From one Biennale to another.

It was in Cairo, a year ago. I went with Alain Declercq. Jany Bourdais had nominated  me to make the French selections  for the two Egyptian Biennales and to assess the need for  our presence at these two manifestations, both,  perhaps,  a little too focused on the  Mediterranean. For Alexandria I had chosen two very young artists, Jeanne Susplugas, Liu An-chi and someone a bit older, Jean-Claude Ruggirello, whose true worth has not been  recognised;  for Cairo, Alain Declercq and Joël Bartolomeo. Not a very original combination (it had just been done elsewhere, at the Beaux Arts in Rouen), but one which looked good, and so pleased me. Bartolomeo, busy with I don’t know quite  what, did not turn up.  Although that  did not stop him sulking at the end of the event because I did not have  his video tape (completely unusable after a month and a half of constant playing) sent back to him and because I did not bring him back a catalogue…

If he had seen this catalogue with its countless ‘holes’ marking the absence of photographs (especially those which had been sent by e-mail and were therefore unusable), he would have been less upset. The Cairo Biennale is not Venice or Sao Paolo. It is a poor Biennale, run by academic artists, concerned about their status and privileges, a brave event, outside time, which survives in the context of the nearby Middle East war, in an atmosphere of constant military and police controls, visible or invisible.

Alain Declercq, who had been to Cairo to look at the premises and who returned back there to organise his contribution, understood perfectly well the context in which we were working. This did not prevent our adventure over there from being quite eventful.

Alain Declercq, who always adapts his work to the particular location, admits that he does not much like, he says, to re-do a piece he has already done elsewhere. He is right. All the same, thinking about the incredible and fascinating traffic in Cairo, he decided to re-use the piece which he had done at Brétigny. It consisted quite simply of making two driverless cars, whose steering wheels and accelerators had been jammed in place,  run anticlockwise, one after another, each cutting across the other’s path,  threatening to run into each other on every circuit and so managing to give  an impression of risk and danger. When Alain Declercq suggested this idea, with the Cairo traffic, I was thrilled. I did  not imagine what was to follow. Neither did Alain Declercq.

The buildings in which the Biennale takes place are situated around a vast esplanade dotted here and there with lawns and municipal gardens . It was there, on the tarmac’d area that Alain Declercq had decided to run his vehicles. He had asked for  Mercedes because of the police and military presence ( they are the ordinary  cars of local officials). Paul Fournel, the cultural attaché and writer, had got us a cheap hire rate and had advised prudence: he had had to give more or less personal guarantees. ‘No problem: Alain Declercq is a serious artist, he has already brought off this piece with success at Brétigny. It is a sure hit’. This is what I can hear myself saying and this what I am thinking about at this moment.

The esplanade and the  buildings are guarded by soldiers, narrow-minded as only soldiers who are given and carry out  orders   can be. There was no question of our being admitted in with our two Mercedes without a written authorisation, at the very least. The presence of a representative of the French embassy  made no difference. We had to park the cars, negotiate, find the director of the Biennale, an artist himself and a delightful man,  explain the situation to him, ask him to come round and talk to the soldiers, who eventually agreed to let us in. That was without taking account of the second barrier, the police, which necessitated just as much palaver. I had informed the embassy a long time before. I had insisted on the resolution of the security problems, and on the  authorisations to be obtained. The embassy had done its job, obtained the necessary assurances; but, obviously, everything is decided and granted here, as often elsewhere, at the last moment.

An hour later, we are on the esplanade. We have two days left. It is up to Alain Declercq to use his talents. Here he is, while another policeman walks  toward me  to ask what were are doing here. He strides over the  area with his long insect legs and sizes  his territory up. Alain Declercq gets into his car. What is he going to use to block the  steering wheel? He brought some strings. Unusable: they slip. On site we get some elastic octopuses. Equally unusable. All that is left is the seat-belt. Here comes the first car, perfectly adjusted. We watch it go round. Almost a triumph! Under the grim scrutiny of the policemen, not too happy to see us there. But, as we are just about to put the second car into orbit, we see, as in a bad dream, a small van approaching, approaching slowly and inexorably, entering the orbit of the Mercedes and, just as slowly, just as inexorably, run violently smack into its side on its way out. The driver of the van, which is loaded with soldiers or policemen, stops for a moment. He gets out of his vehicle, looks at the damage. Apparently  satisfied with his inspection he drives on. I run and shout: Hey! Not so quick! Stop! We must have a statement! But the van does not stop. I have to cling on to it. At last the driver stops and, in a foul temper, asks me what I want. A statement. The insurance company will ask for a statement. Does he understand?

He turns the engine off, takes his keys out. Fine. The soldiers or the policemen get out of the vehicle. Obviously it is going to be a long business! Off to the police station. First bureau: not the right one. Second one: someone asks for my nationality, tells me to sit down. Alain Declercq, who has been looking after the damaged Mercedes, joins me. An interpreter arrives. What is the matter? I explain the facts; but as I speak I take in the absurdity of the situation: a car without a driver- ours- going round in circle hit a van which was passing by and we are complaining! But I keep up the pressure: I want a statement. Well, you are in the wrong place, I am told: there is a special bureau for tourists, just on the other side of the esplanade. I’ll take you there. And off we go, with the driver of the van and the interpreter. In the other bureau, a sort of officer (Inspector? Sergeant? Superintendent?) is drinking tea. We are disturbing him. What’s the matter now…I repeat my story. I can hear myself repeating ‘statement’, ‘insurance’.

Finally he smiles crookedly. A man in civilian clothes who happens to be there  and who speaks French (is he a plain-clothes policeman ?) says to me sotto voce. He is a policeman. Even if you are right you are wrong. The officer finishes his tea, slowly puts his glass down with an extravagant gesture and tells me that we are in Egypt, aren’t we, and that of course he can register my complaint but that it will probably have no effect. He adds, like the other man, that the driver of the van is a policeman and as such has an  advantage over us. This story of a car which goes on its own is funny, indeed, artistic maybe, but  the insurance company is not likely to be as sympathetic as he is…And the man starts to spout a catalogue of clichés, aphorisms and flowery formulas. All I can do is ask him : So, what are we to do? What can we do with the rental company?What is to be done? He’ll tell us; but I cannot mention it here because it is not strictly  legal… I must confess I jumped at the opportunity with relief. And, he seemed relieved himself. We shake hands. We even embrace. We joke. We pat each other on the back. Everybody in the end is pleased with the settlement. By common consent, Alain Declercq and I decide to go back to the hotel to have a shower. He has lost the will to go on with today. So have I.

When we arrive on the esplanade  next morning at 9 o’clock,  the self-important, bulky, moustached policemen  greet us with big smiles. We shake hands. We give the thumbs up . Everything  OK?. Yes OK. The story has gone round the whole area dedicated to the Biennale (and to the police). It is almost as if they were rolling out  the red carpet for us, as if they were running  the traffic just for us…

If only they had! Alain starts his first car, he blocks the steering wheel and  the accelerator, jumps coolly  out of the moving vehicle and glances at the beautiful Mercedes starting on its circuit. Fascinated. Ready to launch the second one. Carefully measuring the circuit…Suddenly a van appears, approaches slowly, cuts the car’s trajectory, like the day before. But, unlike the other van, it slows down.  We make frantic gestures at him to go on,  faster; but it stops, just  where the trajectory of our Mercedes catches it. We shout, wave madly: Drive on! To no avail. At 20km/h, almost calmly, the Mercedes runs into the van with a great crash of crumpled metal.

The driver gets out of his car, mad with rage, but he is quickly surrounded by ‘our’ policemen who temper his rage and enjoin him to calm down. They advise him not to make trouble for us; we are under their protection. It is both  a dream and a nightmare; the poor man goes pathetically, grumbling as he shuffles quietly off. The cops help us put back the smashed bumper and the crumpled wing and call a mechanic who  puts it  all back  together again, but covering  things up rather than making repair. In the afternoon, Alain Declercq puts the first Mercedes on the circuit, then, at last, the second one. What  happens? Almost immediately the two cars collide. It is too much. I burst out laughing. Alain Declercq is devastated. To tell the truth so am I.

What is the insurance company going to say? In what kind of spot are we going to put Paul Fournel? In any case, we must make a decision. We cannot go on like this. Alain Declercq decides to suppress one of the cars and to content himself with running only one. It looks as though it will anyway be enough to cause a sensation here. But surprises have not done with us: next morning, at 9 o’clock, the day of the opening,  we discover that on the space we had marked,  a big sculpture is being erected with a crane and about twenty workmen. I run to the director of the Biennale. What is happening? His handsome forehead creases deeply. He gets up, comes to have a look. He makes the sculptor moderate his expansionist impulses. But this is not enough. I sense that Alain  is on the point of cracking. No: it is now necessary to gain some ground, centimetre by centimetre. I do this by shifting imperceptibly the beams  on the ground which are meant  to mark out of the space for the sculpture.

The opening is at 11 o’clock. Already folk groups are getting into  position,  trying out their flutes and drums. After several attempts in every direction, the sculptor, white with rage, decides to pack up everything; he is not going to exhibit. What a good idea: the space is ours! Alain Declercq quickly gets into the least damaged of our cars, jams everything, leaps out. A crowd has gathered. In  quarter of an hour, the opening speech. In the meantime, the Mercedes is the main attraction. But, like the vans yesterday and the day before, passers-by  cross the path of the Mercedes, unconcerned, used to the traffic in Cairo, not thinking for a minute that the car is not going to stop to let them through. They just escape injury from the  vehicle  as it follows its route imperturbably, amazed when we scream at them or when I throw myself on them to prevent  accident. Three times, five times, ten times.

Around us the spectators are laughing. We are not. If only all this would stop soon! Alain Declercq hands me his camera. Mission: to film his exhibit in this carnival atmosphere. We are going to stop the Mercedes at the  end of the opening day and we shall only keep the video tape. To run the car is too dangerous. Alain Declercq takes his turn with the camera. We were talking about all this, smiling broadly, on the 18th of March, the day before my departure for the Sao Paolo Biennale. From there I was going back to Paris where I stayed for one day to file my article, then I went  to Seoul and Gwangju for another Biennale.

I was recording. Alain Declercq was speaking. From his flat which was crumbling to pieces. About the police: ‘ I would never have thought that I could have this kind of relationship with policemen’ he said, talking about our strange, almost euphoric, relationship with the Cairo police. He had talked a lot about the police during our conversation and particularly, this time, of the megaphones used to call out people by their names in certain areas: ‘Mrs so and so, come dome down, police’ so that the whole area is awakened. ‘Here, where you live,  such thing  is unthinkable,  but, elsewhere not so’. Fluke? In Sao Paolo, two days later, I came across a trade-union demonstration securely surrounded by a huge number of policemen. One every metre. About one for every five demonstrators. Democracy, in all its repressive glory…. In Seoul, five days later, another riot, monstrous traffic jams, huge truncheons, titanic clashes. And in Gwangju, in the South West of the country, the Biennale which, for the first time, was using  the ‘18th May Liberty Park’ where, at the beginning of the nineties, the military regime had fired at a crowd of students, killing hundreds, or even thousands, leaving aside the cases of  torture.

I was listening to the tape made in Paris a few days before of Alain Declercq’s voice, quick, anxious, calling to mind his performance at Brétigny (so similar to the one in Cairo), outside the Art Centre, closed at the time for renovation, on the car park in the middle of the town, with some ‘Lagunas’, ‘Middle-class cars’, he said, adding: ‘I felt like bringing this area to life but it was the tension, even more, in which I was interested. Between the cars brushing against each other  and threatening to collide…but also with the people: playing like a child with  rather high-class cars for the  area  -  made people wince.

When he has  two tons of black Rolls Royce, with red leather seats, diabolically vulgar, delivered in Nantes for the opening of the Zoo Gallery, the arrival of  an object of such  obvious status, the presence of such a strong symbol, in such a tough working-class area,  created tense discussions, reactions. Under the car, the artist installed an inflatable  bubble with a pipe at one  end. He puts this pipe in the exhaust. The gas blows the bubble up which then  acts as a jack. The car tilts in an absurd way, a slant. A kind of lopsided gait, of disjointed action, of obstruction rather than smooth revolution, of sliding pass  rather than confronting, of offering an other way of seeing, of behaving, of living maybe. He makes a video. Does he always do it? No, but, more and more from then on he tries to link the video to the installations. As in ‘Transpalettes’, in the suburb of Bourges, he transforms a wasteland  into a prison and makes one of these ‘loop’ videos  characteristic of his style.

A prison warder is seen – at least someone dressed as a prison warder- holding back a group of people, running  up a flight of stairs, smashing a glass roof and catching a rope thrown  down to him by an helicopter. The machine swoops down, flies over the countryside. This is where the ‘loop’ is set. On the premises, in the guardhouse where the screw is supposed to watch the CCTV, all the rushes are shown. Alain Declercq has a strange relationship with rushes. One day the question would be worth analysing. The question of location – of work related to location- is of prime importance for Alain Declercq. It was when he saw the wasteland which, for him, looked like a prison, that he had the idea of the video, then of the transformation of the site. The danger lay in making the wasteland into a décor. Hence the idea of the guardhouse where all the rushes and images ended. The location therefore acted as a trigger.

‘I do not work in a studio. It rarely happens that I get a room which allows autonomy. Like with the video ‘ State of siege’ which makes Paris look like Prague at the time of the ‘Prague Spring’. The streets of Paris can be seen, deserted, with tanks everywhere. In fact those are the deserted streets of  Paris with assault tanks everywhere. What  Alain Declercq had actually done was to film the Champs Elysées and its neighbourhood for three years early in the morning before the 14th July parade. The work had been shown a first time on Icono then at Le Fresnoy. What is noticeable in Alain Declercq’s work is the importance given to authority and to the techniques of control, as opposed to ostentatious violence. Soon after his degree, he used symbols of authority such as tiers, poking fun at them, emphasising their absurd character, by tangling up the wooden planks with the elation of a naughty kid.

1998: it is the time of  ‘Vigipirate Operation’. Policemen and soldiers ‘invade’ Paris. 98, with its demonstrations, with this 9 which looks like an upside-down  6; it is an upside-down 68. ‘Feedback’, the film he made on that topic, is like a cartwheel. His aim is simple. ‘I am going to watch the watchmen to see how we are watched’. He spots a group of CRS from afar, trying to see them from a distance. He zooms, comes closer, close enough to film them in the end at less than twenty centimetres. ‘My relationship with authority, with public order, has always been a little difficult’, he says. I really had to force myself to come that close. This film freed me from a number of things’.

This, too, works as a ‘loop’. Alain Declercq revisited this work with his film ‘Vis à vis’ recorded on CD-Rom. Why? Because after twenty minutes, with ‘Feedback’, one understands; but it lasts for 30 minutes. With the CD-Rom ‘Vis à vis’, made in 1999 with 42 windows, it is almost the same thing. As soon as you click on a window and the video starts, you understand. The video is a series of short sequences shot from Alain Declercq’s home, showing all that can be seen from his window. It is anecdotal, and thoroughly obsessive. For three months, he stood every night at his window and filmed. ‘ I had no studio, I had a camera’, he says. ‘It was very much sexually orientated. It played on that: the excitement of the window. It did not go much further; but it gave me a great  freedom in filming. A first success and a first warning. ‘As soon as I left school I was asked to exhibit but I was not invited myself. I was only asked for the CD-Rom. I used to hand it over and leave. I had other things in my head but I found it difficult to express them’. It is probably at that time that Alain Declercq decided to  work only  by reference to a location. He decided to go and see the people who approached him,  to look at the location  of the exhibition and to say: ‘Your location interests me, here is my  proposal’ This is how sometimes deep changes occur in the life of an artist. This happened just when he left school at the end of his studies.

His studies are worth a mention. ‘If I had known about it- I did not- it would have been logical for me to have gone to the Beaux Arts after my baccalauréat. For many reasons I told myself that the Arts Appliqués  were maybe not too bad’. He got into Olivier de Serre where he studied ‘visual communication’. It was a first step. But he did not like advertising. Wrong choice.  He escaped by making photos. At  each stage of his training, he got out by meeting someone. A photographer showed him how to work in a laboratory, how to make portraits, do reportage. He was accepted at the Arts Déco with a portfolio mostly based on reportage; but then he began to be interested in Plastic Arts.’ It was an impossible situation’, he says. ‘ For them, photography was so limited that, as soon as you produced a colour photograph you had a problem. You might feel  like sticking a photo on a prop or tearing it up; but any manipulation of an image was unacceptable’. The first  work I did for the Arts Déco, after my first two weeks, I showed something or other and the teacher arrived and said to me’ : ‘Shit, I have seen enough [of that] for one day, I don’t even want to look at it, buzz off ’. ‘I hated the Arts Déco. It was hopelessly uncreative. Except, I met a genius of a guy’. Again. Patrick Jeannes.

Alain Declercq said he was the person who did the most to ‘open his head’. He helped him discover what he really wanted to do.

Alain Declercq still got his  degree from the Arts Déco. Fortunately, that enabled him to do a post-graduate course in Nantes. At the same time he taught in Paris. ‘I trained in Arts Appliqués, he says. ‘Today I am not complaining about that: if I have an idea, I can always find a way of realising it in video, in photography or in silk-screen printing’. He was still a post-graduate when he did a highly significant piece of work with Larsen’s effect, in a strange place which looked like a gallery but  was used by companies for market research. For example, a cat food company would gather fifteen people –they  were paid- and ask them: ‘At what time do you feed your cat, what does he like, do you cuddle him etc.’ In line with  the replies, ideas for new  products were proposed. In that location, there were mikes embedded in the walls, CCTV, a huge two-way mirror. Alain Declercq decided to put the all surveillance  system into his usual ‘loop’ . In the conference room there were two high-tech mikes, as big as air vents, connected to a small room behind the two-way mirror where people with earphones and  notepads were observing the other subjects and their behaviour. Alain Declercq drew out the extension lead  of the speakers and moved each speaker in front of the mikes, which created a Larsen, making the obscene security system useless. He also installed twelve 500-watt halogen lamps in the small room, which inverted the polarity of the two-way mirror: from the meeting room one could see the people behind the glass. The observer was now being observed.

At Valentin’s, Alain Declercq used the musicality which the  Larsen provided.  Walking, clapping one’s  hands, speaking - everything  comes bouncing back in the Larsen. The video shown at the same time at Valentin’s  was Alain Declercq’s first attempt at a narrative where a number of  real events are found: the assassination of Mesrine, the election of Chirac as Mayor of Paris when he was followed live by  a cortege of motorcyclists; the whole film was constructed around that image. There is a long straight road, a car is moving. Alain Declercq is on a motorbike behind the driver with his camera and a flash with its battery: the perfect TV equipment following a car in the spotlight. He took an even more imposing set of equipment, designed to be seen, to be recognised, when he travelled on an American pick-up with an industrial electric generator in the smart area of Montreal and  stood in front of a house on which he turned his floodlights as though on the house of a criminal. Then he took a picture. The house. The equipment. Again it is a  process of turning back to front.  Often he proceeds in that way, which is like his ‘loop’ technique. But what about what he calls ‘letter forging’ which is one of the most troubling features of his activity. A ‘Return to sender’?

What is it? Someone sends him a letter and he replies to his correspondent, in the latter’s handwriting and signs himself ‘Alain Declercq’. How? He scans all the letters of his correspondent one by one, because  ‘r’ in the middle of a world is not the same as  ‘r’ at the end of a word, and he makes a Macintosh typo; he then types this on his keyboard. What comes out is a letter in his correspondent’s writing. Alain Declercq has an amazing  collection of signatures which, in fact,   enables him  – might  enable him – to forge anything; The whole thing also gives him the opportunity happily to sow discord around him as he pleases. You can imagine…     

      

Strangely enough, Alain Declercq regards this activity  as drawing. But what does he call then that related activity which consists, when he meets a writer or an essayist, in learning by heart five complicated sentences of one of their works and then using them in the conversation to the profound discomfort of his interlocutor. ‘For me, it is a way of entering people’s private life’ he says. ‘Not directly. I don’t like direct confrontation. It is an infiltration’.

For a while, in relation to surveillance, Alain Declercq produced a number of first class pieces of work. His debut on cops’ CCTV  is even top class. Today, more and more, he plays with these reversals he found funny at the time,  even to the point of making the police take part in his work in the Palais de Tokyo.  They were policemen who have had an (indirect) connection with Mesrine. ‘For me it was interesting to work with those people. The idea of the  work, to start with, was to make a fence in which bullet holes read as ; ‘death instinct’. Then the idea developed into making people close to that event write those words. I found myself facing a cop, the opposite of the caricature  cop you’d expect. I  told him, ‘ you know it is in the Palais de Tokyo, in the XVIth, just opposite the Museum of Modern Art.  I don’t know if you know where the Museum of Modern Art  is. He replied to me: ’But I  am a cop who goes to museums’. Well. He was still a crack shot…I said to myself: I am putting the  police directly into my  work: what does this mean?’ The game is getting more complex. In Egypt we had turned the cops in our favour by drawing them onto our own ground, by entertaining them. In the Palais de Tokyo, Alain Declercq had had Mesrine’s phrase ‘death instinct’ inscribed by a cop who had probably been after him and had finally, he said, employed the cop as a workman to shoot 650 bullets twice for half an hour. But at Brétigny? When he disguised a car (a Citroën ‘Evasion’…) as a police car and asked  if anyone would like to borrow it to drive around the nearby  town, what if  someone is tempted to do it , what can he do? Two articles of the  Code Pénal (433-15 and 433-22) are put  under his nose; they warn him of the dangers of such an act, just like a contract of loan, more than dissuasive.  It is not just for a few minutes   thrill, to run the risk of being arrested by real cops or stoned by yobs. No: instead of observing the observer or disturbing the system, you are given the opportunity to put yourself in the skin of a cop, to imagine from inside what authority, surveillance,  are  and to understand their mechanisms and devices. Cairo  was something different. Perhaps a side-step in the cultural peculiarities of Egypt.

Michel Nuridsany is a writer, an art critic and a curator.