Conversation Between

Hans-Michael Herzog and Julio Le Parc

 

The conversation was held in Spanish and took place in París on March 17,2005

 

What do you think about someone like me inviting you to do this show in Zürich?

 

l'm surprised, and at the same time I am flattered by this invitation. The recognition of the work that I have done is encouraging and creates a sense of trust. I like to show the whole of my work, and this isn't a small thematic exhibition, but one which covers a central aspect of my work. The works presented in a large space like Daros can manage to convey an idea of the whole. The relation of those experiences, even though they are linked by the theme of light, creates something like a climate, as if the whole were a new work.

 

Are you concerned in your everyday life with what is going on in the world of contemporary art?

 

In the 1960s or earlier, throughout the period of my adolescence and youth, I was very interested in contemporary art: what was going on in Buenos Aires, and what we got to know through journals. Plus what had been going on from the Impressionists on, the various movements that had predominated at that time, such as Futurism, Dadaism, etcetera. It was a period of assimilation, of digesting all those proposals. Once you have assimilated it all, you have to break away in order to be able to work with more freedom and at the same time to allow the imagination or the creative capacity to work and to advance through new terrain. Obviously you pay attention to your surroundings. There is still a capacity to analyse what you see, from a technical point of view and of how the works have been made, of the motivation, of the insertion in society. Afterwards, the analysis of the correspondence that may exist between an artists theoretical position and the actual works. It is logical that there is a lot of mystification surrounding art today, just as there was in the 1960s. And there is always the commerce. Sometimes I think: Wouldn't it be great if there were a clear differentiation within the world of art. On the one hand, "commercial art," with its galleries, collectors, propaganda and its relation with the official circuits, influencing the cultural programmes. On the other hand, the opportunity presented to artists to be willing to experiment, thinking about the creative act, thinking about their place in society, looking for new judgmental criteria, removed from passing trends, beyond the trends created, sometimes artificially, to keep the art market alive. The other day I read an article in a newspaper saying that Charles Saatchi has presented an exhibition of paintings in London. Everything he did before was anti-painting, and now suddenly he organises a big exhibition to launch painting.

 

Talking about the art market, do you have a gallery? You are not very visible in the market. I don't see you here in Europe as a star, like some of your colleagues.

 

To be a star at any price has never been my objective. Everybody can choose the way they live, within certain parameters. There are Latin American artists of the same "tendency" as mine who live just for their work. I have always had a critical, analytical attitude towards the mechanisms of the official culture. First, when I was in the Escuela de Bellas Artes (School of Fine Arts) in Buenos Aires, and afterwards here in Paris. An analytical attitude towards the cultural medium too, with its important events, like the exhibition in the Pompidou in 1972. In every case we ran up against a universal deaf-ness and a lot of aggressiveness on the part of the institution and the authorities. I was categorised as a rebel who was disturbing the system. And all these years down to today it has been practically the same persons: those who were young officials in the 1960s and 1970s are now directors of some institution or other. They say: "Why should Julio Le Parc-the "rebel"-protest? His artistic tendency is represented in the official art" "In which way?" "We have had several big exhibitions of Soto and Morellet. Morellet was with him in G.R.A.V., and Soto is a Latin American like him."

In trie 1980s we formed a team of French and Latin American art critics and artists. We proposed to hold a big Latin American exhibition of three-dimensional art, preferably to be shown in the Centre Pompidou. The specialists at the Pompidou knew about the existence and production of even the latest underground artist in New York. But could they name, for example, three contemporary Mexican artists apart from the three famous muralists? No. Could they name a single Venezuelan apart from Soto, who lives in Paris? No. And not a single Chilean, Colombian, Peruvian, and so on. Nothing at all.

The Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, wanted that exhibition to take place. There were many meetings in his ministry with him and with the director of plástic arts, officials and our team, which had analysed the theme, programmed its possible implementation with diagrams, references and contacts with Latin América. In one of the last meetings the minister arrived and asked where the director of the Centre Pompidou was. He hadn't shown up that day, he'd gone on holiday! The exhibition couldn't be programmed for that year, nor for the following one. When could they do it? Within four years? Fine. We started to work for an exhibition within four years. But that wasn't on either.

 

You are a very political person. Your work is closely connected with politics, but will someone who doesn't know anything about that realise?

 

l'm as interested in politics as the next man. Then, tho analysis that I carried out for myself and in the group of the mechanisms of creation of the artistic world, the appreciation and diffusion of the work of art, showed me that they were a response to a pre-given political culture. Everything was top-down, from the image of the artist as a superior being, and everything connected with that: the mystification and confused interpretations of the art critics. This showed that for us contemporary creation was separate from reality. If we accepted that system in its entirety, we had to make paintings that would be assessed by the art critics, sold by the galleries, and put on show in the museums. Then we tried to discover a point from which we could exert influence. We started to think about our own situation and the starting-point was: either you work for an élite, the critics, the directors of galleries and museums, collectors, or you try to do something to establish a relation with people in general, without having to pass through what was imposed by the circuit.

A painting has the validity of the moment in which it is created and is subsequently transformed into a work of art. I once visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York when they had the painting Guernica. I saw a group of people, students, teachers, walking in front of the painting and adoring the work of art in the museum, but in reality it was a painting denouncing the Nazi bombing of Guernica in a museum of the country which was doing the same in Vietnam at that very moment. That was where the contradiction lay.

I did figurative and denunciatory paintings, but I see them as incidental: to denounce the Pinochet coup in Chile, or to support the Nicaraguans in shaking off the dictator, et cetera I am able to engage in reflection graphically and to offer assistance of a political, humanitarian nature at that point in time through the images. But the aspect that interests me most is how to dismantle those mechanisms, because this makes a major difference. In other words, there is a public which is used to going to museums and submitting — as it submits in every other aspect of its daily lite—to a general regulation: to traffic signals, to the police, to the law. So they go to a museum and have to obey there too, because they have to talk quietly, walk slowly, and the temperature has to remain the same. They are subjected to several works that they cannot appreciate or assess except individually, but their opinions are not taken into account at all by the system.

If a person goes into an exhibition like mine at Daros, for example, it's enough for me if they leave with the feeling of having been part of an experience, whether it comes through the movement and the lights, or because they had to particípate in some works like games and questionnaires, or because the presence of the spectators in front of the work produced some kind of change. No single way of looking at the works is imposed on them, and no two interpretations need be the same.

For a large exhibition that I did in Madrid, I proposed to the director to organise a questionnaire during the first days of the show so that the visitors could choose which of the works I should donate. He said: "No, the people don't know anything." I insisted and said to him: "Look, I will do the questionnaire, and afterwards you can treat it as purely informative." Trien I held a questionnaire. The people were transformed immediately. They looked in a different way. I saw them with the questionnaire, looking, thinking. They were looking at the works of art, looking for their papers, taking notes, discussing them with their companions, all giving their opinión and finally indicating the numbers of the works they liked. A lot of people wrote comments, in many cases better than those written by art critics. There were tremendous things about the exhibition, what they saw. Sometimes they filled five whole pages. Afterwards we analysed the result of the questionnaire with the director. One number carne out of it, he couldn't believe it, and said: "It's impossible, it's impossible - thats the very one that I want to stay in the museum!"

The viewer is often expected to take the motivation of the artist into account. That's fine, but the work is independent, and its relation with the viewer is a part of the visual dimensión. If you have to read twenty pages in order to understand it, it's a work of literature, information, learning, and the viewer has to accept an explanation. In political terms, the viewer remains passive, dependent, like today's citizens. The political aim would be to get rid of all that. What you do then is to believe in a direct relation with people, with what people see.

 

To talk about your personal and professional history, when and why did you come to Paris?

 

In 1958. Before I came to Paris, it was an ambition. We were a group of friends, from the Movimiento de Estudiantes (Students' Movement) in the Escuela do Bellas Artes (School of Fine Arts). We used to meet and swap ideas on Saturday nights, and one night we said: "We want to see with our own eyes what is going on in an important centre of art," which was París. But it was impossible for me because I had a small job with the city council and the journey cost a fortune. I applied for a travel grant, and the jury for the French grant I applied for included the two most important art critics of Buenos Aires of that time, Julio Payró and Jorge Romero Brest. I had had conflicts with them, and did not imagine that they would ever support me. First, because the grant was given to recognised artists. It was a grant for eight months to perfect their technique. It wasn't for students.

We had put up Julio Payró as a candidate and he had been appointed Director of Art Teaching, the most important position for art teaching in the ministry. And we had proposed him as the mediator to carry out the teaching reform in Bellas Artes. But there was a conflict because he was ignoring us, and the student assembly decided, as a means of putting on pressure, to call for the resignation of the mediator, Julio Payró. We sent him a telegram and didn't know how to sign it. We decided that it had to be signed by the president of the Students Centre, and that was me. So I sent it. "On behalf of the Student Movement, I call upon you to resign your position as mediator in art teaching. Signed, Julio Le Parc." He received the telegram and resigned the next day.

The other jury member was Jorge Romero Brest, a very well-known art critic, connected with concrete art in the 1940s. We invited him to the Escuela to lecture, and the relation was a good one. Before applying for the French grant, I applied for one for Canada. As in the case of any grant application, I had to present documentation with letters of recommendation from personalities in the art world. So I went to see him—he was director of the Museo de Bellas Artes (Museum of Fine Arts) at the time—and asked him for a letter of recommendation. Afterwards I went to collect it, walked out of the museum, and opened it in the street, because it wasn't sealed. I read the letter but I didn't like it because it didn't say very much. So I went back upstairs, walked to his office, and threw the letter in his face. So I said to myself: "This person is never going to forgive me for what I did." But in spite of all that, they both supported me and gave me the grant. Later, Jorge Romero Brest was on the jury that was making the selection for the Venice Biennale, and he support­ed my candidature as an artist who represented Argentina. They were very good people and received much consideration because they were not at all vindictive. Here, on the other hand, if you ask the French to include artists in cultural management, no matter at how low a level, you become an enemy for life. Do you get the picture?

 

What was it like to be a Latín American in Paris? Did you feel marginalized, or didn't you attach much importance to it?

 

I was very lucky to get that grant for eight months, because before coming here, I had to go out to work every day in Buenos Aires. In the morning I went to the Escuela Superior (Higher School), in the afternoon to the office, and in the night I went to finish the academy until half past eleven. I had Saturdays, Sundays, and occasional holidays to work for myself, on what I wanted to do. So the great thing about the grant was that I could be here, even if it was on a very low budget, and had twenty-four hours a day to do my work. The Paris scene was very difficult and closed. The welcoming committee for the recipients of the grant organised an exhibition at the end of the year in a gallery in Paris. The director of this gallery didn't want to show us. In the end he put us out of sight in a corner. The art world was dead opposed to any kind of search or experiment. I went to the Musée d'Art Moderne (Museum of Modern Art) in Paris hoping to see paintings by Mondrian, or by Kandinsky, which we knew from books, but there was none of that. It was full of figurative paintings, but they had never bought a painting by Mondrian, and Mondrian had worked in Paris, I don't know, twenty or twenty-five years, in complete isolation. So I console myself by saying that when Mondrian was alive, not a single museum in Paris bought one of his paintings. The museum curators give the impression of being up to date, but all they do is follow the commercial movement of art. Now they will exhibit your work if there is a sponsor who pays for everything, but if an artist doesn't have the means of obtaining a sponsor, and doesn't have the money to pay for the transport and insurance et cetera, he's out.

 

What was it like when the change came, when you began to have more success? It was with the award from the Venice Biennale in 1966, wasn't it?

 

It took eight years before my first individual show at the Denise René gallery in Paris, in 1966. I spent those eight years very well, working with the group and on my own, I was not so preoccupied with success. That exhibition came off because they had given me the great international prize at the Venice Biennale, otherwise the gallery would have waited God knows how many more years, That award carne as a surprise to me, and at the same time it did not affect me much either. An award is the result of a confrontation between a limited number of persons — the jury — and a limited number of artists or works on show. There was a huge polemic. Some tried to neutralise the very strong pressure from the North Americans for a North American to win that Biennale and thereby to smash Paris as a centre of art and all Europe. They had a candidate, who was the Pop artist Lichtenstein, the favourite of all the periodicals. They were already celebrating their victory before the jury had delivered its verdict. There's somebody who is investigating that now, in the archives of the Venice Biennale. They sent me a letter saying that someone wanted to neutralise the North American presence. And well, with all those factors playing a role, at some moment they happened to decide on my work. It wasn't something that was going to change my way of life. At the Venice Biennale there were, I don't know, I think forty of my works in a small space, and not a single one of them was sold during the Biennale. From the economic point of view it wasn't a big award. Besides, it wasn't part of my nature to speculate on that award to gain importance and obtain economic benefits. Some things did sell afterwards, yes, what I sold enabled me to carry on working, to help support my family, to be a bit free to do my own things. Those are the contradictions that an artist can have who wants to change things and sees that they don't change, and who has to carry on and support his family. And at the same time there are the aspirations, what you want to do, and the things that are completely impossible. Then you try to do what is most your own within the limits of the possible, and sometimes a few things that are not permitted.

Why, when and how did you get involved with Kinetic Art?

 

In the Escuela de Bellas Artes, in Argentina, when I was a very young student, there was the Concrete Art movement.

 

At the same time there was Fontana, who was our teacher in the Escuela Preparatoria de Bellas Artes (Pre-paratory School of Fine Arts) with his ideas on Spatialism, he encouraged us with the realisation of the Manifiesto Blanco (White Manifestó). Then, later on, there was aiso a teacher who taught visual basics, the theory of colour, and all those things that set us thinking. Besides, we read books that we could ask for in the library or a few periodicals to get informed, and later there was an exhibition of Vasarely in the Museo de Bellas Artes, organised by Romero Brest. It made an impact on me and my friends in the sense that the geometric art that was being made in Argentina was a prolongation of Constructivism. The Vasarely show, on the other hand, with his black and white paintings, was completely different, it was something with potential. Afterwards we had read Mondrian and other artists, like Kandinsky, whose work was being continued by Vasarely, with its very simple and very direct presence that was different from the other artists we knew. When I came here to Paris with the grant, it was much easier to find a gallery with informal paintings, Tachist paintings, because that was the trend. But what interested us was to develop those simple elements, conceived on the basis of Mondrian's texts. Together with other things that we had studied from the Bauhaus, we were led to develop it as a search in itself rather than as the personal search for an image.

We chopped and changed, doing this and that, always combined with an analysis, with a reflection. Thats why, when we founded our group in the 1960s, we sought a wider reflection, within the framework of collective reflection, but without any loss of individuality. Proposals, confrontations appeared; then we found people with similar concerns and we joined with them to form the Nouvelle Tendance (New Tendency) to achieve a wider reflection than was possible inside the group.

The development of my work wasn't that one day I said: "l'm going to make things with movement," and the next day: "l'm going to make things with light." Movement was the ideal solution to certain problems that I was raising, and when I saw that light could offer me a solution and at the same time enable me to continue with my investigations, I concentrated on that theme. Or in colour... One thing led to another. It wasn't a decisión. I never decided to play with light, but went on experimenting and experimenting. Things occurred to me and I perfected them. The movement gave me the opportunity to explore more things, but at that moment we didn't claim to be doing Kinetic Art, they were just experiments. At one moment I was interested in movement, at another in optics, at another in the participation of the viewer. Afterwards came the experirnent of going out into the street to try to find a new viewer, always trying to transforrn, within our limits, the relation between people and conternporary creation. Many of the things in our practice were connected with contemporary life. We never used technology. And when the new media appeared, like the laser beam or big electronic devices, I never used them.

I am very impressed by the fact that you have always worked with very, very simple materials, with almost banal mechanisms. But you are able to create spaces and spatial phenomena, as well as temporal phenomena, that go way beyond the technological basis. For me they function somewhat like a miracle:

Many things originated out of necessity and at the same time connected with the problem at hand. Sometimes I have seen work by artists who have been assisted by electronic engineers, and then the result is out of proportion to the means used, it is very poor. It is a bombardment with things, but never manages to have a thread. that makes you feel or think about something. It is the technological or electronic media that dominate, not the imagination of their creator.

 

Your work plays with space, time and light, the basic elements of life, of the universe. Can you tell me a littie about that? Do you see this transcendental aspect?

 

Not much, but perhaps the idea of how you have lived, how you have thought, how you have reacted, of what your aspirations and beliefs are, is inside yourself. That is why there are people who see things in a work that I nev­er imagined could be seen in it, and thats fine with me. They surprise me. Perhaps I don't see my own interior very clearly. But if I say: "l'm going to make a work that conveys a philosophical, spiritual, or mystical reflection," it is most likely that it will fail. I work with precise parameters that help me in each case, and if afterwards I see by means of those parameters that other people are made to feel such and such, fine, it's OK, but it isn't something I plan to achieve in advance.

Once we had an experience that is a bit connected with this. A group of us artists decided to hold a meeting in which each of us would present a painting and the others would say what it conveyed to them. Analyses, criticisms...

One of us became furious, he presented a painting and asked things like: "I put this green here, don't you realise what it means? This green represents this, or this, or this, can't you see it? " That artist spent his whole life painting in the belief that people saw what he wanted the colour to convey. And the artist is completely disappointed by the others instead of by himself, and never says: "I didn't manage to get across to them what I wanted".

 

What is the importance of the ludic aspect in your work?

 

In an exhibition that I held in the garden of the Museo de Bellas Artes of Caracas, I made installations of different games. One Sunday I was there, a couple recognised me, and they told me that that morning, as they were walking out with their children, they told them: "We're going to go to an exhibition," and the kids replied:

"Noooo, we'll be bored." But they convinced them. "It's two in the afternoon and we want to go and eat, but the kids don't want to leave the museum." They had gone to the part where the games were. So on that visit to the museum, when they can climb something, place it in position, this way or that, they feel uninhibited, they are freer to be in contact with forms that have colours, with forms that can be moved. When they reach the paintings it's the same, except that the sensation that they have experienced in a bodily, physical way appears as a projection of the ludic aspect, frees itself, and there is a more natural interaction.

When you get kids to do things, drawings of what they have seen, the result is wonderful. They look at an exhibition, and afterwards you get them to draw, and some of them make interpretations with more imagination than the ones they have seen. There is something latent in the viewers, and when you give them the opportunity, they reflect. But since that does not generally have any value for the system, because it is an intrusion within the functioning of the sale of paintings, in the market, it is not done. Who can be interested in what a few kids think about an exhibition?

We weren't saying that it was necessary to elimínate the criterion of the specialists, but that there was a need for confrontation, for going to and tro, to come up with mechanisms to further its growth and self-reflection. Once, we were discussing this with an art critic at a round table in Madrid, and at the end he said: "But, Julio, what you're proposing is to finish everything off, it's impossible. How are we going to dismantle everything we did? We are the ones who say if it is worth anything. How is the man in the street going to contradict us and say that its value is something else? The whole edifíce will collapse. All of the structures, the markets, the galleries, the collectors, the institutions, the big names, the paintings that fetch a very high price, the big exhibitions based on the criterion of a small pressure group, every­thing that functions... How is all that going to change? lt's very nice in utopian terms, but it would be a disaster for artistic activity." What I was proposing was to at least try to arrive at certain confrontations. Perhaps an artist like Tapies represents a higher value for you. But take the painting to a district thirty kilometres outside of Madrid. And if you display that painting there in those conditions; and try to see what people see in that painting: a white painting, with a bit of texture; see how people who haven't been through the conditioning of the school, of teaching and all the rest, respond naturally to that painting. It would be interesting if they had criteria, so that they could confront them with other works afterwards. It might mean the destruction of an artist. It might be good, not for the artists who are already canonical, but for the young artists who are emerging, whose only frame of reference for their work is the institution and the critics, et cetera.

It could link people in a direct way with things and, within that link, if people on a low income, who occupy a subordínate position in terms of social lite, work and family, can recover a bit of energy and optimism by visiting an exhibition, and can then say: "OK, this exhibition has made me feel better," they might be able to proceed in a different way in a different aspect of their lives with that acquired energy. If a viewer realises that he is taken into consideration by the works on display, that they give him something, perhaps he might be able to say afterwards: "Why don't I get this elsewhere?" and start to wonder whether there are people who function like him, or join groups that try to analyse the general situation of a society, of the behaviour of the government, of the political parties.

 

What is beauty to you in life and in art?

 

The idea of beauty is very arbitrary, because it is linked to conditioning, to prejudices that people have about what is and what is not beautiful. In general, for me, something beautiful is something that brings me a certain peace, a certain energy, a certain hope... The idea of beauty has not to be tied to a work of art either, because I may find a situation, a landscape in the countryside beautiful, I may find a person's behaviour beautiful, in the end... During other periods the idea of beauty corresponded to established canons. Nowadays too, a beautiful woman is one who appears in the magazines with the right proportions, and the slimmer the better.

The same thing happens in art: there are fashions, what used to be considered beautiful is no longer so, what sells at the moment, what is fashionable, is what is beautiful. For me in particular, there are many things which give me that feeling of beauty when there is some­thing that moves me, not necessarily perfect things. There are also drawings, paintings, that you can consider beautiful without the need for them to belong to the same tendency as yourself. So, if I classify something as beautiful, it's not because I apply a pre-established canon of beauty, but because if the things I see and come across in lite manage to touch me in some way or other, I feel that they are positive. In general, what has beauty helps people to live. When you come across something that is beautiful, you feel good. If you see something that is falling apart, deteriorating, wasting away, it provokes mortification; you don't experience beauty, but something that pulls you backwards and downwards. I go down to the street and there's a couple of newly-weds, the bride dressed in white, the people well turned out, perhaps the sun is shining and they emerge from a church and it's a beautiful moment, I don't know why, because they are cheerful and that can be beautiful. A funeral can be beautiful too, especially the old-fashioned ones, with the horses, a black carriage and the people behind. There is the emotion of the life that has ended, and at the same time there is the emotion of the life that continues.

 

If you had to advise a young artist who has just started, what would be the most important values for artistic creation?

 

First, to have confidence in himself. To search inside himself and to create situations in which his creative capacities can emerge. To tend towards a greater freedom, and at the same time to have an analytical attitude towards what happens, not to get carried away by what he finds in the artistic circuit and not to compromise with the myths of triumph, of immediate recognition, because it is much more important to know how to develop his own inner capacities. If he denies his capabilities in the search for an easy victory, it is most likely that he will not achieve it, or at most, a passing triumph, but the most important is to discover things that are present and that he can develop through his work, his search, his persistence. The most suitable medium is work, There's nothing that comes spontaneously. In other words, a good drawing, a good painting, can be improved with reflection, because it has to be the intuitive, say, spontaneous side, his desires, his feelings, his intelligence, proceeding by way of the hand that makes things. And reflection also continues what is made.

And besides, let him have an attitude of humility, an awareness of the fact that each of his things is the result of what it has been possible to do. There are young artists who have done four or five paintings and think they are already geniuses. With an attitude of greater humility, one knows that there is a process and a journey to be made, and that nothing comes just like that. The highly talented have also passed through a period of development; their talent is strengthened by what they do and a whole process of artistic work.

 

And of mistakes, too, isn't it?

 

Of course, thats why reflection is important, to see what is being made and comparing it with what has already been made. And if a young artist is able to create situations of collective reflection with others of his own generation... That was a very good stage for me. Even for the young students who are in the schools of fine arts, it is very good to look for that confrontation and exchanges with others. Because a half-truth can be transformed into a negation or a reaffirmation of that truth depending on whom you run up against. And afterwards it's good for a young artist to follow his own course without being influenced by the opinions of others, because sometimos the person who sees what another is doing feeis that he has the authority to give advice, which can sometimes be devastating. Generally speaking, nobody can predict how a young artist will develop, how he will manage to create things, or whether he will make things of high quality. I've known artists who seemed limited to me at a certain moment, but who found their path and moved on years later. In this sense, I refuse to pass judgement. If an artist shows me what he is doing, I don't feel authorised to say this is good or this isn't.

 

And how could a mechanism of self-criticism operate?

 

For an artist? It is confrontation that makes it possible to formulate self-criticism, with oneself and with the rest. But self-criticism is not mandatory, and reflection can replace self-criticism. If there is constant reflection, there is a permanent criticism which is not even a criticism, but an analysis, and situations of very strong self-criticism can be avoided. Analysis orientates you and shows you where you're going, and if there is a mistake you leave something aside and move on in a different direction. To the extent that this strengthens you and leads you to produce, that very production guides you. Now, if you work blindly and finish twenty paintings in six months, and you say: "I have to destroy these paintings because I am engaging in self-criticism," it's a pity.

I think that in the art world today it is impossible for a young artist to say: ''I made a mistake." There's an enormous pressure from the market, and everything that you're going to sell has to be good. I think that an artist cannot conceive the idea that he has made a mistake.

lt's the same as the idea of change. I had an artist friend who sold very well with a gallery in París. Working in his studio, he found a new direction and changed for several months. He was very happy because he could elabo­rate a different choice of theme. When he had a certain number of paintings, he called the gallery owner. When the gallery owner arrived and saw them, he said: "You won't exhibit a single one of these paintings. It was a dream you had, a nightmare, but you won't exhibit a sin­gle one of these. You must carry on doing the same as before for the next exhibition, so that the clients I have will continue to buy." It wasn't even that he denied what he had done before. The gallery owner asked him to carry out a self-criticism of the new paintings.

 

And what happened?

 

The artist didn't want to change; the gallery owner dropped him and carried on selling the paintings of his that he already owned. There's a documental that they broadcast on TV about a very famous couple who is running a gallery in París, who were filmed for a year, I think. As time passed the people making the film started to become like members of the family... And they carried on with their activities. In one of the scenes, you see how the couple of dealers goes to the studio of a fairly well-known artist, and it's funny: the artist takes out the paintings for the new exhibition, big paintings. They look at them and make comments, and the dealer tells him that it's all fine, but that he has given one of the figures a very big penis. The painter explains, but the dealer holds firm: "Because I'm sure that this painting will be bought by such and such, but in the end..." Finally, the gallery owner seizes the palette that is there and the brush and colors, and says to the artist: "May I?" "What do you have in mind?" He imitates more or less the color of the background of the figures and starts to erase the penis. "Look," the gallery owner says, "what has changed in your painting? Nothing has changed; the importance of your painting is all the rest." And the painter asks: "Sure that you will sell the painting?" "Of course I'll sell it for you, now it's certain that I'll sell it."