 |
Gerard Paris-Clavel
Gerard Paris-Clavel was born in 1943 in Paris. After his studies at the Ecole des Métiers d'Arts, he went with Pierre Bernard to Warsaw to study with Henryk Tomaszewski. In the student movement of 1968 they participated in the Atelier Institut de Environment. In 1970 Paris-Clavel was founding member of the graphic design collective Grapus with Bernard and Francois Miehe, joined by Alexander Jordan and Jean-Paul Bachollet in the mid-1970s, Grapus disbanded in 1990. Today, Gerard Paris-Clavel is independent, working mostly with the association Ne pas plier [Do not bend] and active and political battles.
Ursula Held: You were with Grapus from the beginning. Why did it dissolve in 1990?
Gerard Paris-Clavel: You can understand Grapus only if you know the social history of the 1960s and 1970s, the political battles of the period, the liberation of the Third World, Vietnam, Chile … Organised groups, trade unions, institutions and political parties shared our commitment and gave us the means to produce our images. The strength or the group was its composition of very different personalities. Our differences were bound by a common project. The organisation of the group was based on ‘creative conflict’ – permanent disputes and discussions, power struggles. But with time, our differences eroded and criticism was replaced by tolerance or, even worse, indifference.
Just prior to the 1990s, Grapus came to realise its creative and political limits. We could either continue as an agency – making profit but losing our capacity to agitate – or we could separate. We did the latter. When the group dissolves, we refused to profit from the ‘brand name’. Each of us developed differently. The idea of Grapus did not stop but transformed itself, with each of us taking a different direction. It would be wrong to interpret the end of Grapus as a failure. No, it is a sign of the success of the group that we knew –maybe a bit late – that we had to transform. When it began to trade on its reputation and became a ‘real’ business it was no longer interesting. We had twenty people in the end, in a 600 m2 studio – a real agency with administration and so on.
UH: So you went your own way?
G P-C: We had always worked as a team. None of us was capable of working completely on his own. First I founded a group with Vincent Perrottet, Les Graphistes associes. But after a while I realised that society did not even permit a small structure to have an aggressive and creative attitude towards social subjects. So I left. Les Graphistes associes continues to exist and does interesting work in its domain, which is less directly political. I consider myself as an artist rather than a craftsman. I have to initiate my own projects. But it is impossible to work alone in political battles. So I founded a not-for-profit association with friends: Ne pas plier. The group is not about graphic design, but rather the production and distribution of texts and images on social and political issues. We come from very different experiences, knowledge and methods. And where Grapus had clients who shared its attitudes and points of view, Ne pas plier commissions its own work.
UH: When did Ne pas plier start?
G P-C: As an association, Ne pas plier was founded I 1991. Originally it was the title of a journal I had made within Grapus. It was a way of escaping. With artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn and the photographer Marc Pataut (one of the founders) we formed a small group called Cocolux – the ‘crazy gang’ of Grapus. We published several issues of the journal which we distributed free. At that time I was already a little frustrated by the need for Grapus to generate turnover to sustain the agency. We had lost a lot of our freedom.
UH: Is that why you chose the form of a not-for-profit organisation for Ne pas plier?
G P-C: I don’t believe in an agency as a vehicle for creative professions. You are forced to make money out of your know-how and to repeat yourself. Most of the big graphic agencies don’t have the objective means to do real research – they have to be able to pay their employees. At the moment, Ne pas plier doesn’t have any money. It is still financed by its members. In addition we get some small subsidies, or make alternative deals such as selling the copyright of a poster and at the same time getting a certain amount of printed copies. The local council rents us a huge workspace for almost nothing. However the real richness of the group remains the benevolent work of its members. But how can one pay for that? At the moment I spend about 25 per cent of my time earning my living and 75 per cent in Ne pas plier.
UH: How many members participate?
G P-C: The core of the group is about six to ten people; we can gather lots more participants and mobilise them for political agitation. And we have a network of about 800 correspondents (150-200 outside France) who receive our material and publications. Ne pas plier, being a multidisciplinary movement with a network, is much faster in reacting than Grapus, which was only a corporate movement of graphic designers
UH: Ne pas plier has a division called L’Epicerie d’art frais [literally: the corner shop of fresh art] with stickers, postcards and booklets –pamphlets in visual or verbal form. What is its aim?
G P-C: The aim is to distribute the material in the streets to expand our movement. The origins of the material lie in our personal or professional work. When, for example, I did a booklet on AIDS and sexuality for the Centre de Culture Scientifique, I found its political quality sufficiently interesting to ask them for 2,000 copies for the association. Or the stickers for receiving 30 Algerian orphans – I did the work for a local council and got ‘paid’ 10,000 copies. They are always small economical patchworks. As a graphic designer, it was relatively easy to get free copies of posters, stickers or postcards. It is maybe a little unjust for the photographers or architects among us, whose work is more difficult to multiply. Many people think Ne pas plier is about graphic design, just because printed matter is its most visible form …
|
|
