Receding Lines: Interview with Alice Fleury (2007)

Alice Fleury    Why did you choose the title Ma musée?

François Morellet    I’ve always found it so bizarre that all the European languages I know, aside from English, assign genders to all objects. The height of which is when you pin the masculine gender on words that end in ée, the traditional sign of femininity. So my title is justified in full because, on one hand, it corrects an irregularity by making museum feminine—une musée—which makes it sound less severe, more convivial; and on the other hand, of course, with a play on words—a bad one, which is my favorite kind—it suggests the amusement I derive from this silly activity of mine. On which subject I will cite Marcel Duchamp’s favorite saying, according to his first wife: “What does not amuse me does not interest me.” 

Fleury    Your work combines Constructivism and Dada, which is to say it contains both a quest for absolute neutrality, rigor, and precision and an opposing aspect of play, humor, even farce and absurdity. 

                  So here you’ve come to “tickle” the museum and its collection, which is highlighted as well by the title, in the form of a play on words, that you’ve chosen.

Morellet    I’ve always had, thanks to my family education, a taste for wordplay, for frivolity, for insignificance. But I don’t know where I get my penchant for control and precision from. To be honest, I’m not especially gifted when it comes to flights of romantic fancy, and I keep the miasmas of my inner depths to myself. As one art historian wrote, I’m a “rigoureux rigolard”: a rigorous jokester. This is a very French kind of anomaly, which caught on at the end of the nineteenth century through the Salons des Incohérents, where the only requirement was to be against all things “serious.” Alphonse Allais, whom my father adored, showed his monochromes there, like for instance the red canvas entitled Récolte de la tomate par des cardinaux apoplectiques au bord de la mer Rouge (Effet d’aurore boréale). 

                  Marcel Duchamp and, in other domains, Alfred Jarry or Erik Satie took over from there. I’m butchering the summary terribly: to learn more you would need to ask the Americans, at least those from the university in New Jersey who published a very serious work about our lack of seriousness during that era, called The Spirit of Montmartre. The authors trace contemporary art, and Dada in particular, all the way back to what happened in Paris after the war in 1870! So I belong to that minority of people who are both fascinated by Mondrian and Picabia and think Cioran’s pessimism and praise of frivolity are fantastic.

                  I love the cold, systematic, absurd side of Raymond Devos. I’m thinking of his text where he talks about how he shouldn’t say anything on stage and how, ultimately, it’s relatively easy not to say anything. What’s complicated, he says, is making it known. For me it’s the same thing: my painting isn’t trying to say anything, but it’s hard for me to make that known.

                  I was also very interested in the OuLiPo, and particularly in Georges Perec, who worked in directions similar to mine. In Life: A User’s Manual there’s a character named Morellet, which I thought was a coincidence. I was quite moved when I found out that it wasn’t an accident, because all the names in Perec’s novel correspond to specific people. 

Fleury    Since 1973 and the first “destabilized” paintings— that is, canvases of different formats placed side by side, creating an uneven form that comes forth from the wall— you’ve been working in three dimensions and taking into account the surrounding space, what’s around the work being just as important as what’s in it. Would you consider Ma musée a continuation of this preoccupation? 

Morellet    Yes, by all means, and I would have loved to mount the two exhibitions in Nantes—the one from 1973 and the one from 2007—one immediately after the other. 

                  I think it’s a fetching idea, to invade a museum without the invasion being visible. For instance, I can’t stand the rods they use to hang paintings. In a museum hall in Dijon (Présence discrète, Musée des beaux-arts de Dijon, 1983), I made an installation where the first painting had two rods, the second three, then four, and so on . . .

Fleury    In 1991, invited to create an original work for the first Lyon Biennial, you derived the specifications of your contribution from the very structure of the space you were given to work with: a 120-square-meter room enclosed by walls made of fixed panels on wooden ladders. From these data points and using identical materials (ladders, panels, white paint), you created a piece in which the walls of the exhibition space were doubled and staggered. From the beginning of the 1970s, there have also been works made out of adhesive strips. 

                  Putting aside publicly commissioned works realized in non-museum contexts, you have long been interested in the question of site-specificity within the museum space. This is an important dimension in your work. 

Morellet    Yes, because really there’s nowhere besides museums and large-scale expositions where one can make significant in situ work. 

                  I think it was Harald Szeemann, in his famous 1969 exposition When Attitudes Become Form, who made the first exhibition using ephemeral pieces realized in situ. In Nantes, I wanted to make an installation specifically for the museum, one that couldn’t be shown anywhere else. 

Fleury    So there’s a continuity in this work that relates as much to the main question, the in situ, as it does to the desire to take the space into account. But there’s also another dimension, that of self-citation. At the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris this year, you showed an exposition in which you chose to enlarge a series of canvases dated 1952. For your contribution in Nantes, you drew on a canvas produced in 1975. Is self-citation a new element in your work? What interests you about the idea? Is it a way of escaping art history and bringing the pieces back toward a new kind of currency? 

Morellet    The work I’ve “vampirized” the most is a very radical painting I made in 1953, Sixteen carrés. In 1964, I made a copy in neon that was reflected in the black water of a pool agitated by the viewer. In 1994, I had my neonist recopy the drawings of children who had tried to copy the same painting from 1953 (RECREATION n° 1, d’après une oeuvre de 1953 redessinée en 1994 par un enfant). Another time, in 2002, I had the same neonist recopy the photos of the reflections from 1964 (Après réflexion, 2002). Really, for these new works, it was a question of destruction, or at least of perversion, more than one of self-citation. 

                  The pieces from 1952 that I redid at larger scale, that’s very different. It was a museum director who gave me the idea. These works were made to be large, because they’re all-over, repetitive, open. When they envelop you, it’s a wonderful effect. Obviously, there are some works that don’t benefit from enlargement. The charm of the void only works in large formats. That’s what major American artists like Frank Stella and Donald Judd discovered later—and they were quite severe, by the way, toward everyone who had preceded them. 

Fleury    So it’s a bit of a thumbing of the nose? 

Morellet    Yes, it started with a not very honorable sentiment! For a publication on Frank Stella in 1988, Alfred Pacquement reproduced some of my preparatory drawings and others of Stella’s in the catalogue. It’s striking to see the degree to which the drawings are similar. But Stella was sixteen in 1952, so it’s not shocking that he wasn’t able to do it before I did. 

Fleury    And in Nantes? 

Morellet    In Nantes it’s primarily a piece for people familiar with my work—for my “accomplices,” as Bertrand Lavier puts it. I want it to be as surprising as possible for these accomplices who show up to see what claptrap I’ve managed to pull off this time. They may be a bit surprised by the dimensions of my “Escape Device” (25 × 25 m). True, I don’t have much of a taste for large works. But in this case it’s a very light work, relatively easy to put up and to take down. It will be the property of the museum, which will only have to keep the angles in storage. Yes, I don’t care much for grandiosity. I’ve even developed an allergy to pyramids and cathedrals. I prefer Paul Klee to Fernand Léger and Fred Sandback to Richard Serra.