On the Fly<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Serge Allaire<\/strong>: Gilbert, as I was preparing for this encounter, I found a short piece that you wrote in the catalogue for the exhibition Inachev\u00e9e et rien d\u2019h\u00e9ro\u00efque<\/em>, presented at the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019art contemporain de Montr\u00e9al in 1999. Knowing your work, I quickly surmised that this text aptly summarizes the broad lines of your approach. You mention the fundamental aspect of text and speech\u2014bits of conversation, fictional accounts, quotations \u2013 engraved for perpetuity in materials such as granite, glass, or brass, and then scattered throughout the city more or less anonymously. Can you talk in greater detail about where this fascination with words comes from, about the expression \u201cparoles gel\u00e9es<\/em>\u201d (frozen words) in air, and about how words resonate in you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gilbert Boyer<\/strong>: The expression \u201cparoles gel\u00e9es<\/em>\u201d comes from an excerpt from Fran\u00e7ois Rabelais\u2019s book Le Quart livre<\/em>. In this part of the story, which takes place in glacial seas (Rabelais took some of his inspiration from Jacques Cartier\u2019s voyages to North America), Pantagruel hears sounds of battle even though there is no one nearby. Rabelais describes these sounds and voices, these frozen words, in the form of capsules of colour that become audible when they melt in the warmth of spring. I read the book when I was very young\u2014I must have been eleven or twelve\u2014and that image made a big impression on me. The idea of solid words melting in the environment seemed quite magical and meaningful. So, starting from there, I became interested in the materiality of words in space. At just about the same time, I came upon Arthur Rimbaud\u2019s Voyelles<\/em>; I was hooked. Then, various little experiences were hitched on to this rolling train. Everything suggested to me that words have colour and consistency, and that they exist in a certain way in space and in matter. That\u2019s how I talk about it now, but although this comprehension is very clear today, it came to me gradually, as I produced projects and through intuitions in installations. It was only with the fabrication and staging of words that this materiality of language was confirmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I never get tired of using and reusing words with all their contextual nuances, their sounds, the different languages, alphabets, varied and unique accents. Even pauses and silences speak to me\u2014in short, everything that revolves around materialized speech … staging and installing words somewhere besides on a sheet of paper, with other materials and in other contexts. Yet, the words themselves don\u2019t make great declarations: they simply exist. And then there are also my own limitations, so that words, my words, don\u2019t always successfully transmit the idea, the feeling, the emotion that I put into them. So, I have to keep trying to understand how it works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SA<\/strong>: The other fundamental dimension of your work over the years has been your preference for private speech that is manifested in the public space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GB<\/strong>: Private speech exists in the public space, in real life, as sound. We hear it everywhere, but we don\u2019t see it. Aside from artworks that propagate them, the only texts we might see in the city are impersonal words in traffic signs, advertising, commercial posters, or institutional explanatory texts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, when I think about it, the only texts or words of a personal nature inscribed in the public space, other than graffiti, are those in cemeteries! Gravestones allow for emotional thoughts about our departed family members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why is it only institutions, public safety agencies, businesses, and advertisers that exploit the public space and infringe on our eyes and mental space? Why is the murmur of words in the city limited to the sound of conversations heard by chance? I reacted to this when I began to take action in the city. Are the words or little stories that I inscribe here and there more important? Mine, in particular? No! But what they might evoke for readers, yes. We have to make room for this kind of speech\u2014these words, these everyday voices. Because these voices are what construct a living environment, a village: not signage, not advertising, and all those things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SA<\/strong>: How do you choose where you put your works? Do you look for how the place, the space, and the text relate to each other?<\/p>\n\n\n\n GB<\/strong>: Choose? I was going to write \u201cat random,\u201d but that\u2019s not exactly it. In fact, the choices are usually spontaneous; they are based on experiences of the place and what they evoke, on impressions that are sometimes tenuous, but real. In my early works, the Cartesian aspect played a bigger role due to constraints or because I assigned myself instructions and restrictions. Now, I leave room for improvisation. The text moves in the same way. It\u2019s a combination of what I feel and observe on site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maggie Roussel Blot<\/strong>: I met Gilbert Boyer in the early 2000s. He and his young family were friends of mine, and we had supper together from time to time, having joyous discussions about the arts (arts: including literature!), translation, teaching, and a thousand other things. As a literary person, which I am, I\u2019ve seen, spent time with, visited, and revisited a few of his works, often hooked on the words that they contain, on their edges. The questions that I ask here reveal, perhaps, an aesthetic meeting of minds characterized, among other things, by … uncertainty, expressed, and a gentle brazenness. Furthermore, if some of these questions seem indelicate, don\u2019t forget: the investigator is an \u201cother.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Gilbert, am I mistaken if I say that for you, letters and words are made mainly to be thrown out of windows, blown away by the wind, defenceless, with no parachute or final period?<\/p>\n\n\n\n GB<\/strong>: I really like that idea of throwing words into the wind without a parachute: it makes me think of an adventure in which anything is possible! But defenceless and thrown out the window … That idea also scares me … as if I were abandoning these words … In the end, I know very well that a few people will have a chance to adopt them … eventually. So I give them an opportunity to be rescued somewhere else, by someone else. Without a final period … because nothing is ever really over. When there\u2019s no final period, there are generally three periods, an ellipsis. I place the words elsewhere, in other places, under other circumstances, so that they\u2019re revealed (to me, first) in another light (the real <\/em>light?), because of course words and phrases mean something else when they are ensconced in real life, and not just in my head and my eyes … Their meaning is revealed sometimes to me, and sometimes to others as well, to other degrees. Because ultimately, they become concrete! We give them this weight, we make them concrete by reading them, by our projections; they\u2019re just words but, assembled, contextualized, they\u2019re no longer abstract and they stick to any welcoming receptive surface.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - In addition to the \u201csurfaces\u201d of the human retina and psyche, to which Boyer poetically alludes here, we must mention the \u201csurfaces\u201d of infrastructural elements and all the other things on which he might deposit or exhibit words, for\u2014today more than ever, perhaps\u2014 he sees all the multiplicity and potentialities of these surfaces. Thanks to various ultra-light apparatuses that he has designed in recent years, he is thrilled to be able to hang words, deposit them, or make them float on practically all types of surfaces that he finds on his walks.<\/span>Sometimes, in my case, few people see them, it\u2019s true … And then, we have to play a bit with the words and take them lightly before giving them weight … for ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MRB<\/strong>: OK … So, am I mistaken if I say that you\u2019ve \u201cstolen\u201d conversations, private words, that you\u2019ve fashioned yourself as a sort of prince of thieves, a Robin Hood, to steal from a few rich speakers and, allegedly, to redistribute ownership of language on a large scale?<\/p>\n\n\n\n GB<\/strong>: Robin Hood, nice image. Steal? But I never took anything away from them! I only borrowed, and also … usually I\u2019ve transformed<\/em> that \u201cownership of language.\u201d Were they truly its owners? Weren\u2019t they words I recognized as my own property, as everyone\u2019s property? In any case, words should be shared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MRB<\/strong>: Yes, but am I mistaken if I say that the statements or words that constitute many of your works become less and less precise and that over the years, the decades, their precision and quantity have melted like snow in the sun?<\/p>\n\n\n\n GB<\/strong>: You\u2019re right, they melt in the sun, diminish in quantity, are less and less sure of themselves, even ramble from time to time, don\u2019t affirm, hesitate, usually exist alone in a changing context, or are sometimes incomplete. And more and more, these very words are coloured by the context (the context of the sentence, of course, but also by what\u2019s around it, the places and times it\u2019s found and photographed) … In any case that\u2019s what happening with the latest project, p10h88<\/em>, which I\u2019m working on slowly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, the same word, in a different context, can suggest something else completely. The idea of the single sentence disappears behind that of many possibilities. The word exists in a sentence that is whispered in the background in a landscape or a blur, in another tone, without letter or verb or declension. Do I try to convey the texture of a voice, its flow, its intonation, its accent, by what surrounds and introduces it? Do I try to avoid creating a hierarchy for the order of reading? Am I\u2014are we\u2014capable of reading words and context, colours, blurs, all simultaneously, like an orchestra? Words, sentences … not as a piece of information, not as an abstraction, but as an atmosphere, a feeling, as if the adjectives, adverbs, and relative clauses were stated in colours, in places, in the background of weather conditions or of daily geographic situations in the city, on the ground, or somewhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MRB<\/strong>: Okay, okay. Now, am I mistaken if I say that you tend to feel stifled in a gallery or museum?<\/p>\n\n\n\n GB<\/strong>: I never thought about it like that, but in fact it\u2019s something I feel more and more. And then, being in museums and galleries requires invitations, approaches, working conditions with which I\u2019m not always comfortable. The rules of the game in a museum and a gallery are different; they involve many things that I don\u2019t understand or don\u2019t really control. That being said, the public space isn\u2019t much better. There, truly, the artist and the artwork find themselves in the midst of influence peddling. Nevertheless, I prefer the imperfection, instability, and temporariness of my works in the public space. Those that manage to survive have a better life, unless they\u2019re simply destroyed or removed by a more or less responsible city. In a museum or gallery, on the other hand, the works are protected, managed … but also held captive, sold like companion animals, and removed from the gaze of people in general … Well, that\u2019s a reductive image, it\u2019s true, but it\u2019s how I feel occasionally. To clear my conscience, because I\u2019m not there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ll return … to the subject, not in a museum or gallery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n MRB<\/strong>: With regard to where a work is installed in the public space, Boyer observes that over the course of his art practice, he has gradually arrived at the notion of \u201copen-ended installation in the public space.\u201d Starting from the initial physical spaces where it came into being, the work continues its life in photographs and videos, which then circulate on social media pages on electronic devices. For Boyer, in fact, the idea of emphasis on certain sites where the works are visible or their respective value is secondary, or maybe even unimportant, because \u201cthe idea is to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.\u201d One day, a public-art agent told him that, in her view, a work of contemporary art that isn\u2019t published on the internet \u201cdoesn\u2019t exist.\u201d Perplexed, Boyer no doubt responded in his own way\u2014that is, by making what he has created since \u201cexist and not exist\u201d at the same time, insinuating itself everywhere, more or less temporarily, depending on the case (being presented here or there, moving from material reality to virtual reality), thus reaffirming the undeniable, but paradoxically transitory, <\/em>existence\u2014fragile and adaptable, nomadic, fleeting\u2014of his most recent works.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Jacob Boyer-Pomerance<\/strong>: You wrote a book, right? I think I\u2019ve seen it. Was it made to be read?<\/p>\n\n\n\n GB<\/strong>: Not really. In fact, above all I learned to write, in my own way. I realized over time that words are a story unto themselves and we don\u2019t have to tell long stories about them. I try to tame them, to manage them in various places, in different contexts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n JBP<\/strong>: This interview, which I conducted with my father by email, opens the door to a new way of communicating.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n How do you appropriate a medium? Do you try to find media or do you let them find you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n GB<\/strong>: I take what\u2019s around me, because I think that all materials can be used. My daily life has provided me with a lot. I was a mailman, and that became my material. I transported letters, I still do that today …<\/p>\n\n\n\n JBP<\/strong>: In my view, this last sentence is a good reflection of his approach. He uses excerpts that are more loaded, and shorter, to the point that they\u2019re cut off mid-word. As readers, we take advantage of infinite outcomes; he refers to the letters (characters) that he uses, to the messages that he sends, to the mail he has delivered …<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A condensation of his intention that\u2019s as economical as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As we visited together, by bike, the disks in his installation <\/em>La montagne des jours (1991), he talked about the discreet nature of his works.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n GB<\/strong>: It\u2019s a sideways glance, practically a traffic accident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n JBP<\/strong>: Later, I made the following remark to him.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m thinking of a sentence that comes to mind with regard to the public works that you make. It\u2019s like a secret in public; everyone can see it, but at the same time, I get the feeling that it\u2019s there only for certain people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n GB<\/strong>: Like a secret in public … No one has ever thought of saying it like that, not even me. It\u2019s very close to what I feel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by K\u00e4the Roth<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Gilbert-Boyer-construire\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_CHR_Gilbert-Boyer_construire3701.jpg\")
Ange interdit<\/em> (1\/102 padlock), 1998.
Photo: GBoyer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Gilbert-Boyer-montagne\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_CHR_Gilbert-Boyer_montagne_7710.jpg\")
La montagne des jours <\/em>(1\/5 discs), installation view, Mont-Royal Park, Montr\u00e9al, 1991.
Photo: GBoyer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Gilbert-Boyer\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_CHR_Gilbert-Boyer_P1050322.jpg\")
Permis10h57<\/em> (1\/109 collars), installation view, Faubourg des R\u00e9collets, Montr\u00e9al, 2017.
Photo: GBoyer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nInvestigation: Am I Mistaken if I Say \u2026?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Gilbert-Boyer\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_CHR_Gilbert-Boyer_7958.jpg\")
Ce jour l\u00e0<\/em>, installation view, La Chambre Blanche, Qu\u00e9bec, 1998.
Photo: GBoyer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Gilbert-Boyer\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_CHR_Gilbert-Boyer_cremazie3898.jpg\")
Atelier \u00e0 ciel ouvert<\/em>, from the series #p10h88 <\/em>on Instagram, video still, 2021.
Photo: GBoyer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Gilbert-Boyer\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_CHR_Gilbert-Boyer_ououou26octobre22.jpg\")
#p10h88<\/em> (detail), series on Instagram, 2022.
Photo: GBoyer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nA Secret in Public<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/107_CHR_Gilbert-Boyer_Instagram_1420220105_COULEUR.jpg\")
#p10h88<\/em> (details), series on Instagram, 2022.
Photo: GBoyer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n