it the easel and the painting, the pigments or tubes, the palette and the grinder. It speaks of a relatively fixed and stable time. Far from this image, Guykayser belongs to our migrant era. He began by working with ladders, like Jacob in his dream, but his ladders were those of a house painter. It reminded him of his grandfather. However, making sculpture with painter’s ladders [exhibition Les échelles, at the Galerie Julio Gonzales in 1994] was a beautiful thumbing of the nose at academic categories of art.

After several exhibitions at the Galerie Jean-Claude Riedel, Rue Guénégaud in Paris, where he showed sculpture-objects built from found materials, chosen for the variety of their textures and the shimmer they provoke, Guykayser gradually distanced himself from the gallery world. Art and money play a game there that is, to his taste—and he is not alone—so unclear that he found it hard to see his way through. He would leave Paris.

The American Land Art artists had also taken a detour, escaping cities to discover nature in its solitude. Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, or Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty broke the reduced scale imposed by gallery walls. Although their landscape-objects were unsellable, they nevertheless maintained a link with the “white cube” of the gallery, where photographic or other evidence of what they had produced in these hard-to-reach places eventually ended up, between Site and Non-Site, as Smithson said. Guykayser also sought an alternative to urban saturation and its artistic and real estate corollaries!

If he leaves to settle in the countryside, it is not, however, to break with his fellow man; quite the contrary. It seems that moving away from urban overcrowding has instead favored a closer connection with his peers. Abandoning the manufacture of objects whose vocation is to belong to the silent world of sculpture opened a new chapter for Guykayser, which I would willingly place under the category of transactional relations.

The transactional object enters, by definition, into an exchange market. It is what we give as much as what we receive, what we talk about or what we keep silent out of shame; it is a point of crystallization of the encounter with the other. This step away from the traditional definition of the work of art is not a small one. Borrowing an expression from the Polish artist Jan Swidzinski, Paul Ardenne might classify Guykayser’s approach in the category of “contextual art” which he developed in 2002, and this would be legitimate provided it is clearly highlighted that it involves bringing together worlds that usually hardly speak to each other. Speaking to each other! This is undoubtedly one of the striking characteristics of Guykayser’s work. With him, the artist goes to meet people, in search of their words. Although he is often close to the techniques characteristic of the social sciences, it is never a matter for him of investigating a social object. On the contrary, Guykayser goes in search of the words of subjects fully recognized in their singularity. It is about listening to them and offering them, in the exchange, a place of expression and an echo of their concerns through the very attention paid to them.
To carry out such a project, Guykayser benefits from his extensive experience with multimedia technical tools. One never bathes twice in the same river [2019] illustrates what could be called an unstable social state of communication. The installation consists of a large painted panel showing a scale comparable to those that measure the flood levels of a river, topped by a loudspeaker. From there resonate voices repeating the phrase: “One never bathes twice in the same river,” first distinct and understandable, then, through an acceleration that makes them overlap, the phrases leap over one another in a deafening cacophony, finally falling back to an audible intensity. On the scale, a cursor moves up and down, a seismograph of this communication catastrophe.
The succinct description of this installation makes it clear how the artist articulates movement, sound, and image. The manipulation consists of casting an inquiring look at nature and the possibility of verbal communication.

The fragility highlighted by the artistic device can refer to the noise produced, in daily life, by the difficulty we have in listening to others. It then indicates the risk of a Babel-like misunderstanding. It can also be due, in certain cultural or social situations, to the difficulty of having the necessary words to formulate a thought. We do not all have the same access to words, to the discursive flow that establishes links.

It is undoubtedly this aspect that led Guykayser to the project Les Passagers (The Passengers), which he carried out at the Centre d’hébergement et de réinsertion sociale (CHRS) on Rue Cantagrel, a building constructed by Le Corbusier in 1933 in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. It involved gathering, through long interviews, moments of experience from the “Passengers” in transit in this refuge, from which the artist would attempt to create portraits of his interlocutors. The idea of a collective portrait is essential here. It underlines our collective belonging to a common humanity at the same time as our faces draw the singularity, often mute, of the paths through which, through ups and downs, we progress toward this difficult and common horizon.

From then on, image, speech, and the human and experimental relationship would be the material from which Guykayser would design his multimedia installations. His work would henceforth always result from the paradoxical convergence of high-level technical mastery and absolute availability to the humble and secret experiences of his interlocutors.

Over the years, Guykayser has thus set up various devices around listening: L’Envol du tracteur (The Flight of the Tractor), [2000] which, through the buffoonery of its title, opens a space of expression for farmers unaccustomed to contemporary art and who, moreover, like others for whom this has different implications, wonder if this is indeed what they were taught in school was “Art.” In a similar vein, Vous gagnez à être connu (You’re Worth Knowing) (2013) brings together speakers from surrounding villages, whom the artist invites to express themselves about objects they have chosen and that are particularly important to them. This event-installation will be shown at the Festival Excentrique in Chinon.

In recent years, the intimate characteristics of this work explain the new developments it has taken. Guykayser has a consummate art of letting speech come. There is nothing forced in those who open up in response to his own availability. One feels the naturalness pouring out with the words. Yet this source of such free speech is a treasure for linguists seeking to follow the evolution of the language. Indeed, their survey methods are not always capable of creating such speaking spontaneity.

Thus, a convergence was created between Olivier Baude, a linguist, and the artist Guykayser, a maker of language situations. With him, when people talk, they talk naturally! As a result, the recorded stories, in which the pleasure of remembering and telling one’s story shines through, become a documentary base of unprecedented richness. For the linguist, these speech situations create infinitely precious speakers.
It is this convergence of interests that gave rise to an inventive device for capturing speech, the Laboratoire mobile des langues de France (Mobile Laboratory of the Languages of France). It involves, around a Conversational Terminal housed in a truck born of Guykayser’s imagination, creating fruitful and relaxed speech situations. Thus, being able to move anywhere in the country, this mobile ear and its reception device will allow linguists to listen to the great diversity of dialects that constantly renew the French language.

Guykayser began his work of encounter on the banks of the Loing, the river that waters the country where he lives. He has taken over locks where the flow of water is suspended; he has traced paths between the Seine and the Loire; he has taken the measure of Man by making himself very small while visiting Les Passagers on Rue Cantagrel.
Finally, it is by following the course of the Ourcq that he intends to capture the different dialects exchanged between the Hauts-de-France and Paris. The winding path of the Ourcq through several departments, towns, and villages is a beautiful metaphor for the way the language we speak is enriched and transformed. Like the river that fertilizes its territories, language crosses lands and populations to finally throw itself into the great Parisian maelstrom. Following it in its detours is to better understand its riches and transformations.
Attentive to the landscapes of languages crossed by the river’s course, the artistic device designed by Guykayser creates locks and terminals where one can rest, halts where one can take the time to speak, the time to listen, and where one can finally take the time to bathe once more in life and let nothing of it be lost.