Interview with S. Garbarg
Sarah Garbarg, Building, 2005, wood, screws, paint, dimensions variable
Leila Simon: Could you tell me about Building (first and second version)?
Sarah Garbarg: This piece is a bit special as it existed in two versions, or rather two distinct forms that are actually quite different from one another. I say "has existed" since currently there is only the second version, the other having been destroyed.
The first version is a series of models of buildings, different colors are stacked on each other.
is a model rather than a genuine piece. She used to determine a number of questions which I then developed into the second version as drawing, color use, deconstruction, the relationship architecture, the archetype.
This first version is what might be called an experiment. It's a piece I built quite intuitively, with hands directly without going through a conceptualization or intellectualization. I am not saying here that a piece is constructed experimentally necessarily a model. Projection , Castle in the Air , Untitled (house flat two exits) are also parts constructed experimentally and I consider accomplished.
I thoroughly manipulated and observed this first version, this model. She never had fixed form. I could use two, three or twenty, I focus on color, line, deconstruction. It's a part that, somehow, I served as a tool.
The second version is a piece that was much more considered and determined in full before construction. This is not the final form, or installed, but who determines its own construction. Building consists of two sets of cleats made of different woods and whose dimensions incorporate the building standards of an empty building. These brackets are then attached together by a bolt as in a building game. There is not a way to organize these cleats together and in that building did not even form an assembly to another.
In the first version, the color was a recovery, whereas here it comes from the material itself. The reference architecture was quite Direct is simple, whereas in the second she appears in the system of measurement, cleats, and therefore the scale of the piece comes to confront the scale of its surroundings.
Sarah Garbarg, + fine + high + low + wide , 2006, mirror polished aluminum, 95.5 x80x49, 5cm
LS: How did you come to realize + fine + high + low + off
SG: In this room, there is a reference to architecture, but it's a different work of Building which is a very close part of the design. What interested me in this work was the report that could maintain the sculpture as a container and not as a form. I chose to perform this piece in an aluminum plate as thin as possible so that the boundary between inside and outside is as small as possible. Polishing material allows me to use a mirror, which both multiplies interior space, and bouncing the surrounding space on the outer walls. A mirror that plays on two different and almost contradictory reports.
This situation-box architecture - sculpture appeals to me very much. It appears for the first time in + fine + high + low + wide . I then resumed in a different way in Untitled (house flat two exits).
LS: You mentioned the option of using architectural standards to achieve Building the second version, could you explain this choice, what path led you there?
SG: The length of cleats ranges from 16 cm to 3 m. 16 cm is the height of a stair-step and 3 m height is often the sub-ceiling in our interiors. I stopped on a number of predetermined standards for the construction of a building, such that they can be found in the "Neufret" for example. And I speak here only of an empty building and no furniture. Indeed, there are fifteen different heights and widths of door such as the use buildings and my goal was not to identify all but the most common choice. Although this system has evolved, there is a common measurement system for each building (no stairs, width and height of door, window, hallway, high ceilings, under window).
This measuring system allowed me to start to obtain the final scale of my room and create a strong tension between it and its environ ment . The relationship with the space in which building is located is through this relationship and measures of scale. Standards that build building are in the building where it is presented
I've been thinking about Mel Bochner to perform this piece.
LS: Did you choose to construct Building from a plan, a scheme that does you were given or is it that every reconstruction will take a different form?
SG: No, indeed Building (2nd version) takes different forms each time it is reassembled.
LS: With this piece we can talk about building game, yet we find this idea with Castle in the Air where for the first time the words appear in your work.
Can we see a connection between these two parts, a construction set?
SG: Yes, indeed we find the idea of play and construction in two parts.
The game induces a notion of beginning, it is meant to be repeated, replayed. And it's an idea that I defend in the sculpture. The idea to present an object that would be there only for itself does not interest me.
Any game also has its own rules, I like to compare the establishment of a system within a room. But a game is also a world in itself, a way to represent it, to replay it, to appropriate it.
construction because that's what I do: I build objects, pieces ... things concrete and material. And what interests me is that state building under construction. It joins the first idea of the game: the beginning. In building, in addition to using a flexible mounting system, the color scheme disturbs the plant and draw a new one. Castle in the words carved into blocks, are not fixed to each other. The stack is very precarious. The video, located cons point where they see me drive, play with these blocks, or bricks, words shown. I pile the words until they collapse and try again. In doing so, a text is built.
LS: Yes, construct, deconstruct, reconstruct, as for a set of Lego pieces or one stacked together.
SG: The state construction-deconstruction-reconstruction is part of my own thinking and my bias for the sculpture, to my own definition of sculpture. I also speak of "de-finish". It is important that the pieces that I build can not be stable, enduring, fixed, they can be deconstructed, there is a certain fragility ... they induce by itself a possibility of reconstruction, an opening.
This idea of construction does not only in my work in reference to building game. But it is perhaps the simplest, most immediate, most direct because hardware.
Generally, my pieces are struggling with the situation they find themselves. I spoke of container for + fine + high + low + wide. But also situations where my pieces may tend to a certain fading, missing person, or some transparency instead.
The use of the words participating also a deconstruction, a de-finish. I think each of us has a relationship, a different distance in contact with an image of a material object or a word. We do not get all three things the same way, it does not necessarily have the same distance either. When an object appears to be a word, I think something is happening at this distance. Maybe somehow we can say that it deconstructs the object. It's pretty complex ...
Sarah Garbarg, Shine-No , 2006 plexiglass mirror, 116 x 21 x 0.3 cm
LS: What led you to use the words?
SG: I always had a strong relationship to writing, writing, and often these are my readings that have inspired or at least influenced my work. I also write and in doing so, I am always particularly attentive to the words I choose. Trying to see where it may be necessary with a minimum of words, which direction, what direction is open, proposed. The dictionary has been my first tool even before introducing words into my sculpture.
I started to use words when I asked myself the question of representation. The choice of representation and, or, abstraction, and the significance of these choices and for me today. The words have become a way of solving the same time to avoid this problem. Choose to ask the question differently. Often I write things to the limit of the visible flirting so much with abstraction. Where I am is in the more figurative pieces that address architecture. Being between the two allows me to have a position I enjoy. I wanted to offer a less abstract, more real. The words also allow me to go somewhere else. They play with the object-sculpture, with what can be projected above, they stumble. Some ambiguity in the spring and that's what I like.
Besides, I just said "I write things" when I should have said "I realize the words" but it's a sense that is difficult to accept. If I say, "I make words on the edge of the visible" it almost does more sense. Yet that is what I do: I realize I'm doing, I materialize, I build ...
Sarah Garbarg, After the quake (blocks piled up like the Streets Along words fallen in disuse, 2006 (Expodium production), cardboard and tape, dimensions variable.
LS: How did you choose these words, these quotes ("conspicuous by its absence", "After the quake
" ...?
SG :. I use expressions or idioms ("conspicuous by its absence"), quotes ("After the quake" or "To start from the beginning"); words I'll isolate (such as "Enter" and "connect-fill"). Each time these words will make sense and question me about my practice and because I'm going, at some point, choose to give them a particular shape, such and such materiality. For example, with Shine-No we are in the problem of being-there of the object and the viewer, their involvement, their justification. "To start from the beginning" is a sentence that accompanied me a lot. It "fence" the book of Guy Debord 'In girum' and introduces the idea of working in a loop of restarting. At the same time, I mix this sentence to a barrier that is the object-obstacle par excellence. "After the quake" may be different. I removed the sentence of the adjectives by Murakami . I pruned all that could voice quality so that the sentence may have the widest sense. "Blocks stacked along the streets as the words fell into disuse." Besides the poetry of the sentence, the reference to "blocks" made me think strongly Deleuze and therefore has led several reading levels.
I mix words within the sentence, just as the master of philosophy in the bourgeois gentleman, and finally I did not care location, this sentence would always say something and Obviously the meaning evolved differently. It was both a concrete landscape but also mentally.
For isolated words, this is the moment of verbs and they thus describe the actions. "Enter" is a sculpture placed on the ground, almost at ground level, which can easily crush, which is so fragile .
LS: At the exhibition "Build'in" in 2007, in Nantes, you presented the cartons in which you had drawn architectures ( Untitled (house flat two exits )) . Why have you chosen to work with cartons?
SG: They are moving boxes, boxes that serve a particular time for transportation. There is the idea of economy of means that emanated from it. But especially the temporary side, in a state of transition, a more precarious time and material. ... And of course the box container.
LS: The board has the idea of container and at the same time you have designed an architecture, so a container, inside this "box". The idea was presented to Russian dolls me, you open a container to find one another and so on. We feel that the architecture shown in this paper is more fragile than the cardboard that contains, protects. We understand differently cardboard and drawing, we turn around to get different points of view ... What was the thrust of this work?
SG: The original idea, before any attempt to realize, of course, was that report box-sculpture-architecture, but also use the drawing to "close" box. The cardboard box is shown open on the floor. Drawing, representation architecture, it is seen as a good point of view (one that allows the reconstruction of the image), comes "close" the box, or at least gives the impression. The drawing closes the form or fill it. The play wavers between an open form, a vacuum, and a closed, full, depending on your point of view.
The fact of representing an architecture and design instead of the train causing contradictions, tensions between drawing and sculpture, fragility and strength, and a scale ratio "returned". To take your idea, Russian dolls which we would know or recognize not nesting order .
LS: Thou hast spoken of your desire to flirt with abstraction, can you explain why this choice when you work with language?
SG: I am primarily sculpture and what interests me is the object. This material presence that can have before their eyes, which occupies one end of our space, which lives with us. If the word is immediately recognizable that does not interest me, because there is more room for the object. But still I repeat the word or phrase contained in the title. I still wish there was a possibility of or read these words may make sense.
The title, referring to the piece, not just an ad. The work on the title interests me, it just ends meet and form the loop. It allows me to emphasize this movement to the object, at work between visible and legible. That is to say that this space is fluctuating through the perception and the distance that can be set or between a physical presence: an object, and a conceptual contribution, meaning: a word. This is important for me that this space that exists between a viewer and a viewed object can vary, it is not fixed, maybe we can not control it and thus allow the work to work.
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send an e-mail me expressed his unease. To read his message, I felt like me again ten years ago ... I want to say what helped me out of my psychological pain, not regression or my research but well and truly a good psy. The quest has could begin only when I finally felt myself. It came as a gift. Besides, I said, distant memories return only when you are completely relaxed and in tune with what we are and aspire to be. 
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