A brief look at a contemporary multimedia artist by Jacques Leenhardt
Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Honorary President of the International Association of Art Critics.
How powerful the image of the artist in his studio is. It comes with the easel and the canvas, pigments or tubes, the palette and the grinder. It speaks of a relatively fixed and stable time. Far from that image, Guykayser belongs to our migratory age. 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 painters’ ladders, [exhibition Les échelles, at the Galerie Julio Gonzales in 1994] was a fine thumbed nose at the academic categories of art.
After several exhibitions at the Galerie Jean-Claude Riedel, Rue Guénégaud in Paris, where he showed object-sculptures he had built from found materials, chosen for the variety of their textures and the shimmer they create, Guykayser gradually distanced himself from the gallery world. Art and money played there, to his taste—and he is not the only one—a game so unclear that he could hardly see himself finding his way in it. He would leave Paris.
The American Land Art artists had also taken off, escaping the 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 kept a link with the gallery’s “white cube”, where traces—photographic or otherwise—of what they had produced in those hard-to-reach places ultimately ended up, between Site and Non-Site, as Smithson put it. Guykayser too sought an alternative to urban saturation and its artistic and real-estate corollaries!
If he went to settle in the countryside, it was not, however, to break with his fellow human beings—quite the opposite. It seems that distance from urban overcrowding rather encouraged in him a closer bond with others. Abandoning the making of objects whose vocation is to belong to the mute world of sculpture opened, for Guykayser, a new chapter that I would readily place under the category of transactional relations.
The transactional object, by definition, enters into a market of exchange. It is what one gives as much as what one receives, what one speaks of or what one keeps silent about out of shame; it is a point of crystallization of the encounter with the other. The sidestep from the traditional definition of the work of art is no small one. Taking up an expression by the Polish artist Jan Swidzinski, Paul Ardenne might perhaps classify Guykayser’s approach in the category of “contextual art” that he developed in 2002—and that would be legitimate, provided one makes it clear that it is about bringing together worlds that usually hardly speak to one another. Speak to one another! That is undoubtedly one of the striking characteristics of Guykayser’s work. With him, the artist goes out to meet people, in search of their words. Although he is often close to techniques characteristic of the social sciences, it is never, for him, a matter of investigating a social object. ? On the contrary, Guykayser sets out 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 to speak and an echo to their concerns, thanks to the very attention paid to them.
To carry out such a project, Guykayser draws on his extensive experience with multimedia technical tools. One never bathes twice in the same river [2019 ] illustrates what one might call an unstable social state of communication. The installation consists of a large painted panel showing a ladder comparable to those used to measure a river’s flood level, topped by a loudspeaker. From it resonate voices repeating the sentence: “One never bathes twice in the same river”, at first distinct and understandable, then, as an acceleration makes them overlap, the sentences leap over one another in a deafening cacophony, before finally dropping back to an audible intensity. On the ladder, a slider rises and falls, a seismograph of this catastrophe of communication.
This brief description of the installation shows how the artist articulates movement, sound and image. The manipulation consists in casting a questioning glance at nature and the possibility of verbal communication.
The fragility highlighted by the artistic device may refer to the noise produced, in everyday life, by the difficulty we have in listening to others. It then points to the risk of a Babel-like misunderstanding. It may also be due, in certain cultural or social situations, to the difficulty of having the words needed to formulate a thought. We do not all have the same access to words, to the discursive flow that creates links.
No doubt it was this aspect that led Guykayser to the project Les Passagers, 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 Paris’s 13th arrondissement. The idea was to gather, through long interviews, moments of experience from the “Passengers” in transit in this refuge, from which the artist would try to draw a portrait of his interlocutors. The idea of a collective portrait is essential here. It underscores our collective belonging to a common humanity, even as our face traces the singularity—often mute—of the paths by which, through good and bad fortune, we move toward that difficult and shared horizon.
From then on, image, speech, and the human relationship—both experimental—would be the material from which Guykayser would conceive his multimedia installations. His work would henceforth always result from the paradoxical convergence of high-level technical mastery and an absolute openness to the humble and secret experiences of his interlocutors.
Over the years, Guykayser thus set up various listening-based devices: L’Envol du tracteur, [2000] which, through the buffoonery of its title, opens a space of expression for farmers little accustomed to contemporary art and who, moreover, like others for whom it carries different expectations, wonder whether this is really what they were taught at school to be “Art”. In a similar vein, Vous gagnez à être connu (2013) brings together speakers from the surrounding villages, whom the artist invites to speak about objects they have chosen and that matter particularly to them. This event-installation was shown at the Festival excentrique de Chinon.
In recent years, the intimate characteristics of this work explain the new developments it has taken. Guykayser has a consummate art of letting words come. Nothing is forced in those who open up in response to his own availability. You sense a naturalness that pours out with the words. Now, this source of such free speech is a treasure for linguists seeking to follow the evolution of language. Indeed, their survey devices are not always able to create such spoken spontaneity.
Thus a convergence emerged between Olivier Baude, a linguist, and the artist Guykayser, a maker of language situations. With him, when it talks, it talks naturally! As a result, the recorded narratives—through which the pleasure of remembering and telling one’s story shines—become a documentary base of unprecedented richness. These speaking situations create, for the linguist, infinitely precious speakers.
It is this convergence of interests that gave rise to an inventive device for capturing speech: the Mobile Laboratory of the Languages of France. The idea is, around a Conversation Booth housed in a truck born of Guykayser’s imagination, to create fruitful and relaxed speaking situations. Able to travel anywhere in the country, this mobile ear and its welcoming setup will allow linguists to listen to the great diversity of ways of speaking that constantly renew the French language.
Guykayser began his work of encounter on the banks of the Loing, the river that waters the region where he lives. There he invested in locks where the course of the water is suspended; he traced paths between the Seine and the Loire; he took the measure of Man by making himself very small when visiting Les Passagers on rue Cantagrel.
In the end, it is by following the course of the Ourcq that he intends to capture the different ways of speaking exchanged between Hauts-de-France and Paris. The winding course of the Ourcq through several départements, towns and villages is a fine metaphor for the way the language we speak is enriched and transformed. Like the river that fertilizes its territories, language crosses lands and populations, finally flowing into the great Parisian maelstrom. To follow it through its twists and turns is to better understand its riches and transformations.
Attentive to the language landscapes the river’s course passes through, the artistic device conceived by Guykayser creates locks and booths where one can rest, stops where one can take the time to speak, the time to listen—where one can finally take the time to bathe once again in life and let none of it be lost.
