Deep interview with Franck Leibovici on his commission for the Centre Pompidou.
Hero: The first question is about the logistics and story-telling. You mentioned you were filming today. So when a powerful museum like Centre Pompidou shuts down for five years and starts packing away thousands of landmark works, it’s easy to see it as just a massive storage operation. But you would see a quiet choreography, as you were mentioning in our discussion at Goldsmiths, which really struck me because I never thought about it that way. So each decision, pause, labelling, gesture... tells us something about how institutions function and how meaning is shaped by how things are handled behind the scenes. Packing, in this case, would become its own kind of expression. How does this process at the Centre Pompidou function as a site for re-description of the whole museum ecosystem, showing how meaning, care, and decision-making are built into the everyday actions behind the scenes?
Franck Leibovici: I have to tell you before we start that I found you asking very good questions, very precise, and very accurate. I will start to answer, and if you want to ask more precise questions from my answers, don’t hesitate. I am very open to go as in depth as you would like. So just ask more questions.
Hero: That’s very kind of you. Thank you!
Leibovici: Before we start, let me introduce you to Marion Naccache, who is a documentary filmmaker, between I would way, in terms of influences, Fredrick Wiseman and Tsai Ming-liang, and to Yaël Kreplak who is a sociologist, who has been working for years and years on the everyday life of artworks. When I got commissioned from Centre Pompidou, I invited Marion and Yaël to join because they have very specific skills, and I thought it would be much more interesting if we were doing this together. So the three of us will be co-authors. Some of the ideas we will talk about today result from the work we have been developing together.
There are two ways to describe an institution like the museum of modern art or contemporary art. You can start either from its mission statement, for instance, that would define its public mission. Or you can define the same institution by the different kind of staffs that are working there. The American philosopher John Dewey said, when you want to define a political regime—for instance, democracy—, don’t start from its great principles, try to describe rather the body of employees of the government and its functioning, which is the more precise understanding of the system. For instance, when we are observing this, what you called “massive storage operation”, you have different directors, different units, different departments which are working together; the building, the museum, the production department. So the building is concerned with anything you would find with a building, except that —because its a museum— they have also have to take into account the temperature, the hygrometry, bugs on the floor, the staff’s security, health, and for the public, the security, flux management (there should not be too many people in the hall, etc.).
And at the intersection of the museum and the production, you will find the conservators, the ones we call in French “attachés de collection”, the restorers, various managers (in French, “la régie”), the handlers and the people who pack and, from the outside, the art carriers. And only when these different departments are coordinated, the dismantling can start. If the crates are not lifted to the right floors because the huge elevator for such crates (in French: the monte-charge) is not working, then nobody can work — you cannot take the paintings off the walls because the crates are not there. But before you put the artworks into the crate you need to write a condition report, you need to restore them if you find some damage, you need also to take pictures, and before you take the pictures you need to remove the dust because you’re not going to shoot dirty works. And if the work is an installation with different elements, before you start working you need to make a plan where you will distribute the different elements in different crates, so that when you will reinstall the work, you will know exactly what is where, and in which order you’re supposed to reinstall the work, and so on.
What we call in French the “aller voir” (literally “go see”) is this moment when the restorer, the registrar, the handler and the crates maker are going together in front of the work to describe it very materially and decide how to lift it and transport it. They pinpoint the fragile zones of the work, highlight where you put your hands, and what kind of crates you need to make so it doesn’t get damaged. What I learned from those preparatory meetings is that, as soon as an artwork enters a museum, it becomes an “instructed object” —as the American anthropologist Michael Lynch would say, Yaël wrote extensively about that notion.
An instructed object is an object which is produced through a list of instructions. Here, even though the artwork is not a conceptual artwork, it could be, in a way, exhibited in a show like as “Art by telephone”. Do you know that show? it’s an exhibition from the ‘60s, I think it was in (Museum of Contemporary Art) Chicago, and the curator asked the artists to give instructions by telephone and the museum would produce the works remotely. The artwork is then just the output of these instructions. Step 1, you do this, Step 2, you do that, Step 3, you do that…. So filming the aller voir or the Go See showed us that any artwork becomes an instructed object, and could be translated into a set of instructions. Specially when it’s a complex installation, they need to organize step by step. They would say, Step 1, we need to take off the roof or the glass, Step 2, we do this…, Step 3 we do that…, Step 20…etc. So that when they will reinstall the work, they will start from Step 20, then Step 19, then Step 18 etc. till Step 1. It was a real discovery for me to see this process by a museum that would translate any artwork into a set of instructions.
Hero: Hmm fascinating!
Leibovici: The second thing is that those instructions could look like an Ikea how-to manual. When you buy a piece of furniture at Ikea, you have a set of instructions to set it up. And of course, with Ikea it never works… There is always something missing. Or the instructions are not precise enough. It’s the same in museums. When an artwork enters a museum, the museums produces a paper twin, a doppelgänger, which is called “dossier d'œuvre”, or “Work File”. It’s a document, the identity card of the artwork with as much information as possible: the different exhibitions, the different restorations, the price, provenance, etc. Everytime something happens to an artwork, it’s recorded there. And in this file, you also have the set of instructions. So every time you have to install or de-install the work, you go check the “dossier d’œuvre”. But every time they de-install or re-install an artwork, they realise the instructions are not complete. Something is missing. So every time they activate an artwork, they have to re-write or to complete the instructions to make them more precise.
Hero: That’s an interesting point. If I may come in, is it because the same person isn’t going over the steps they may have written down and it’s some other person that has to interpret what this person had written, and there is that gap in understanding because it’s two different people? Or if it’s the same person doing it again, there could also be the possibility that they themselves had left something out before. So I could conjecture it’s a matter of practice that would come into it; how many times they have done it and how many times they’ve understood their own steps, because you may misunderstand your own instructions.
Leibovici: Yeah you have different possibilities. One possibility is the one you described, it’s a question of practice. But it’s also because for sometime, something was not causing a problem. It was not a problem. And suddenly, for instance, an element breaks, so there is an issue and you have to investigate. I’ll give you a silly example.
Hero: Hahah... Ok
Leibovici: We were filming, a few weeks ago, two works by Duchamp that were being de-installed. One is a shovel, En prévision du bras cassé (1915/1964) [In Advance of a Broken Arm].
Centre Pompidou collection: Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887-1968), In Advance of the Broken Arm (En prévision du bras cassé), 1915/1964. Ready-made: wood and galvanised iron, 132 x 35 cm. Purchased 1986. Inventory no. AM 1986-289. This "commun-or-garden snow shovel", as Duchamp described it, was a banal household object in American homes of 1915. On his arrival in New York in 1915, Marcel Duchamp purchased a snow shovel from a hardware store. The handle of the object was adorned with a cryptic message: ln advance of the broken arm. Counteracting any descriptive aim, Duchamp's titles were intended to engage the viewer in what the artist called the "more verbal regions". By hanging this snow shovel in his studio like a guillotine, he may have sought to transform it into a more threatening and less "simple" object than first appears. Currently at Centre Pompidou Málaga, Málaga (Espagne) as part of To Open Eyes : Miradas de Artista, 03 July 2025 - 11 January 2027.
So you had this shovel suspended in the air. And there is next to it another one by Duchamp which is called Porte-bouteilles (1914 / 1964) [Bottle Rack].
Centre Pompidou collection: Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887-1968), Porte-bouteilles (Bottle Rack), 1914/1964. Ready-made: galvanised iron, Height: 64 cm, Diameter: 42 cm. Purchased 1986. Inventory no. AM 1986-288. ln 1914, Duchamp purchased an ordinary bottle-holder from the Bazar de l'Hôtel de Ville, an object chosen, in his words, for its "total lack of good or bad taste”. This object (no longer in existence) originally carried wording that the artist claimed to have forgotten, a proof of the absence of thought that went into the development of readymade. Yet with this work, Duchamp forged the fate of the 20th century object : the choice of an indifferent visual aesthetic, randomness, the importance of "laissez-faire" and wording used as a "colour" of the object.
Both of them are suspended, so the handlers were asked to bring them down. One of them goes up in a gondola (attached to a lifting device), and he is cutting the metal thread of the Porte-bouteilles and gives it to the other handler. Then he goes to the second piece, En prévision du bras cassé, he’s going to cut the thread, and suddenly you hear a shout, “Don’t do that!” He says, “What?” A voice from afar says, “The thread is part of the work.”
Hero: Hahahah... that’s hilarious!
Leibovici: So he asked “Oh, but how do we know that the thread is part of it ? Because on the label, it’s not written. So the registrar said, “Oh Okay… when the thread is surrounded by a liner, a sheath, a duct around the thread, it means, it is part of the work. When it’s not, when it’s naked, you can cut it”. So, as long as the issue is not raised, you don’t make things explicit : you install the work and there is a thread, so you use the thread to hold the work. It’s only when you ask the question, “should I cut it or not(?),” that suddenly it becomes a problem and you realize that, in the set of instructions, nothing is said about the thread. Because nobody thought before that it could be a problem. You see?
Hero: Yeah so they could take certain things for granted, that the duct or liner is going to protect this thread, that the persons reading the instructions would know that.
Leibovici: It’s only when the problem arises that suddenly we go and check, and we realize that the instruction set is not complete. It means that when there is no answer, after they have investigated, when there is no answer written down, or an oral answer around them, they need to improvise, they need to make a decision. And they will transform the work in a certain way by this decision because they have decided it will be like this. They will then write it down in the set of instructions, and for the future, it will stay like that. Because the future staff will refer to that state of things to do their work. Of course, with the example of the thread, it is tiny or insignificant, but you can have massive examples. If you take Paik Nam June, for instance, we don't find anymore the TV monitor as he was using. We only have flat screens. So the restorers have to make a decision : either to fix the old round screens or to change the installation with flat screens from today. And depending on which option they will decide on, it will change the aesthetic or the spirit of the work.
Gagosian Gallery: Nam June Paik (1932–2006) brought the television to fine art, treating it as a tactile and multisensory medium and object. Trained as a classical pianist, he came into contact with protagonists of the counterculture and avant-garde movements of the 1960s through his early interests in composition and performance, and this engagement profoundly shaped his outlook at a time when electronic images were becoming increasingly present in everyday life. His groundbreaking work is considered seminal to the development of video art.
About Dan Flavin, you cannot find the neons anymore in the market. And I’ve heard that some people are blowing glass to make hand-made neons, which is the opposite of what Flavin was intending. He was buying them at the corner of the street. But in order to keep it exactly the same, you’re going to the opposite of the practice of the artist. And you cannot find the answer in the instruction set in the dossier d’œuvre. So you have to invent, you have to decide.
So, to sum up , the first part of my answer: on the one hand, different teams coordinating, working together, each team depending on the others to do their task. On the other hand, as soon as a work enters a museum, it becomes an instructed object, a set of instructions. And this set of instructions is never complete, it will require to be completed and rewritten all along the life of the artwork.
The second thing I could think of is that when we started to talk about this project, we got two different kinds of reactions. The first one was: people would not understand why we were interested in the moving of furnitures. Moving artworks was nothing different than moving furnitures, and that was not of interest, a boring project —personally I disagree, I think filming a moving out from an apartment could be very interesting, and I guess some artists have already done it. By the way, do you know the unpacking videos on YouTube, when teenagers are unpacking Amazon products in front of their computers? they have many millions of views…
Hero: Yeah I do, I was one of those viewers!
Leibovici: So unpacking or packing is something that can sometimes be very interesting... The second reaction we had is that, people think we are desecrating artworks by showing that paintings are just objects, ie, canvas and pieces of wood. They said, “oh, that’s a critical statement!” Personally, I think if that were the case, that would be a very, very low critique, not really interesting. Sacredness has nothing to do with that. When we decided to film, it is because, first, it’s a joyful moment, even though the museum is going to close for at least five years if not more (when I consider the renovation of my bathroom I was said it would take one week and it took a month and half…). It’s also a very unusual moment, a moment that only artists in their studio, and professionals in museums, have access to. So it’s interesting for the public to have access to that moment. But above all, it’s a moment where the artworks are going to exhibit other features, other properties than the ones that they exhibit usually when they are already installed, stabilised, to the public. For instance, we’re going to experience, how much time they require to be dismantled. Is it going to take 1 minute, or three weeks. You can experience the weight: sometimes, it looks very heavy but it’s very light, or it seems to be very light, but is hugely heavy. You’re going to see how many people are required to move the work; you don’t see it the same if it’s two people or fifteen people. You’re going to see what kind of tools or device you need to move it with; is it just pair of white gloves, or is it a fork lift, for instance?
By seeing what kind of device, tools, and people is attached to the work, you have a different understanding of it. But even beyond the material aspect, you can describe, through that moment, an artwork as a series of actions. As an instance, Bird in Space, a Brancusi sculpture : you’re going to see how two or three handlers are going to lift it from its pedestal, are going switch or toggle it from vertical to horizontal. They’re going to do a half circle to be in the right direction and they are going to synchronise with each other to put it in the crate, whose inside in foam has been sculpted in the exact shape of the sculpture. We could call it a choreography : you need people, you need a certain kind of gestures, and a certain kind of movements, and a certain kind of coordination before it goes into the crate. While I was filming that choreography, the curator of the show came into the room and saw it. And she told me, “oh, I realize now that when there was the famous Brancusi case at the American customs,” —the customs considered it was not art, but just industrial material, so the VAT had to be not for an artwork but on the industrial material, which was higher at that time— “It’s because they saw the sculpture laid down in a crate. When you see it vertically, you don’t doubt that it’s a sculpture, while if you see a piece of bronze laid down in a crate, you don’t know.”
Centre Pompidou collection: Constantin Brancusi (Romanian, 1876-1957), L'Oiseau dans l'espace (Bird in Space), 1941. Sculpture: polished bronze, onyx, 193.4 x 13.3 x 16 cm; (base) H. 18.3 x diam. 18 cm. Bequest of Constantin Brancusi, 1957. Inventory no. AM 4002-106, AM 4002-106 (1). One of the final iterations of a motif Brancusi explored for nearly forty years, this polished bronze Bird in Space, likely derived from a black marble version, is the largest of the series and considered the ultimate expression of the theme. It is presented on a stack of three bases, reflecting the artist's ideal display.
Hero: There is something to the horizontality and verticality, the verticality is what gives structure and dignity. That’s what Rosalind Krauss talks about.
Leibovici: Yes, exactly. So even the curator of the show had not realised that before she saw the artwork “in action”, the artwork in movement.
Hero: Yeah and that’s an art historical… art criticism-based insight isn't it?
Leibovici: It’s something you become aware of only when you see it. I was very me happy when I realized that Brancusi was doing that himself in his studio. He kept moving his sculptures from one spot to another one, in order to show his visitors his sculpture were producing space. Through the movement, but also by changing their position in the space. And he had set up a series of instruments to lift, by himself, the hugely heavy sculptures, like 500 kg, it’s really, really heavy. He kept moving his sculptures in the space. And I realized that beyond the artist himself, very few people had seen the artworks in action or in movement like that, in this choreography. We felt we were very lucky to be allowed to film this moment…
Hero: Hmm yeah that’s really, really interesting. And production of space, I love that idea. It reminds me of Richard Serra, who would talk about activating spaces through the effect of his work and the whole architecture of the space around the art would come into play. And there would be a whole drama around that. I heard Nicholas Serota in an interview that I attended for Gagosian, he was telling stories about working with the artist.
Leibovici: Regarding Serra, in a room for Minimalists at Pompidou, to one of his works, there is a Bruce Nauman sculpture. Serra’s sculpture is a tiny, tiny roll of lead, I would say 50 centimetres long and 20 centimetres high. Next to this little lead roll, you have a large sculpture by Nauman, a metre and half each side. But it’s in resin. The Serra’s was very heavy, it needed five people to lift it, the Nauman’s, only two people were lifting it easily. From afar, they look the same, they are painted and have practically the same colour. You cannot tell the difference.
Hero: Interesting… and that’s an aspect of the artwork that a viewer wouldn’t know.
Leibovici: You realize that only when you see it moved. In one case, five or six people are required, and they need to put the sculpture on a piece of wood : it’s too to have six people's hands on it, so you need to put it on a larger surface to lift it. While the other one which looks huge, well, two people would take it with just one hand. It’s interesting to note that for sculptures, the weight is never indicated on the caption next to the work, while it could be an element to take into account in our perception of it (think of Charles Ray’s; for instance).
Centre Pompidou collection: Richard Serra (American, 1938-2024), Rolled, Encased, Sawed, 1968. Sculpture: rolled lead plate, 10.5 x 92.5 x 14 cm. Purchased 1988. Inventory no. AM 1988-615. Created as Serra aligned with the "Anti Form" movement, this work directly embodies the actions listed in its title, reflecting the artist's exploration of material, form, and process, as outlined in his 1967 "Verb List." The lead plate is literally rolled, encased, and sawed into a metal log.
Centre Pompidou collection: Bruce Nauman (American, born 1941), Untitled, 1965. Sculpture: fiberglass, polyester resin, 129 x 241 x 25 cm. Purchased 1985. Inventory no. AM 1985-141. An early fabricated object by Nauman, this sculpture, made with then-uncommon materials in sculpture, fiberglass and resin, reflects the artist's move away from minimalist orthogonality towards an "anti-form" aesthetic, exploring transparency, opacity, and a handmade, irregular quality that questions our perception of the world.
Hero: That’s fascinating. I mean this is a very significant aspect of the work. Even the art historians who are going and looking at the works would never know unless they’re part of your project.
Leibovici: It’s knowledge that most art historians and curators don’t have. Because only those who have been in physical contact with the work can get it, and there is no process to publicise it beyond the “work file” which is confidential and only for the staff. That knowledge is not made to be taught to broader audience, maybe because museums consider it as too technical, or not tackling broader issues, I don’t know...
Hero: Exactly. So this knowledge that you’re producing is critical knowledge for any researcher for art to have!
Leibovici: All these people, registrars, handlers, restorers, managers, conservators, even the people who produce the crates, all have a very, very specific knowledge about the artwork because they need to develop specific tasks to take care of it, and be sure that it’s not going to be damaged. So they have to study it very specifically. Most of them have never been to art school, they don’t have a master in art history, or whatever, they know nothing about conceptual concepts from an academic standpoint. As one of them told me “directors consider we know artworks but we don’t know Art”… So their knowledge is made totally invisible. The only moment it is made public is during events in museums like: “This Sunday a restorer is going to talk about this painting, come at 10 am,” and you will hear the restorer speaking, but nothing like accounts in art history books.
Hero: Hahaha I went to one of those actually! I went to a company that does restoration work for art, and there were only two people who attended: Myself and an interior designer.
Leibovici: you see? according to me, the knowledge of the restorer, the registrar, the handlers should be circulating for students in university because you learn from them about the work as much as from philosophy or art history.
Hero: Absolutely, and these are significant layers of the work. As you mentioned about Brancusi moving the work around to produce space! Thank you! So in the next question is about the drama. The atmosphere must be calm on the surface but at the same time underneath a quiet negotiation is taking place. So no major dramas I would imagine, since these people are so highly specialised and they would need to be very well coordinated. But there must be frictions like competing priorities, invisible hierarchies between people…negotiating and renegotiating roles in real time. I mean you’re collaborating with two other makers so I would imagine you negotiate the project with them too. So your practice has been about paying attention to those subtle dynamics, the kind you’d find in office politics or corporate restructures, but happening around crates and climate-controlled trucks?
Leibovici: Like about your first question, when I was saying that there are two ways to describe an institution —either from the mission statement, the great principles of, say, for a political regime, or from the staff, the different departments— I would say that there are two ways to answer. From a sociological perspective, of course, like in any institution, museum, universities, the International criminal court, you will find conflicts, dominations, inequalities, you will find people working more than they should and people who do less than they should. But the core of the project is not about this. It is about the specific modes of existence of the artworks, that become visible only during the setting or unsetting of the works. And the different teams of the staff become, in a way, extensions of the works. So we never do interviews, we never ask questions to the staff about what they think or how they feel. However, the way the people are going to interact, coordinate each other, tells a lot about the spirit. Of course, there are tensions, social fights, and there is a very strong union in the museum. But because artworks are at the center of the activity, they produce a different kind of collective, which is slightly different from the one descrived in the organigram. For instance you’re going to see an art handler literally sculpting for 45 minutes a tiny piece of foam in order to stabilise a dirty object in plastic that was maybe bought at a flea market for £1. This person who will sculpt for 45 minutes this piece of foam to secure the plastic object clearly understand how important their role is in the life of this artwork, very conscious and, I would say, proud of it. Because they know their skill about the artwork and very few people on earth have the same knowledge than them.
A lot of these people could be labeled as workers. But unlike a factory where you may not have access to the whole process and just repeat the same gesture, here they are in direct contact with the artwork: they see exactly what they do, why they do it, and what for. They know that they are instrumental to the life of the artwork. Therefore, one of the major issues is the question of transmission of this knowledge. We were talking about the fact it doesn’t permeate the academic world, but even inside the museum, it’s an issue. Considere the Centre Pompidou was opened in 1977. 45 years later, some people who started their career at the end of the 70s are still here. They were the first to install artworks, worked with the artists, and they’re going to retire next year or in two years, while the museum will be closed. Their knowledge may disappear quickly as, since, I would say, early 2000s, big museums all around the world, used more and more external companies to cut the costs. By outsourcing, by hiring external companies instead of working with internal staff, they are destroying knowledge, destroying experience. Youngsters won’t be trained by elders. And this knowledge about the artworks of the collections will be, little by little, disappearing. Of course, through years, records and work files are getting thicker, better documented, the staff does a lot of reports, they take pictures all the time for their own task— the restorer, the conservator, the registrar, the art carriers keep shooting with their cellphones. Everybody takes pictures and makes reports, but as in Ikea instructions, something will be always missing: the live experience of the people who have been working there for decades. Call it embodied knowledge, or oral knowledge, there are many expressions to pinpoint it.
Hero: that is such a powerful point that you’ve just made. And this is obviously at the heart of the political climate across the industrialised world, where the appreciation of knowledge and knowledge that comes from experience, and care, you know, cannot be replaced. And there will always be that thing missing. And I guess that can most literally be felt when something just doesn’t fit. And you just don’t know what to do at this point such as with the thread of the Duchamps.
Leibovici: Exactly. Their feeling is that big museums like MoMA, Tate, Pompidou need more and more money, and the communication department is taking more room. One of the consequences of the definition of their role is shrinking: the restorers feel they are reduced to taking the dust off the artwork, instead of defining a policy of care for the long term, of preservation. Or they will just fix troubles before the opening of the exhibition, at the last minute, in a emergency state. Time to work properly is never given to them most of the time, because it costs money. The conservators (in French, conservators refers to the ones who structure the collection) are feeling that they are being swept away by the position of curator, like if organising public events was better considered than taking care of the collection or producing knowledge about it.
If you have time, I’ll give you another example.
Centre Pompidou collection: Ben (Benjamin Vautier, dit) (French, 1935-2024), Le magasin de Ben (Ben's Shop), 1958-1973. Installation: diverse materials, 402 x 446 x 596 cm. Purchased 1975. Inventory no. AM 1975-185. This ever-evolving installation, Ben's former shop in Nice, became a hub for artistic exchange and embodies his "everything is art" concept, influenced by Duchamp and his involvement with Fluxus. Reinstalled at the museum, it remains a dynamic accumulation of everyday objects.
Hero: Yes, I have all the time in the world!
Leibovici: There is this French artist, who was part of the Fluxus movement, called Ben. 50 years ago, the museum bought a huge work called Le magasin de Ben (1958-1973) (Ben's Shop), a sort of log cabin filled with about three hundred objects —like cheap objects, whatever people bring would work. Each object doesn’t have any value and the objects are turned into assemblage. They are glued, they are tied or roped with other things, you don’t know exactly what it is and it doesn’t matter. And an “ingénieur d’étude” has been trying to make and inventory of that work for decades, really decades. She needed to invent a way to describe the elements of the artwork, and in order to do that, she had to get rid of the names of the objects and replaced them by their geolocation in the log. She would say, for instance, on the left side, on the third shelf, the fourth object from the left. So she invented a lexicon or vocabulary to geolocate what had to be put in the crates. When I asked her why she was doing that, she said “ people who take care of the crate, the managers, the registrars, the restorers, each of them has a different way to describe the object. We will never be precise enough to be able to work together if I use the name of the object, because the names that the restorers will use, will be useless for the registrar, or for the handlers, or for the art carriers. So my lexicon is the only way to coordinate all the teams and have them working together for this specific piece.” So, even though there are social fights, there are unions, etc., the artworks and the techniques the teams are inventing to work together are, in a way, a sort of political proposal. An artwork can have people inventing techniques to work together. To coordinate. The excel spreadsheet of this conservator is a pure invention of language. It could be an abstract poem. But for her, it has very pragmatic reason : she needs it in order to unify the different teams.
Hero: Hmm yeah, really interesting. It’s like coordinating the team but instead of instructing them, she’s creating a lexicon that automatically aligns people.
Leibovici: Exactly. Because the three hundred objects, of course, won’t all fit in one crate. This installation will require something like twenty crates. And each crate has mini crates inside. The objects are allocated according to their size and material qualities. On the same shelf, let’s say there are fifteen objects, these fifteen objects won’t be all in the same crate, but in different crates. So when you need to put them back in the exact same position when you re-install the work, you really need to organise a little bit when you design and produce the crates. The objects are going to move through different hands—registrar, handlers etc.—and you need to map that circulation. This invention of language is a way to map it.
Hero: There’s so many parallels to how the world works, and it’s fascinating.
Leibovici: What is more fascinating is that each artwork, produces a different language. Or a different way to organize things. Each artwork, in a way, is “a proposal for a microsociety”. It’s saying, here is how we’re going to work together if we want things to go well…if we want things to be fine, here is the distribution of interactions I suggest (it’s the artwork that is speaking). The fact that the organisation of the groups is very different from one work to the other is invisible when you are facing an artwork which it is stabilised, which is installed, during a public moment. The production of a microsociety and the political interactions among the members can be perceived only during the installation of the work.
Hero: That’s truly…I mean I’m learning so much. Yeah it’s like seeing an artwork, your description is like experiencing art. And that’s exactly what sunend.org is for. To be able to reveal all of this. To unveil behind the mystique of the work that holds you at a distance, because the processes behind it are so incredible too. Next question? So form emerging by following systems, exactly like the Microsociety emerging. I don’t think you’re arriving at the Pompidou with a fixed idea of the final ‘product,’ like a book, a diagram, or an installation, and you did mention the film work of your collaborators. And and you’re also not positioning yourself as an outsider coming in to critique or expose the institution. You seem to move with its systems, observing how it operates and adjusting your own tools along the way. How do you balance this open-ended approach to format with your role inside such a major institution?
Leibovici: you’re right, the approach is much more pragmatic than critical. It’s also for that reason, we were able to build trust with the museum; they told us that in fifty years it was the first time they would allow artists to attend their preparatory meetings, the place where they develop their secrets. So they needed to have a lot of trust in us and understand our approach was not to denounce this or that, and to say, ohh they work badly, or they don’t do this well or…. It’s more how to describe, more and more finely, more and more precisely, to such a degree that it becomes totally crazy. When you reach a level of description that is so thin then reality becomes much crazier than fiction. For us, what is at stake is to find out what are the relevant tools of description, what are the right tools of description. microscope and telescope don’t capture the same level of reality. It doesn’t mean that one scale is better than the other. It’s very interesting to see stars, and very interesting to see cells. But it would be a mistake to see cells with a telescope, or to see stars with a microscope. And sometimes the instrument doesn’t exist…yet. So you have to invent it.
That is why it was important work with Marion and Yaël because each of them has their specific sensibility—sensible to specific things. And we are able to build common tools of description from our different perspectives. In this regard, I would say the criterion to check if it’s interesting or not is when we show samples to the concerned people, to the staff, and they answer both at the same time, “Yes it’s exactly that,” and “Wow, I didn’t know that.” Why both at the same time? Because they need to recognize that what we are showing is the reality, we are not faking it, we are not distorting what they are experiencing. It’s important for us that they recognize that what we are showing is what they experience. But at the same time, if we are just showing things that they consider banal, they won't be interested. So they need to be surprise. They want to learn something from what we are capturing from them. They are very interested to learn something about themselves through us. That’s why I was saying we need to have these two reactions, “Yes, it’s exactly that,” and “Wow, I didn’t know that.”
One of the conservators who is monitoring the packing of the contemporary floor told me that he had never thought about the choreographical aspect of the artwork. But now since he has realized that, he sees it all the time and everywhere. Another example comes from Marion, who is making very long shots where it seems that nothing is happening. In fact, she is just waiting for something to happen, but she doesn’t know what. She’s just available and the camera is available for something to happen. (Hero: hmm interesting.) At the beginning, people were not understanding why she was not trying to film the real action, like taking the painting off the wall and putting it in the crate. That’s what journalists (are supposed to) do, usually. When TV journalists are coming to the museum (because it’s a big event, the Pompidou is closing…), they make a big zoom on the hands during one minute, and that’s it. You see? Or on the electric drill that will close down the crate because it’s very striking for 15 seconds. (Hero laughs) On the opposite, Marion is shooting from very far, wants to have a large plan, a large frame, and she’s filming forever. At the beginning, the staff did not understand what she was doing. And through days and weeks, they got accustomed and they understood her logic. Now they are very sensitive to what she does. And you can feel the vibe, you can feel that they understand. So we are learning from them and they are learning from us, it’s a circulation also of energy.
Hero: So are they more conscious because she’s recording them now that they understand that she’s recording them the whole time.
Leibovici: Well, they don’t pay attention anymore to the camera. We are like water, we are almost invisible. But it doesn’t mean they don’t see us. They are more sensitive to our own sensitivity. For instance, when there are interesting movements in the space, I can see that some people are looking at us and giving us an eye, saying, “I got it” or “Did you see that?” (Hero laughs). So they are sharing with us the production of the space or the qualities of the artwork. For instance, we put contact mics on the artworks when that was not risky, in order to be able to produce a sonic portrait, an audio portrait, of the artworks when they are put in movement. We wanted to record their vibrations to hear how they sound. The handlers and the art carriers are so sensitive to the sound of the objects that now they manipulate our mics, and move them when they feel that, “This mic should be in a better position”. They would take the decision by themselves because they want the recording to be improved. That is very generous of them. It’s not like the mic is here and I have to live with that. They contribute to the sonic production by moving the instrument, they understand what we are doing.
Hero: It’s like you’re becoming part of a community right?
Leibovici: Yes, that’s what we’re trying to do…that an artwork is supposed to produce a community.
Hero: Is that a Microsociety? Can you elaborate on the terminology?
Leibovici: There is a quote from John Cage I like very much, that says “when you compose a score, you need to compose it as if it were a Microsociety you’d like to live in”. At first you could be surprised: what’s the link between a score, a musical score, and a political organization ? I guess he was refering to graphic scores. When you see the organization of a classical orchestra, you have a conductor and you have, let’s say, twenty or forty musicians, and they all put their bodies in the direction of the conductor. like a pyramid. On the top of the pyramid, the conductor, giving instructions, and as the basis of the floor, the musicians executing the instructions.
If you take graphic scores, which can use anything as symbolic values (it can be geometrical shapes, like a circle, a square and a triangle), the score is not going to tell you which notes you should play here and there, like a C, then a G and an A. The graphic scores will invite you to decide how you should interact with your neighbouring musicians. For instance, it would be, “Don’t play until your neighbour on your left has finished.” Or “Start to play when the person in front of you starts to play.” So it is more about how to interact with other members of the group than about your own set of notes. So it will be about how to interact with other members of the group, of the orchestra, there is not always a need for a conductor. It could be purely horizontal. In those two examples of scores, you have two model of societies. Either the pyramid with the conductor, or the horizontal group where you decide from each other in a more local way. And then suddenly, the quote by Cage makes sense. When you compose a score, you have to compose it as if it were a microsociety where you would like to live, where you wish to live.
John Cage (American, 1912-1992), Untitled Score, Date Unknown. Graphic Notation. This score utilises visual elements as a form of musical instruction.
For me, an artwork works a bit the same. The artwork cannot be reduced to the material elements but you can’t experience it without taking into account the agency of each element. The artwork is a set of practices, it’s a collective thing, it has its own temporality, its own economy. And if you don’t make this ecosystem visible, you miss the point. Take, for instance, red monochromes from five or six different painters. Let’s say that the first monochrome was painted at the end of the XIXth century and, till today, you have painters who do monochromes. You put the six red monochromes next to each other. You can say, there are six monochromes and they are all the same. It’s one single artwork, in fact, and it has no artist name, it’s a generic work, an abstract category. Or you consider that one monochrome took six months to be painted — it was an exercise of meditation and the artist used a tiny, tiny paintbrush, painting everyday for six hours. The second artist used a roll, a big roll to paint walls, he painted his monochrome in less than 10 minutes, and was very proud of his careless manner. Both monochromes are red but are they the same artwork? Not only materially speaking, but also the practice-wise. One is a meditative, the other one is a statement about industrial painting. If you don’t take into consideration practices, which are not obviously visible, if you don’t investigate a little bit or if you don't build the mediation to make these practices visible in the museum, you miss the point.
If an artist takes two years to make by themselves the artwork, while another artist hires a staff of ten assistants to produce the artwork, although physically it might be very similar, it’s in fact a totally different economy. Ten assistants in a studio means there is a market economy : you need to pay them; in order to pay them, you need to sell more; in order to sell more, you need a gallery, you need a market, you need to do the fairs, and you need to produce more because if you stop producing, you cannot pay your assistants anymore. If you work by yourself, maybe you work with the market, but maybe not. You don’t have the same economic constraint.
Considering an artwork is not reduced to the materiality that is exhibited during the public moment allows to take into account its whole ecosystem. It’s what I call the “form of life of the artwork” —not of the artist. For instance, in order to do this project at Pompidou Center, we have to wake up everyday at 5:30 am. (Hero: Wow) Because the teams start to work at 8:30, and at 8:30 we need to have the three cameras and the mics ready. I’m not a morning person. (Laughter) For the last twenty-five years, my point was to work very late till 2:00 or 3:00 am, and not wake up before 10:00 or 11:00 am. I chose to do what I do because of that. I didn’t want to wake up early. But the form of life of this project forces me to wake up at 5:30 am. At some point, the form of life that is produced by the practice is in contradiction with your own life. You may try to negotiate with it but it doesn’t mean you may win.
More than fifteen years now, I started a cycle about the ecology of art for. Every three or four years, I add an extra step. After an autoportrait of Pompidou Centre in 2009, and in 2012 the forms of life project, In 2014, I developed with Yaël on ordinary conversations, an exhibition and publication about the different modes of existence of the artworks. Even though you can experience a lot of artworks in a face to face situation in museums, artworks have another life outside the exhibition moments —which are in fact tiny moments in their lives. Most of the artworks are exhibited for three weeks or three months and that's it —when they are exhibited. Sometimes some luckier artworks are exhibited a second time and a third time and that’s it, again.
Hero: That’s actually one of the motivations for building sunend.org to extend the life of an exhibition, going deep into all of the aspects that relate to The Form of Life of The Artwork.
Leibovici: Yes, because if the artwork is not destroyed, materially speaking, its public moment is, in fact, very short.
Hero: Exactly.
Leibovici: Compare it to the time they spend in the darkness of a crate... But they have other modes of existence, they can exist through reproductions in catalogue, or on your online platform, for instance. And there is a third mode of existence, which is in our ordinary conversations. Not the expert discourse, the skilled one by professionals, but the one we have when we get out of movie theatre or an exhibition and talk about what we have seen, or the day after, “…Yesterday I went to see a show” etc., Usually, you don’t describe an artwork like you would do on a caption, like “Yesterday I saw a Brancusi, 1905, marble, 22 x 53 centimetres, private collection.” (Hero Laughs) You never talk like that. You say, “Yesterday I saw a show. It was beautiful. It was very crowded. I don’t remember the name of the artist. But wow I should go back. You should come with me. You’d like it.” So the level of information is very, very low. You learn very little about the artist, about the artwork. But that’s what allows the artwork to stay alive because if you get rid of this mode of existence, the artwork is dead.
Hero: That’s a powerful statement to make, really.
Leibovici: It’s funny because ordinary conversations are the most important mode of existence for an artwork,. But it’s the most despised. It’s not noble, because the information is very low, and very often it’s full of mistakes. So we thought, “Ok, if it’s 95% of the life of an artwork, and if the properties, the features of an artwork in the conversation are not the same as on the label, what are the qualities of an artwork in a conversation?” And we made a show about that. We recorded a lot of conversations and we transcribed them with the techniques that Yaël knew from conversation analysis, a methodology which allows you to study, not so much what is said, but how it is said. And we noticed, for instance, that one feature of an artwork in the conversation is, “How long does it last?”. Sometimes it can last 30 seconds, sometimes 10 minutes. It depends on the situation, but it has a duration, a lifespan (feature 1). Usually, when you go to see a sculpture, you don’t ask, “How long should I stay in front of the sculpture?” 30 seconds or 1 minute, 5 minutes. Usually, not more than that. But you never ask this question of how long. You can measure it more easily in a conversation. The second thing we noticed is that, as soon as somebody in a collective conversation speaks about an artwork, somebody else is going to make it “bigger” with other artworks by saying, “Oh it makes me think of another artwork”, or “Have you seen that other artwork from that other artist?” And very quickly the conversation will produce a sort of genealogy of family of artworks so that a group can share a conversation about an artwork even when nobody else has seen the artwork. By making a family of artworks, it allow everybody to participate. “Maybe I haven’t seen the artwork you’re talking about but I’m raising a brother or sister,” and so the third person can enter the conversation (feature 2).
Or you can do the same not with artworks but with ideas. “Oh, this artwork is about freedom, sexuality…” whatever. So it raises an issue and people can talk about the issue (feature 3). Or you can say also the artwork was produced by a monologue of somebody who spoke alone for 10 minutes, or it was a chorality, everybody was participating in the conversation about the artwork. So the more choralities, the longer the artwork will last (feature 4).
The show in 2014 was, partly, about those features. We considered it as an “exhibition training” because we were training the visitors to become sensitive to these aspects during any conversation so that, the day after the show, the day after the opening, when they would go to the bar and talk with their friends about an artwork, they would see the artwork produced in the conversation with specific qualities, specific features.
Franck Leibovici, Grégory Castéra, and Yaël Kreplak, Exhibition Training, 2014, exhibition explored the idea that an artwork comes to life through conversation, revealing how its meaning shifts depending on who engages with it and how it's remembered in everyday language through recorded discussions. Instead of a static display, the exhibition encourages visitors to recognise how these conversational dynamics contribute to an artwork's ongoing story, allowing it to live beyond its exhibited or stabilised state.
Hero: That is fascinating! This is exactly what my contention was when I was working at the gallery, not being able to give the artwork more life, and there’s only so much you can communicate with someone who is trying to understand and is not from the art world. That’s one of the reasons why I have this platform because the exhibition text that we publish is based on very long interview, over an hour long discussion on each artwork, over multiple weeks. From those interviews, I work with an art historian with they advise we create a reading list from which we write a whole in depth paper about the exhibition. Every single artwork is broken down into context, details, process and reference. Really unparalleled depth that even the masters didn’t receive. There are all of these layers around a work that as you were saying, a work dies and that's exactly what I don’t want to happen, especially to great works. So this is a way for me to enable those (life-sustaining) conversations, by allowing people to engage with the work very, very deeply. I would to study this work and the insights.
Leibovici: I’ll send you some material about it. And I remember when we did this exhibition and publication, some curators from Pompidou Centre were interested too because they were telling us, “You see? We are constrained by a very silly definition of what public means today. For us, we have to define public with tickets.” Public is somebody who buys the ticket to visit the show, to pay 10 Euros or 15 Euros to visit an exhibition. “With your definition of public, people who are talking about an artwork in a bar or in a restaurant or at home could be considered as part of the public. But we have no way to trace them.” To count them. “And we cannot have a quantitative analysis of conversation. But it’s probably as important as the tickets to consider the life of the artwork”, especially today with cultural tourism. When people go to the Louvre, do you know the questions the guards receive from the visitors ? They get two questions, “where is “La Joconde” and “where are the toilets?”, That’s it. (Laughter). The room of La Joconde is so packed nowadays that they consider to build a specific room almost outside the museum with a special ticket for it. The permanent collection of the museum is not empty, you can feel the difference. If you take the ticket as a measure of the public, you miss the point because you don’t know what people are seeing and are experiencing, except for queuing for going to see La Joconde and the toilets. While if you trace them through the properties, qualities that are developed in a conversation, you can see how powerful an artwork is.
Hero: Beautiful, thank you for that. There were two more questions. One has just been covered by our discussion just now about the life of an artwork beyond the exhibition space (Leibovici: Yes, exactly.) So we have the last question then. About the ritual and level of personal sentiment: I can imagine you are developing habits following the path of a painting from the wall to the crate, watching how it’s treated, how many hands it passes through. It’s a way of understanding the care, rhythm, and precision that holds everything together. Lastly, amidst all this movement and disappearance, have you developed any personal attachments or rituals around particular works being packed away? Not just works, but if I may include, certain choreographies.
Leibovici: Yes, I will start with a little story which happened a few months ago, which is very telling for me. I was carrying a drawing in the subway, one evening around 10 o’clock. This drawing was from an artist who is a little famous. I was not the owner of this drawing, I was just carrying it for a friend from a place to another place. During the trip of a few stations, I lost the drawing (Hero: Oh my god!), the drawing had fallen down from the folder and when I arrived at the place, i realised the folder was empty. I went back, I was really freaking out (Hero: I can imagine!), I called the guards of the subway station and they told me, “Yeah yeah yeah we found it, you can come back.” Half an hour later, I was at the departure of the metro station and the guy told me that he saw the drawing on the floor and he put it in the trash. (Hero: Huh!) So when I called him on the phone, he took it from the trash and he kept it for me.
The drawing was a watercolour on paper, on a very specific format of paper, 70x30cm, so not like a usual letter format. You could see then that it was an art paper, it was a watercolour with a signature. The watercolour was face up, so you would see that it was a drawing. When I got it back, I noticed it had marks of footsteps on it. It was like after 10 o’clock, so it was not rush hour. The subway station was empty, which means that you would see from afar a drawing on the floor, but even though, people stepped on it. The second thing is that the guard, seeing the drawing stepped on, took it and put it in the trash. He could’ve said, “Ok this is a drawing, I’m going to put it behind my desk, and wait for somebody to ask for it.” Maybe he doesn’t like the drawing, but still it’s a drawing. It’s a watercolour, not a filthy wrap for sandwich. Still, he put it in the trash. Which means that this kind of object doesn’t mean anything for most people. (Hero: Yeah that’s terrifying.) I thought, “Oh I really live in a bubble,” because when I see that in the museum an art carrier can devote 45 minutes to sculpt a piece of foam, to protect a tiny element of an artwork, to make sure it’s not going to be hurt by the vibration of the crate, and he feels related with the artwork, it’s really a different world. When I see that the conservator is inventing a system of lexicon in order to coordinate the different people, it’s very local, of course, but in this specific framing you can see the effect of the artwork.
And I would say that what I realized during this filming is that there are two different types of artworks. You have artworks which are claiming, pronouncing big statements, “We are like this, we are like that, we want this, we want that…” but when they are arriving at the museum they are totally standardised. They obey to the system and to the standards of the institution. They are docile, very docile. Then you have another kind of artworks. They are more modest, more discreet, they don’t say much, but in order to be taken care of, the museum, the institution has to change everything (Leibovici laughs). It is the museum that has to adapt itself. Usually this kind of work changes the institution from the inside. And it has nothing to do with the topic of the artwork.
Hero: Yeah, or who the artist is!
Leibovici: Yes, it has nothing to do with that. So the topic can be almost water, like tasteless….but it changes the whole way people are working. And others are big statements, you know, semantic perspective, but they are so docile. They are just adapted, for market and fair…
Hero: And fit.
Leibovici: And they fit.
