Johan Creten \u201cFireworks\u201d<\/strong> Johan Creten (b. 1963) is a Belgian sculptor. In the 1980s, Creten revived use of ceramics as a primary medium in contemporary art, followed by prominent German artist, Thomas Sch\u00fctte. Johan Creten lives and works in Paris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This interview took place on the occasion of the artist\u2019s recent solo show in Hong Kong. It began with Johan taking me on a Skype tour of the exhibition. A more permanent movie about Johan Creten can be seen here on You Tube<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chris Moore<\/strong>: I want to have your lapel brooch. Is it a cicada?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Johan Creten<\/strong>: Yes! I have to work out if it is a lucky symbol in China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: How familiar are you with Hong Kong and China?<\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: I have been before to Hong Kong and China, but the amazing thing is, with Hong Kong, each time I come, I don\u2019t recognize the city from my previous visits. It\u2019s changed so much. It\u2019s such an incredible situation. And it is funny that my show is called \u201cFireworks\u201d because of China and the link with fireworks, but also looking down in the street from here, \u201cfireworks\u201d takes on a very different kind of meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: There are a number of different ways to approach your work. On one side it bears reference to structures built by animals, whether bees or coral, or the way mussels accrete on objects in the sea\u2014complex animal societies at a microscopic level\u2014but it is also drawn to anthropomorphism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: The thing is, everybody gets his or her access to my work through a different door. You say I react to this as something coming from nature. Yesterday someone said, \u201cI see a Viking helmet!\u201d So one person will come from nature and another will come from culture, at the outset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [At this point Johan paused and sighed.]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: As an artist, it is SO<\/em> difficult! You don\u2019t want to say too much. Today, artists talk too much. You also have to let things speak for themselves. It\u2019s true\u2014if they look like natural organisms first and then you think about society in a second approach, then you\u2019re on a right track, if that makes any sense\u2026you don\u2019t hear me anymore?<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: No, I can hear you perfectly!<\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: You can hear but you\u2019re asleep!<\/p>\n\n\n\n [At this point, CM is laughing]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: No, no, I\u2019m listening!<\/p>\n\n\n\n [CM is not laughing anymore because Johan sounds serious]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: If you look at this piece, for instance [\u201cGlory 8\u201d], and you look at it structurally, you would say this is something maybe from nature; but if you would, look at the building across the street and the way the street and the road [interact]. Today that road is empty, but normally it is filled with cars that are bumper to bumper; you look at that building, and the building has these weird structures\u2014these lines\u2014and you go back to the show [returning to \u201cGlory 8\u201d], and you see this! Okay, you could also talk about nature but you can see it also has something to do with the energy of the city, the energy of who we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: Well, the city is also an organism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: This is called \u201cLa Gloire\u201d and glory is also something religious. I have never looked at a cell. I have never looked at something from nature as a scientist. I make a lot of things from birds and animals but I haven\u2019t looked at an animal in years. The animals [in the works] are there because they talk about you and me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: Another work in the exhibition is \u201cOdore di Femmina\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: I have been working on these torsos since the late \u201980s. And in the \u201980s that was kind of taboo. In the late \u201980s when I started in Belgium and then in France, you couldn\u2019t work with ceramics [and be taken seriously as an artist]. You were immediately taken off the list of people [whose work was] worthy of being looked at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: There\u2019s still very few artists working with ceramics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: If you go to a trendy gallery in Hong Kong, at this moment, you\u2019ll see some. You\u2019ll see somebody like Sterling Ruby. You\u2019ll see lots of artists even in Germany turning to the material. But when I started, there was almost no one. Afterwards there was Thomas Sch\u00fctte, whose work has been linked to mine a couple of times. But the idea [at the time] was that serious artists don\u2019t work with their hands; they work with their brains. You don\u2019t touch the dirt; you don\u2019t touch the wet, dirty material that is clay. So the \u201cOdore di Femmina\u201d series came out of a link between the earth and then, at some point I heard Don Giovanni (1). At a point when he is alone, he suddenly sniffs and says \u201cOdore di Femmina\u201d\u2014which is not the perfume\u2014much more complex than the aroma\u2014 it is the scent<\/em>. It\u2019s also blood. It\u2019s also menstruation. It\u2019s also seduction but it\u2019s also decay. It\u2019s birth but it\u2019s also lots of other things. And I have made a lot of works that have dealt with what makes them<\/em> different from us<\/em>, including this series. And there are two examples in the show. One is black and makes the link to La Mer<\/em> and La M\u00e8re<\/em>\u2014in French, the sea and the mother. They also look like mussels and, I think even in Germany\u2014I\u2019m Flemish, Belgian [between France and Germany], you\u2019re in art, so you know it also stands for the female sexual organ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: As in Botticelli\u2019s \u201cVenus\u201d [1486].<\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: Yes, exactly. So, again, I think I\u2019m saying way too much!<\/p>\n\n\n\n [No you\u2019re not, thinks CM, behind a slightly-too-loud chuckle, needing to distract JC again<\/em>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: The sculptures are of course fired, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: Well this reinforces the idea that they are \u201cuntouchable.\u201d The idea is that they look so fragile that people don\u2019t know how to open my sculptures. And the funny thing is, each time the sculptures are installed, people cut themselves. So these flowers that look untouchable are at the same time extremely sharp\u2014they will cut you. So La Mer<\/em>\u2014mother earth\u2026but again, we are explaining much too much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: It reminds me a great deal of radical French feminism from the 1970s and 1980s, with texts by, for instance, Luce Irigaray\u2014who was actually born in Belgium\u2014have these texts informed your work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: I\u2019m a sculptor\u2014you know, they always say, \u201cStupid like a sculptor\u201d. I\u2019m not into theory. One of the first people to write what was a fantastic text was Rosa Martinez, who did the biennale in Istanbul (2), and she included a couple of these works in the biennale, and for sure there are these links\u2026but that\u2019s your job, that\u2019s not my job, as an artist. It\u2019s true that in my first shows, there were some pieces with roosters. How do you say \u201crooster\u201d in German?<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: Der hahn. [The French is \u201cCoq\u201d]<\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: There were two roosters sitting one on top of the other. People bought the sculpture and only months later did they come to see me, brutally shocked because they only understood when they had the sculpture at their house that there were\u00a0two<\/em>\u00a0roosters sitting on top of each other. Because there are some things people don\u2019t see; under the idea of beauty, you can have a lot of things accepted that are, if you put them in words, very controversial\u2014some quote-unquote \u201cpolitical\u201d thing. So to get back to your feminist thing, there might be something funny or feminine or gay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: The obvious correspondence to draw with this exhibition is the connection to classical Chinese culture regarding porcelain, which heavily affected European culture, whether via S\u00e8vres in France, Meissen in Germany or Wedgewood in England\u2014firstly learning from China the processes of creating porcelain and then how to industrialize them. In China, there wasn\u2019t the same distinction or hierarchy between a beautiful cup and the finest designs made on Song Dynasty imperial porcelain or funeral animals that would be placed with people in their graves. So there are these connections with China but also, thinking in terms of \u201cOdore di Femmina\u201d and of Hong Kong\u2014which literarily means \u201cFragrant Harbor\u201d\u2014how did these connections\u2014classical Chinese history and the connections between Europe\u2014influence the show?<\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: I am not interested in ceramics. I hate ceramics<\/em>. I have never had the training as a ceramicist. I have no idea how to make a firing. Each time instinct makes me do certain things and it works but I am not interested in ceramics as ceramics<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: No, I meant on the artistic side\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: These sculptural references that you make to the history of art and the history of ceramics, they are part of how you look at these things. What I mean is, I collect Renaissance and Baroque bronzes. I look at these things and I find so many links in these small sculptures\u2014history, politics, to local economics, to beauty\u2014here it\u2019s the same thing. If you have old Chinese ceramics at home, that\u2019s another key to my work, and that\u2019s part of it but never a conscious, premeditated thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: I don\u2019t want to reveal and uncover every<\/em> last detail of the works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n JC:<\/strong> For instance, in this show I was going to show ceramic paintings [some were shown at FIAC this year], which are made of ceramic slabs that crack during the firing. The clay is torn and worn and fissures [erupt] in the transparent glazes that go back to several Chinese historical lead glazes. So there are a lot more references to Chinese culture in them, as you describe it. And finally, I decided that for the show in Hong Kong I had to have something much purer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CM<\/strong>: I would like to finish with a discussion of the independent life of an artwork, once it is out in the world. Even the most erudite, clinical, abstract, conceptual works\u2014no matter how brutal they are\u2014end up being decoration, in some sort of context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n JC<\/strong>: The thing is that in \u201986, \u201887, I made several performances where I took [my] ceramic sculptures which were shown during the day at a gallery in Paris, and each evening when the gallery closed, I took a sculpture, took it in my arms, and went through the city of Paris, and sit in front of the Moulin Rouge or in the subway. The idea was very simple. What I hope is that with my pieces, wherever you leave them, out of the context of the galleries Perrotin or Almine Rech or Gagosian or a museum, you bring them to a flea-market in Hong Kong or Berlin, I hope that these things have enough power inside of themselves to be strong enough to survive even outside of any possible art context. I was a young student, still at art school. This was the period of minimal art, the period of conceptual art. And I love [the work of F\u00e9lix] Gonz\u00e1lez-Torres. I love the minimalists. I have an enormous esteem for them. At the same time, with a Renaissance bronze there is another relationship to the object and it has all the power [it needs] inside it. With my work, okay, if they go to somebody\u2019s house, they can end up as decoration. There is not much you can do about that. My hope is that with my work they end up with people a little bit like myself, people with a lot of books, with a lot of other objects, and they will handle the objects in a different way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What I am going for is that the thing itself [the artwork] is like a person, and I can leave him alone in the subway, and he\u2019ll survive. With a lot of minimal art, that is not something you can do. With a lot of art that is made today, that is not something you can do. If you have an Eskimo mask with three feathers\u2014you know those masks that Breton loved with just a piece of wood with three feathers?\u2014even 70 years later, there\u2019s always somebody who is enough in love with the thing<\/em>, who will say, \u201cI will care for this.\u201d Maybe it\u2019s the same for Donald Judd\u2014a piece of plywood or something\u2014there will be someone enough in love with the thing to respect it, to care for it and to behold it. At the same time, I try to put in enough of my own world, my own emotions\u2014it\u2019s almost too pompous to say I put my heart and soul in there\u2014but that is still what I believe. You make something and hopefully it is strong enough to survive this society at large, as it is today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 1. Don Giovanni<\/em>, an opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, premiered on October 29, 1787 at the Teatro di Praga, now called the Estates theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2. Rosa Martinez, Artistic Director of \u201cOn Life, Beauty, Translations and Other Difficulties\u201d, 5th International Istanbul Biennial, 1997, Istanbul (Turkey)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Christopher Moore 2014.12.08 Johan Cr … Continue reading
Galerie Perrotin Hong Kong<\/strong> (17\/F, 50 Connaught Road Central) Oct 2\u2014Nov 15, 2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/randian-art.s3.ap-east-1.amazonaws.com\/2022\/08\/en\/GEP_JohanCreten77-1024x682-1.jpg\")