Jérôme Bel : I realized that in the last four years, my pieces came from “invitations” -they were commissions. I don’t have the time anymore to develop my own ideas, not even a small one on the side. I respond to commissions. To contexts.

Daniel Buren : Actually, an artist always works under commission, a term that’s a little obsolete and to which I prefer the terms “invitation”, “request”, and “offer”. I’m not talking only about what you can do in a public space, but also in a museum, in a gallery. Even in the case of an art gallery, where you have the most freedom, it’s still a commission we’re responding to!

Jérôme Bel : The nicest is when I’m offered a context that I wouldn’t have sought out myself, for example, L’Opéra [Ballet] de Paris. I had never imagined doing a show with a classical dancer. The worst is when they say to you, “Come, and do whatever you want!” I could as easily just stay at home!

As a choreographer, you question your contextual environment with acuity…

Jérôme Bel : Yes, I’m very much interested in that, which isn’t the case for other choreographers. I often work “on site” (in situ; “site-specific”). It’s kind of weird to say that in front of Daniel Buren. I identified a lot, actually, with your way of working, notably the idea of not having a studio. Because early on, you abandoned the idea of a studio, which really helped me. My method of working is the artist, or the writer -alone reflecting on his or her work. Even if I work with actors/dancers in the end. Or with a context. The Opera of Paris was such a determining context that I didn’t imagine abstracting it. The same with Thailand [in reference to Pichet Klunchun and Myself]: I don’t see myself arriving with my dancers, housing them in a four-star hotel and rehearsing a piece in a theater in Bangkok. No, once I’m there, I work with Thai dance, its relation between Thai culture and our own.

Daniel Buren, as in your participation in live plastic art performances like the Circus- do you still see yourself working “on site”, or is there another way to work ?

Daniel Buren : No, and my answer is simple: what is essentially site-specific is the theater, the circus. It’s there where everything plays out, before the eyes of witnesses, in a specific place -it’s completely site-specific, well before this notion was introduced into the art world, except perhaps during the Renaissance, for we must not forget that the fresco artists at the time worked “on site”. But since then we’ve forgotten this aspect of artistic work a little, and the idea has become fixed that the artist is completely free, detached from any context outside of a canvas.

Jérôme Bel : For choreographers, there are still independent companies: I am the master of my tools and of the way in which I produce and present my work. I turned down all the commissions people could ever give to me that fell under the classification of an independent company. I don’t have the time anymore to be independent! I’m extremely dependent!

Daniel Buren : It’s a paradox. Whoever says “site-specific” seemingly abandons the artist’s freedom in order to respond to the context, to the point where certain artists only see themselves to be “decorating.” I have received these critiques before, but I was aware of them and had already integrated this problem -and therefore its antidote- into my work.

Jérôme Bel : The idea of the artist’s freedom, it’s preconceived and absurd. Are we really free? No. And also the idea that we must be alone at home before our easel, or in a museum with walls, windows, the public… It’s an obsolete paradigm. For me, on the other hand, I’m interested in working with this reality and it’s why I find commissions interesting: we aren’t free, there’s a context, constraints, spectators. At the center of something constraining with very precise rules, how can we ever get started? It’s easier in the end. The more constraints I have, the better I see where I must work, my subject takes shape -I love it! If someone says to me, “Do whatever you want”, I’m not interested. I want to do what there is to do.

Jérôme Bel, have you ever made choreography for a public space ?

Jérôme Bel : No, even though people have proposed it to me. Projects like these are usually very successful, but I can’t imagine my work outside of the theater. If what I do on stage were to be moved out to a public space, no one would notice it. For me, it doesn’t make sense because I do it on stage and I oblige the people to watch. The tradition of western theater is to not say anything and to stay until intermission. In Switzerland, what I did was so banal that the public didn’t even see it. Only the black box of the theater, with lighting and the immobile position of the audience, allows showing these things. I turned down an offer in an airport because I don’t imagine what one could do in this context, surrounded by travelers and their luggage.

Daniel Buren : That’s interesting, because one of the rare times that I turned down something a little enticing was for the Munich airport. I was perhaps wrong because others succeeded in doing things that were not so bad. But I just wasn’t feeling it. And I know airports too well to know that one can want to do many things, but one is not to look at an art work. Another problem comes up: Can all sites, specific or not, and all contexts welcome a art installation? I don’t think so. In the public space, certain artistic propositions are often accepted because of their relative invisibility. Their advantage is that they don’t disturb anyone, don’t cost a lot and don’t provoke anything. No one sees them, so it’s okay!

Jérôme Bel : On the other hand, there is in our world a tradition in the street. One of my ideas for the Pompidou Center would have been to bring into the theater the people who do things on the square in front of the building. Like the mime all smeared in white who doesn’t even budge an eyebrow. I want to show that on stage. To bring into the theater what happens on the street, or even in the wings -it resembles what I already do. The piece Véronique Doisneau at the Opera Ballet of Paris brought out this approach.

What was it like watching this piece by Jérôme Bel ? Did you recognize any of your own approaches to “on site” work, this time applied on stage ?

Daniel Buren : I was blown away by this piece, but I wasn’t thinking of myself. Moreover, I don’t think we can see the works of others likewise. I thought about it, and after reading a sentence where Jérôme explained he was influenced by my work, I could make the connection and see what he meant by that, and of course I was very proud.

Jérôme Bel : Yes, but I would like to say again today that [that piece] came to me thanks to your idea of art, to this history of “on site”, of working with the context. For me, dance is just a tool, just like you use stripes in your work. I’ve always thought that it was a language, a tool, and it’s why I can work with a ballet dancer or with hip hop dancers, which are today the two most recognizable figures in dance. Whereas a contemporary dancer is much more difficult to define.

Daniel Buren : Most of all in the street! I saw the premiere of Véronique Doisneau at the Opera, and the piece came right after the conventional lineup of all the dancers on stage, from the little ones up to the star dancers. It’s like the great fountain shows of Versailles (les Grandes Eaux): they’re magnificent but they’re also a total cliché. And then you see walk on stage this dancer who has never achieved star status who tells her story, speaks of what has been painful or wonderful at the Opera -I thought that was fantastic. Because in addition you saw both dance and a critique of the dance profession. Actual pleasure that doesn’t camouflage actual suffering. I was astonished by the public’s reaction. I was expecting to hear hissing -you too I presume. But since it was very delicate, the audience was touched by something they already knew in the back of their mind, a certain truth that’s hidden at the Opera.

We’re touching on an idea here that’s fundamental for you both, the notion of criticism. Daniel Buren, you have contributed to what has been called “institutional criticism”, and in a way Jérôme Bel’s show at the Opera is of this kind. We know very well that to make a criticism of a place, an institution or a context is not necessarily to speak poorly about it, in any case it isn’t a total demolition. It’s above all a way of questioning the space, working accurately, the reality of a location, and also to talk about the great aspects.

Daniel Buren : One has even to accept that the “critique” in question plays in all directions. The accent can be very critical, but its sensibility cannot limit itself to an exclusively negative dialogue. I’ve always fought against that, even if in the beginning I was more often a critic than not. In the early 70s, once I realized that my work was being classified as political criticism, I quickly added in things that accented the artistic -the aesthetic- side of my work that I wouldn’t have done until then. If plastic art can only exist by its critical discourse, one day or another it will sink into this criticism. There are examples of very good artists, like Hans Haacke for example, who closed themselves off in an exclusively critical method. As soon as he would make something, we would wait for him to ferociously critique the museum, the gallery, those who were financing, how he was going to tell us his story and where he was going to lead us. Others, you’ll say to me, only paint bouquets of flowers, and they’ve got a point!

Jérôme Bel : I could have destroyed the Opera. I could have found an embittered dancer, who wasn’t faring well and who wanted to do something to the institution. In the beginning, I made the mistake of wanting to work with “the worst ballerina”. The Opera refused, I slammed the door. They called me back and offered to choose a dancer situated in the middle ranks of the hierarchy. To take from the middle, that’s what there was to work with. Because crisis, criticism, is to put into crisis, open the thing, show the insides, and with Véronique Doisneau I precisely open the Opera of Paris from the inside. The dancer Véronique Doisneau is in the middle ranks of the Opera Ballet corps, she’s not a star, but she’s not far from being one. She has problems with the establishment, but also many joys -each audience member decides for his or herself.

Daniel Buren : This detail nicely shows what it means to accept a commission. Without that dialogue, the piece wouldn’t have been balanced. If you had acted alone in total freedom, you would no doubt have gone astray and the show wouldn’t have had the strength that it did. In every commission there is before anything else the acceptance of the other.

Daniel, you have sometimes used people as a medium, whether they were stand-ins for a performance, or museum guards that you had dressed in striped vests. Here we’re reaching the boundaries of theater, direction, and even choreography…

Daniel Buren : In 1973, then in 1975 in the streets of New York, I did a project entitled Seven Ballets in Manhattan, which clearly brings up choreography. “Protesters” marched with a colored placard, as in a strike. They had a route, they walked for two hours and changed neighborhoods every day. The only thing they were allowed to answer to passersby who posed questions was the name of the color that they were toting. Before that, in early 1968, I did a project in Paris with people wearing sandwich advertising boards. And then there was the museum guards’ vests, a project started in 1977 and on display at MoMA right now in the exhibition Color Charts, where I made 150 vests of five different colors. Which creates an improbable ballet of a museum guards army that criss-crosses and meanders on all floors.

On the other hand, you also directed Superpositions, where you had a painting made by assistants by directing them live. It’s a very autonomous approach and similar to a studio environment. On stage there is a large empty wall onto which you dictate to five people to glue or tear off colored sheets of paper. A spectacle of a painting in the process of being made.

Jérôme Bel : In that, there is an act that is theatrical-performative. It’s you who dictates to your assistants where they must glue the sheets of paper. You are a director, in real time. I must say that that’s my dream! To direct actors while they act. I direct them beforehand or the previous day, but during the actual show, they don’t always do what I told them to! It’s the limitations of a director: once the piece is created, I can’t say anything else to them. No one’s ever done that, apart from Tadeusz Kantor, who was in the wings and intervened during the performance. I saw him at the Pompidou Center and I was completely fascinated. It’s an act that I’ve never stopped thinking about. It’s really my dream. If an orchestra conductor one evening is feeling down, he can change the orchestra, the game. It’s absolutely performative -it’s in his idea of the work in the instant that it’s playing out.

Daniel Buren : I’ve never thought of that, it’s funny but it’s true! And I’ve never seen that in theater or in choreography. I am there like an orchestra conductor that directs a score that hasn’t yet been written but the performers still can follow and compose at the same time. It’s also like a ballet, and I improvise what happens throughout, with all the surprises that can arise.

Jérôme Bel : I have to say that you’ve hit there the essence of theater. Directing, in its most performative aspect, for me, is the essence of theater, and everyone searches for that at present. And it’s always people coming from elsewhere that help us reach it.

Daniel Buren : My point of departure was not at all theater, but to “do” the painting, all the paintings: the spectacle of those amateur painters that you sometimes see in the street painting away. In the U.S., there are TV shows where you learn to paint. It’s often about painting a mountain landscape with a lake and you watch the progressive making of the picture. It’s really the worst kind of painting, but despite it all there’s something fascinating in the way the picture is created. It’s the fascination of the “doing”, whether it’s executed by a leisure painter or by Picasso, that interests me. Which has set in motion this type of performance for me. There’s a pleasure to doing that affects all people who paint, whether it’s Picasso or Yves Brayer. But then it gets confusing: it’s not because we get pleasure from doing something that we must automatically show it to others so that they too can find pleasure in it. That becomes a problem.

Jérôme Bel : In dance, you sometimes see a dancer’s own pleasure. And it’s frightening. One can enjoy dancing, and it’s necessary perhaps to have this pleasure, but why give it to me to see? That’s not enough. I, the spectator, want to feel it too!

Daniel Buren : Exactly. In these TV shows, it’s always catastrophic in the end. When the guy finishes his mountain landscape, it’s horrible. But during the entire time we were watching him do it, there’s something fascinating. The problem is the result. Whereas at the end of the Superpositions show, the lights go out, the realized work is destroyed and there’s nothing left. What counts here is only the process, not the result.

Contemporary dance often shows the making of a work on stage, or its “work in progress”…

Jérôme Bel : Yes, and I like this idea a lot. I always try, during the course of the performance, to make the viewer understand how I made the show. From the beginning to the end, it’s one of the laws of my work. There are rules to the game, the viewer learns them, and he or she then sees how I start to trick, to play with the rules. It’s working with the mind. I really like this TV show that you speak of. When I see someone first put on the colors, the forest in the background and then put in the people, I am in his head, I see the mind of the work. There is a construction, and I’m amazed.

Daniel Buren : What’s beautiful in this kind of living spectacle is this game with time. For me, time is equally present in art that’s in a space, and is essentially inseparable from what we see. It is explicitly inherent in the term “on site” (in situ) when I use it for example. It’s also true of traditional painting- time isn’t apparent as such and it’s rarely ever felt by the viewer, but it’s there! It’s moreover what I find much more exciting in painting than in video: the time isn’t fixed in advance. In painting, it’s free. A painting can be one second or one hundred years. It’s not imposed and doesn’t depend on the viewer.

Jérôme Bel : That there is your advantage. In the visual arts, the viewer decides how much time is spent. We [who are in dance or theater] are stuck in the dark for a specific duration. And I clearly see that the artists I know have a hard time staying in the theater! By habit and by aesthetic choice, they have a much different idea of the timespan of a work, freely chosen by the viewer

Interviewed by Jean-Max Colard