An Encounter.
inventions. You can term it a quite a find, when, faced with forms of traditional art that had been fixed for years, for centuries, like a Crucifixion or a Woman-and-Child from the Middle Ages, or in our case a guardian of ancestral bones or a Kota protecting-figure reliquary in tribal art, an artist suddenly makes a small change. This decision makes all the difference with regard to a production that perpetuates a tradition and might be interesting, but doesn't bring us anything that we didn't already know. This decision makes itself felt as an enrichment, an addition, like a change in the volume or in the relationship between the elements. Sometimes this decision goes to create a masterpiece. M.B.M.: Put another way, when youfind yourselfface toface with a work by a good African sculptor, you are looking at a sculpture, a work, as you would do for any other artist, no matter where on this earth? A.: Absolutely! Indeed, any artist of my generation, myself included, and any other traditional artist from the past, are called upon to make such decisions. My own forms are not unchangeable, but in the end they come to set within my own stylistic canon. One is not constantly in the process of reinventing. Thus, there are a number of givens that characterize me, just like for many artists. And there, from time to time, I am obliged to take decisions, to stop with something, to start with something else, and it's in this entire creative process that I feel very close to the African sculptor, to the Oceanic sculptor—in this particular case where one is confronted with what one must do, to change or not to change, to exaggerate something. A.M.B.: I suppose that you've unsurprisingly discovered that among these so-called "primitive" artists there was the same consciousness, the same creative capacity, as felt by yourself: A.: You're right, this didn't come as a surprise. Since my youth, I've had the conviction that man is the same everywhere, strictly the same, with the same proportion, in any particular group, of people who are intelligent, stupid, generous, egotistical, good folks and bad. That's to say that, unfortunately, human groups produce around the same proportion of geniuses or imbeciles. And when I discovered masterpieces from other cultures, so-called "primitive" cultures, I was relieved to have confirmation of this notion that man is the same all over. A baby born in a certain culture but raised in another absorbs it like a sponge, and it belongs to the new culture where it grows up. Thus we all have more or less the same starting materials, whether in painting or in sculpture, the fact that—if you'll excuse the expression—"he eyes have it." This because we belong to one of those species of higher mammals that accords primacy to the sense of sight, instead of to smell as is the case with many others. With us, it's the seeing, a fixed gaze. When people get together, they don't go around sniffing each another like dogs and cats. But they look at each other, and this look carries many things, changes, nuances. I think that it's the most important of the social senses, the sense of contact between people. In certain works, whether they come from African art or the Quattrocento, or even in more recent works, this "perception" is pushed and extended. It's these works that I find particularly interesting, and to which I'm very much drawn.
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