Loris Gréaud
Loris Gréaud's work is more talked about than seen. Of course, some version of this is always the case with much-hyped young artists. Gréaud's recent show 'Cellar Door', at Paris's Palais de Tokyo, represented the first time that the entire institution was given over to a single exhibition - and Gréaud is still under thirty. Most everyone, or so it would seem to readers of art magazines, was aware of this coup - many more at any rate, than actually visited. (In fact, the Palais de Tokyo clocked 140,000 visitors to 'Cellar Door', breaking the institution's attendance record for any single previous exhibition). But Gréaud's work is also, often, more profoundly elusive. A few years ago for a Freize commission Gréaud made a series of "nanosculptures" - titled 'Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?' The sculptures were engineered with the help of the French national research institute, and each work was, naturally, microscopic. To the artist, it seemed "superfluous" to display them on pedestals. He simply mounted them on the wall, embedded in plastic plaques - the kind used to label art and artifacts in museums. In fact he used the plaques as labels, too. No magnification was provided (and all the sculptures were sold).
Is it recognizable as institutional critique? It is, pretty decisively, not. Gréaud didn't himself come through the familiar set of institutions. He went to a musical conservatory to learn to play the flute, where, the story goes, he was kicked out at the age of 14 for setting up a "school of musical unlearning." He then started his own electronic music label, Sibilance, and later studied graphics and film. With two architects, he founded the design collective DGZ, who have never made anything functional. His textual references don't fit either - Gréaud draws mostly from British positivist fantasy: CS Lewis, JRR Tolkein, and Lewis Carroll.
'Cellar Door' was commissioned two years ago. In the interim, the artist - preparing what was promised to be a multifarious extravaganza without precedent, and running famously over budget - has showed relaltively little new work. His 2008 shows have nevertheless been much anticipated. Gréaud evidently excites. Perhaps he provokes imagination about what we might want from artists - or from geniuses.
'Cellar Door' is not a travelling exhibition in the strict sense. It has recently "moved" from Paris to London only in the sense that it "was" at the Palais de Tokyo, and now "is" at the ICA. But even that depends on what "is" is in your book - since, as far as I know, none of the exhibition's physical elements have been transported. ('Cellar Door' is, also, arguably, an opera - either that or it will be an opera, when the music it inspired is first staged in Paris later in the year.)
Installation at the ICA
For the show currently on in London (until June 22), Gréaud has divided the ICA's relatively modest space into three identical rooms. By contrast, the rambling Paris installation - which covered 4500 sq meters - encompassed several replicas of Greaud's past exhibits, some of them apparently subtly rejigged so that exits became entrances and vice versa. There, there was also a movie shot on stock that Gréaud found in the Palais de Tokyo's storage facilities - without telling the actors that it was ruined, he says. In another room was a minimal, artificial forest and an orange sun (electric). It also had a paint ball.
I have not seen either one. Images published by the ICA and the Palais de Tokyo show that the walls in each have been painted black, but those images would obviously fail to capture the atmosphere as experienced inside the galleries - which apparently were very dimly lit. I imagine it being something like Laser Kingdom, where I was taken as a child, on very special occasions, to play laser tag. The goal of laser tag was to shoot the other kids with your laser gun (ie, your glorified TV remote) and not to be shot yourself; but that was not the point. The point of laser tag was to dart like a banshee-cheetah through the dark caverns of Laser Kingdom, where you could never tell what you were going to run into. There were all sorts of strange rocks and bunkers and moon craters to be negotiated - depending on the music that was on, who your colleagues were and who they happened to be. The vast and fluid Laser Kingdom was housed in an innocuous-looking shopping centre in suburban New York. Over the years that we went, I don't think it was ever once cleaned, much less renovated or otherwise modified. At a certain point, we went pretty much every weekend.
I had a friend who went to see 'Cellar Door' in Paris. He reported that it he was disappointed. There were jokes, but they seemed like tounge-in-cheek one-liners, more gratifying to their creator than the audience - like the spoiled film, and the projector on a motion sensor, which stopped running as viewers approached. (My friend is a filmmaker.) He figured the artist had wonderful ideas - but none of them seemed adequately carried through. It was like it was up to the viewer to complete the work, or something.
Celador candy vending machine
At the exhibit, my friend had bought some of the candy called Celador, another conceptual appendage of 'Cellar Door'. It was for sale in vending machines in the Palais de Tokyo, and it is being marketed - swankily, and relatively traditionally - under the byline "the taste of illusion/the illusion of taste." Indeed, Celador is a candy with no flavor. Nevertheless, we each ate a piece. I chose red because, since my Laser Kingdom days, that's been my wont. Reviews had described the candy as "unpleasant" and "offensively tasteless", but it's not at all like that. It is funny to have it in your mouth. It's actually like nothing you can imagine.
'Cellar Door', installation at the Palais de Tokyo
NINE QUESTIONS FOR LORIS GREAUD
1
ALIX RULE: You've compared yourself to a conductor - correct? Why this format? Why this role?
LORIS GREAUD: I was only trying to find a similarity, because in general I'm compared to a [film] producer. It's a lot of work to not to be compared to anything, so I'll answer with questions:
Why, as we're working in a field of knowledge that tries to blur boundaries and positions, do we always have to link in someway with existing professions or processes?
If being an artist is already a profession what could be a position or behavior that didn't exist and needs be invented?
Does inventing a behavior itself mean taking a position?
Is comparing yourself to something or someone a profession?
What is your profession and can you compare yours with an existing one?
2
ALIX RULE: Here is something you said in an interview with FRIEZE, regarding your nanosculptures, that intrigued and puzzled me:
"what is being developed today in the nanoworld could save humanity - in combating local and global pollution, or in halting the exhaustion of the world's natural resources. In my opinion what is really significant is the merging, or the metamerging, of information technologies, communication technologies, biotechnologies and cognitive sciences. This notion of merging suddenly focuses different fields of knowledge and investigation of things on a minute scale. We have no official theory "cadre" today, and this is both exciting and scary."
Can you explain a bit? What's exciting and what's scary?
LORIS GREAUD: Saying yes and no at the same time is scary and exciting. In this discussion I was focused on the nanotechnologies employed in my commission project. Why is a raven like a writing desk? The ethical issue of nanotechnologies still abstract. There is a total absence of scientific clarity about the potential health effects of occupational exposure to nanoparticles, there is also a fear nowadays since it's not fully understood. There is this paradox of risks and opportunity, involving human health, environment, hazards of nanoparticles, self replications of miniature machines...and this scary issue of surveillance.
3
ALIX RULE: The ICA press release for 'Cellar Door' says, in parentheses: "Fuller is a forefather of the current debate on architecture and global economy, and an emblematic figure for Gréaud." What debate does this refer to, and why are you interested in Fuller's role in it?
LORIS GREAUD:
Homer Simpson: "Thank the Lord for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest energy source there is! Except for solar, which is just a pipe dream."
Buckminster Fuller: "Nature has decided the closest we should come to nuclear reactor is 93 millions miles..."
I think that Fuller's work has not yet received the attention that it deserves, I'm interested personally in his thoughts and the "leap" of his intuitions. Take this little language example, which could emblematize a general aspect of his thinking : Fuller used the word 'Universe' without the definite or indefinite articles (a or the) and always capitalized the word as if the universe were finally the sum of all experiences.
4
ALIX RULE: Is there a difference between utopianism and escapism?
LORIS GREAUD: As a Conductor... I would say that utopianism is the belief (in a religious way) or ideal of perfect and harmonious things and society, man and nature, or that beyond the death must exist the possibility of living happily... Escapism describes more a mental diversion, and wrongly carries a negative connotation, that is, it tends to suggest that escapists are unhappy.
But let's take for example Tolkien (who is the origin of the title of my project Cellar Door): "escapism had an element of emancipation in its attempt to figure a different reality" and finally his friend C S Lewis responding to Anglo-Saxon academic debate : "the usual enemies of escape were jailers."
5
ALIX RULE: So today: who are the utopians and who are the escapists? Do you have any allegiances?
LORIS GREAUD: If jailers are utopian enemies of escape, then where are the dystopians? Or: If jailers are enemies of utopian escapists, then where are the dystopians?
6
ALIX RULE: You've said that you hope that you hope that the 'Cellar Door' exhibit, when it comes to rest, will be housed in your studio, yes? How do you think it will be to live with it? That is, how will you avoid the risk of it becoming like furniture (something that becomes almost invisible as it becomes un-peculiar). Will you need to formulate a new escape?
LORIS GREAUD: 'Cellar Door' will become my studio. The construction will start when the orchestra replays the opera/exhibition, which will be staged in Paris, New York and Hong Kong. It's an oxymoronic thought, that the object be seprated in these paradoxical forms; the actual concrete building of the architecture and the reinterpretation of it on stage, then the global project, which has the potential to be replayed endlessly.
The main thing is to turn the process of creating the show upside down, so that it becomes more a starter for things, which then to crash into reality and not a simple ending of procedures. Placing in the center of the project the imaginary of my studio, a studio that could change my activities and behaviour...
7
ALIX RULE: Tell me about the idea of marketing the Celador candy.
LORIS GREAUD: You can see the commercial of it and snapshots of the shooting in Hong Kong. The main idea was to find a way to reanimate the 'Cellar Door' project (what taste an exhibition? What taste an architecture?), to make it reappear outside the exhibition, outside itself. Of course we (DGZ_ Dölger-Gréaud-Ziakovic) were trying to synthesize and to copy the design and the process of marketed products. We never intended to raise money from this project, the idea is more about buying a Mc Guffin at McDonalds.
8
ALIX RULE: You mentioned (at your opening) that you had the idea not to be an artist anymore.
LORIS GREAUD: Here's a slippery rhetoric: we all agree that art students want to be artists, but when artists wants to be artists they become art students. My biggest ambition is now to skip school.
9
ALIX RULE: At this point I've read tons about your work to prepare for the interview, but still never seen it. How much do you think this matters?
LORIS GREAUD: In my recent discussion with Sarah Kent for The Times I was wrongly quoted as saying: "I believe the best exhibitions are the ones you've only heard about". What I've said - and personally think - is : "the most beautiful exhibitions I've seen are the ones I've been told about". Of course you've seen my "work" and I've seen yours, we're in the middle of it, right here, right now.
Loris Greaud
Until 22 June
ICA
London
Alix Rule writes on art and politics. She has worked for In These Times and Dissent magazine, and her writing has appeared in a variety of other publications. Alix grew up in New York and studied at the University of Chicago at then at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating she worked briefly as an organizer of low-wage workers in London, UK. Alix is interested in interior and outer space, organizing communities, "social entrepreneurship" and above all, clothing. She has recently moved to Berlin. You can contact her at alix.rule@gmail.com.
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