Interview: Cyprien Gaillard

Cyprien Gaillard: Crazy Horse, 2008. Outside filmprojection and performance

It seems like architecture and especially modernistic architecture plays an important role in your work. Can you describe your interest in architecture?

Of course I am interested in architecture. We all share an interest for modernistic buildings, but my particular interest is the idea of landscape – more than architecture. A building in the centre of the city won’t interest me. For me there has to be pure landscape.

So you see architecture more like an element of landscape?

Yes exactly. And I see architecture like it is today. Of course we are talking about ruins. I like the idea of the state of a building, how it is now, not how it was in the beginning.

You mean architecture not as a concept in the mind of the architect but as a physical reality?

I force myself to look at buildings in the state that they are now. They have a life of their own: away from modernism, away from the architect. The building belongs to time. It’s all ruined and sharing the traces of everyday. I am not so interested in the utopias and the failure of modernism. For me modernism died in 1973, when they bombed this neighbourhood in St. Louis called Pruitt-Igoe. (Pruitt-Igoe was often used as an example of the failure of American public housing and urban renewal. Heavily vandalized the buildings remained largely vacant for years, and after several failed attempts to rehabilitate the area the St. Louis Housing Authority began demolition of the complex on March 16, 1972. – S.Q.). It is a very infamous social housing project. It was built in 1955 and demolished in 1973, so it was used about 18 years. It was shot in the film Koyaanisqatsi. The interesting thing in this story is that the architect who built “Pruitt-Igoe” is the same architect that built the Twin Towers – Minoru Yamasaki. It’s like a curse. He died in ’88 so he didn’t see the twin Towers fall. Urban renovation is all crusades by fighting entropy, recession and terrorism.

It must be interesting for you to be in a city like Berlin, where you can observe so many layers of history in the architecture?

It’s true, but I don’t like it. The whole building landscape is between different stories and nothing works. I personally find it very messy.

Cyprien Gaillard: Le canard de Beaugrenelle, 2008. 200 x 150 x 200 cm Bronze, concrete		Cyprien Gaillard: Le canard de Beaugrenelle, 2008. 200 x 150 x 200 cm Bronze, concrete

What would be an architect or architecture you like?

There is that very interesting building that I love, which might be demolished in the next years, by Paul Rudolph, a very important modernist architect - important in American history. He built the Tracey Towers in the Bronx. It’s a masterpiece.

It seems that the concept of architecture which is manifested in the Neue Nationalgalerie is contradictory to your point of view: while Mies van der Rohe’s building wants to occur as a pure statement of an architect out of time, you are pointing at the reality, damage and ruin of architecture. What were your ideas when you placed your sculpture in front of the building?

My gesture was: what is failed architecture of the time and what is success? In Paris they were demolishing this neighbourhood Le Beaugrenelle … it’s about 15 high-rise buildings and they are demolishing and renovating all the bridges and buildings and in the middle of all this renovation there was that sculpture that was built when the complex was raised in the end of the 60s. It’s the symbol of the neighbourhood. It wasn’t a part of the new plan of renovation. I just managed to save the sculpture. It was raised in almost exactly the same time like the Neue Nationalgalerie, except that this sculpture was just rusting in Paris. I just moved it and placed it in the front of the Neue Nationalgalerie.

Everything is about decaying?

Of course everything is decaying. In the cities a lot of architecture is full of glass. It’s pretending not to be decaying. It’s the incredible lie of architecture and I hate architecture there. I have no respect for it. This kind of lie: Everything is fine. Imagine how ugly this building is (points at an office building outside the window) and how it’s going to age.

Cyprien Gaillard: Crazy Horse, 2008. Outside filmprojection and performance		Cyprien Gaillard: Crazy Horse, 2008. Outside filmprojection and performance

There are a lot of references to land art in your work – for example a photo of a burnt car with the title “Land Art's Not Dead” (2005) or the work “Real Remnants of Fictive Wars VI” (2007), where you were blowing industrial fire extinguishers on Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Getty”. What does land art mean to you and how do you position yourself in relation to it?

First of all in the practice of land art the idea that I like is getting out of the studio, working with the reality outside – this is the thing that really appeals to me. I can never be considered as a craftsman. For me it was clear that I couldn’t stand time in studios. I don’t like to be indoors. I want to be outside.

And then the second idea was that I like the dialectic of working outdoors and showing works indoors – the problematic: if you do a strong work outdoors – what does the viewer get to see in a space? And also in a lot of the works, you are referring to, I like the idea of “land art as vandalism”.

So not only your artistic strategy is vandalism – as it is described in your gallery’s homepage – but you see also land art itself as a form of vandalism?

Yes, completely. In the sixties they didn’t have the ecological consciousness we have now: imagine today someone like Robert Smithson pouring a thousand tons of asphalt just outside Rome, its impossible. Or like Michael Heizer blowing down a whole cliff in the desert. All is vandalism.

The most important vandalism you observe is estate vandalism. This is what people don’t understand. They think vandalism is scratching a car. There is an amazing book; it’s called “The history of vandalism”. The word vandalism has to be understood in a larger way. Urban renovation is a form of vandalism.

So what is the future? It’s very pessimistic. The future will be the past in reverse, like Nabokov said. I like the idea that the future is more chaotic and more ruined and especially more honest and I embrace it. I believe that chaos will be the other state of L’esprit libre. But if you are fighting against it and lying about the situation, not accepting the entropic situation then it will be a disaster.

Cyprien Gaillard: The Arena and the Wasteland, 2008. Dimensions variable Light installation with light poles		Cyprien Gaillard: The Arena and the Wasteland, 2008. Dimensions variable Light installation with light poles
Cyprien Gaillard: The Arena and the Wasteland, 2008. Dimensions variable Light installation with light poles		Cyprien Gaillard: The Arena and the Wasteland, 2008. Dimensions variable Light installation with light poles

Do you see the film “Crazy Horse” you are showing tonight in the same context – the monument as vandalism?

Yes, of course. The story is interesting, because the monument was started in 1948 and it is still going on. It will probably take another 60 years to be finished. This sculpture went to through all the periods of post war art. It’s also land art.

The Indians saw the mount Rushmore (the American presidents carved in stone) and they thought: “We were here first! We need to have a sculpture.“ But they had no money and they didn’t know how to carve stone. They saw that the Polish Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski won a price at a sculpture show in New York and invited him to realize a monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a very important land for Indians. Korczak dedicated his whole life to build the sculpture. And now his children and grandchildren are working on the sculpture. And Crazy Horse is 25 times bigger than the mount Rushmore. It will be the biggest monument on earth – bigger than the pyramids of Gizeh.

But it is exactly what I was saying: it’s a monster: The people, who commissioned the sculpture are long time dead, the sculptor is long time dead. They are using dynamite to blast away the stone, a whole part of a forest disappeared, thousands of birds died. They are building this monument to nature and liberty. But the more it goes towards its end the more obsolete it gets. It’s all ruined and it probably will not be finished. Ten years ago I donated 200 dollars and I came back and nothing had progressed.

Thank you for the interview •

Cyprien Gaillard: Crazy Horse, 2008. Outside filmprojection and performance