REBECCA LAMARCHE-VADEL In preparation for the Humpty \ Dumpty exhibition, which is divided into two chapters at the Palais de Tokyo and Lafayette Anticipations, you have roamed incessantly across the city of Paris. You captured many images around the Eiffel Tower and the Place de la Concorde, as well as all those historical monuments currently being renovated for the 2024 Olympic Games.

CYPRIEN GAILLARD I like the idea that we are at a time when Paris is conducting its own entropic examination. The city is trying to preserve certain buildings, but its public policy of restoration is inevitably exclusive: it cannot include all entire built environment. A hierarchy is therefore already in place that identifies those buildings and monuments to be restored as a priority. These are precisely the limits that I am interested in exploring. I have always been fascinated by fault lines. I remember playing marbles when you had to push the agate marble into a hole - for me, cracks in the ground were always spaces to aim for, to occupy. This motif of the interstice often comes up in my work. I think that every artist is looking for a point of entry into the world around them, a gap for the light to pass through, and I feel that with our increasingly rationalized, standardized urban environment, there is less and less free space into which you can project yourself, where you can experience something other than yourself...

Restoring Le Défenseur du Temps (The Defender of Time), the work by Jacques Monestier installed in 1979 and abandoned since 2003, was an obvious response to your invitation. I have always had this idea of breathing new life into someone else’s work, because I was particularly touched by the fate that befalls public artworks, especially those that sink into a form of anonymity. Le Défenseur du Temps is even more symbolic of this idea of a new life as it was in motion and then stopped. I remember seeing it operate as a child and feeling a great sense of strangeness. It was an enigma in a neighbourhood I could not quite understand or identify. It was snot central because it was “on the way” to the Centre Pompidou, but in the eyes of child it was much more interesting than the museum. I remember passing through this interstitial space, the Quartier de l’Horloge, many times - it is a pedestrian space that lends itself to drifting. The automaton is located between the Centre Pompidou and the Musée des Arts et Métiers, but it doesn’t belong in either of these locations. It exists in a “counter-space”, as Foucault said of his heterotopias.

The Horloge district is also seen as a bit of an urban fiasco in the collective Parisian consciousness, in the same way as Les Halles. These two sites were part of the same ZAC (urban development zone) project at the time. True to postmodern ideas and their taste for historical reappropriation, the Horloge district takes up the concept of the medieval island. It is also a neighbourhood full of stories. Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect was created on rue Beaubourg in 1975 in a building that was being demolished to make way for the Quartier de l’Horloge, just a few years before the inauguration of Le Défenseur du Temps in 1979. There was also this nightclub, Le Saxo, an after-hours club that was quite famous in the 1990s - there were often police raids, then the place would close for months before secretly reopening to the great dismay of local residents... Around the corner, a young man is said to have overdosed in a fountain, just past Max Ernst’s “owl”. The latter seems to be signalling to us: “Don’t go any further.” Wedged between the Leroy Merlin home improvement shop and the Flunch restaurant chain, it seems to be a landmark indicating the end of the Centre Pompidou’s sphere of influence.

RLV The Défenseur was also quite central for a certain community, like a kind of beating heart that, every hour, brought together curious people of all kinds, from neighbourhood residents to tourists from all around the world.

CG Yes, many Parisians do not know him, but he was central to a few others: the inhabitants of the district who used to meet at the Bistrot de l’Horloge to see him fight his three adversaries at noon, six o’clock, and ten o’clock. The Défenseur fights against the elements: the crab represents water, the bird represents air and the dragon represents fire. In truth, I have known him mostly to be broken down. In the 2000s, I remember that there was a sign up asking for funds for restoration. I wondered how much it would cost and I was quite touched by this gesture, like a thrown together distress call. I always kept the Défenseur in mind, but sometimes it takes years to find the right opportunity to bring an idea about.

RLV I remember that reviving the Défenseur at the Foundation was a foregone conclusion for you.

CG Yes, and I did not have a plan B. I liked the idea of decontextualising this automaton, to increase its scope of action so that it would no longer be attached to its wall, so that it would start working again a few blocks away in Rem Koolhaas’s building, which everyone agrees is important in contrast to the indifference encountered by the Défenseur. I wanted to combine this automaton with the building, giving the Défenseur a new skin and a new context in which to be reconsidered. There are mechanical limits to what the Défenseur can do: it works with these compressed air cylinders that power a rather archaic choreography. But I wanted it to be able to make up for the time lost since it came to a halt, hence the new frequency of movement every fifteen minutes rather than every hour, and the hands of the master clock which move backwards, freeing it from quartz time.

RLV In 2003 Le Défenseur came to ahalt, after its creator Jacques Monestier decided to pull the plug when the maintenance budget for the automaton ended, thereby condemning it to a slow decline. Rather than see it decline and founder, Monestier preferred to send it into a kind of coma.

CG Yes, it is a form of self-sabotage. There are three key dates: in 1979, the work was inaugurated; in 2003, it was switched off; and in 2022, it was reactivated. It was important to me that the work display evidence of this reanimation, that it should keep certain traces of its out-of-commission life.

However, for Jacques Monestier it was highly problematic to embrace these traces of time, to leave the patina and the pigeon droppings. After a long discussion, we came to a compromise which consisted in retaining the traces of wear and tear on the central figure and restoring the rest of the object. I conceived this exhibition as a piece of fiction, and I wanted this automaton to play a central role within it. This role is not the one that Monestier had initially attributed to it and this story is not the one he had written for it; with this work, I am trying to tell the story of its second life, between its death in 2003 and its rebirth in 2022. So, I had to rethink a choreography for the occasion, to reprogram it.

RLV Le Défenseur du Temps will only be your work for the three months of the exhibition. You embrace Marcel Duchamp’s vision that the artist of the twenty-first century would disappear. You breathe this new life into the object, creating an immaterial work that will fade away when the Défenseur isreinstalled in the Horloge district in 2023.

CG Yes, there will be nothing left in my name.

RLV You put this rebirth into perspective with the death of Gaël a few years ago, a dear friend who will never be reborn and experience a new life.

CG No, indeed, he will not be able to come back to life. These questions of architectural and cultural conservation are only interesting to me when you connect them to our instinct to preserve beings, to preserve ourselves. The city is constantly trying to look after itself and maintain objects so that they survive us. There are two major obstacles to this project of regenerating the city of Paris: one is a metal – lead - and the other a mineral - asbestos. Lead is mainly found in paint, such as in certain layers of the Eiffel Tower; asbestos is found in the Grand Palais and the Palais de la Découverte, among other locations. These monuments are the subject of construction sites which I have been able to visit: they are extremely toxic. An asbestos removal project is highly risky. I often think of the men and women who are on the front line of this war against ruin, who risk their lives to preserve these monuments, which end up existing only in two dimensions in the collective memory, in the form of printed postcards, or virtually on social networks and mobile wallpapers.

I have an emotional relationship with architecture: a ruined building is for me comparable to the state in which one can find oneself at a given moment in the city, as the body is also a spatial fragment. Asbestos reminds us that our built environment is not only around us, but also inside us. We are porous beings. It seemed to me that there should be a human presence in the exhibition that evokes the instinct for self-preservation. I wanted to pay tribute to my friend Gaël Foucher who died in 2013 and who was very fond of Le Défenseur du Temps. I imagine that he saw in this abandoned work the intact soul of the outsider on the fringe of the institution that the Centre Pompidou represents.

RLV These questions of fragmentation, fracture, and decomposition are central, notably in the title Humpty \ Dumpty.

CG Humpty \ Dumpty refers to a character and his story is that of his fragmentation, as told in Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass, a work conceived as a sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This character had previously appeared in an eighteenth-century nursery rhyme. In Carroll’s book, Humpty Dumpty is shaped like an anthropomorphic egg, but the nursery rhyme tells us nothing of the sort. It is about a fictional character who stands on a shaky brick wall, falls off and breaks, followed by the collective effort to restore him to his original state. It is then explained that it is impossible to return to that state. Even if put back together he will never be the same again; it is the idea of the spiral that performs the same movement as the loop, but never returns to its starting point. This title seemed to me particularly appropriate in relation to this great restoration campaign of the centre of Paris for the Olympic Games, and to evoke the preservation issues which are involved.

RLV The exhibition is very much about love, dignity and the attention we give to things. These padlocks represent a conditioned love that is expressed through this object; public cultural policies designate which works, which monuments, which buildings are worthy of love and therefore of preservation. Le Défenseur du Temps is reborn after being “unloved” and forgotten. All this evokes the question of restoration: material restoration seems to proceed from spiritual and affective restoration.

CG Yes, the padlocks evoke generic love and indeed deal with normalized love. For Le Défenseur du Temps, it was also a question of making a work that does not add to the long list of objects that weigh down our world, such as these padlocks. The gesture of reanimating the Défenseur is profoundly immaterial. I have always liked works of art that have an economy of means. You have to work with what is around you.

RLV The relationship to the world that you have created with Le Défenseur du Temps goes beyond the cult of permanence and of the author; it is rather a question of giving it back a new dignity and intensity, of changing our affects towards it. The immaterial and its qualities recur frequently in the project, especially through sound and music, which are fundamental in your work.

CG For Le Défenseur du Temps I have made a soundtrack for a sculpture for the first time. I usually think of sound in relation to my films, and my musical choices are conceptual considerations in relation to the subject. I try to take myself out of the equation and think about what sound this fossil, tree or firework would like to hear - just as you have to ask the brick what it wants to become before you build a building, as Louis Kahn used to say.

RLV These songs are like asbestos, aren’t they? They contaminate, they get into our memories, they assault our psyches.

CG Yes, they are indelible from our memories and refer us to a specific period. I wanted to bring up the idea of music which is hard, not seductive, corrosive. It is a more experimental choice so I knew from the outset that sound would not have the immersive role that it can have in my films. Having said that, the soundtrack is conceived in two stages: it oscillates between aggression on the one hand, with the “hits”, and the idea of repair on the other, with the “Heal” section.

RLV The “Heal” section is a piece of spiritual music driven by the search for harmony and the healing power of sound carried by Laraaji’s composition.

CG Yes, the healing comes from new age, ambient music, sometimes referred to as “elevator music”, but the elevator is also an interstice, a public space that oscillates between the earth and the heavens, and Laraaji’s sound is definitely heavenly. His music has had a new lease of life in recent years - even though he was already working with Brian Eno in the 1980s - and it seems to me that there is a new interest in ambientmusic in general. It is a porous music, you never hear the same track twice, because this kind of music lets the sounds of the outside world in - a siren, children’s laughter, or the sound of air conditioning. It is an inclusive music, without sonic barriers, open to the world, interested in the common good, the street, parks, public space.


This conversation is an extract from the upcoming exhibition catalogue HUMPTY \ DUMPTY.
The exhibition HUMPTY \ DUMPTY will be on view at the Palais the Tokyo and Lafayette Anticipations in Paris until January 8th.

Bio

Cyprien Gaillard (1980, Paris) lives and works in Berlin. He received numerous prizes such as Arken Art Prize and Award for Best Experimental Short Film, Melbourne International Film Festival (both 2016), Preis der Nationalgalerie (2011) and Prix Marcel Duchamp (2010). Gaillard holds a degree from L'École Cantonale d'Art de Lausanne. Selected solo exhibitions include: Fondation LUMA, Arles (2022), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2021), TANK Shanghai (2019), Accelerator Konsthall, Stockholm (2019). Significant group exhibitions include: Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles (2022), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2022), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2021), among others.

Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel is director of Lafayette Anticipations, the Galeries Lafayette Fondation, and an exhibition curator. She curated the projects of Marguerite Humeau and Jean-Marie Appriou (2021) and Martin Margiela (2021). In 2020 she curated the Riga Biennial. From 2011 to 2019, she was curator at the Palais de Tokyo where she put together, among others, the cartes blanches of Tomás Saraceno, ON AIR (2018-2019) and Tino Sehgal (2016). She has regularly collaborated with international institutions, regularly publishes in French and international magazines and catalogues, and participates in numerous seminars and juries in France and abroad (FIAC, French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022). She is also a member of the committee of the Mondes Nouveaux programme, for the support of creation.