It must have been incredibly hard getting water from the pump, I mean, it has to be said that running water was a real revolution but, like everything else, routine turns it into alienation. It’s the same with all our relations, which end up lobotomising us in small doses. Since I rather tend to resist the categorical tap system, very often I merely react to the context because I suspect all this plumbing is building up pressure in a single direction out of a concern for efficiency and according to principles of unilateral, basic functionality. I tend to think that a tap is only likeable when it splashes ! I distrust electricity, painting or mediated humanitarianism ! Naturally, I need to correct this. But to react to the blackmail of the beam of ordered and specialised directional logic, I try to redirect the jets and upset the apparent obviousness of a movement that would seem to flow self-evidently from source.


So I experiment with all kinds of things so as to block the pipes and see where else it might spurt out, and I always want to reassemble the plumbing back to front, tending to look for flow in places where it shouldn’t be moving because I get the impression that things must always be happening elsewhere and elsewhere, and it’s quite possible that this may be here or there and so I don’t know a damned thing - I can test and con-test the canalisations. It’s true that such an attitude doesn’t help the linearity of the thing ! Still, I think that there’s nothing hermetic or complex about my tortuous movements but that they are fairly blatant because it’s more a kind of existential and transitory meta-ball of wool that is super-monstrously fluid in its auto-chaoticization and whose trajectory develops only in continuous and contiguous formation by blocks of knots, as opposed to all those depressing directionalities that all these people want to inflict on us, offering some pretty staggering justifications under cover of truth, wisdom, or at least of some stupid concept of coherence ! Because this standardised coherence which is brandished to establish the proof of proper process is nothing but a reassuring illusion, a trick ! I would like to blow up this kind of procedure that seems to point straight to the target because I can’t make myself respect this idea of roadsigns, this famous «home-grown common sense», by following this bloody, lusted-for light like a mutt with the desire and the pretension of unravelling things in a way that would imply a kind of certainty between paradigm and suprematism ! The sublimated hyper-target, the ultimate carrot is clearly determined as the absolute end of the process ! Truth is that way, no, this way ! Jesus ! I really do want to fight that kind of madness and I am ready to throw myself into that uncomfortable pulverisation. I am ready to float in mental errancy and anguishing, vertiginous dissemination, even if I have to bury myself in an unbearable chaos ! So there’s no way I am going to gawp in amazement at a system based on the principle of convictions. I reject that kind of crap which is crawling all over our everyday social, economic and political reality and that in the art world you zoom onto in simulations that are sometimes epic, sometimes insignificant. I have no special bag when it comes to plastic or aesthetic modes - on the contrary, I am conscientiously and extremely fickle to perfection and contradictorily capable of accepting vice versa and head-to-tail the dissolution of my actions and the scattering of my most incompatible gestures in the mixing, remixing and re-remixing of the mixture of the mixed mixture. I am not a Teflon artist and even if it sticks to the bottom I try to be incredibly slippery, dispersed, dismenbered, fragmented. I am very apprehensive but I want to be as permeable as possible the better to surprise myself, destabilise myself and try to act uncontainedly by planning and calculating as little as possible so as to randomly feel the greatest unpredictability in each of the experiences under the nose of the dominant flabbergasted language.

 

Because I have always tried to radically delegate a certain number of volatile postures, it would seem that my epidemic work regulary reflects this attitude of mixing, contamination, exchange, linkage and ineractivity, especially when, for example, I make bread at a bakery or invite the public to eat my work or when I invite a professional clown to come and present my pieces in my stead at the private view of my show, when I organise a students-vs.-riot police soccer match or a pop High Mass in a boxing ring, when I invite a scientist to come and give a lecture on nuclear physics on a boat, using the sail as a paperboard, when I put on an action on the Cherbourg-Paris turbo train, handing out copies and colour pencils to all the travellers so they can play at railway beggar-my-neighbour with their seatmate, or when I invite my whole family to indulge in its favourite hobby in public, or when I have myself an electro-encephalogram at the psychiatric hospital and present it to the customers of a hair salon while shaving a girl live, when I open and for seven years run the «Nouveau Mixage» artist’s space, when I set up a rock group with false musicians to try and play in the hottest nightspots in Paris and London in a parody of the star system, when I become world champion camembert thrower in the middle of the Paris streets and thus get into the Guinness Book of Records, when with a friend I organise a plein-air painting competition mixing fifty contemporary artists with fifty naff Sunday painters, when, disguised as a fortune teller at an exhibition, I read the cards for people, when I make a choral video, inviting neighbours and fellow villagers to come and sing in my studio in front of a static camera, when I present a sculpture, «The Gene of the Atheist Cross for Clay Sculpture» with twelve gas cookers and twelve whistling kettles so as to provide tea for the public all through the exhibition, when at the Nantes C.R.D.C I presente the «Bo-Û Exchanger-Changer», summoning thirty-odd artists to come and squat my solo show so that they can graft themselves and prosthesise directly onto my own pieces, which they can add to, when I organise the HIATUS café, when I make a sado-masochistic billard table for bars or when I make monochrome object sites with the help of the local population, which I enjoin via adverts in the papers and on local radio, when I offer to make a gutter 1,8 kilometres long made of 25000 glass containers, corresponding to the 25000 inhabitants and suggest that each person appropriate one container in this transparent line that runs through the whole town, by inviting artists to dance with me or by creating one-colour-only sale or return shops or, currently, by making «cyba-cloms» with local people, etc. I have the impression that I have often proposed interfacing contraptions the better to be open, available and attentive, ready to try new combinations, other modifiable and proliferating articulations, I have cobbed together quite a lot of configurations to try to trigger other desires and make more or less successful attempts at other modes of exchange. All these various ongoing experiences constitute, it seems to me, the equivalent of an intermediary presence that comes quite close to this idea of proximity and possibly micropolitical links, trying always to share differently, to enter into a relation as between fish and fowl with sometimes surprising and incongruous effects that may be highly enriching or completely useless à la «say hello to the microphone... hello microphone !» - and most of all so as not to play the political pimp.

Joël Hubaut. Fin de siècle wholesaler.
Translation Charles Penwarden