ANITA MOLINERO : A PRIVATE MANIFEST
INTERVIEW BY ALAIN BERLAND AND VALERIE DA COSTA PUBLISHED IN
PARTICULES N°22, DECEMBER 2008/JANUARY 2009
Avoiding virtuosity, ease or even commentary, this is the very unlikely programme that Anita Molinero's work has set itself from the beginning. A project that she has been stubbornly carrying for thirty years to build a body of work that has no equal on the French artistic scene.
\"During my studies at Fine Arts School, I painted but I wasn't very good at sculpture and technique. I said to myself that the unknown in art should probably confront itself with them. It's a small private manifest, made of negations, based on conditions that one gives oneself to be able to do something that is new enough and can one day become a creation. I couldn't see any other way at the beginning of the eighties, in a period where we were invaded by conceptual art like "three pencil writings on a wall". A form of art that presented itself as impersonal, but that paradoxically I found very narcissistic. I wanted to do the opposite of the conceptual artists: use tools without knowing what they were used for, whilst using them with precision. I then made mountains of small cardboard boxes that I varnished with wallpaper paste and that I then assembled on anything, or rubbish bags that I filled with plaster and that I modelled with a wood gouge. At that time, I remember that artistic conditions were post-modern, based on the defeat of idols. I didn't believe in form, or its opposite, that is to say the culture of the message. I quickly found a relay in the person of Yves Michaud who showed me David Hammons' work. But the latter had a culture of minority that I didn't, except if the sum of normal conventions makes up a minority in art, that is to say that I am a mother, I am a teacher, I live outside of Paris... A situation that makes me a minority in the art world.
AVOIDING COMMENTARY
It's by elimination that I ended up calling what I do "sculpture". There was no other choice. I didn't want to call it "art" or "installation". I find Boris Groys's sentence in his book The communist Post-scriptum great, when he says that art that looks like art cannot be art. For me, the art of commentary in which we are in now bothers me. Many artists just interpret and revisit with small nuances. It's art that looks like art, and because it has already been art, it distances itself from it. So, what part of what I do is non art? For the rubbish bins for example, people tell me they look too much like rubbish bins. No. They are rubbish bins, they can only look like what they are; that is my guarantee. I am keen that they be recognised, it is significant of something that is the rubbish bin and not art. I protected myself from the art of commentary or project by using very few ideas. I do not have a project for my exhibitions. I know what I want to work with, but not what the sculptures are going to look like. I improvise by making the sculptures on site. I discover sixty percent of the work while doing it. It's always a risk, but I don't want to do it any other way. The most difficult is to stop the gesture before the piece becomes a puddle, lava or its own commentary. It must remain identifiable. I stop before the inform takes over and sometimes the piece is finished before having been started. Sculpture must remain form and not go into the inform. I have tested everything. I have made small earth mounds with cardboard boxes, but I realised that I was going too much into the inform, into the deference of the gesture, of a "beautiful gesture". I therefore stopped because I found it too curious and precious. I would like to redo small sculptures, what I called slightly venomous chimney sculptures. I made them for twenty years, but I am worried I will not be able to find their charm again. I would like them to have the strength of my larger sculptures, but it's difficult because I work to scale, without reducing or enlarging. However, "the small" moves us. It's often a "comfort" sculpture to scale. "The small" is often quickly "nothing" and I am wary of this magnified "nothing". I have worked for the last four years with two assistants, but I don't delegate. They are there and I am too. I circle the piece and give instructions that they often anticipate because we understand each other well. I work without drawing, after all these years, the stock of images is in my head and the instructions come via language. It is a very visual and sexual language. I tell them: "So, do cocks." It's very coded, it's a studio language, a language of the action to carry out (not that of an exhibition). In sculpture, we have always talked about knockout. I preserve my sculpture by sometimes using failure. When I find that a sculpture doesn't work, I throw it away, but at the same time, this gesture scares me slightly.
FORCING ONESELF
I destroyed fifteen years of creation, that was maybe an advantage, but difficult to live with. The last sculpture most likely carries all the others. I lacked "professionalism" by rarely or badly archiving my work. For several years now, someone else does it in my place. I have accepted the process. Sometimes, I feel that what I thought was a failure or a success is only a dream, a fantastical projection. If one says that my art is masculine, it's simply because it isn't feminine. When the artistic scene opened itself to women, it started down the road of intimate and feminine representations, with the complicity of men. This aspect doesn't interest me. My art isn't masculine as is for example Dewar & Gicquel's, it doesn't use masculine attributes, activities like boxing, drumming, fishing. But, if you want, you can say that my sculpture is potent. Its confrontation with matter is direct and violent. My great model is Rodin, I find the orbits of Balzac's eyes extraordinary, it's the first great modern sculpture. It's true that there are few women sculptors who confront themselves so violently with the matter. Sometimes I want to mention other artists I admire like Bernard Requichot; I hold him within me, but I don't refer to him. It's not the same to hold an artist within, to comment him or to quote him. To comment implies a distance that I do not want to have, and I see it in others, it bores me greatly. It's precisely art that looks like art. I try to do art that steers clear from this "in between" whilst refusing to do something that seduces the public, that becomes a "lawsuit against the world". It isn't easy, but it leaves a lot of room for the object. I can't stand the hundredth slightly dented minimalist painting. It's pleasure or erudition. What possible choice is there apart from that ? Political action that positions the spectator, but that doesn't interest me either. I am convinced that art must contain politics, but not use them. I have concerns that are not necessarily "opinions" on my time. I often name my pieces a posteriori, and when I qualify them of "post-Tchernobyl", it's retroactively. Now, I give titles to my sculptures, but titles have often been the object of reflection as to title artworks by a concept, is to take away a lot of their energetic quality. It's like drawing a box around them, preceding them. It's also too present. I have therefore shrugged this off. And one sculpture gives rise to another. I said to myself that a title must have the strength of a name. In the end, I gradually called them by the equivalent of a name, that doesn't have meaning unless it is worn. In fact, they have titles that I often forget. For construction cones, I take the name of the company that I am transforming and making better. It can also start with typing errors, pronunciation mistakes. They are Christian names, but it took me a long time to find them. The rubbish bins are the only ones not to have titles because I like saying "rubbish bins". "Look, we're getting out the old rubbish bins. »
WORKING WITH ORDINARY MATERIALS
I don't create series. I would say that there are genres that I go back to. Since 1995, I love working with polystyrene that reminds me of perennial materials like bronze because you cannot get rid of it. In the nineties, it wasn't well looked upon to work with this kind of material because art that circulated and sold was maybe, paradoxically, an art of the ephemeral that had the qualities of instability, but with a symbolic added value. However, when you love a piece by Filliou made up of a broom and a bucket, it's as unstable and melancholy as polystyrene with bike chains. The visual void is maybe more difficult to grasp. You therefore have to build a myth around it. In an exhibition in Tours, a collector insulted me when seeing my work. That day, I understood why I made sculpture. You can put anything on a canvas, people are hardly ever shocked because the frame is fixed, but this poor object (it was two construction cones) that I presented, and that didn't have any violent meaning in itself, couldn't be looked at because it was violent in itself. Painting is always possible, whereas sculpture is often placed on the side of the impossible, of difficulty, probably because it is on the side of reality. For me, the presence of the contemporary is located in sculpture and I have always sought to intervene on the matter. The ready-made remains for me a moment of genius and like any moment of genius, it is unnecessary to reproduce it. All the artists who redo it today, for me it's a joke. I call it "art of creational leisure". When you go to look at Duchamp's ready-mades, you really need to be a fetishist otherwise you don't look at them. You go on a pilgrimage to see a relic. And then, you realise the importance of the montage (the museum's) like when you go to look at a relic with everything that involves. The rereading of Duchamp's ready-made doesn't even have the poverty, the daring of a relic. Duchamp was very just in his choices. He didn't go wrong. I learnt with Duchamp, but I understood with Degas (the danser), who dresses an excremental bronze in a tulle skirt. It's when watching science fiction films like Terminator that I saw the type of sculpture that I was doing. The Venilia wall comes from there; it's the transition from liquid to solid. It's homemade morphing! By making rubbish bins, I was thinking of Aliens. Science fiction is in a rubbish bin for me, it's organic science fiction, not technological. I think I create an artwork that repeats itself. Rubbish bins, for example, I will be making all my life. It's a bit like Rodin that used the same gestures on different subjects all his life. Repetition isn't the same as creating a system. I could never create environments like Jessica Stockholder, who is an artist of conquest. I am an artist of furrows, I dig deeper into what I do. I like excessiveness and I don't like installed things that give a petty bourgeois aspect. I want to work with ordinary materials, that can always be found next-door. I recently made sculptures with a childbirth table, Zimmer frames and wheelchairs. They are objects that leave us on the spot. They stagger us and force us to fix ourselves. They oppose themselves to fluidity, rapidity. In relationship with the sculpture's unity, their ergonomic measures are correct. And old age is probably the next obscene and creative age. Psychoanalysis, like art, makes diagnosis and behaviour appear and disappear. When I talk about hysteria in my work, it is through encounters, intellectual coincidences. I thought about what was the most appropriate figure when talking about the art that I did, and hysteria fascinated me because we say that it is a state that develops outside of oneself. It is no longer brought up today, but its old representations show fixed bodies looking like stone. That is why I like making this analogy. I fix energy, it has to come out of oneself, it has to be exhilarating.
REFERENCE POINTS?
My references are located in a cemetery with the missing persons, ghosts and a supermarket. Living, death and spirits. The common trait between these spaces is the organisation in aisles for the cemetery and for the supermarket. Amongst the missing persons that let me rest in peace: a Fontana sculpture, a Degas dancer with a tutu for example. In the ghost series that haunt Morris' crayons, a ball knitted by R Truckel, a beautiful pussy by Séchas, Mondrian's painting with a "Delft" blue background and coloured adhesive. The meeting of poverty and exhilaration in Oïticica's work. Manzoni was also for me a fascinating and dynamic figure whose insolent avantgarde aspect I envied for a long time, that I would have liked to own like you covet a natural yet unjustly inaccessible quality. I realised not very long ago that it was "cotton, the Velpeau bandage effect", the naughty and childish Catholic playing with nursery materials that interested me in Manzoni. He is now part of the missing persons. Ghosts are artworks with vague outlines and with parts detached from everything, it can go from this slightly rugged and matted white matter of Sechas' radiant pussy to a bright curtain by F Gonzalez Torres. In the Supermarket series, I help myself, I consume without concern for traceability; films. Bernadette Lafond and her cabin, a whore in love with a goat in the pirate's fiancée, the ideal collector for one of my sculpture series. Terminator 2, an encounter between a film sequence and a Venilia wall. Alien 3, because I sometimes feel that at the bottom of my melted rubbish bins, two glimmers are looking at me and trying to soften me with their wet glares. A bit of ketchup, a bit of mayonnaise and chocolate, one day or another I will make a sculpture with these 3 colours thinking of Mac Carty and a crochet cover by M Kelley of knotted sheets like Cattelan that I could use to attach a sculpture... But it in the end, is there an invariant element that has spun through the years and the forms? I was asking myself this question, looking over a text I had written, so I looked for notes, I looked at invitation cards. I thought about this stubborn refusal to give titles, going so far as deleting the "untitled" that is conventional in this case. I realised that the word sculpture was always present and tirelessly repeated without any concern for elegance (never a synonym for avoiding heaviness) or any sense of humour or play. I started observing, as one looks with attention at an object from all its angles, trying to discover its function. I first discovered it handwritten and in my writing: a simple S separated from the word, is still the S of "sorcière" (the French for "witch"), a synthetic representation of a (whistling) snake, then comes the word "CULPTURE" divided (by isolating CUL) by the mute "P" of Papa or Penis. And what if this choice of sculpture, often tiresome to do, found its reference and its completion in its name, written preferably by me?