Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
In the world of performance, of action,
as everyday objects were used,
nothing is more everyday than a table and chair...
So I have used lots of chairs throughout my life.
For many reasons.
Firstly, because I like sitting more than standing up,
especially now that I'm older.
Actions with chairs, I have the canon for 30 chairs.
I have a great deal of works with chairs.
And if you see pictures of my performances,
you will see that I'm sitting down in many of them.
I found it in the street, as I told you, and I sat down.
I sat down because I was very tired,
really exhausted.
I sat down and I thought
"oh, I'd sit here until I died".
Those things you say foolishly, I don't know.
So I brought it home and,
the next morning, needless to say, I came across it at home.
And so the scene of the night before sprang to mind
and I said to myself that I was going to make this piece.
For a time the sign was handwritten
because I wanted it to be in the language of the place
in which the chair was exhibited.
So if it is exhibited in China, the sign has to be in Chinese...
So I knowingly made a paper sign
so that they could change it.
I used the chair to type, to sit down,
for guests to sit on when they came round because I had very few chairs.
Over time, as we used it so much for years,
well it came apart here.
It splintered or something like that.
And so, I said to myself, to make it more solid,
so that we wouldn't fall when we sat down.
Can you see that? I attached a string to it,
which I painted in a similar colour
so that you wouldn't notice it much. And here too, can you see?
It's repaired here too.
But I never actually thought this would end up in a museum.
These beauty contests, that is to say, the sizes.
Women have to be a certain size...
All this body worshipping is becoming all the more excessive.
We have to be more and more perfect physically speaking.
We can't have the slightest imperfection.
We get rid of everything. I, for instance,
have horrible teeth as you can see, but I've never had them fixed.
And when I see myself in photos, I say "oh my goodness, such teeth",
but in real life, I don't notice them.
You can live without being perfect.
And then I simply thought
of publicly measuring my body in front of people.
There are many variations and many possibilities:
you can measure your own body
or you can measure someone else's body.
In other words, you can do it alone, you can do it with somebody else,
with lots of people, etc.
The important thing is that you measure your body
and that the measurements are made known.
You can do it by attaching a sticker to yourself, like here,
or drawing a picture on the wall of your body
and jotting down the measurements, or saying them aloud, etc.
So that people know what height you are,
what bra size you are -I don't know what size you're supposed to have,
but come on, I've never had it, "bien sūr que non".
In other words, just simply measuring your body.
I never consider a video of one of my performances
unless I intend creating a piece with it to be a work.
The performance is the child for me.
This is more difficult.
For this piece I asked the photographer to take the photos,
something I never do. But I really liked this work
and I still do, and so I wanted to have a record of it.
Besides, I really like them
because they remind me of the cinema
and I really like arranging them like that.
This one is special to me, as are others,
because they are very old things, which I've made many times,
which I've made because I'm really interested in making them.
And so I have sort of an "attachement",
an affection, with these works.