Tête à tête avec Gilbert Boyer

In this article, we offer an open conversation in which three authors talk to Gilbert Boyer about his work. In dialogue with Boyer’s creations, fragmented and dispersed in the space, are the thoughts and words of an art historian and a poet, as well as a son’s intimate view. On the Fly Serge Allaire: Gilbert, as I was preparing for this encounter, I found a short piece that you wrote in the catalogue for the exhibition Inachevée et rien d’héroïque, presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in 1999. Knowing your work, I quickly surmised that this text aptly summarizes the broad lines of your approach. You mention the fundamental aspect of text and speech—bits of conversation, fictional accounts, quotations – engraved for perpetuity in materials such as granite, glass, or brass, and then scattered throughout the city more or less anonymously. Can you talk in greater detail about where this fascination with words comes from, about the expression “paroles gelées” (frozen words) in air, and about how words resonate in you? Gilbert Boyer: The expression “paroles gelées” comes from an excerpt from François Rabelais’s book Le Quart livre. In this part of the story, which takes place in glacial seas (Rabelais took some of his inspiration from Jacques Cartier’s voyages to North America), Pantagruel hears sounds of battle even though there is no one nearby. Rabelais describes these sounds and voices, these frozen words, in the form of capsules of colour that become audible when they melt in the warmth of spring. I read the book when I was very young—I must have been eleven or twelve—and that image made a big impression on me. The idea of solid words melting in the environment seemed quite magical and meaningful. So, starting from there, I became interested in the materiality of words in space. At just about the same time, I came upon Arthur Rimbaud’s Voyelles; I was hooked. Then, various little experiences were hitched on to this rolling train. Everything suggested to me that words have colour and consistency, and that they exist in a certain way in space and in matter. That’s how I talk about it now, but although this comprehension is very clear today, it came to me gradually, as I produced projects and through intuitions in installations. It was only with the fabrication and staging of words that this materiality of language was confirmed. Gilbert BoyerAnge interdit (1/102 padlock), 1998.Photo: GBoyer I never get tired of using and reusing words with all their contextual nuances, their sounds, the different languages, alphabets, varied and unique accents. Even pauses and silences speak to me—in short, everything that revolves around materialized speech ... staging and installing words somewhere besides on a sheet of paper, with other materials and in other contexts. Yet, the words themselves don’t make great declarations: they simply exist. And then there are also my own limitations, so that words, my words, don’t always successfully transmit the idea, the feeling, the emotion that I put into them. So, I have to keep trying to understand how it works. SA: The other fundamental dimension of your work over the years has been your preference for private speech that is manifested in the public space. GB: Private speech exists in the public space, in real life, as sound. We hear it everywhere, but we don’t see it. Aside from artworks that propagate them, the only texts we might see in the city are impersonal words in traffic signs, advertising, commercial posters, or institutional explanatory texts. In fact, when I think about it, the only texts or words of a personal nature inscribed in the public space, other than graffiti, are those in cemeteries! Gravestones allow for emotional thoughts about our departed family members. Gilbert BoyerLa montagne des jours (1/5 discs), installation view, Mont-Royal Park, Montréal, 1991.Photo: GBoyer Why is it only institutions, public safety agencies, businesses, and advertisers that exploit the public space and infringe on our eyes and mental space? Why is the murmur of words in the city limited to the sound of conversations heard by chance? I reacted to this when I began to take action in the city. Are the words or little stories that I inscribe here and there more important? Mine, in particular? No! But what they might evoke for readers, yes. We have to make room for this kind of speech—these words, these everyday voices. Because these voices are what construct a living environment, a village: not signage, not advertising, and all those things. SA: How do you choose where you put your works? Do you look for how the place, the space, and the text relate to each other? GB: Choose? I was going to write “at random,” but that’s not exactly it. In fact, the choices are usually spontaneous; they are based on experiences of the place and what they evoke, on impressions that are sometimes tenuous, but real. In my early works, the Cartesian aspect played a bigger role due to constraints or because I assigned myself instructions and restrictions. Now, I leave room for improvisation. The text moves in the same way. It’s a combination of what I feel and observe on site. Gilbert BoyerPermis10h57 (1/109 collars), installation view, Faubourg des Récollets, Montréal, 2017.Photo: GBoyer Investigation: Am I Mistaken if I Say …? Maggie Roussel Blot: I met Gilbert Boyer in the early 2000s. He and his young family were friends of mine, and we had supper together from time to time, having joyous discussions about the arts (arts: including literature!), translation, teaching, and a thousand other things. As a literary person, which I am, I’ve seen, spent time with, visited, and revisited a few of his works, often hooked on the words that they contain, on their edges. The questions that I ask here reveal, perhaps, an aesthetic meeting of minds characterized, among other things, by ... uncertainty, expressed, and a gentle brazenness. Furthermore, if some of these questions seem indelicate, don’t forget: the investigator is an “other.” Gilbert, am I mistaken if I say that for you, letters and words are made mainly to be thrown out of windows, blown away by the wind, defenceless, with no parachute or final period? GB: I really like that idea of throwing words into the wind without a parachute: it makes me think of an adventure in which anything is possible! But defenceless and thrown out the window ... That idea also scares me ... as if I were abandoning these words ... In the end, I know very well that a few people will have a chance to adopt them ... eventually. So I give them an opportunity to be rescued somewhere else, by someone else. Without a final period ... because nothing is ever really over. When there’s no final period, there are generally three periods, an ellipsis. I place the words elsewhere, in other places, under other circumstances, so that they’re revealed (to me, first) in another light (the real light?), because of course words and phrases mean something else when they are ensconced in real life, and not just in my head and my eyes ... Their meaning is revealed sometimes to me, and sometimes to others as well, to other degrees. Because ultimately, they become concrete! We give them this weight, we make them concrete by reading them, by our projections; they’re just words but, assembled, contextualized, they’re no longer abstract and they stick to any welcoming receptive surface.In addition to the “surfaces” of the human retina and psyche, to which Boyer poetically alludes here, we must mention the “surfaces” of infrastructural elements and all the other things on which he might deposit or exhibit words, for—today more than ever, perhaps— he sees all the multiplicity and potentialities of these surfaces. Thanks to various ultra-light apparatuses that he has designed in recent years, he is thrilled to be able to hang words, deposit them, or make them float on practically all types of surfaces that he finds on his walks.Sometimes, in my case, few people see them, it’s true ... And then, we have to play a bit with the words and take them lightly before giving them weight ... for ourselves. Gilbert BoyerCe jour là, installation view, La Chambre Blanche, Québec, 1998. Photo: GBoyer MRB: OK ... So, am I mistaken if I say that you’ve “stolen” conversations, private words, that you’ve fashioned yourself as a sort of prince of thieves, a Robin Hood, to steal from a few rich speakers and, allegedly, to redistribute ownership of language on a large scale? GB: Robin Hood, nice image. Steal? But I never took anything away from them! I only borrowed, and also ... usually I’ve transformed that “ownership of language.” Were they truly its owners? Weren’t they words I recognized as my own property, as everyone’s property? In any case, words should be shared. MRB: Yes, but am I mistaken if I say that the statements or words that constitute many of your works become less and less precise and that over the years, the decades, their precision and quantity have melted like snow in the sun? GB: You’re right, they melt in the sun, diminish in quantity, are less and less sure of themselves, even ramble from time to time, don’t affirm, hesitate, usually exist alone in a changing context, or are sometimes incomplete. And more and more, these very words are coloured by the context (the context of the sentence, of course, but also by what’s around it, the places and times it’s found and photographed) ... In any case that’s what happening with the latest project, p10h88, which I’m working on slowly. In fact, the same word, in a different context, can suggest something else completely. The idea of the single sentence disappears behind that of many possibilities. The word exists in a sentence that is whispered in the background in a landscape or a blur, in another tone, without letter or verb or declension. Do I try to convey the texture of a voice, its flow, its intonation, its accent, by what surrounds and introduces it? Do I try to avoid creating a hierarchy for the order of reading? Am I—are we—capable of reading words and context, colours, blurs, all simultaneously, like an orchestra? Words, sentences ... not as a piece of information, not as an abstraction, but as an atmosphere, a feeling, as if the adjectives, adverbs, and relative clauses were stated in colours, in places, in the background of weather conditions or of daily geographic situations in the city, on the ground, or somewhere else. Gilbert BoyerAtelier à ciel ouvert, from the series #p10h88 on Instagram, video still, 2021. Photo: GBoyer MRB: Okay, okay. Now, am I mistaken if I say that you tend to feel stifled in a gallery or museum? GB: I never thought about it like that, but in fact it’s something I feel more and more. And then, being in museums and galleries requires invitations, approaches, working conditions with which I’m not always comfortable. The rules of the game in a museum and a gallery are different; they involve many things that I don’t understand or don’t really control. That being said, the public space isn’t much better. There, truly, the artist and the artwork find themselves in the midst of influence peddling. Nevertheless, I prefer the imperfection, instability, and temporariness of my works in the public space. Those that manage to survive have a better life, unless they’re simply destroyed or removed by a more or less responsible city. In a museum or gallery, on the other hand, the works are protected, managed ... but also held captive, sold like companion animals, and removed from the gaze of people in general ... Well, that’s a reductive image, it’s true, but it’s how I feel occasionally. To clear my conscience, because I’m not there. I’ll return ... to the subject, not in a museum or gallery. MRB: With regard to where a work is installed in the public space, Boyer observes that over the course of his art practice, he has gradually arrived at the notion of “open-ended installation in the public space.” Starting from the initial physical spaces where it came into being, the work continues its life in photographs and videos, which then circulate on social media pages on electronic devices. For Boyer, in fact, the idea of emphasis on certain sites where the works are visible or their respective value is secondary, or maybe even unimportant, because “the idea is to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.” One day, a public-art agent told him that, in her view, a work of contemporary art that isn’t published on the internet “doesn’t exist.” Perplexed, Boyer no doubt responded in his own way—that is, by making what he has created since “exist and not exist” at the same time, insinuating itself everywhere, more or less temporarily, depending on the case (being presented here or there, moving from material reality to virtual reality), thus reaffirming the undeniable, but paradoxically transitory, existence—fragile and adaptable, nomadic, fleeting—of his most recent works. Gilbert Boyer#p10h88 (detail), series on Instagram, 2022. Photo: GBoyer A Secret in Public Jacob Boyer-Pomerance: You wrote a book, right? I think I’ve seen it. Was it made to be read? GB: Not really. In fact, above all I learned to write, in my own way. I realized over time that words are a story unto themselves and we don’t have to tell long stories about them. I try to tame them, to manage them in various places, in different contexts. JBP: This interview, which I conducted with my father by email, opens the door to a new way of communicating. How do you appropriate a medium? Do you try to find media or do you let them find you? GB: I take what’s around me, because I think that all materials can be used. My daily life has provided me with a lot. I was a mailman, and that became my material. I transported letters, I still do that today ... Gilbert Boyer#p10h88 (details), series on Instagram, 2022. Photo: GBoyer JBP: In my view, this last sentence is a good reflection of his approach. He uses excerpts that are more loaded, and shorter, to the point that they’re cut off mid-word. As readers, we take advantage of infinite outcomes; he refers to the letters (characters) that he uses, to the messages that he sends, to the mail he has delivered ... A condensation of his intention that’s as economical as possible. As we visited together, by bike, the disks in his installation La montagne des jours (1991), he talked about the discreet nature of his works. GB: It’s a sideways glance, practically a traffic accident. JBP: Later, I made the following remark to him. I’m thinking of a sentence that comes to mind with regard to the public works that you make. It’s like a secret in public; everyone can see it, but at the same time, I get the feeling that it’s there only for certain people. GB: Like a secret in public ... No one has ever thought of saying it like that, not even me. It’s very close to what I feel. Translated from the French by Käthe Roth Gilbert Boyer, Jacob Boyer-Pomerance, Maggie Roussel Blot, Serge Allaire

Tête à tête avec Gilbert Boyer

Jacob Boyer-Pomerance

Maggie Roussel Blot

Serge Allaire

On the Fly

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