Jean-Luc Moulène Optimisation Formelle
More or Less Bone (Formal Topological Optimization) (Paris-NY, 2018-19) is a monumental work in fiberglass and epoxy paint by Jean-Luc Moulène (b. 1955, Reims). Produced for his solo exhibition at SculptureCenter in New York, the commission has been conceived as the result of
“material, bodily, economic, and historical conditions.” In conversation with Miguel Abreu, the artist discusses the relationship between sculpture and formal optimization, offering deep insight into the new work.
MIGUEL ABREU: Formal optimization is the theme of your exhibition that will take place at the SculptureCenter in New York at the end of April. What does this idea imply?
JEAN-LUC MOULÈNE: I think the first thing that needs to be solved is the question of form. What is the point of form? Has Moulène become a formalist?
We are talking about a very large work, more than eight meters long, a monumental object created by using very sophisticated aeronautical software.
With the help of GDTech, a European consulting, development and research company in engineering, analysis and numerical modeling.
The object has three parts, which you could describe for us.
Yes, but before getting to this work itself, I would like to address the question of form in general. Because in our hearts we know that form cannot suffice. This means, quite simply, that a formal argument is not reason enough to create a work. On the other hand, I am not certain that complete suppression of form in favor of “process,” as in certain contemporary experiments, i.e. the famous dematerialization, is not an impasse for art. Form allows me to establish either a descriptive rhetoric of the experience, or to produce the experience in the viewer. To produce the experience is simply to produce a relationship of consciousness with regard to objects. It’s something that I’ve always used. That is, I make forms that account for or produce experiences. I’m not interested in knowing whether the square is better than the circle or the triangle. I’m not at all into that kind of thing. It turns out that today, advancing technologies are in some sense just starting to take an interest in form. And they are starting to take an interest in form simply with the objective of their profitability, which is not really experimental. We have heard about this story of the profitability of forms long ago, in the United States. Minimalism is the maximum of effect for the minimum of form! This maximization of effect is not my problem at all. I am not here to make experiments profitable. So we can forget about this maximization of effect. If I indeed produced effects,
I would be a cosmetics manufacturer, like many artists are today. That is, they make surface effects. The human experience is simply made static in these surface effects. So to get back to this piece, technologies have invented methods of formal optimization, which consist in creating profitable pieces, often mechanical pieces, structural objects. These objects meet needs, they are ultra-light, often fiberized, and have left behind machining for printing. Their atomic composition can be precisely observed. There is total control of the amount of material needed etc. And why is this? Because it’s expensive to send satellites into space! So, in the end, formal optimization, as its name suggests – just like tax optimization – is about producing profit. (Profit being the thing which, in the end, no one speaks about anymore). Everyone is supposed to profit. Profit, in principle, is only the profitability of capital. So we end up today with a capitalism that produces a technology that deals in forms. Which even does so experimentally. I would say this is a tendency: all the objects that surround us will be produced in an optimized way. Obviously, this pays. It means that we are at the dawn,
in a way, of the invention of a new style; just as we had the Louis XVI style, now we will have an optimized style!
Just as there was functionalism?
Just as there was functionalism. And given that this optimization is extremely expensive, and that for the moment these tools for optimization are not accessible, it seemed important to me to show, from today on, what technologies are going to tend towards. It turns out that what they are tending towards is, well... The first time I saw an optimized piece, I burst out laughing, because it tends to produce something that looks like a bone.
Hence the title of this immense sculpture called
More or Less Bone.
It looks like a mechanical part, a mechanical structure, something that has both bones and elements of classical mechanics. At the same time, that’s what’s beautiful. One could almost say that the formal ideal of capital is the cadaver. Because for us, who are living, a bone is only perceptible on someone who has been accidentally opened up, or who is dead. This is what will survive us, in theory: the bone. In the sense of surviving our dead selves.
In the material sense.
Yes, that’s it. An execution.
A skeleton.
You see my head, my skull. It is quite beautiful that the technologies we are talking about today allow us to place, if you will, your face, your skull in bronze above your fireplace. Because we are able to print a medical scan or an MRI. So today you can have your collector’s vanity on the mantelpiece. It should be possible to show and make others aware that the objectives of profitability are in fact objectives of reduction of the quantity of life. Who or what is in excess is unprofitable. Life is everything around the bone, everything around profitability, but this is not taken into account by profitability. And here, in my opinion, we have a real political problem.
So let’s finally talk about how you started this piece from these three elements.
First I met people through the University of Toulouse, which has developed an IT hub, in modelization. It is very interesting, they are brilliant. Obviously, since they are in Toulouse, they are not very far from the Airbus aerospace teams. There is a lot of industry around. So first they invited me to speak in a professional conference about new printing technologies. A conference in which there were, obviously, mainly software manufacturers, machine manufacturers, manufacturers of control systems between machines on production lines... and also things that do not leave the labs.
They are engineers...
Indeed. But they are research engineers. They are not necessarily applied engineers. There is one who works on the digital printing of life: on cells. So they invite me in there. I do my presentation in front of fifty guys in suits, who are the salesmen for their companies. And I remind them of a number of fundamental principles regarding new inventions. For example, if they do not get the public on their side, these new inventions will not work. As in the case of theories in mathematics or physics. We must get the public on our side. As soon as there is invention, it must also invent a specific rep
resentation. We must invent our own popularization. I gave them my general speech, and I told them very clearly: if I accepted this invitation to spread a so-called cultural discourse it is because I need these machines. I do not have access to the machines. No researcher in the field of visual arts has access to these machines. It’s just too expensive. Machines and programs... So I told them, “I need machines.” And three teams came to me, including this person who deals with biological morphogenesis; this team of European engineers who are a consulting agency, called GDTech; and a small company from Toulouse. In the end, the GDTech team confirmed their commitment, which proved fruitful throughout the work. At that time I started to...
To imagine the piece.
To imagine the project we have in front of us. Why though? Because, from my point of view as an artist, I have always said that there is no work without conditions. There are no works without conditions. Without material, bodily, economic conditions, the conditions of history. The artist is now, tomorrow, or the day before yesterday. He was born in an optimum period, or not. So there is no work without conditions. And in my opinion this is an extremely important question, because I think many people think that art is free, because the artist is free. Not at all. The artist is no more free than any other citizen. The artist is corporeally conditioned like everyone else. Art is not free, and neither is the artist. On the other hand, works are systematic liberations. And thus concrete acts in the real world. There is no liberty, there are only liberations. And it’s quite important in a piece like that to come back to this question of the condition, because what the optimization machines fundamentally take into account are exclusively the conditions. So I have tried to make a piece that is merely its own condition of existence. It is the calculators and the optimization machines that have drawn the object. What I provided are the conditions. I entered into the conditions, which, by the way, at the end of the experiment, are removed and are no longer visible.
What are these conditions?
The conditions are first of all the machine’s working definition of volume, so 8.5 meters in length, by 1.6 in height, by 4.5 in width. We give the machine its work volume. At three very precise points of the space in question I placed a sphere (thus an abstraction), a spiral staircase (thus a construction), and a bone (thus something of an organic order). Three types of objects that, to be clear, together can form a world. I entered these three conditions. We gave these generic objects a weight. The sphere is a bubble without weight; the staircase weighs 128 kilos and the bone 80 kilos (also their height in centimeters). We entered conditions of gravity: the earth’s gravity. We could, moreover, have entered a lunar gravity. Wind conditions. Earthquake conditions. All the legal conditions which were provided as necessary to install a public sculpture in the United States. What else did we introduce? The length of the fiberglass. Its weight, its breaking point, its coefficient of elasticity.
Is the fiberglass a condition in itself?
Yes, it was entered as a condition.
Okay, so there is a kind of stabilization of these three objects, which must stay in place. The machine will then link them, make them join together in some way.
Yes: the order given to the machine is to calculate a junction object.
So there is no fusion, a junction.
Absolutely. In my older works people instead talked about disjunction, discontinuity, heterogeneity, etc. And here, for the first time – because obviously one must always try what one does not know how to do – there is a connecting piece.
I think it’s also interesting because we could say that today’s world is nothing but disjunctions!
That’s exactly what I think today. When I did the Disjunctions in the 1980s, I had the intuition that this was the only way to describe events in an intense and lyrical way. It turns out today that the world has become this generalized disjunction from which the common is excluded, each citizen has become a pure vector. So the question of joining comes back. It returns...
Because it is absent.
Ys, because it is absent.
And of course, we have to create a work, a work against the state of things.
With and against the state of things. In fact, art is there to implement the tension between these two states... So that’s about the whole story. After that, the machine works. It works on the “negative,” that is to say it does not add material. It considers that the block, the domain of definition is a block of material. And in this block it will remove all the parts that yield to the forces – all those which are useless to the tensions of the forces. In the present case, we had worked out as a condition that we would present a sculpture in the almost classical sense, that is to say that it would be closed. A closed volume that stands alone, made of a single material.
And with contours...
With contours, with an end. When I say that there are only conditions, this is not quite true, because, for example, when I decide that the bottom part of the piece is going to be 80 cm, this is because I know that 80 cm is the height of a desk, and that in the bodily pathway that will be traced around the object, there is a moment when simply the height of the object is going to be familiar, and thus will allow for contact, in a way, including the hand’s reassuring touch. When I introduce the three basic elements, as I told you, I do not introduce just any three elements. I introduce three elements that a priori make a world. They will then be removed, since in the final piece we do not see the sphere, the staircase, or the bone, but...
The imprint.
The imprint, a hollow space, by which the piece joins with the absent objects. In a way, I can say that the piece is the result only of its own conditions, since I have removed mine. But there is obviously always ambiguity about the degree of involvement... it’s always the same, as in artificial intelligence, there is someone behind it who says, “I want these conditions.”
Well, I think that we have aptly described this kind of prototype of a work, a prototype of thought.
To emphasize all that, we made it bone white.
This piece is going to be made in America, and presented on its own at the SculptureCenter.
We should also mention the very committed team of engineers that worked with me in France on this demonstration about the future of capitalism. They put a lot of energy and desire into it. They were great. Even if this desire is precisely in contradiction with profitability. It must be said that this team is virtually inventing the optimization equations. One can imagine that for an inventor, for an engineer, it is more satisfying to work on a piece of art than on a cannon. If people do not do things that interest them, they will not do them; or they will do something that has been imposed upon them, but do it badly.
Obviously after all that, there is the concrete production of the object. The simple fact that we can make a file cross the Atlantic, in terms of the mode of production, is also rather new. These are processes that need to further experimentation. It soon becomes clear that manufacturers of objects in Europe and the United States do not work in quite the same way. So the manufacturing, which is local, enters into the conditions of the piece. I could not say, “It’s not what I expected.” Because I do not expect anything. If I expected something, I would expect an effect. I do not expect anything. I am in the process of manufacturing, which will incorporate all the conditions that arise.
And the constraints.
And the constraints. Conditions and constraints.
Miguel Abreu is an art dealer and founder of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.