Erik Verhagen
“Interview”

Hippolyte Hentgen Interviewed by Erik Verhagen
June-September 2015

EVTo begin, could we take a look back at both the genesis of Hippolyte Hentgen as well as its prehistory? What were the respective trajectories of Hippolyte and Hentgen before the reconciliation of your surnames opened up the possibility of (con)fusing your artistic identities?
How was this fusion born, in what context? What were the different stages and what potential protocols were agreed upon?

HHOur duo Hippolyte Hentgen is made up of Gaëlle Hippolyte, born in 1977 and Lina Hentgen, born in 1980. We were both in our turn students at the Villa Arson in Nice between 1998 and 2006 but we met for the first time during a residency at the Point Ephémère in Paris. It quickly became our shared studio, a crucial place, filled with joy and dancing, where during a period of three years, we were able to carry out a whole range of experiments: technical exploration as well as theoretical research. Neither of us had ever considered, a priori, working as a duo even though the idea of a group had always seemed both attractive and natural. It was while working together that we became friends.
Our collaboration is based on a shared culture and the somewhat troubling familiarity of our respective oeuvres conceived before our encounter. In addition, our mutual curiosity at the idea of working as a duo rapidly grew as this practice once again brings into question the notion of the author, something, which is at the heart of our shared preoccupations.
Before getting to know each other, we had both drawn inspiration from similar sources; Modernist painting, graphic design from between the wars and certain fringe styles of music.
Another similarity lay in our intentionally citational use of source material, where the image is of more importance than the subject: anonymous photos, press cuttings, amateur handicraft projects and clearly recognisable details, all treated with the same methodical neutrality, the same inexpressive indifference.
We were both focussed on issues bringing into question the place of the author within the creative process and the difficulty of making great statements, creating something new, of being able to deliver something emotional after a century of excessive image production.
Our partnership and the resulting fictional third person to whom we delegate the role of author and signatory, is itself derived from a dual interest: on one hand that of rethinking the reading of an image employing a principal of anonymity becoming of our industrial era and on the other with the idea of providing mutual reassurance as to the feasibility of such an undertaking, in an era where questions of practice, form and representation are drowning in their own contradictions.
Of course, behind the double surname Hippolyte Hentgen, there are still two individuals and two ways of thinking, both complicit yet distinct.

EVThis questioning of authorship does not however correspond to the different strategies that evolved in the wake of conceptual art, most notably echoing Roland Barthes’ 1968 article “La mort de l’auteur”. Is it true to state that the position of the author has been challenged – in terms that would amount to being abolished – in the case of Hippolyte Hentgen? On the contrary, hasn’t it rather been enlarged and extended? How do you manage your respective egos in terms of the impact it might have on your oeuvre? How do you establish a balance? Or do you in fact seek to generate a state of imbalance? I’d like to come back to the genesis of your collaboration: how did this “questioning” evolve? Were there different stages or did this (im)balance establish itself from the beginning?

HHIn our particular case, we don’t seek to remove traces of an author – or a subject – , which might be too present or cumbersome. On the contrary, our aim is to make the ghosts of absent figures (re)appear. The absence in question is possibly historically linked to the affirmation of negation from the conceptual and minimalist periods but also and more importantly, to the history of images and the way they have been produced and disseminated since the industrial revolution.
Industrialisation led to a reduction in the emotional impact of a subject or visual representation. Some of the earliest figures from the era of reproducibility – characters from commercials or certain early American comics – are made up of geometrical shapes (circles, squares, segments) and isolated lines. Whether they are superimposed, one on top of another or alone on the page, they are simply objectified figures, of no particular origin, whose author has often long since been forgotten; they are, in these terms, close to abstraction, a kind of “degree zero” of the figure. The drawings of Hippolyte Hentgen find their origins in – and implicitly refer to – these drawings that appeared alongside industrialisation and the mechanised production of images. These characters were conceived with reduced emotional detail to be reproduced easily and to be readily available in great number. It is if they have been emptied of all existentiality and are practically incapable of uttering the word “I”.
We ourselves have nevertheless attempted a little appropriation. We play on the dialectic between the “I” of the author – “we” in our particular case – which is confused with the fictional “he” of Hippolyte Hentgen.
We are simply trying to give back these characters a little of the humour and pride which they seem to have lost in the industrial process. And even if they seem a little confused by their own presence, by the umpteenth enigmatic role they are asked to act out, we amuse ourselves with their incapacity to change the world, to make important statements or even say something new. A common aim of all our drawings is one of anthropomorphisation. This is obviously partially due to man’s capacity to see his own image in whatever he observes.
Thus, although Hippolyte Hentgen is always Lina & Gaëlle, we are not always Hippolyte Hentgen, which is simply a means of naming our collaboration. The notion of authorship has become a rich vein of experimentation for us, where our distinct personalities come together to form sedimentary layers on the same support.
Much more than any question of our respective egos, the experience of equality and sharing is what we enjoy the most about this collective project.
In addition, we quickly noticed that the order in which our names appeared in exhibition literature also represented a hierarchical notion, which obviously was something we didn’t appreciate.

EVSo where does this attraction for what you describe as “ghosts of absent figures” come from? And your affinity for the drawings that appeared alongside industrialisation and the mechanisation of image production? You also seem to sometimes use reproducible images and backgrounds in certain of your oeuvres. Your work always exudes an aura of originality in content and form, something that is missing from the above-mentioned images and backgrounds. Is this a question of reinvesting these images with a presence that was originally absent? Should this be seen as a sort of anachronism in this era of uncontrolled proliferation of images?

HHAttempting to appropriate figures devoid of emotional impact is a paradoxical challenge within the process of “becoming art” of these images. In any case, there is some disappointment involved in all of this for the ambition of drawing within the world of art, which has traditionally been associated with notions of virtuosity and pertinence. These figures and their impersonal lyricism are at the same time exactly what is inflicted upon fine art students at the beginning of their studies.
When we started our collaborative work, the way we appropriated these references was both intuitive and emotional. To put it simply, we were drawing things taken from our epoch, things we had lived with since our middle-class childhoods: posters, cartoons, packaging, motifs from 80s/90s clothing as well as details from pieces of art that were important to us. Our first objective was to set up a practice of continual drawing in our studio modelled on other daily activities. These long hours of drawing, with no intention of depicting anything in particular are what unconsciously made these figures, with their absence of visual qualities, appear from our distant memories, and ultimately become almost self-portraits.
Working as a duo, with our shared delight for studio work, enabled us to create a kind of matrix of figures and forms. Oddly, this image bank, mainly citing popular culture, actually had some depth: certain formal and æsthetic characteristics seemed to emerge, whereas the vast majority of critics and historians that we knew about dealt with the legacy of American pop art as a sort of homogeneous block, rarely bothering to cite sources or even the names of comic book artists and authors, who were in fact at the origin of these new icons.
Drawing is essentially a joyful practice, yet our choice of this subject matter central to our work and its ambiguous poverty, is also the paradoxical manifestation of a more melancholic observation that brings us face to face with our own limits and our incapacity as artists, to change the world fundamentally. This question of the legacy of modernity and its effect on current artistic practice is amongst the issues that concern us.
Thus even if strictly speaking our work doesn’t enter the category of “conceptual art”, and experimenting with forms in the studio is at the heart of our artistic practice, this daily gratification does not exclude reflection on the legacy of our industrial world. In other words, there is a political dimension to our work, which has as much to do with the idea of pushing forward our artistic experiment as the motifs and pretexts we use.

EVApart from the references to pop culture, what are your sources of inspiration? I remember the first time we met, being struck by uniqueness and diversity of your genealogy in terms of points of reference and artistic sources. I’m thinking particularly of Paul Thek or René Daniëls, whose works are rarely seen or shown in France.

HHMany of our points of reference are linked to the wonderful encounters and the excellent teachers we have been lucky enough to meet. Art schools are marvellous places: spaces dedicated to building and exercising the mind; places, which raise questions concerning one’s relationship to the world and where one experiences, more than anywhere else, the difficulties behind a certain idea of liberty. As far as our genealogy in the visual arts is concerned, it is above all completely unabashed. We have no problems bringing together sources that a priori have no direct connection: Basil Wolverton/Rubens or Reiser/Karl Blossfeldt for example.
When we visit an exhibition, we first seek to understand the construction of the images or the logic behind the forms, their resistance to scrutiny, to the space itself and their surroundings. We prefer artists, whose oeuvre tends towards the protean, who know how to cover their tracks and for whom impressions, quotations, caricature and pastiche form a perimeter of actions to be deciphered. It is a means of awakening the mind, suggesting several levels of seeing and understanding, avoiding boredom, constantly learning and above all finding a way around the pitfalls of literal representation and immediacy, which are so often naively authoritarian forms.
Among our “artistic reference points” we could mention Paul Thek, Matt Mullican, Siah Armajani, Mike Kelley, Öyvind Fahlström, Fischli & Weiss, Jim Shaw, Anita Molinero, Bruno Gironcoli, Sturtevant, Alighiero e Boetti, Walter Swennen, Peter Saul, Philip Guston, Eva Hesse, Jean-Michel Sanejouand, Zoe Beloff, and the list goes on…
The magnificent retrospective exhibition of René Daniëls at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid evokes lasting memories of tenderness and restraint. While its emotional impact was quite different, the Walter Swennen exhibition at the WIELS in Brussels was equally moving. There are (occasionally) extremely beautiful exhibitions – important for us in any case – here in France: Fischli & Weiss at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris or Jim Shaw at the CAPC in Bordeaux for example.

EVThe fact that you reminisce about this or that exhibition, emphasizing particularly the importance of the relationship between the images and the exhibition space; can this be interpreted as clear proof of a concept of drawing that transgresses the two-dimensional, homogenous, autonomous and “instant” framework in which modernism seeks to confine it? This concept seems in your case to have rapidly resulted in an opening up, in mental as well as physical terms, towards the surrounding space. With regard to your early experiments where has this practice of “drawing within an expansive field” led you?

HHThis opening up is related to the type of drawing we use as well as once again to our collaborative experimentation. The perpetual learning process and continued complicity brought about by our work as a duo has enabled us to elaborate a wide variety of projects, which do however alternate with a more classic conception of drawing. What interests us above all is the capacity of drawing, its power to reproduce; then the need – and the difficulty – to view drawing as an autonomous medium, freed from the hierarchy imposed by the world of fine arts, where it is relegated to a subordinate role and to see it as a transversal notation technique, almost transcendental due to its flexibility and ductility; to see it as the cutting edge of visual communication. This means of writing – as it really is form of writing – has led us quite naturally towards a variety of media: mural painting, shows, installations…
The animation of drawn forms is a decisive step towards the transversal aspect of drawing as a medium. Taking this hypothesis literally, and seeking to understand the nature of the type of animation that “manufactures” images, we created Les Géomètres in 2011, at the Spielart theatre festival in Munich.

Les Géomètres is a wordless and silent representation featuring a set of simple geometric shapes, subjected to rudimentary personification as way of simplifying the face-to-face relationship with the spectators. The different scenes are played out on a background of large-scale paintings, which themselves are in movement. Two actors and a dancer punctuate with choreographed movements the different instants when images crystallise, as they are literally “staged”.

The theatre, being basically a black box, is a kind of ideal landscape. You can play with it; animate figures, like you can on a sheet of paper but with aspects of place and duration.
The representation contains no text in any form but it does follow a scenario. This scenario however, is itself more drawn than written down, which could go towards explaining the absence of text…
We seek in public to develop and verify the questions, which both the painted and drawn image as well as sculpture ask of us in the enclosed space of the studio. Animating drawings within an almost silent world seemed to us to be a way of giving body and soul – in the sense of practice and experience – to the representation of our work as author(s) of these images that could just as well be anonymous.
Thus in Les Géomètres we see two types of sculptures with human attributes taking stage: strictly geometrical white shapes and multi-coloured transformable monsters. The actors play on the opposing elements, are astonished by their similarities and question the meaning they are meant to bear.
When one learns to draw, one starts by practising and realising that any form can be broken down into simple geometry, which little by little is given more shape and detail, which will eventually define the subject.

EVYour show Les Géomètres clearly marks a turning point in your trajectory and reflects your need to broaden your horizons and make your work permeable to the performing arts. I’m particularly thinking of the extraordinary “performance” based on Alain Resnais’ film Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968). Could you provide some insight into this side of your work?

HHIt is perhaps with the idea of pushing the question of authorship even further or simply through shared tastes and other affinities that we work regularly with others in order to open our projects to other points of view and other disciplines. Currently, for example, we are working with the composer Pierre-Yves Macé on an installation for the Abbaye Sainte-Croix Museum (MASC) in Sables d’Olonne (France).
The performance you mentioned is part of a larger project; it concerns a gallery of six “acted” portraits in the form of readings, stage scenes or performances. The project is organised in collaboration with John John, a theatrical duo made up of the actress Perle Palombe and the director Emilie Rousset. We are attempting to put into perspective the place of language, questions of appropriation, archiving and quotation within our respective disciplines.
Portrait 9: Claude Ridder is a theatrical adaptation of the Science fiction film Je t’aime, Je t’aime by Alain Resnais and writer Jacques Sternberg. The hero, Claude Ridder, an office worker without ambition, randomly relives moments of his life and the loss of his love. The film resembles a modernist collage and is made up of countless scenes. A great deal of space is given to the inconsistency between moments of lyrical outpouring and the general placidity of the characters. Much importance is also lent to the distortion between a kind of documentary neutrality and the phantasmagorical elements that are consequently rendered even more surprising and beautiful. The methodology we have chosen confirms the segmented aspect of the film and re-examines questions of montage, filtered through the specificities of our disciplines. The backdrop is composed of large format drawn panels, which make up a linear landscape around twenty metres long and which can be modulated depending on the size and shape of the stage. A grid mapped out on the floor completes the décor together with a few accessories and most importantly a cinema sized video screen.
We retained and reworked part of the soundtrack and replaced the voice of the character Claude Ridder with that of Perle Palombe. She is equipped with a microphone and headset and filmed in front of the painted panels, which frame the images projected live on the screen. This arrangement thus shows the audience a scene, which is (re)played, then (re)filmed and projected in the same space and at the same time.

Many of Alain Resnais’ films show a distinct taste for drawing. In Aimer, Boire et Chanter (2014) for example, outlines drawn free hand in close-up scenes, seem to squeeze out the imaginary of the previous scene: it’s like a filmed paper chase through boulevard theatre using the codes of the comic book – the drawings are done by the excellent Blutch, by the way.
Beyond the example of Portrait 9: Claude Ridder, this type of collaborative project establishes a transition with the body puppets of our previous piece Les Géomètres and elicits broader questioning and experimentation of issues concerning our taste for the incorporation of documentary quotations. Our partners as well as the models and different materials we use are themselves subject to these different questions. This does not really represent a turning point in our trajectory but rather a kind of natural branching out, giving greater freedom in our field of investigation: the use of drawing remains our guiding principle but through this type of experiment we are trying to broaden its spectrum through the use of different strategies, which we hope offer both a particular and reciprocal coherence.

EVCould we come back to your “taste for the incorporation of documentary quotations” and more generally to the integration or de-integration of “ready-made” elements in your oeuvre. We have already touched on this aspect of your (re)production, yet I get the impression that the (de-)integration we already mentioned has increased in recent years or has it changed nature? Should we expect an ex nihilo creation from Hippolyte Hentgen in the near future?

HHA documentary is a means of learning about something: it represents the “capture” of a real event, an open window on the “not art”. It is at the same time both content and form and from the outset suggests an ambivalence of vision.
It is an accepted idea that drawing privileges feeling over reason and this intuitively gave us the idea of placing within our drawings different registers of images and inspirational sources focussed on different topics: techniques, plays on the logic of different forms, the importance of the body, the relationship with time, narration, etc. We are trying to put together a sort of methodology and within our work to organize a wide variety of experiments. The inclusion of documentary elements serves both to anchor and enrich this project, whilst at the same time maintaining the kind of fragility that is inherent to drawing and which is so dear to us.
These sets of drawings – Documents 1, 2 and 3, Lizzie Derriey, Night Sound, Merry Melodies, Les Somnambules… – constitute a sort of methodological inventory. Within them, there is the idea of sampling archetypal drawings related to image reproduction. The variety of visual media, the use of old and worn images, the variety of technical processes, the different ways of incorporating elements, may be the very subject of the oeuvre or might appear as simple vignettes or patterns. Thus one of the questions brought forth by these experiments is whether it is a likeness we recognise at the heart of the oeuvre or the document itself, in its true nature as a document or simple object.
So a certain number of iconographic and technical problems arise, as in music, when a piece is being transcribed: how does an image pass from one state to another? In the same way that the body – our main tool – has its own unknown quantities, these reproductions are quite flexible or even inaccurate. We wanted to define this sampling in our own way and of course, to take into consideration the processes involved by testing out our different attempts in a larger number of series than before. The rules concerning our play on forms and the body with its organic memory, which traces them out, must be able to find their place on a regular basis.
The question of an ex nihilo work is not really valid in that before any real incorporation of a document – whether it is the subject, a motif or a background – there is always the quotation, the influence or in more general terms, the involvement in a current event or memory. An idea for something new appears as something of a mirage. So rather than beginning a drawing on a clean white sheet it’s more of a palimpsest.

EVAs something of a conclusion, could you tell us about your current work and projects? Could you also let us know a little about your exhibition at the MASC in Sables d’Olonne? What is the scenario?

HHWe are working on several different projects at the moment. We are just back from a trip to the United States, more exactly the West Coast, where we carried out some research around experimental film and more specifically animated cinema. We made two or three films over there, directly worked on 16mm film and which can be seen at the MASC exhibition.
The title of the exhibition Cyclo is in reference to the blue backgrounds that are used for image overlay. The title also refers to the circular movement of modern cogwheels or perhaps simply a bicycle ride along the seafront, as one might feel obliged to take in Sables d’Olonne.
When we visited the town in autumn, it was very quiet and the museum seemed like some kind of “chic and charming” time capsule from the 1970s. It has a fantastic collection of art brut with rare works by Victor Brauner, Gaston Chaissac, Jean Dubuffet… At the time of our visit the contemporary art collection on show, contained a number of artists who are important to us: Philip Guston, Peter Saul, Matt Mullican, Jean-Michel Sanejouand, François Morellet, and Anton Henning, to name but a few.
Exploring a little further, we loved the “Marine department” with its mix of folk art, objects from the souvenir industry, model ships and a collection of 18th century patronymic porcelain. We were delighted when Gaëlle Rageot, the director of the museum invited us to take over two very different spaces: one of them is in the “white cube” tradition, while the other is its exact opposite; situated in the shadows of a 17th century attic, covered in wood panelling. For this exhibition, we wanted to continue and develop oeuvres initiated over the past three years concerning the presence of documentary material in drawing as well as pressing forward with the collaborations that we hold dear.
The documents we have chosen are partly contextualised. They are an insight into the very space of the museum, into the popular history of Sables d’Olonne as well as into our own learning and unlearning of the art of drawing.
This place is ideal for drawing up a sort of genealogy of the paths we have travelled since our meeting. The close relation that interests us between folk art – or singular art – and the countless unique pieces from the contemporary art collection immediately struck us as a framework to be exploited in our new work.
The need for artistic activity and a minimum of practical experience whether professional or amateur make up a part of the common ground that unites the heterogeneous forms of folk and contemporary art. The connection seemed far from straightforward to us and appears to be a particularity of the MASC and its eclectic collection, whose positioning and individuality we find quite touching. Here, the rubbings of Mullican’s work, the rough lines of Guston’s hooded figures, Sanejouand’s tribal apparitions and the strangely homemade creatures from the “Marine department” are merely a step away from each other.