Paris, 2017

WHAT IS AN ARCHIVE FOR?

To find out what memory has forgotten.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR ARCHIVE?

I would say that there are two archives: the first one is made of leftovers. I am a curator and I believe my task is not to write but to make exhibitions. Of course, during this process you write letters, notes, and this is what remains after the exhibition is over. I hate to throw things away, maybe because I am a museum curator (conservateur in French, the one who keeps and preserves), and fortunately I have a house in the countryside in southern France where I can store them. This is what we might call the passive archive. Then there is a second one, the active archive. Having worked very closely with artists that I have followed for decades, I wanted to create a database of information about the lectures, shows, and texts I made for them. I therefore keep artists’ files in a filing cabinet in the attic, and I fill them with everything I can find about those artists (press articles, invitation cards, ephemera, etc.). There is no systematic filing of those documents; they are organized randomly, but each file is devoted to a single artist. It is very easy afterwards when I look for something about a specific artist and need to use this material, which is original and very lively and leads to surprising, unsolicited connections. This happens for artists whose careers I follow closely or even for those whom I hardly know and who might interest me for future exhibitions. It is like an intellectual family for me. Maybe I could add a third archive, which has evolved more recently when my exhibitions started to be included in art history and exhibition histories: the exhibitions’ archive, which I keep on my laptop or record on DVDs. I use this material when people ask me questions about my past and present curatorial activities, about my vision on transhistorical and transcultural exhibitions, and so on. There has been a lot of interest in it recently.

WE COULD SAY THE ARCHIVE IS AN INSPIRING BASE FOR THINKING THAT HELPS YOU NAVIGATE THROUGH QUESTIONS THAT HAVE ALWAYS BEEN IMPORTANT FOR YOU AS A CURATOR.

Yes, definitely.

ONCE YOU TOLD ME THAT WHEN YOU DO SOMETHING, CURATORIALLY, YOU AREN’T ONLY SPEAKING FOR YOURSELF BUT FOR AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF ARTISTS AND COLLEAGUES WHO WERE NOURISHED BY THE SAME CULTURAL ATMOSPHERE AS YOU WERE—A KIND OF “COLLECTIVE SUBJECTIVITY” AS I STARTED TO CALL IT. DO YOU THINK THAT YOUR ARCHIVE CAN BE A PLACE FOR COLLECTIVE MEMORY?

I think so. I grew up with artists such as Christian Boltanski, Robert Filliou, Annette Messager, Daniel Buren, Bertrand Lavier, Gérard Titus-Carmel, Alain Fleischer, Braco Dimitrijević, Gina Pane, and Sarkis and was very influenced by some of them. I have a particular way of thinking that belongs to a certain time, and you cannot escape that. Nevertheless, I try to see in terms of broader history and I have to thank my background for this.

I THINK THAT WHAT YOU ARE DOING COMES FROM ANOTHER TIME AND CONTEXT.

Exactly. My experience of art originated in the 1960s, so my thinking comes from that time.

DO YOU THINK THAT THE WAY YOU UNDERSTAND ART IS REFLECTED IN THE STRUCTURE OF YOUR ARCHIVE?

I KNOW THIS MAY BE A TRICKY QUESTION SINCE YOU ARE THE ONE WHO BUILT THIS PLACE SO IT’S DIFFICULT FOR YOU TO BE OBJECTIVE. I AM ASKING, BECAUSE WHEN I VISITED YOUR ARCHIVE, I COULD CLEARLY SEE THE PARALLELS BETWEEN THE WAY YOU CURATE EXHIBITIONS, YOUR VISUAL THINKING, AND THE WAY YOU HAD ORGANIZED DOCUMENTS AND OBJECTS IN THE MAIN ROOM OF YOUR HOUSE, YOUR DESK, YOUR GRANDFATHER’S COLLECTION, YOUR LIBRARY, YOUR FATHER’S LIBRARY, YOUR ART OBJECTS, NOTEBOOKS, AND YOUR COLLECTION OF POSTCARDS.

You are right… this is the environment in which I live and work, it must be the place where my vision is seen. Except for the monographs, I classify books according to geographical criteria; it is my way of mapping the items and making them available for my personal research. It took me some time to understand that this was the most practical way for me to deal with the accumulation of catalogs, objects, and documents. This place is my memory, and it does work like my memory, geographically, somehow.

THE ARCHIVE ALSO REFLECTS YOUR WAY OF THINKING THEN. IT WORKS AS AN EXTENSION OF YOUR MEMORY AND YOUR SENSIBILITY FOR OBJECTS FROM DIFFERENT TIMES AND PLACES.

Sure.

THERE IS A STRONG SIMILARITY BETWEEN THE WAY YOU ARCHIVE AND HOW YOU CREATE… AND THE LINK IS YOU, OF COURSE. BUT I CAN SEE THIS BECAUSE I HAVE HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO TALK WITH YOU EXTENSIVELY OVER THE PAST THREE YEARS, AND TO KNOW YOUR APPROACH BY OBSERVING YOU.

I agree with you. I am the connection among this group of objects. As I further develop my ideas for the exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in 2021, I understand that among the thousands of possible connections and analogies between the items of the museum’s collection, the only tools I have to make something out of these resources are my sensibility and my brain. And if my memory fails, I can always go back to books and get lost; that’s the path to serendipity.

ALL PARTS OF YOUR ARCHIVE, WHEN YOU WORK WITHIN IT, ARE ACTIVATED BY YOUR PRESENCE—YOU CAN JUMP FROM A BOOK TO AN OLD LETTER AND THEN BACK TO SOME IMAGES ON YOUR LAPTOP…

Absolutely, it is a living place. And it is perfect for all the things you cannot find on the internet. We tend to think that we can find everything there, but it is not true. Anyway, I really like Pinterest as a database for images; it has fascinating themes that I can explore and be inspired by.

LIKE THE SECTION WITH MANUSCRIPTS FROM THE MIDDLE AGES?

Indeed! But at the same time, the miniatures interest me more for my visual thinking than for display, because they are very difficult to include in exhibitions.

WHICH PART OF YOUR ARCHIVE DO YOU PREFER, OR USE THE MOST?

The artists’ files, definitely. What I called the active archive. I feed it like a plant. I have a small folder here in Paris, and I throw in everything I want to bring to the countryside house, in order to fill the attic files unremittingly. This is for the physical part of it. I have a special file on my laptop too, which I call “Les affinités insolites classées” [Classified unusual affinities]: this is where all my obsessions and favorite themes are. To give you an idea of such themes: Caché dévoilé [Hidden, Unveiled], Corps cyclades guitar [Bodies, Cyclades, Guitar], Coulures couleurs taches [Drips, Colors, Stains], Déformation corporelle [Body Deformity], Esprits ombres fantômes [Spirits, Shadows, Ghosts], Nuage fumée [Cloud, Smoke], Pilosité [Hairiness], Postérieur [Backside], Rhyparographies [Still Lives], Super héros [Superheroes], Vent drapeaux [Wind, Flags].

WOULD YOU SAY THAT YOUR POSTCARDS COLLECTION IS THE FORERUNNER OF YOUR LAPTOP FILE?

Maybe. At the beginning, it all started with postcards of artworks. I wanted to focus more on the aesthetic features of these objects that we can find everywhere. I have an entire set of sunsets, sex-related scenes, ethnographic scenes, monochrome cards with captions, Mona Lisas, flowers, and so on. I like the popular humor and culture they rep- resent. I have a taste for the vulgar. The aesthetics of postcards changes according to the cultural and political climate, you can see it clearly as you go through my collection: it would have been impossible to find a postcard making fun of the Mafia in Palermo twenty years ago, but of course increased tourism changed everything. Sometimes it is more complicated for me to find postcards that I would want to make part of the collection, sometimes less.

WHAT PHRASE BEST DESCRIBES THE FEELING OF WORKING IN YOUR COUNTRYSIDE HOUSE, SURROUNDED BY YOUR BOOKS, BY THEIR CULTURAL POTENTIAL?

I would say the freedom to navigate, to stimulate connections by the simple fact of walking around and grabbing a book or looking at a picture. Sometimes when I lay down there, I have the feeling that all this enormous knowledge around invades me.

AND THE PLACE WHERE WE ARE RIGHT NOW, YOUR PARISIAN APARTMENT, IS THE PLACE FOR DAILY WORK. WHEN YOU NEED TO BE MORE FOCUSED YOU GO SOUTHWARDS.

Here I keep the books and documents I need to work on a daily basis. When the project is done, I take everything to the other place, where things find their final destination. The two spaces coexist in my practice; they have complementary uses.

ONCE YOU TOLD ME THAT ORGANIZING THINGS SATISFIES YOU.

Completely. I love to classify. I applied to the École des Chartes (a grande école for archivist- paleographers) because there was no school for museum curators in France in the early 1960s, but I was not successful. Therefore, I basically applied the same obsession within museums, starting from École du Louvre through my directorships in France and abroad. I like things to be classified and easily accessible.

IS IT A PURELY FUNCTIONAL APPROACH?

No, it is more than that. The act of classifying reflects a mechanical way of dealing with things. It is relaxing and reassuring, and it is much easier than thinking. Thirty years ago, I had three libraries: for ancient, modern, and contemporary art monographs. Then I organized them according to alphabetical order, and this allowed all kinds of connections between artists of different times and spaces, appearing to share the same shelves of a unique library.

WHAT IS YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO OBJECTS?

I love them! I am amazed how important they are in our lives and the affective power they have. Daniel Spoerri made an action/événement (at that time the word performance did not exist) where he would sit with a selection of his stuff and ask people to come and exchange their own objects, and explain to him why those objects were important to them. A great palette of affection, intimate histories, and marvelous memories came out of that work, through the simple act of explaining to the Other, putting in words what one feels for an ordinary object. Objects, including works of art, are great communicators. I call them “indirect messengers,” because they really link people by carrying information. This fascinates me. Interpretation changes according to the times, but objects stay the same.

WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF YOUR ARCHIVE?

You have made me think a lot about my archive, more than I did before meeting you. I realized that for a long time I did not care much about it. For sure I cared about the archive in the sense that I didn’t neglect or underestimate its function, but I never thought of building my own archive and preserving the stories it could tell. It was only after Magiciens de la terre that I understood how important it was to keep the memory of the exhibitions I was making and how valuable this could be for others. I asked all those working on the show to transfer their arc- hives (notes, documents, correspondence with artists, etc.) to the Documentation Department of the Centre Georges Pompidou, now called the Kandinsky Library. This show was quite exceptional and I knew it was going to have huge repercussions. Before the 1990s, I used to believe that not everything should be kept—think of the letters we wrote during the making of the show: when you had read and understood the message in it, you trashed the letter without even thinking that it could have been precious. I once threw away a letter from Claude Lévi-Strauss—I regret it so much! Nowadays, I am aware and keep material for those who will need to use it one day. Going back to your question, there are several ways for my archive to exist in the future. I think the best would be to donate part of it to an institution, where people could easily have access to it.

IS YOUR ARCHIVE USEFUL, IN YOUR OPINION?

I’ve always thought that art history is a science molle, a soft science, and not even a science to be honest. I mean it is very subjective and largely based on individuals and personalities working in art. When you first contacted me, I was very impressed by the thesis you are developing: the curatorial archives as a way to understand the exhibition through the personal memories and knowledge of the person who put it together, the curator. I guess that providing access to a set of tools like those we find in an archive would really make art history more relevant and distinct in the future. There are a lot of secondary histories and forgotten artists in my artists’ files, waiting to be rediscovered. Using firsthand material accumulated by a curator along his/her professional path could give valuable insights about the exhibitions he/she has made, and the contextual reasons for making them. At the same time, I am absolutely convinced that we cannot keep everything; it is impossible and dangerous…

WHY WOULD THAT BE DANGEROUS?

Because memory has to be selective. You cannot grasp the totality of facts and documents about a whole period of time. We have to create ideas and interpretations, not to make enormous encyclopedias of events and notions. The past is past, and it cannot be revived. In the 1970s many art professionals wanted to start documentation centers and collect information about contemporary art. I have always been doubtful about this approach, and concerned: who was going to explore the material? The internet made these efforts even more problematic. It is utopian to keep everything, and even if we could, the question is what to do with it. We have to make choices. Il faut les tripoter quoi [we must play with them]!

BUT DON’T YOU THINK THAT IT’S NOT FOR US TO MAKE THE SELECTION? PERHAPS FUTURE USERS OF THIS MATERIAL WILL MAKE THEIR OWN CHOICES, WHICH IS ONLY POSSIBLE IF WE GIVE THEM EVERYTHING.

Maybe, but we cannot do this practically. Also, a lot is temporarily lost and then discovered afterwards! This is the nice part of oblivion, that it is reversible.

DON’T YOU THINK THAT WE WILL LOSE SOMETHING WHEN YOUR ARCHIVE IS MOVED TO AN INSTITUTION, IF THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS? WHAT WILL WE LOSE?

Me, of course! And you cannot revive me once I am dead, it is life, you know… we become something else.