Simon Maidment

Interview with Fabien Giraud & Raphael Siboni

Mel­bourne Fes­ti­val Visual Arts Coor­di­na­tor Simon Maid­ment met with French artists Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni on the occa­sion of their first Aus­tralian exhi­bi­tion Les choses qui tombent [’some­times they fall’] accom­pa­nied by Chris Sharp, vis­it­ing US born, Paris based, cura­tor and critic under­tak­ing a cura­to­r­ial res­i­dency at Gertrude Con­tem­po­rary Art Spaces.

Les choses qui tombent exhi­bi­tion, Gertrude Con­tem­po­rary Art Spaces, Mel­bourne Inter­na­tional Arts Fes­ti­val Octo­ber 2009.

Simon Maid­ment: So Fabien we were just won­der­ing, to begin with; the title of the show and con­cep­tual frame­work of the show how did you come to it and what is it?

Fabien Giraud: Well I think the first thing we were inter­ested in was a very basic sculp­tural ques­tion, dis­cov­er­ing the space debris and space junk; things that are falling back from the space con­quest, from the six­ties and sev­en­ties, back to earth now. Actu­ally Aus­tralia is a big place for this falling down of objects. And we found this object, I mean this is a replica of the orig­i­nal object [point­ing to sculp­tures], which is a gas tank and we just like the idea that it is almost like a ready made but just it’s been through two major forces. Obvi­ously it’s an indus­trial object that was fly­ing in space but then in the end it fell back to earth and went through the force of the atmos­phere. Usu­ally objects get pul­ver­ized and they [turned into] dust and we don’t see the objects back on earth. But this object went through the atmos­phere, was crushed by its entry in the atmos­phere and crushed a sec­ond time on its col­lid­ing to the ground. We just like the idea that it was a sculp­tural form. The orig­i­nal object reminded us of a Henry Moore kind of shape, very, I don’t know, round or oval gas tank, per­fectly shaped.

SM: Almost feminine

FB: Yes, it reminded us very much of Henry Moore’s sculp­ture, and this mod­ernist era of appre­hen­sion of the form.  So yeah that was the basis of this object.

Raphaël Siboni: There is also the idea that usu­ally when NASA wanted to destroy like a satel­lite or some­thing, they con­trol the re-entry of the object so its been pul­ver­ized when it re-enters the atmos­phere but this one is like an uncon­trolled re-entry. And so think­ing of uncon­trolled shapes, sculp­ture was the start of the show.

FG: And I think for us it was impor­tant to work with this idea that basi­cally since there is sup­posed to be the end of his­tory from the nineties, and the whole fan­tasy, cul­tural fan­tasy of the event, not a his­tor­i­cal event like an upris­ing of the peo­ple or some­thing, but some­thing that falls from the sky. Some­thing that’s like any kind of Hol­ly­wood movie from the last ten or twenty years it has been about. You see its amaz­ing its just aster­oid hit­ting the earth or the earth going upward with a tsumami, and every­thing is com­ing from some­thing which it’s not, which is not a force, the forces are just exter­nal. The fan­tasy is that we exter­nalise the forces not on a soci­ety level but on a kind of tran­scen­den­tal thing. But with­out the idea that what hap­pens, what comes back from the sky, it’s not this UFO thing, it’s actu­ally just a gas tank. You know, like that was the big myth­i­cal space con­quest and it’s now all just falling back

SM: When we spoke at the open­ing, a lit­tle bit, about those forces you men­tioned that there was some­thing in there of impor­tance about those forces that were sculpt­ing the object that were no longer the hand of a person.

RS: Yes – because it’s kind of an ambigu­ous shape because it’s been made by man, a more com­plex shape cre­ated by man but at the same time its when you think of it just like a pure force that shaped the objects’ form. Then also the other idea, when we started work­ing on it, and even in the pho­tos, there was no real way to have an idea of the size of those tanks and no size ref­er­ence and this made us start think­ing about the object as, like when you think of it in the uni­verse which don’t have a sense of what is its size is and so we start mak­ing dif­fer­ent scales of the same object, try­ing to repli­cate it, and at one point try­ing to pro­vide the same feel­ing for the peo­ple in the exhi­bi­tion — so that you never know what is the right dis­tance to have between you and the object.  Which is some­thing sim­ple, which you never know. Like if you always have to refind this gap between you and the object.

FG: I guess it is some­thing which runs through the whole show. Like when you walk up to the plinth, it can be empty or have wedges under­neath or painted com­pletely dif­fer­ently then I think this whole idea of what is the ref­er­ence point to an object or what is the ref­er­ence point to an event itself. It is just the insti­tu­tional frame of some­thing that gives it its scale, because things have to be scaled to in order to be expe­ri­enced and so I guess we wanted to link it to this idea that in space there is obvi­ously no ref­er­ence point because there is no com­par­i­son and what hap­pens, you know, when things fall onto the earth and then we expe­ri­ence this com­par­i­son. But we wanted to keep it loose by mak­ing all of these dif­fer­ent scales, and dif­fer­ent adjust­ments, of plinths.

RS: Like the size of the plinth is based on the size of the object so at one point we also thought we could use an empty plinth because when you see the plinth there is no more need for the object because you can have a sense.

SM:  So just on that, you’re ref­er­enc­ing that in space, the lack of light means you use a dif­fer­ent ref­er­ence point or ref­er­ence media or tech­nol­ogy to iden­tify an object and find out its shape, laser or RADAR or what­ever, because visu­ally you can’t tell its scale if there is noth­ing else around it to show us by con­trast.  An audi­ence mem­ber in here is see­ing this object crashed in the desert but also poten­tially on the other side of a plan­e­tary sys­tem or right up close to them in a vac­uum. But there was some­thing within that expla­na­tion that I wanted to poten­tially touch on, which is what you said about the fram­ing of the insti­tu­tion as a ref­er­ence point for an art­work, as you have done, did you want to extrap­o­late on that a lit­tle bit? How you were think­ing specif­i­cally about this insti­tu­tion, or the insti­tu­tion of the cur­rent space?

FG: Quite recently we have been inter­ested in look­ing back at the his­tory of insti­tu­tional cri­tique from the 70’s, and how from a nar­ra­tive point of view, about all the nar­ra­tives we bring into this sort of dry ges­ture of Michael Asher, these peo­ple we are quite fas­ci­nated with, and we, many works we work on now are going in that direc­tion, so it’s not this insti­tu­tion as Gertrude, but more a very basic ques­tion of how, when we expe­ri­ence, what hap­pens, what is the frame, what is the frame of expe­ri­ence today? If we pass the cyn­i­cal era of the 80’s and 90’s, where old val­ues are put down, I think we’ve passed this era now, it’s how we can re-question the idea of expe­ri­ence, which is not just flat, and which I under­stand as this cyn­i­cal era of art…

SM: Well we are enter­ing what Ger­ard Rau­nig calls the third phase of insti­tu­tional cri­tique. I was going to pick up on the lack of cyn­i­cism or sar­casm within this works as appro­pri­a­tion and the forces on the Mod­ernist form which are forces that are not your hands but the hands of grav­ity, the dust hit­ting it at high forces, but also the use of the what plinth and that Mod­ernist form, but it is light hearted in some sec­tions of this show, it is not done with any sense of cynicism.

RS: I think if we want to sum up, there are many con­nec­tions between the pieces but also there is this very sim­ple idea that at one point, what is this expe­ri­ence or this event, when some­one is fac­ing an object that is art, so with the cop­per plates we can speak, fac­ing tech­nol­ogy that totally obso­lete,  it’s just this very rela­tion that we…

FG: We like the idea of think­ing about art as a his­tor­i­cal nerve. And some nerves die out, like 16^th cen­tury nerves, if you think of art like nerves. They die out like a dead nerve that didn’t work any­more. And it goes through the show, this big cop­per mez­zotint that we made which is this 17^th cen­tury tech­nique, as a dead nerve, kind of late, some­thing which stored there and which is not…

SM: And also the use of the clear glass in the lens rather than the mod­ern refrac­tive glass, pre­vent­ing you from hav­ing the proper “pho­to­graphic image”. The inter­est in an obso­lete tech­nol­ogy or an obso­lete prac­tice is also an adjunct to that with this idea of the artist sort of stop­ping at some point, and the force of some­thing else com­plet­ing the work. Really com­plet­ing the work — the object here or in the case of the video, the lenses no longer refract­ing — and that abstrac­tion, the end image, isn’t a fil­ter or some­thing you’ve done, rather that it’s some­thing through the process that has been brought on – the other day we talked about the forces of the sun. I won­dered whether that was also in your minds as to the choice of mate­ri­als and the way you fin­ished the black sculp­tural works.  Given you know which has got­ten inter­est in that you started off look­ing at ways in which you could poten­tially make them and the first step was going look­ing at the RMIT ceramic cen­tre which .…..the ceram­ics as sculp­ture as this feel­ing almost a lit­tle, like feel­ing in the same boat as the a dead nerve that twitches all the time

FG: yeah, yeah, yeah.… with work in the stu­dio for sure…

RS: Also I think this idea with the video and the mez­zotint of a dead, I don’t know, what? A dead sen­sor.  So like, you can think of mez­zotint as a con­tin­ual pro­cess­ing like, it is still ongo­ing but not so effi­cient any­more — it just like the cam­era, it keeps record­ing some­thing with no out­put, just pure…

FG: You asked this ques­tion about the sur­face of things, of these objects, I think we wanted to, I don’t know if we suc­ceeded so much in that way, but we wanted at some point that the sur­face of an object can become the object itself.… its not just like the ceram­ics being glazed or some­thing, its about the ceram­ics being shaped by its sur­face, you know its like because there is so much tar, bitu­men and so much latex, but the objects are always about the effect in a way, that the effect can become the sur­face, effect can become such a mate­r­ial thing, such a dense thing that it becomes a mate­r­ial you know, it’s not just a coat on the sur­face of things. Then it becomes so thick that some things are actu­ally sculpted in the sur­face of the object. But maybe we could move onto the video and explain a lit­tle bit…

It’s a lens that we brought in Cal­i­for­nia, it is a 35mm lens, quite myth­i­cal from the 70’s… basi­cally we did a very sim­ple thing, we just replaced every glass lens inside this object of which there are about 12, and we replaced it with clear glass so its a very sim­ple and regres­sive act in a way because  I like this idea that for cen­turies we have been pol­ish­ing opti­cal lenses to record the vision that our eyes were grasping.

SM: .…to repli­cate the phys­i­cal of the eye, the shape of the retina

FG: yes exactly, and the fram­ing of real­ity obvi­ously, because what hap­pens in the optic (the cam­era) is that you can have a right angle on it so you can frame.…

RS: it is very sim­ple because the light goes through, it goes through the opti­cal lense as if there is no optic in a way, so at one point when we shot the movie we can see the sun­set we have shot in a way, as a machine would see it, it is like a non– human.…

FG: it’s like an opti­cal lens as a pros­the­sis, we can­celled it by doing this, so when we shot the movie, we can talk about the movie, but its, this film we just went in the desert, here in the mid­dle of Aus­tralia and we shot directly into the sun­set with very high def­i­n­i­tion cam­era, a Red Cam­era, which is sup­posed to be the most advanced cam­era now that you can find on the mar­ket, obvi­ously it will be obso­lete in one year, three years, but this is the cam­era and we put this object which is as if we didn’t have a lens, in a way you know like as if the light was going directly onto the very high def­i­n­i­tion sen­sor and I think the idea was really how could we record day as just a quan­tity of light touch­ing the sur­face of earth if you see the day as this, when day goes by and sun­set hap­pens, it goes from white where the sen­sor is sat­u­rated by light to the very dark, obvi­ously this very high sen­sor lost in the desert fac­ing in the mid­dle of nowhere fac­ing this very old tech­nol­ogy of the sun. If we say that the sun is a piece of technology.

RS: this very sim­ple idea of two tech­nolo­gies fac­ing each other in an empty space and how.…

FG: if the sun is a technology.

RS: like there is noth­ing in between these technologies

FG: I like this, I think we were we were fas­ci­nated with this idea of high def­i­n­i­tion as a con­tem­po­rary myth of the image — that high def­i­n­i­tion has poten­tially no lim­its, obvi­ously it is a mar­ket­ing argu­ment that they try to exag­ger­ate so maybe it’s that with mez­zotint is the tech­nique to this high def­i­n­i­tion sen­sors which I see as a very tac­tile thing, the sensor’s really feel­ing its like pho­tons hit­ting the sur­face of a thing. We like this idea that in two years they say they are going to bring out a cam­era which is 25 times HD, so this cam­era we have is 4 times, this is should be 25 times HD, but then you know like 200 and whatever.

RS: then the shot, the actual footage of the cam­era there is no video pro­jec­tor that can…

Chris Sharp: That’s strong enough to actu­ally project it.

RS: there is not enough res­o­lu­tion so like the shot of the footage is wait­ing for the future — like wait­ing for its sup­port you know.

FG: but not only that, but its wait­ing for the body to sup­port it, because our brain can receive only so much def­i­n­i­tion. Sci­en­tists can define the eye in terms of def­i­n­i­tion, in terms of pixel ratio. I mean obvi­ously you can­not see every par­ti­cle of the world when I look at this wall. Like this idea, I think that when you film in this sup­pos­edly very high def­i­n­i­tion cam­era where does it stop? Because who are you film­ing for? Since as humans we can­not per­ceive it so then you know you are catch­ing some­thing for some­thing or some­one that is not there yet.

RS: they started like recently to make pros­the­sis with nan­otech­nolo­gies for blind peo­ple so now they are work­ing on a sys­tem for the eye that is 10 pixel by 10 pixel, so the world for those peo­ple is like 10 by 10 so you can have a sense of the space at some point like we could see some­thing in high res­o­lu­tion that our brain can process.

SM: also in terms of the devel­op­ment of con­tem­po­rary per­cep­tion, its a well known learnt trait of a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions ago, if you put a sin­gle frame cut into a film no one would be able to see it, its like this idea of sub­lim­i­nal map­ping of 24 frames per sec­ond one of those frames was not enough for peo­ple to be able to but now you need a quar­ter of those frames because every­one has grown up with the tech­nol­ogy, its been mutated to develop in this way, pho­tog­ra­phers say the human eye can­not quite reach 16 bit level of detail tonal­ity but that peo­ple using dig­i­tal imagery and pho­tog­ra­phy reg­u­larly have been tested to be able to increase that, the more they kind of prac­tice, until they go blind or what­ever. The really inter­est­ing thing there also about the time, so this image is some­thing for the future, and it’s some­thing to train or mutate humankind via the Red Cam­era or other tech­nol­ogy, that sim­i­larly it then cap­tured some­thing which will, while the rest of the world waits for, to catch up to, to expe­ri­ence, is so many mil­lion min­utes from when that light was spat out from the sun. So you have the idea the past event, when it was cap­tured or when it was emit­ted, so there’s that kind of inter­est­ing idea about it as well. Time, com­ing back to that sense of obso­les­cence or cir­cu­lar­ity in these works, is really per­ti­nent as well.

CS: I think when you titled the show Les Choses Qui Tombent in the sense of things that fall from the sky and these tech­nolo­gies that fall into des­ti­tute and become obso­lete. I mean it’s pretty coher­ent in the sense that a lot of what you’re say­ing in that the human eye becomes obso­lete, to a cer­tain degree until it can catch up with this tech­nol­ogy. But human vision as we know it falls into des­ti­tute so in that sense it’s.…

FG: Yeah I think as we talked about this dead nerve, you know what I mean by dead nerve? Obvi­ously one man look­ing at the sky the third cen­tury after Christ, and one man look­ing at the sky now; his vision is a dead nerve, the guy from the third cen­tury, because we can­not relate in any way to this idea of a dome, a black dome in which shines some crys­tals that they used to see. This vision, the way he was look­ing at the world, fas­ci­nated us because we went through the gallery and we went through all these rev­o­lu­tions, that we can­not, still our eyes func­tion­ing, our brain func­tion­ing but this nerve, this kind of ten­sion with the world is dead and I guess too art’s, I like this idea and we dis­cuss it a lot, you can cross times, you can make nerves reap­pear, reac­ti­vate  them.

RS: There’s also ellip­sis con­nected with this idea, because at the same time it relates to our def­i­n­i­tion of tech­nolo­gies but also there was this idea as Matthew Brown [Mel­bourne Artist] told and when he first heard about the movie we made, he thought of this first time when the rep­tiles go out of the water and they see for the first time and they didn’t have the eye focused and it’s like the first vision…

FG: Wide open to some­thing that they can­not grasp. I love this idea.…

RS: Also I think in terms of the cin­e­matic, remov­ing the lenses it’s also, because so many peo­ple keep say­ing that video is not as good as the film, say­ing that film is much more like the human eye. So actu­ally the movie we made is like the the­ory made real – it’s what the cam­era sees. There is no inter­pre­ta­tion between…

SM: It’s a human­i­sa­tion almost, it’s an attempt to make what repli­cates the human eye but that is the sun hit­ting that sensor.

RS: It’s like the truth you know, I mean they say that about cin­ema, but this is like pure record­ing of the world as it is, just pho­tons hit­ting the sur­face of the sensor.

FG: I think we for­get too much that when we invent, tech­nol­ogy is not images, we invent sen­sors, you know, to sense the world. Images are just like some inter­pre­ta­tion of this but if we take the cam­era down to what it is, a sen­sor, as it was in the chem­i­cal ana­logue world of machines, in the dig­i­tal it becomes, for me this very sen­sual thing. Which goes com­pletely oppo­site to what­ever peo­ple say about dig­i­tal being just a record­ing medium. [laughing]

SM: It’s that inter­est­ing thing also, not to steer the con­ver­sa­tion here but just as an aside, about the past and the future and what becomes what at dif­fer­ent times. The anal­ogy of the space race and the anal­ogy of the cold war being fought on that level and that every­thing was about the future and it was about the future in an almost Stal­in­ist kind of way, it was all about soci­etal pro­gres­sion, and now it’s com­pletely redun­dant to the point where you’re high­light­ing it crash­ing back to earth and it comes back as art rather than com­ing back as soci­ety future; well then soci­ety future is con­tained – that’s the sculp­ture of it.

FG: This idea that in the 60’s and 70’s, now our idea of the future is really that every­thing will be about the immune sys­tem, you know, against sickness.…

I think we see our bod­ies as a poten­tial, or just the earth, as being hit by these things, or earth as ris­ing, the sea ris­ing, the earth col­laps­ing and we are here as a very weak units, and the whole flu thing that’s been going on in the world for one year now, it’s like you can see how much we just became very human – we want to have a shell, we want to have some­thing to pro­tect us on a very sort of bio­log­i­cal level and in the 60’s and 70’s with space con­quest, and it’s quite inter­est­ing that actu­ally now peo­ple are think­ing again of going to the moon, but they don’t know how any­more. There’s this whole debate, but we can’t do it any­more. In the 60’s and 70’s even­tu­ally this whole thing, this idea of going out­ward, going to the exte­rior was a very deep thing as it is not today, now the exte­rior is com­ing from all over, from the biol­ogy itself, from our inner degen­er­a­tion of cells, and that’s why I think the space con­quest is not inter­est­ing and it’s just regressive.

SM: In terms of not much what we talked about here, just take us through the mezzotint.

FG: The mez­zotint, it’s very easy to explain as this obso­lete tech­nique that we were inter­ested in, this mez­zotint that is a tech­nique that is used to make, as you know, very black mono­chrome and very rich back­grounds in engrav­ing, and we wanted to do this thing, this object, which is nearly an object which is not really a draw­ing or paint­ing because it’s never to be printed, and it is not really a sculp­tural thing but it is just a sub­lim­i­nal thing, some­thing that stands there, it is inked, and the ink never dries. The ink is always ready to be printed… this print ink is very sticky, and this objects stand there, as we titled the show, yet to be writ­ten, yet to be told, and it’s there as… I don’t like the world ‘poten­tial’, but as an open mon­u­ment, or form… an open something!

SM: So it stands in for the art, it becomes the art aura, like the aura… when you look at a piece of art it is con­tained ‘here’, and not hav­ing the draw­ing or the print, this becomes the aura, it has poten­tial, it is not real art, but it is real art, because every­thing is already there

FG: Yeah I see it as an interpretation…

SM: …an inter­pre­ta­tion of what’s going to hap­pen, in that what is printed, or what it goes onto is left up to the viewer? It goes back to… not unfin­ished, but again, the incomplete…

FG: For me, it’s not really incom­plete, I think one thing that fas­ci­nates me in  our cul­ture is the use of glue. Glue is a very fas­ci­nat­ing thing because it is not a mate­r­ial in itself– you know, I use glue as a mate­r­ial because glue is made for glu­ing objects. But you know, I think it was Neil Bohr, or some very applauded physi­cist that said some­one came to visit him and asked ‘What are you study­ing now?’ and he replied ‘Glue, because glue is the most fas­ci­nat­ing thing’. And actu­ally when they do stud­ies on glue, they say they still don’t know actu­ally what it is, but on a very basic level glue, is like when you take an object, you break it– if it’s a vase for exam­ple, the glue is a syn­thetic mol­e­c­u­lar chain, because the mol­e­cules have been bro­ken in the object, and it is a syn­thetic bridge for them, between these two mol­e­cule chains in the object. And what is inter­est­ing is this idea of affin­ity, because glue will not glue all things together, there needs to be affin­ity on a mol­e­c­u­lar level between two objects, and the glue is mak­ing this affin­ity. You know what I mean?

SM: I do

FG: So it’s kind of a fas­ci­na­tion with this idea that maybe an object, a really inter­est­ing object, or sit­u­a­tion, should be like glue. Maybe this thing that is always open– because glue itself is like an open bridge, a bridge lead­ing to nowhere.

SM: So this became the bridge between your con­cep­tual idea and the illus­tra­tion of it, poten­tial illus­tra­tion through some­thing and then the final mate­r­ial almost dead­ened, and this is the syn­thetic mol­e­c­u­lar chain between those.

FG: You could think of it that way… I just think of it as glue

[laugher]

RS: There is no real dif­fer­ence between the idea of the work and the work itself, like, I don’t think of the work as an illus­tra­tion of our idea. I think they are on the same level, both the work and the idea, because you can put ideas (and works) together in a con­trolled way. And so we don’t want to trans­late ideas that shapes the work with those dif­fer­ent sys­tems, on the sale level.

FG: I think, that when you talk in this lan­guage, it is very dif­fer­ent. Well, not very dif­fer­ent, but just this idea of inscrip­tion. Start­ing an image with this inscrip­tion in the mez­zotint, that you can find a sec­ondary, ‘ultra’ image in the small pro­jec­tion that’s there. You have this rela­tion­ship sup­ported by the wall. Then we wanted to have an ele­ment that was just the raw cop­per that we brought to use in this project; we wanted to leave it as we had got­ten it. But this thing was big chunks of cop­per com­ing from a mine in China, so get­ting it into Aus­tralia and into a fac­tory! [Laughs] In the end, in the process of the trans­porta­tion, there were some marks on the sur­face – acci­dents in trans­porta­tion. So we just decided to ink the whole sur­face of the cop­per. As if it had to be printed.

RS: But as I was doing the etch­ing, I pre­ferred the act of etch­ing to the actual out­come of the etch­ing – the process was impor­tant, not the result.  And in a way, just by the act of ink­ing it, trans­formed this hard mate­r­ial object into nearly an image.  A nor­mal cop­per plate, just with this very slight modification.

SM: Its that very mod­i­fi­ca­tion that becomes the draw­ing of the tran­si­tion into dif­fer­ent states and trans­porta­tion here. Which is again, like all of these three, the poten­tial future of our under­stand­ing of it. In the same way we can­not fully tech­no­log­i­cally or phys­i­o­log­i­cally present or receive the video work, in a way that fully grasps def­i­n­i­tion. These are also sit­ting here in a way that, they are sit­ting here with the poten­tial of future cri­tique. The frame­work also allows for expo­nen­tial improvement.

RS: I think what is impor­tant between these three is, cause at the very begin­ning, this was just the idea to reduce draw­ing to a pure idea. To reduce draw­ing as the ulti­mate expres­sion of the self. Lay­ers and lay­ers of ges­ture; so this one was see a ges­ture that is not related to a self. It’s just like pure trans­porta­tion; its pure act.

FG: There is no ges­ture actually.

RS: It’s just traces of an event. Just like transportation.

CS: What’s the sig­nif­i­cance of the size?

R: It’s just a stan­dard size; the pal­lets for the pieces as well as the trucks involved in trans­porta­tion all have a stan­dard size.

END