  Self Portrait à la "cap", 1994 My first encounter with Noel Dolla's work was in 1991, at a large exhibition (at the Musee d'Art Moderne in Saint-Etienne) devoted to the "Supports/Surfaces" movement. I was immediately transfixed by Dolla's works from the late '60s and early '70s, which employed handkerchiefs, dish towels and various pieces of loosely hanging fabric, sometimes no more than a few inches in diameter, sometimes a hundred feet long. The stains and dots Dolla applied to these lowly materials evoked American Color Field painting, yet conceptually the work sided with the refusals and provocations of radical French culture during May '68 and its aftermath. In the end what struck me most was how effortless contemporary pieces like "Etendoir aux mouchoirs" or "Structure a la tente d'indien" looked, more than two decades after their making. Since then I've come to know Dolla's work much better, from his "Fumee" paintings (monochromes which he delicately defaces with smoke from a burning torch), to the raw figuration of the "Tchernobyl" series, to the "Jalousie" triptychs in which a large monochrome with an array of dots serves as an unlikely shelf for a "Fumee" and a painted wooden shutter. These have been followed by the "Ripolin Non Non" series where a "Fumee" is balanced on cans of Dolla's favorite brand of paint --Ripolin-- which in turn rest on a larger monochrome canvas. The paint cans have been punctured and the paint has poured down the monochrome, creating vertical lines. The work is an oblique homage to Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and, perhaps, Yves Klein, but it is also pure Dolla, happily zig-zagging across the no-man's-land between the retinal and conceptual. While Dolla constantly seeks out new materials and techniques--the "Enol A. Bait" series mixes acrylic paint and jam, a new work called "Gant a debarbouiller la peinture" uses a paint-soaked wash cloth/glove as a support--he never indulges in stylistic exercises. Like one of his great models, Duchamp, he has a fear of being pigeon-holed; but like his other hero, Barnett Newman, he has an exalted conception of the role of the artist. In recent years, Dolla has himself become something of a beacon for a younger generation of French artists, especially those who have studied with him at the Villa Arson in Nice. On this side of the Atlantic, Dolla's work remains only a rumor, except among a half-dozen abstract painters in New York. This interview was conducted in the fall of 1993, during one of Dolla's regular visits to New York. Noel is an impassioned and tireless speaker (as I've learned from long sessions around the kitchen table at his home in Nice), furiously stirring together the discourses of the French intellectual and the Nicoise fisherman. Many of the particularities of Dolla's verbal style may have been lost in the translation from French to English, but I hope I have captured some of his abiding anger at the business-as-usual attitude of the society around him and deep concern for the past, present and future of painting. R.R. RR: Let's start with the here-and-now. Do you think New York is still the capital of Abstraction? ND: About four years ago, I was very interested in the idea of Abstraction as it existed in New York but today there are lots of problems with what I see. I'm afraid that Abstraction is again turning towards Formalism. Maybe I'm wrong, but for me the important thing is not the form but the idea, the spirit of Abstraction. Think about Duchamp. Lots of artists think the idea Duchamp posed was the end of painting and the opening towards the object. On the contrary, I think that Duchamp sends us directly to painting. The whole of his oeuvre, and above all "Etant donne", speaks to us of the look. One can't look at an abstract work outside of the history that produced it. The work has its form, but the reading of an abstract work can't stop at the object. RR: How does this relate to the fact that your work is made up of many elements, which you are constantly interchanging? ND: The Duchampian side is that I have always displayed at least two tendencies in my work at the same time. It's fundamental for me to show the duality of things and to say that I'm against the definitive judgement--if there's no dialectic between things there's no spirit. Even at the very beginning, I introduced the number 3 into my painting, be it three pieces of canvas or three dots. The three elements result from the complexity of things: one element is unity, two is duality, three is complexity. Everything in the present situation, and in fact it's been this way for some time, seems to be conspiring to interfere with the work of the painter. How is this done? Through the market, through social pressure, through a process that always reproduces the same schema, a schema recognizable like a trademark. In 1966, I read a book by David Ogilvy, the famous American advertising man. Ogilvy said: when you have a good slogan, never get rid of it as long as it is still working. He also said: tell the truth rendering it fascinating. Reading this was important for me because I thought: if that's advertising, art is the opposite. Since then, I've built my work on that differentiation between the advertising slogan and art. RR: This was also taking a position against Pop art. ND: Exactly! Beginning in '67, my works were always conceived with the desire to displace the awareness of the spectator in relation to his own beliefs. Even today I show several canvases, apparently different in terms of appearance but with the same result in terms of spirit, in order to get the spectator to wonder why someone who has been painting for 25 years does these very different things when he could just keep turning out a single kind of work. If one displaces one's own beliefs in front of a work of art, you enter into a movement of thought and thus into a social displacement. The will to break with the idea that one is right has a political sense because it says to people that they have to think, to look and to face what they don't yet know or what is hard for them to accept. I think of drug addicts or even sexual criminals, rapists and others. Did you know that in the U.S. today, a convicted rapist risks a much heavier prison sentence than a murderer? I don't know what to think of a society which makes such a judgement. To kill for money, out of greed or necessity, or for any other reason is apparently less serious in the eyes of puritan society that the mental illness of sexual frustration. Further, doesn't anyone ever think that it's wrong when a society condemns a sick person to prison instead of sending him to a place where he might be cured? RR: To change the subject slightly, do you see museums as hospitals or prisons? ND: They can be prisons or they can be playgrounds. If the market doesn't leave freedom to the museum to exist in its most noble form, the museum becomes a prison because it only says one thing, it no longer takes time for reflection. Today the museums are filled with what I call the "young old," when they should be filled with artists who are noble and old.
RR: Are things equally off-track in America and Europe? ND: The mistake Europe makes is in not taking the best from the U.S. and then saying plainly that the rest should be thrown out. From Americans I want to learn pragmatism and power, but I don't want to lose a certain intelligence that is the result of a culture several thousand years old. In the end, there's an excess of pragmatism here that at a given moment turns against America itself. At a certain moment I wrote against conceptual art--because I was a painter, but not because I was against conceptual art. I think that art is conceptual! There is no art without concepts, without ideas. The material with which you work is only a part of the work of art. I won't go on. This is taking us towards a baroque idea of the soul. RR: I think a great lesson of your work is a certain kind of relationship between material and thought, which not all viewers get. ND: That's why I wrote about the idea of abstraction. I said that abstraction can't be looked at with the same intellectual structures that were in place prior to 1910. A monochrome has nothing to say outside of art history, it says nothing to people outside of a certain history. Abstraction cannot be situated in representation; a monochrome represents nothing. You can see this perhaps in a work I did in 1987, "La peinture a l'age de l'universe (Painting is as Old as the Universe)". I made 12 small paintings whose grounds were combinations of four colors, black, yellow, red and white (the "four races"). From the height of one meter, I dropped five feathers onto each canvas, on which I also made three crosses. Arranged in a grid, these canvases are meant to be rotated and turned. Making these shifts at the rate of one per minute, I've calculated that there are something like 15 billion possible permutations. In other words, this is a work which will never be seen in its totality. I wanted to say that we don't have 15 billion minutes in life, so we can never see all the possibilities of this painting. That's really an abstract painting--what you don't see is what stays in the mind. My titles are often also mental keys for thinking about the painting. For instance the title of a series I just finished is "Enol A. Bait." "Enol" is an anagram of Noel and "bait" in English is what you use to catch fish. The title also also has a relation to the Enola Gay, the plane--named for the pilot's mother--that bombed Hiroshima in 1945, the year I was born. "Gay" means happiness and, of course, there is the present connotation of homosexuality. I'm interested in changing meanings that pass from masculine to feminine. There are my works "Ripolin NoNo" and "Ripolin Non Non." "Ripolin NoNo" is masculine, the paint can in the work is pierced by a tool like a drill, an awl, or a screwdriver. "Ripolin Non Non" is feminine, the opening in the can is made by a combat knife with a triangular blade. Someone who doesn't notice how the holes are made in the can and how on one side there is a feminine sex, a lozenge, and on the other side a circular hole, is not seeing the work. Someone who doesn't pay attention to what is written on the can of Ripolin paint is also missing the point. These are not meaningless things and this is perhaps where I'm close to Duchamp. The person who looks at a painting has not finished looking at the painting when he closes his eyes. RR: It's a way to say that the work isn't only composed of the object, it also includes the title, the name of the artist, and the whole life of the artist, the ensemble, the complete project.
ND: Yes, and I think this is true with my "Tchernobyl" paintings. Everyone said about them "Dolla is making figurative, expressionist painting." I tried to explain why I did the painting. In 1986, I learned that my two brothers were HIV-positive. The first of May that year I was with my best friend Max, fishing on the coast of the Riviera. We took our shirts off because it way a fine day and all afternoon stayed out fishing. It was great. Max and I grew up together, we've been friends for 40 years or more. The next day I learned that we had been all that day of great happiness under a beautiful sky subject to the fallout of Chernobyl--there was lots on the Cte d'Azur. And I thought that perhaps I would die from cancer with a beautiful sky and much happiness. In my mind, the two things combined: AIDS which you contract by making love at a moment of great happiness, and on the other side, the death organized by men through a misunderstanding or an atomic bomb or a badly managed reactor, as a result of which you can meet death under a blue sky. After that I found I had a need to make paintings that would, in some way, draw out everything that I had just absorbed from these events. I felt they couldn't be abstract because abstract painting never heals the individual painter. To be an abstract painter is always to put the subject at a distance from the act, to separate your own life and the work's pure intellectuality. When I make works like the "Enol A. Bait" paintings it's not a gesture which heals me, its a gesture of pure intellectuality and the pleasure is always pushed back towards the intelligence. With the "Tchernobyl" paintings I had a need to explode, but rather than return to a simple expressionist representation I tried to invent--out of this necessity of healing--the mutilated body. That's why I painted with one of my eyes covered by a patch, to lose perspective, and with only the right hand (I'm left-handed) to getrid of the Academy. I couldn't return to the figure, I could only intellectualize my own body, that's to say at a given moment I put all my spirit and flesh into play, thereby saying: man can't separate himself. So when someone tells me I "returned to the figure," I don't know what they mean. That's why I've always refused to show these paintings alone; they have sense only in the chain which constitutes 25 years of abstract practice.
RR: What artists do you feel close to? ND: This question reminds me how Matisse pointed out that at a given moment the great Japanese painters constantly changed their names to stay free in relation to society. An American artist I like alot is Bruce Nauman, but the artist who was most important for me after Matisse was Barnett Newman. At the beginning of my work he was a beacon, both for what is in his work and also for the way he lived. There's that 1970 catalogue of Newman's show in Paris that I have always at home as a kind of bible. RR: Newman wrote and spoke a lot. ND: The idea of an ensemble--painting, writing, living, etc.--is the idea that man is a totality, it's to give to man a superior idea, which may appear ridiculous today. People like Newman or Cezanne or da Vinci are beacons. What I'm saying may sound pretentious, but the artist should be a beacon for other people, an example both in work and life. RR: Like the exemplary life of a saint. ND: If one wants art to still have meaning, it's necessary for the person who makes art to be an example of integrity in his work and life. Without that, art has no meaning, it's just business and as a business it's better to do something else to make money. At a given moment, I made a good deal of money from my work. Then I stopped making what they wanted, in order to make what I wanted. I had to make art without knowing if I was right, without thinking I was a genius, but simply because I had decided to do something I believed in, something I had to follow all the way to the end. Without this, art becomes just so many decorative objects. We think that Matisse is decorative, but he's not! What sense does Barnett Newman's work make if not seen in the context of art history, in relation to what preceded him, what he did by putting into question his whole life by breaking with Surrealism, his political position? I try to think that man is a totality and he has duties. I know this may sound old-fashioned. When we were talking about titles, I wanted to stress the great importance of titles. If, when Picasso painted "Guernica" he had called it "Cow's Head with Electric Light," the meaning would change completely. He took a position. This is also the case in my paintings titled "Boat People" or "Tchernobyl" which pose certain questions in relation to abstract painting. The serious problem is that so much art today is linked to economics. In too many cases, it's money that directs things, not thought. I don't want to be a martyr for art, not at all -- I want to simply keep making art and try to make it understood and try to sell, but I don't want to make saleable works. If they sell at very high prices, great! If they don't, tough luck. lingo 4
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