Otherness
In your use of tools like painting and the relationship with the body, is it the other – otherness, other people – you're experimenting with?
My work is based on permeability and the other. On the seizing of the presence of the other, and its transformation into absence. The void created by the absence of the other is also a withdrawal that triggers memory: a hole that beckons desire and nothingness. Jacques Lacan called it troumatisme ("holeness"). I close that void up.
You began with what you called your Ombrographies, then moved on to two other series, Visiteurs and Silences.
Yes. Ombrographies was a way of keeping a trace of bodies passing through. I caught their imprint via photocopying, a process that in fact captures shadow – unlike photography, which captures light. The pigment is laid down where there's shadow: it's the black of the toner that gives the trace its shape. I began this series in 1994. It's in two parts, one for the face and the other for the hands, because I noticed straight off that people didn't place their hands and their face on the photocopier in the same way. Through their hands they revealed an outward expression and through their faces an interior one. That's why I separated the two and made the series a diptych. And that's how Ombrographies became a starting point: for Visiteurs, in which the imprint of people dropping by the studio is rendered directly onto the canvas, and for Silences, where my interest was all the languages the hands were capable of conveying.
The Coming Of The Sign
Hands extend speech, the gesture extends the word. I explored these hand signs and called the series Silences, perhaps in reference to André Malraux's Voices of Silence. In an interview about his film Éloge de l’amour ("In Praise of Love"), Jean-Luc Godard quotes a sentence he says he learnt by heart from Robert Bresson's Notes on Cinematography: "Be sure you have exhausted all the possibilities of communicating via immobility and silence."1 A strange injunction for two film makers who have devoted their lives to movement and sound.
This immobility and this silence are the subject of the series. Hand signs appear in the holes of the void left by my face; I circle the emptiness with my finger, which leaves its print. Hebrew uses the same word for "mouth" and "hole", and Marc-Alain Ouaknin has related these shapes to the ephod, the priest's garment described in the Book of Exodus: its central opening for the head has a hem that cannot be torn, which is equated with the lips.
In this series I reproduce by hand, and compare, the sign alphabets of different civilisations, from those of the prehistoric caves down to our own time. There are disturbing correspondences in these mute languages. I find the same signs at very different periods and in widely separated places. Their meanings, when we know them, are often very similar.
These concordances – from Buddhist ritual, Christianity, deaf-mute language, hunting signs from the indigenous people of New Guinea, signs of recognition – demonstrate the universality of signs allowing simultaneously for saying and seeing, for language and sight. This dual form of expression uses the hand to generate a tripartite relational phenomenon, a trinity with links to the real, the imaginary and the symbolic; the result is what you might call a kind of Borromean knot of the relationship to the other.
Ur-knowledge
In these series, but also in the films you've made with children, you seem preoccupied by the issue of nature and nurture, or rather by the possibility of a primordial instinct, an ancestral knowledge. For instance: is a body's situation in space determined by a cultural stance or by reflexes predating its birth – by a way of being that predates knowledge in the strict sense?
The way you place your body in space – your way of speaking with gestures, with posture – is in fact something very profound. When I got the same people to pose at different periods, they always took up the same posture. Likewise, the language produced by the sound of words is determined by accent, tone and a positioning of the voice specific to each person; you place yourself in space and use body language in exactly the same way. This accentuation of signs, of positions, is deeply rooted in both space and time: we can readily imagine that hand signs are contemporaneous with the appearance of mankind, given that we find them on the walls of caves going back to the earliest human times. Every human being has this power within himself; he elaborates it, complements it and, with the aid of knowledge, structures it. Children have the capacity to express it. At birth babies have a spinal column reflex that allows them to crawl, and which they lose after a few days. In the same way, the perception and comprehension born of that primordial knowledge can be discerned in the speech and drawing of children. I did a series of videos Qui? Quoi? ("Who? What?") in which I ask children metaphysical questions about the origin of the world, of light and of language. The answers are pretty exact. There are members of religious orders who asked children to interpret extracts from the Bible, and the results they got were really surprising. The freedom children reveal in their gestures and drawings is there in their words, too. They don't have the signifieds of learning, they have the emotion of innate knowledge. Art can be the preservation of that knowledge. When an art critic said to Miró, "You draw like a child," Miró's reply was, "I've spent my whole life getting back to that."
The Wrong Side Of The Wrong Side Of The Voice
These projects are all to do with gesture and sign, yet the sound of the voice is somehow – silently – omnipresent.
In the Book of Exodus, Moses tells the Israelites, "See the voices." In hand signs there is a link between eye and voice that goes beyond speech – men use their hands to push speech beyond words – and in the same way, through the sound of words, through sound-words, through emotion, there comes a sound beyond our understanding, an unheard vibration. This is what I've tried to make audible in the sound/video work L’Envers de l’envers de la voix ("The Wrong Side of the Wrong Side of the Voice"). Just as there's no civilisation without art, there's no human race without language. Language is fundamental and at the moment I'm working on this unheard element of the "right" side of the voice, and the way it becomes visible, and audible, on the "wrong" side.
From the wrong side of the voice there emerge sounds that are imperceptible on the right side. Here I resorted to the same process as the painters who used a mirror to look at their compositions in reverse and spot where they were out of balance. The composer Didier Pascalis recorded my voice and played it back to me in reverse through headphones. And I sang what I was hearing. I sang it because I didn't speak or declaim or recite it. I reproduced the sound as I perceived it, without its signified, and this released a speech music that flowed out through the sound of the words. We recorded this and then reversed it again, so as to find the right side in the wrong side of the wrong side. But two wrongs don't make a right: between the wrong side and the right side there's a space beyond the signified, an enchanted space of sound-words, of emotions that upset the sound-vibration field. Maybe in the wrong side of the wrong side I rediscovered the sound of a universal ur-language that I'd observed in signs made with the hands: a tower of Babel of sound, of accents and intonations, of languages I've never spoken and which exist in the shadow of our voices.
From Trace To Timelessness
To get back to the hand signs in Silences: as it happens, once having used the body of the other, at a given moment it was your own hands you put to work.
Yes, I was after the idea within the idea: what's shown is the hand that is making the work. In Silences the hand appears in an eye-shaped hole in which it could be the pupil: you can see with your hands as well. As the blind show us, the possibilities of seeing with your hands are enormous. I'm trying out this view of things. When you come down to it, my approach is somewhat phenomenological. In the chapter on "indirect language and the voices of silence" in Signs, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes: "The artist always refers to his world as if the equivalence principle he will use to make it manifest has always been buried therein."2
So, in Visiteurs, do these gaps you're talking about – these traces of bodies – take the form of a silhouette or an area of colour?
A silhouette is an outline, and the word goes back to the 17th century. The aristocrat who was Minister of Finance had decided on cost-cutting measures for the state – they had that then, too. His name was Étienne de Silhouette and his idea was a land tax for the nobility and pension cuts for the privileged classes. They revolted, and to hold his thriftiness up to ridicule they applied the name "silhouettes" to the unadorned outlines of objects and faces that were very much in vogue at the time.
There's no outline for my Visiteurs. And no light for throwing a shadow – Pliny the Elder relates that Butades of Sicyones' daughter outlined the cast shadow of her lover on a wall. Here it's the visitor's body that holds the pencil and forms the line. The shadow merges with the body. I'm haunted by those inconceivable photos taken after the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima: the fusion of bodies caused by the flash from the bomb was projected as shadow onto the walls. In the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, Marguerite Duras' dialogue for Emmanuelle Riva/She and Eiji Okada/He runs, "I saw everything in Hiroshima, everything – You saw nothing in Hiroshima, nothing." The world was lost to us, lost to sight; and it's that loss of sight I try to give physical expression to in these paintings.
So these really are pictures.
Yes. And I use the word deliberately, as a jab at the current in contemporary art that excludes the term. The picture space is a fixed space, it has its limits. Each expressive space has its dimensions and time frame. The picture is outside time. It's not produced by a frequency of twenty-four images a second, or by a wave frequency. It's a space outside the contemporary system of image production – maybe the only space where you're not in the here and now. This is why the various art media have trouble getting a handle on it. The picture is the movement of a fall somewhere outside of time: it produces an indeterminate time. Whenever you enter a picture you're entering thirty thousand years of history. Inevitably that makes you stop and think. There's a question I'd like to put here: why are the two great periods of 20th-century art – modern art and contemporary art – named in relation to time? Why does our use of language bring art and time together?
This business of time and the way it can be stretched – doesn't that go back to your meeting with Leroi-Gourhan, the prehistorian?
Right. I met André Leroi-Gourhan at the Collège de France in 1984, for a series of interviews I was doing for L’Art vivant, a review I was working for. He showed me how the human race had been producing images from its very beginnings. When I was a student at the Villa Arson, what had happened ten years before seemed prehistoric to me, but Leroi-Gourhan taught me objectivity: he saw art cycles as running at three to four thousand years. He explained to me that whole schools were often eclipsed, that civilisations vanished, that you could detect stylistic evolution in cave art as well. So my ten-year view of things was very, very short-term. And the development of my work since then has been influenced by these questions.
Towards A Notation Of Light
As the successor to modernity, post-modernity and the change of millennium, the art of today is a different kind of challenge.
What's interesting, as the new millennium gets under way, is that light is once more an important subject in art. Maybe because it's the link between mind and matter. In Time and the Other Emmanuel Lévinas writes, "Light is what distinguishes something else from me, but as if that something else were emerging out of me. Not only is the lit object something we encounter, it is also, precisely because it is lit, something we encounter as if emerging out of us."3 Light and language both connect, and so cushion the troumatisme. Maybe that's what art is all about.
The avant-gardes have laid us open to all media, all techniques, all ways of working. This opening-up process means I can use painting, video, photography, writing and sound. If I compare words the way I compare signs, the digital of "digit" meaning "figure" echoes the digital of the Latin digitus meaning "finger". Computer digitisation and the trace of the imprint – two modes that might seem contradictory – come together in my work as they do in the word.
There's a Chinese proverb that says, "When the sage points at the moon, the fool looks at his finger." I'd like to close by saying something about my most recent work: a connection between the hand and infinity in the writing-down of planets and stars. I use my camera to catch the light of the stars, like a pen aspirating luminous ink. Since I move faster than the memory of the sensing device, the light leaves the trace of the sign in the merging of the speed of my hand and the speed of light. Set against the immobility of cosmic time, this writing-down seeks to relativise the void.
Digne / Marseille, December 2003 – January 2004
1. Télérama n° 2679 du 16 mai 2001.
2. 1960, Gallimard, Paris.
3. 1983, PUF, Paris, conférences 1946-1947 au Collège de Philosophie.
© Éditions Paris-Musées / Actes Sud, 2004.