Article de Bruna Donatelli.  Rivista annuale (Igitur)  di lingue, letterature e culture moderne. Gennaio-Dicembre 2002

 

Inteview with Michel Butor on his Venetian “Captions”

Bruna Donatelli

 

Serge Assier and Michel Butor exhibited their “works in common” about the city of Venice at the Insituto di Cultura Rumena de Venise from April 14th  to May 3rd, one using images and the other words.  Michel Butor is in no need of a formal introduction because of his reputation for the originality of his work in the world of literature, literary criticism, painting, and music.  The name of Serge Assier, although well-known in professional and artistic photography circles, is less familiar to the public at large.  A photo journalist in Marseilles, he had his first photography exhibition in Arles in 1984 under the tutelage of the poet Rene Char.  What really struck the poet was the quality of Assier’s artistic perspective which had been formed and refined by the difficult years he spent as a shepherd.  “Nervous, sensitive, and obstinate, Serge was swept up in the most deceptive, the most inhuman, yet also the least debateable of professions: that of a shepherd.  In just a few years, Serge gained the eyes to see and the insight to deduce.  Drawing as much on personal relationships as from his own ups and downs in life, he recognized the need to report to the public on the uniqueness of human faces and their flashes of expression which he saw springing everyday from the well of everyday work life.  And Serge Assier knows how to do this in only one way: personally. From this time spent in the wake of what is almost a fairy tale personal story, Serge Assier has entered the literary pantheon.  Writers such as Fernando Arrabal, Yves Bonnefoy, and Edmonde Charles-Roux have supported his work with prefaces for his catalogues and exhibitions.  His realtionship with Michel Butor dates from 1991 when, while photographing the Marseilles neighborhood of l’Estaque, Serge Assier proposed that he write fifty-five quatrains for his fifty-five photographs.  Everyday life seen there through the eyes of Serge Assier mesmerized the poet, and, reciprocally, the photographer was charmed by Michel Butor’s “unique way of stripping away the exterior of the photo while maintaining a poetic purity”.  It was his first collaborative work with a poet.   The photographs served as  “models” for the creation of poems which, in turn, seemed to suggest other interpretations of the photographs.  Serge Assier and Michel Butor have combined their respective talents several times to create dream-like depictions of reality: in 1994 with In the Shadow of the Ladies, in 1999 with With a View of Olympia, in 2000 with Good Mistral, and today with Behind the Scenes in Venice.  I had the honor and the pleasure to have this conversation with Michel Butor about this latest work which he has graciously consented to have published.

 

 

Your  “dialogue”  with painting has been going on for a long time now.  When did you actually begin to make your photography “speak”? 

 

It began with Andre Villers in 1977 with the publication of Folded Shadows.  We then worked alot together for several years.  It was Andre Villers who introduced me to Serge Assier.

 

How are the two dialogues different, if at all?

 

It all depends on the photographers (and the painters).  There are some photographers who are particularly pictoral, and vice versa.  In general, photography is much more tied to a place, anchored in a time and a place really.  It is very important to me that I already know these places, even if I have not gone there with the photographer when he shot the pictures.

 

Your work leaves one with the impression that it is constructed from a sort of “model”.  It seems to me that photographic images, and those of Serge Assier in particular, are created from a certain layer of meaning which you try to gain access to for the “production” of your poems.  It seems an ideal device for the representation of  the “fragmentary” and the “discontinuous”.  Can you speak more about these themes?

 

Yes, I often make models, and the photographic image can play an essential role in this preparation.  It is always a kind of cutting out and freezing.  It’s a sort of stenography that can be “developed”.

 

How does the transposition from one form of expression to another take place, and what role does detail play in the passage?

 

Because Serge Assier actually cuts out a piece of reality when he shoots, I select out one detail or another that furnishes me with a powerful word.  I then transpose this visual print in a kind of ideogram made up of diverse elements that one can consider in one way, but which one can also revisit to consider in another.

 

Behind the Scenes in Venice is the title of the fifth catalogue that you have produced with Serge Assier.  He seems to concentrate on all that lies behind what a city like Venice has to offer, but perhaps he is suggesting alternative interpretations pf life there as well.

 

I always like to look behind what someone shows me, to look not only at what is shown but also at the how and the why of it.  Sometimes the mechanics of the theater is more interesting than the actual production.

 

It seems to me that the words and objects of your Venitian poems unfurl like tiny revelations on the emptiness of the blank page.  They also seem to restore a dreamlike dimension to the photographic work that otherwise might be lost due to its “realistic” quality.  I am thinking for example of lines like “surface painting” and “closed oven doors waiting for the new day to nourish a blazing mouth”.

 

The Venitian captions reanimate what is immobile.  It doesn’t necessarily consist of real movement, which is most of the time inaccessible, but rather potential movement with all its dreamlike implications and values.  I work not only behind the scenes of Venice but also behind those of the photographs themselves.

 

In which way does your “written manuscript” connect with the photography beyond the simple superimposition of the two surfaces?

 

The printed word is solid, and there remains in it something of the lead used in old forms of typesetting. But from that stems its solemnity.  The handwritten word, provided it is not too “caligraphied”, has something much more mobile in it, something with wings.  “Scripta manent, verba volant”.  While writing it, we experience this flying.

 

In your “Venetian itineraries”, you use a particular place and time.  Can you speak a little about this?

 

Each quatrain makes a seed of conserved time sprout in the print.  The voice that speaks is sometimes that of one of the subjects in the image, sometimes the spectator, sometimes myself.  Everything is eventually filtered through me but in different ways.  I saw some of the places depicted in the images but not at the same time as they were photographed.  I see the subjects in the same way.

 

What is impressive in the work you have done with Serge Assier is the implied invitation the reader gets  to participate in the creative process of the work.  Was this planned for in the creation of the book?

 

Serge Assier’s work is an invitation to look at the city, not necessarily as he sees it, but with the same things in mind.  Similarly, my work is an invitation to look at Serge Assier’s work, and thus the city as seen through his eyes.  It is also an invitation to respond with other words, other photography, and other activities.

 

In Venice, in the prestigious galleries of the Institute for Romanian Culture where your work was shown, the handwritten quatrains were not displayed together with the corresponding photographs and were even displayed in different rooms.  Was this intentional?

 

In the book, the quatrains are printed twice: first in typeset letters across from the image, and then in handwritten letters in the tracings which highlight the work.  At the exhibition, the texts are framed like the photographs.  The visiter who is taken with one of the quatrains will look for its corresponding image; while looking, however, he may see another image which will lead him back to the quatrains to find the one which has sprung from this new image, and so on.  The visit becomes more interactive, the reading, too.

 

From The Description of San Marco which you wrote in 1963 to Behind the Scenes in Venice which has just come out, your perception of the city of Venice seems to have rather completely changed.  In the first, variations on the same words experiment with the anticipated reactions of the crowd in front of a famous monument. In the second, it is rather the daily gestures and rituals of everyday life which are highlighted.  Are there some elements in common between these two books?

 

These are just two sides of Venice: the venerated monument which hides its secrets and the little known daily life which becomes itself a kind of spectacle.  The two books compliment each other.  There could be other sides as well.

 

When is your next collaboration with photography?  Do you foresee, you and Serge Assier, another “artistic voyage” together?

 

There is already a Michel Butor photographic exhibition in October at the Selestat in Alsace.  Serge Assier will of course be one of the featured artists.  I really hope that we will have the opportunity to travel together whether in images and text or in flesh and blood.