Upon a new peninsula

When I began work on the exhibition for La Verrière, I decided, on the spur of the moment, to talk to my friend the sculptor Loïc Blairon, because I know that language and poetry are of central importance for him as an artist. We often discuss this, and each time I come away pondering what has been said and mulling it over in my mind. So when Guillaume Désanges suggested I ask an author to contribute a text, write a poem or do an interview, I decided to go back to Loïc and ask those unresolved questions. In so doing, I’m not trying clarify things, rather, I hope to capture something of the energy of our regular discussions, which I would like to have along with me as I work. 

Ismaïl Bahri

Ismaïl Bahri : I know that your sculptural work is suffused with poetry, which you read a great deal. But it’s not immediately apparent, it’s not ‘on show.’ Quite the opposite. And that’s what touches me: the poetry goes about its work secretly, with great restraint. It’s kind of held in reserve. And yet the word ‘poetic’ comes up time and again in the feedback I receive about my own work. And that bothers me because it seems that the characterisation of the work as ‘poetic’ is a superficial response, to its most obvious quality, whereas I feel that its poetry – if it exists at all – should be more deeply suffused, further underground. Something of the essential nature of poetry is at play in that contradiction between the invisible and the openly stated, it seems to me. 

Loïc Blairon : I’m always suspicious when the word ‘poetry’ crops up in discussion, because all too often it’s used to mean everything and its opposite! In the strictest sense, ‘poetry’ refers to texts written by poets, and that’s all. But if we try to expand that a little – which is complicated – I would say that poetry sets out the conditions of an experience. So, if we go looking for the poetry in your work, we may find it in the extreme, reductive economy of your pieces, and your minutely detailed observation of the environment. What’s interesting is that I don’t see you as a great reader of poetry, but as someone who engages more actively, searching books for motifs and objects your recognise and can identify with. 

I.B. : Yes, you’re right. The allusion to the ‘poetic’ in my work certainly has something to do with that intensely observational relationship to my surroundings, which is itself characterised by a very specific, perhaps heightened relationship to space and time. That in itself speaks to the experience of looking at our surroundings, as a way of gauging distance and re-evaluating the relationships between their different elements. By the way, I think I read less as a way of accessing information, than as a way to feed on raw energies and improve my attention and concentration. Reading poetry is part of that act of ‘attentiveness’, and it’s something that interests me more and more, I have to say. 

L.B. : Your work has a great, apparent homogeneity of form and ideas. But the flip side is that its homogeneity can appear like a system, a closed circuit. One video leads to another, and the one after that takes us back to where we started. Two pieces mirror one another… The work seems to stand as a whole, as a structure for the circulation of its own internal meaning. The precise mechanics of your pieces make me think of the we way structure a phrase, of a kind of grammar. Isn’t poetry the opposite of that?

I.B. : For a long time, I devised each exhibition as the development and resolution of a mystery, which implies constructing a kind of meaning, absolutely. And that method – starting from a single reference point, whether it’s a gesture, a thing or a circumscribed situation – allows me to detect the tiny nuances, deviations and accidents that impact the development of a form. These breaks in continuity always interest me, but I feel I’m becoming more and more open to other logics, other economies in my work. 

L.B. :  You used the word ‘mystery’. Do you mean something waiting to be discovered? 

I.B. : Mystery, for me, suggests something in motion, a process rather than a state of being. It refers to something that ‘develops’ or appears slowly and gradually, not something that’s revealed straightaway, though all the elements are there in plain sight, right before our eyes. It’s the process of inferring causes through the attentive observation of their effects. That’s what guides the film essays I made on a beach in Tunis for the exhibition at La Verrière. Paradoxically, the sense of mystery is generated by what’s plainly visible. But the mystery in your work, resides more in its restraint, its reticence. I’m thinking, in particular, of the ‘burial acts’ you’re doing at the moment. 

L.B. :  My sculpture is an accumulation of temporal strata, and the restraint comes in part from that process of stratification. In my work, causes tend to produce more causes, rather than effects. My work inhabits that endless continuum, and the exhibition is a kind of witness to that. It halts the process momentarily, it shows one particular state of the sculpture. 

I.B. : For me, I think less about the work’s immediate setting, perhaps. Bending the energy of the work to conform to an imposed context doesn’t interest me. It puts me in mind of a phrase of Giacometti’s I read recently: ‘Space doesn’t exist, you have to make it.’ 

L.B. :  If a work needs a particular space in which to exist, that’s terrible, indeed. The exhibition is a kind of laboratory: you have to put in place the conditions for an experiment. And the space is structured by the work, not the other way around. 

I.B. : Yes, that implies constructing the exhibition from the work’s own imanent energy, from the scale of its creative gesture… 

L.B. :  Often, the scale is dictated by the size of your hand. 

I.B. : Or my body. The ‘small accidents’ I talked about before are identified within the limits of the scope of my gestures. Outside that scale, its gets complicated. For example, I realise that bringing a piece of work to exhibition can smooth out the sharp intrusions of reality. So ‘framing’ the work and finding the right scale, so that its essence is preserved, are particularly delicate tasks: you need to stop just before you have mastered it, in order to preserve the balance between precision and irresolution. That’s what interests me especially, in the idea behind Ballistic Poetry, the current season at La Verrière. 

L.B. :  In his introduction to the season, Guillaume Désanges talks about the ‘program’ too. That’s interesting in light of something Deleuze wrote about Proust, along the lines of ‘don’t bring your intellect to the fore’, which I take to mean ‘let your intuition do the work.’ There’s a great polarity in your work between what appears as a highly programmatic practice, but which constantly allows for intuition and contingency, and the irruption of new things. The question of surprise seems very important to me, in particular: surprise as tension or fracturing. 

I.B. : I think I try to surprise myself with what the work makes me do, where it takes me. And the surprise comes with an unexpected, open ended event, when the situation ‘jumps’ all of a sudden from being quite unexceptional, to being something remarkable… At the moment, I tend to approach each exhibition from that precise standpoint. I try to rely on those moments of surprise, without trying to slot them into a kind of hierarchy, to judge their quality or enclose them within some kind of overall meaning. On the subject of surprise, I remember an extract from Rilke that you sent me, and which I often re-read: ‘We know how poorly we see the things that surround us in our everyday lives; often, it takes someone come from afar to show us what is all around us; and so we should start by distancing ourselves from things, so that we can approach them again, more equitably, and with greater serenity, with less familiarity, and a respectful distance. Because our understanding of nature begins when we find we cannot understand it any longer. When mankind sensed that nature was something different, an objective, impartial reality with no senses with which to perceive our presence – only then did we emerge from nature, alone, from out of a deserted wilderness.’ 

L.B. :  I see a connection between that and your way of working. It seems to me that in Tunis, you’re looking for a sense of exteriority, which is paradoxical because that’s where you’re absolutely at home. You don’t live there now, but you make everything there, perhaps because that’s precisely where you manage to take yourself out of a context that’s very familiar to you, by putting it at a distance. Like grasping something by distancing it from yourself. 

I.B. : Yes, pushing it away, like when you re-evaluate a distance. It’s the measure of a space, the search for a focal point in relation to things you thought were familiar. On which subject, it seems to me that the element of surprise becomes a precise gesture to pinpoint something incalculable. When it points to a leak. It’s invaluable because it seldom happens. One method is to start from a point of close proximity or intimacy. And to look for a reference point, and then place yourself in its shadow, so that you are off to one side. I remember you once finished a lecture on your sculptural wok by showing a photograph of your son emerging from a cardboard box. Hence, the starting point for a piece of work is often in the realm of the emotions, connected to a place from childhood, to people or elements or material things that are dear to us. And from that whole environment we create a new peninsula, as Dickinson wrote, perhaps that’s all it is finally…