<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/104_CH_JEAN_GRAUERHOLZ_ATELIER_RGB_01-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nAnd so, looking back at Grauerholz\u2019s practice and taking stock of the various roles she has played in the Montr\u00e9al cultural community\u2014graphic designer, co-founder of Artexte, and professor\u2014we have to recognize that she is not only a well-known artist but a woman of many skills (to say the least) and accomplishments. And yet, a constant emerges from all these roles\u2014a fundamental way of working and of conceiving projects that might be summarized in an abiding concern for the dispositif. For forty years now, Grauerholz has continually sought to bring to light the mechanism, spatial device, or normative system at work in books, design objects, photographs, archives, and collections. The exhibition is yet another essential dispositif, and we felt that it was important to look at it in order to understand its capacity, to quote Giorgio Agamben, “to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control” actions, opinions, and discourses.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus?<\/em>, translated from the Italian by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).<\/span> Whence, no doubt, the fact that this notion gradually surfaced during my conversation with Grauerholz, which took place partly in person and partly by email. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Marie-Jos\u00e9e Jean<\/strong>: Let\u2019s talk about the book: its conception, production, graphic design, collection, spatial arrangement, classification, reproduction, archiving, content, quotations, loss, and now its multiple digital forms, involving online distribution. All these aspects of the book have been a part of your professional career since 1972, as you began studying graphic design at the Kunstschule Alsterdamm in Hamburg. The book is also a major concern in your art practice. And you collect books in the form of objects, texts, images, and quotations. Why has the book been a core aspect of your work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Angela Grauerholz<\/strong>: I\u2019m interested in books because they\u2019re part of daily life, and they also represent something generic, as might bottles of different shapes or the utensils and packaging that come with take-out meals. These objects belong to the domain of design, even though we don\u2019t usually notice it because their function is utilitarian. I\u2019ve always thought that it\u2019s crucial to get past this less visible (or too literal) aspect of design and\/or of artistic expression so that I can engage in my work in a more creative and imaginative manner.<\/p>\n\n\n In a way, the book is also a generic dispositif<\/em>, comparable to the furniture that I\u2019ve designed for my installations: each offers a space to fill up and analyze. In this sense, my relationship with books initially meant the idea of working within a given space, both literally and figuratively. For me, an open book represents a space for thought\u2014in German we use the term Denkzimmer<\/em> (literally, \u201croom for thought\u201d), which means a defined space where you can close yourself off and think about things with no distractions (which seems like a utopia to me)\u2014that is, a space that lets your imagination run, a space to explore, never truly fixed. At the same time, once closed, the book returns to being a simple container, printed, and thus frozen in time and space. It\u2019s a nice contradiction, because simply turning a page of a book implies an interaction, a sequence of actions that we\u2019re very familiar with, dictated by the generic form of the book\u2014gestures from which we might develop thoughts. I also allude to the book as a dispositif<\/em> in my photographic work. I\u2019m thinking here of the series Privation<\/em> (2001). These images, which were scanned\u2014in fact, it was the first series of digital images that I produced\u2014showed the front and back covers of some of my books that had been damaged in a fire. They became impenetrable, at least metaphorically, because they came to be mere photographic reproductions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n My most recent work, The Empty S(h)elf<\/em>, offers a different aspect of my exploration of the book. For the first iteration of the series, shown at Artexte in 2019, I tried to approach the exhibition space as the spatialization of a book. I was inspired by a passage from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges about the architecture of an infinite library. I didn\u2019t reproduce any main text on the wall (normally, this would have involved blocks or entire columns of text), but instead used countless citations in the form of footnotes placed around the gallery. Absence and presence are both strategic devices that leave it up to the reader\/spectator to establish the meaning of the text. In the exhibition, I also added photographic images (which I had produced or found) and a video to emphasize certain concerns, such as changes in our reading habits and the impact of the Internet\u2014how it affects the way we think. <\/p>\n\n\n\n MJJ<\/strong>: Has constantly working with text, and therefore having to express yourself in languages other than your mother tongue, been difficult for you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n AG<\/strong>: I use <\/strong>French and English every day, but neither of them is actually my \u201cmother tongue.\u201d I think that when I left Hamburg in 1976 and chose to live in Montr\u00e9al, I wanted to understand better what it means to live in a multilingual environment, how that would influence my thinking and my experience of the world. In this, I was no doubt inspired by one of my aunts, who was Belgian and went back and forth, like me, from one language to another every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MJJ<\/strong>: When I look at your photographs, I realize that it\u2019s almost impossible to associate them with a specific temporality. Your images seem timeless, removed from any reality-based spatiotemporal reference. This was true for your black-and-white images, which featured dark scenes and were blurred through movement\u2014an aesthetic of which you became an emblematic representative in Qu\u00e9bec in the 1980s\u2014but also for your later colour series. Although you abandoned the intimate aesthetic of the early years for a systematic, more conceptual approach, you nevertheless refer to an undiscernible temporality with its own internal logic, closely related to cinematographic time. Can you talk about this conception of time in your photographic practice?<\/p>\n\n\n\n AG<\/strong>: Yes, indeed, you\u2019re right to stress the (in)temporality of my photographs. Even as a student, I was already actively trying to pull away from the dominant photographic aesthetic, which was based on the \u201cdecisive moment.\u201d This doctrine didn\u2019t correspond to my conception of photography, which tries to take into consideration the past as much as the present and the future. In fact, I was trying to find a feeling of lastingness, and it is right, in this sense, to associate my approach with filmic time. My intention was to extend the moment and to fill it, in a way, with my own experiences. My greatest influence in this respect was undoubtedly Chris Marker. In his film La Jet\u00e9e<\/em> (1962), we see someone who, after a war, preserves part of his memory in the form of fixed images; aside from the fact that Marker\u2019s protagonist was also capable of seeing the past and the future (the idea that one can see the image of one\u2019s own death still haunts me today), this kind of search, for images already present in one\u2019s memory, has become my way of working. This presumes that the images pre-existed (somewhere) and that I take the photograph at the moment of recognition or select it once I see and recognize it among my negatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MJJ<\/strong>: In parallel with your photographic practice, you create sculptural objects and installations in the form of dispositifs<\/em>. Can you talk about when they emerged in your practice?<\/p>\n\n\n\n AG<\/strong>: I began to think about the question of the dispositif<\/em> in my work with the piece that I called Eclogue or Filling the Landscape<\/em> (1995). For me, this piece marked the inception of a reflection on multiple images, as it made me wonder about what I would do with my collection of unused negatives\u2014that is, with certain images that I was accumulating that I hadn\u2019t yet put a value on. How could I give meaning to all these images that were hidden away, but existed? This fundamental question stayed with me, and I\u2019ve examined it in various ways in my work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, the exhibition (as art form) is connected to this question when it comes to presenting archives or photographic series, and that\u2019s why, starting in 1995, I began to design \u201cfurniture\u201d to house them. Leading up to Eclogue<\/em>, after a residency that I did at the Domaine de Kergu\u00e9hennec, in Brittany, I began to think about archives as sites of memory and conceived of ways to recontextualize images and show them in the form of archives. The resulting trilogy of works\u2014the in situ work Secrets, a gothic tale<\/em> (1993), which I produced at Kergu\u00e9hennec; the sculpture Eclogue<\/em> (1995); and the book Aporia<\/em> (1995)\u2014is based on this conceptual apparatus, as well as on images and citations. Then, I created Sententia I-LXII<\/em> (1998) as an interactive installation that functioned kind of like a book, even though the form of the work resembled a storage cabinet, somewhat similar to Eclogue<\/em>. The sequence of gestures that had to be made to see the piece corresponded to the ritual of opening a book and turning its pages, and each of the frames that one could take out of the piece of furniture held two images, placed back to back (recto and verso). <\/p>\n\n\n\n These three dispositifs<\/em> have been filled with a constantly growing number of images\u2014starting with about eighty and topping three hundred in the book Aporia<\/em>\u2014to the point that I felt more and more that I was covering up the images or even emptying them of their meaning. I still have trouble figuring out whether this feeling arose from my sense of being at an impasse with my work or if it was a premonition, an intuition that I had concerning the evolution of technologies, which were going to transform our relationship with images and their archives. In 1995, the Internet didn\u2019t quite exist, my work was still analogue, and digital technologies radically changed my practice a few years later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n MJJ<\/strong>: The exhibition also functions like a dispositif<\/em> in your work. You\u2019ve already talked about the exhibition at the Domaine de Kergu\u00e9hennec, and I also have to mention your in situ intervention at the Neue Galerie, in Cassel, for documenta IX, in 1992. (In fact, you\u2019re one of the few artists from Qu\u00e9bec to have participated in this major art event!) This time, you inserted \u201cphotographic paintings\u201d in a collection of nineteenth-century works by substituting certain historical paintings with your pieces. This gesture of substitution invited the public to reflect on the ways in which history is transmitted, and historical narratives are staged in such institutional contexts. In this respect, I must absolutely tell you that in looking through the documenta catalogue, I reacted to one detail right away: you chose to include an isometric perspective view of the museum\u2019s galleries. Wasn\u2019t this the first occurrence of the memory palace, which you used as a new device for presentation of archives fifteen years later, in the Web project atworkandplay<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n AG<\/strong>: In fact, you\u2019re right. Even though I didn\u2019t find using isometric drawing to portray a \u201cmemory palace\u201d satisfying at first (it seemed too simple a gesture), in the end I thought it was a convincing solution on the visual level because I could show, through transparency, the architecture formed by an archive or the web.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MJJ<\/strong>: To place this project in a better context, let\u2019s start by describing the exhibition Reading Room for the Working Artist<\/em> (2006), upon which it is based. At VOX, I had the opportunity to show the definitive version of this installation in several acts. Its point of departure was a reconstruction (from a black-and-white photograph) of the furniture in the reading room of the workers\u2019 club in the USSR designed by Aleksander Rodchenko in 1925, along with your personal collection of images, texts, poems, quotations, postcards, and other printed objects. As you summarize it so well, \u201c[your] objective was to create a \u2018site of memory\u2019 (Pierre Nora) in which the history of the workers\u2019 club would blend with the history and work of other artists, including [yours].\u201d The installation, at the intersection of art and design, included furnishings, a film, photographs, a new typeface, and twelve books, organized along thematic lines that emerged from your archive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s when I challenged you to adapt this exhibition for the Web. To my surprise, you accepted my invitation right away, taking on the goal of exploring the notion of \u201ctraceability\u201d of the documents that make up the Internet\u2014that colossal archive. In return, you exposed us to quite a challenge, which led, three years later, to the conception of atworkandplay<\/em>. I should note that in 2009, the notorious encryption system known as cookies didn\u2019t exist yet\u2014at least, not in the form we know today. Among other things, this basic functionality records the digital imprint that we leave each time we visit a website. So, we worked with a multidisciplinary team, including programmers, to create such a functionality. The web-based work, introduced by a film (referring to a perpetual motion machine), ultimately proposed a new way to navigate within an archive on the cultural history of the twentieth century that contained more than four thousand works. But what was exceptional about this work was that each person who visited the archive could view the path they had navigated through it in real time, which, thanks to the modeling of a memory palace, created a unique plan and elevation for each individual visit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To conclude, couldn\u2019t we say that your exhibitions, in all their forms, also testify to a deep fascination with memory and the construction of its narratives? So, I\u2019m coming to think that art, including each of your works and their exhibition, has perhaps represented for you an allegorical way of creating memory events, but starting with categories of the present, as Pierre Nora would say.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de m\u00e9moire<\/em>, tome 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984; 674)<\/span> A form of memory based not so much on the transmission of past stories as on the idea of inventing dispositifs<\/em> and places to recontextualize these stories and ensure that they are reappropriated and reactivated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n AG<\/strong>: I would add simply that for me, these memory events also represent the outcome of a learning and working process that is important to me, that I trust, and in which I deeply believe, in the sense that it will always lead me to something, even when the result obtained is different from my initial objective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by K\u00e4the Roth<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\nThe Book<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/104_CH_JEAN_GRAUERHOLZ_PRIVATION_RGB_43FRONT-scaled.jpg\")
Privation Folded Book No. 43 (front)<\/em>, 2001.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/104_CH_JEAN_GRAUERHOLZ_EMPTYSHELF_RGB_09-scaled.jpg\"){kind=spacer}
The Empty S(h)elf<\/em>, exhibition view, Artexte, Montr\u00e9al, 2019.
Photo: Paul Litherland, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nFrom One Language to Another<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Working Artist as Photographer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Dispositifs<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/104_CH_JEAN_GRAUERHOLZ_ECLOGUE_RGB-scaled.jpg\")
Eglogue or Filling the Landscape<\/em>, 1995.
Photo: courtesy of the artist and Mus\u00e9e d\u2019art contemporain de Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nExhibitions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/104_CH_JEAN_GRAUERHOLZ_RGB_02.jpg\")
atworkandplay<\/em>, web artwork, 2008-2009.
Photos: courtesy of the artist and Vox, centre de l\u2019image contemporaine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/104_CH_JEAN_GRAUERHOLZ_RGB_05.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/104_CH_JEAN_GRAUERHOLZ_RGB_51.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n