Can you tell us more about the title of your show, Portrait of the artist as an ornamental hermit?
Although the title might raise questions, ornamental hermits really existed in the United Kingdom in the 17th century. Rich landowners would invite those men to sit in a cave or a folly, in exchange for board and room. The hermits had to provide advice or simply stay there for recreational purposes. I think there’s a lot of humour in the perception of those human beings serving as ornaments for spiritual purposes. Back in 2012, I created the show L’Ermite ornamental after visiting an exhibition by Richard Serra (an American artist who makes monumental metal works) at the Grand Palais, where I was left dumbstruck by the power of those stripped-down shapes. That silence was very important to me. In my stories, I always add something personal, maybe a family story or an intimate detail, to what one could call History or the flow of time. After that exhibition, I asked a friend of my mother’s, who owns a castle, if I could become her ornamental hermit. It may have looked like a joke, but something deeper was at stake then: the idea that silence and contemplation as a way of life were connected to artistic practice. I’m fascinated by that way of wanting to dedicate oneself completely to one’s art, to delve into one’s own fundamental and essential questions while accepting that this purpose in life might be seen as mere ornament. To me, the ornamental hermit is the most beautiful image of what an artist could be. His position also makes life a little more bearable in our troubled times. The idea is to step back, without losing sight of our involvement in the world.
At the heart of this show, your idea is to perform either L’Appartement à trous or Les Images flottantes, depending on the day.
Yes, we’re offering two distinct propositions to the audience. To come see L’Appartement à trous or Les Images flottantes on different days. Both projects are based on events that affected me, that stayed in my memory, in spite of their insignificance. And when I start delving into those memories, I end up pulling on a long thread of meaning. L’Appartement à trous starts as follows: I was a child, I was holding a cat, and my mother told me “Lèche le chat” (“Lick the cat”). I did, much to her surprise. She’d said “lâche le chat” (“Let go of the cat”), not lick it. It’s turned into a very funny story in our family, but it made me think about language, about the poetic resonance of language. What does it mean, “donner sa langue au chat*”? Which I’d physically done. What’s a mother tongue? What’s this about a tongue I share with my mother, with humans, with the cat, and which becomes a language we can share? I also pay homage to poet Ossip Mandelstam, who worked on those forms of poetic vibrations. It’s a way to fit into several different cultural heritages, into a way to be in the world. Les Images flottantes is based on another autobiographical episode: as a young child, I’d been amazed by a performance of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande. After the performance, once the sets had been disassembled, I was allowed to go up on the stage. All that was left were little white crosses on the floor, to tell actors where to stand. Those meaningless things became essential to me. The show is based on that event, mixed to a fiction in which I collect those pieces of white tape. Here, the question is that of the Ideal, of the projection of our mental images and their incarnation in objects. It also allows me to talk about painting, about Kasimir Malevitch, a major figure in abstract art. It’s also a story about a child who will physically become a work of art and will ask this question: how can we draw death?
*”to give one’s tongue to the cat,” i.e., to give up, particularly when playing a guessing game.
Are there commonalities between those two propositions?
We might call them harmless little stories, but they carry a metaphysical dimension and allow us to casually bring together low and high culture. I call it "potential art", because it may or may not become art. Those forms can have a lightness of tone and a freedom of action which allows us to embrace questions that are bigger than us. It also encourages the audience to let go of their preconceptions and to agree to the principle of suspension of disbelief. What unites those two performances is that they’re both made of paper. They are books, and the books themselves are present on stage. It’s as if we were turning the pages together with the audience. It’s a whole thing. In my shows, there’s always a time set aside for the spectators to silently read written texts we present to them. It’s a way of creating a community of readers and to share an emotion which is usually tied to something done on one’s own. The objects that come to life during those performances (books, tables, small wooden crosses, pieces of chalk or coal…) may seem like little things, but they are powerful developers of fiction. They allow us to travel towards deeper layers of consciousness, but without fear, without vertigo. It also guarantees I’m not cheating. I come with a table, and all the images that come out of it are the result of a plastic work done live. They’re not just theatre props, they’re objects charged with the stories they carry.
In the second part of Portrait de l’artiste en ermite ornemental, you invite the audience to play in turn. Is it a way to initiate a personal creative gesture while being part of the great community that is the audience?
There’s the idea of belonging to a larger narrative while making it yours through play. We invite the audience to enter a sensory and sensual process thanks to stories. We’ve decided to call those games our Fantaisies. It lasts for about 30 minutes, and the stories are told by Dominique Roodthooft. We provide the audience with objects handmade by plastic arts students during lockdown and of which about 100 copies were made for the show. Le Dessous-Dessus is a fantasy based on bead games, and Le Voyage de la flaque a disc we spin to create images, inspired by the work of William Morris (a 19th-century English artist, writer, and publisher). The idea is for the audience to be fully in the moment thanks to those immemorial devices. They remind us of children’s games, but games to which we’d ascribed considerable value, because they’re part of what made us, they helped us grow. Le Voyage de la flaque and Le Dessous-Dessus are creations for the Festival d’Avignon. What I’m looking for, here and always, is a form of complicity, and in complicity, everyone plays. It’s a state that makes no impositions, everyone remains entirely free. The question of the beauty of art is something that could scare me, because it implies a concept of power, and I don’t want to have anything to do with a relationship based on hierarchy and authority.
Interview conducted by Marion Guilloux and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach