Pierre Tilman is one of those artists, and rare friend, who one cannot describe properly. I hesitate to single him out as either a poet, a visual artist, art critic, theorist, teacher or educator, because he performs these functions equally well all at the same time. According to Wikipedia, that forlorn platform for multifaceted talents:

“Poet, artist, writer, professor, friend of Robert Filliou, Pierre Tilman was born in 1944 in Salerne, in the South of France. He co-founded the magazine Chorus (1968-1974) with Franck Venaille, Daniel Biga and Jean Pierre Le Boul’ch.”

Tilman has been living and working in Sète, southern France, ever since he abandoned his busy Parisian life and the teaching he pursued for decades. This dialogue was conducted in his house in the medieval town of Sète, where I enjoyed Tilman’s principal and most treasured activity: friendship!

Pierre Tilman obviously likes his friends. Thus, he cites his great mentor-cum-guru Robert Filliou, who once said that “Art is just freedom from reason and the obligation to think reasonably.”

Pierre Tilman: Can you imagine if your parents hadn’t felt obliged to be reasonable with you, how much suffering they would have saved you from? Had they only told us things like «you should not cut like this, you shouldn’t have placed this form like that!» you could’ve, I mean, one could’ve built a beautiful world without Cartesian Reason! So now, everyone thinks his world is the best, his family the smartest, the best, etc.

Nina Zivancevic: Yes, I know, I’ve suffered myself with my folks… but tell me something, all in all, what do you essentially owe to Filliou? What has this great artist has taught you for life?

PT: Well, a certain philosophy, a sense for philosophical thinking. Above all, a feeling for a Buddhist sort of approach to life—we were not familiar with those things in France in the 1960s. Even intelligent people like Alain Jouffroy were far away from that sort of thinking, they were not aware of it. They were not hot for the Dalai Lama but for someone more like Mao Tse Tung!

NZ: Oh, I see…

PT: Oh, now you see! People here were supporting all the torture and hideous things that Mao was doing, without any sympathy for the Tibetan Lamas. I’d say that France was politicized in a wrong, stupid way during that time. And here we should include Philippe Sollers and his group ‘Tel Quel.’ Filliou did not join this group of people, above all, he was an American, but it was he who “authorized” me to become an artist. He made me understand poetry by saying “if you do so and so, that IS poetry.” He had never published anything pertaining to that genre, he did not publish a book on his own, but he was a poet. And his attitude legitimized my work, he authorized me to be a poet. And perhaps, to answer your question, I would like to say something on love and the corporal body. For me, the main subject of my work is the body; that is the means I am working with, it is also a great unknown to me. We do not understand one another, life is full of misunderstandings in regards to our body, but for me it is the core subject of all poetry. There is its surface, we have skin, you can caress that skin, one has contact with that surface, but that skin is much more than the eye can meet. That surface has its depth, it goes deep down within; so if I caress that skin, usually it is the surface of a woman in my particular case.

NZ: I see, you are not post-post-modern in that way…

PT: [laughter] Yes, ha, I always tend to be on the exterior of that skin, my hand is there caressing skin, but it gets complicated a bit here because the caressing does not end there, it goes deeper than the surface which is skin, my hand is something deeper than the skin and the person that I am caressing also feels a movement which goes deep, beyond their skin. The same goes with poetry, you use words but you don’t know how far they are going to go, you cannot measure their depth.

NZ: I believe there was a strong point in the work of Marina Abramovic, which connects to the very idea you have just described. There was a strong video presentation at Centre Pompidou a few years ago where the artist was just brushing her hair—nothing more or less than that. Well, she was also working with the notion of Buddhist meditative tradition, also visible in her piece “The Artist is Present.” I’d like to ask you a preposterous question: Have you “escaped” from a close familial circle by devoting your life to art?

PT: No, I haven’t devoted my life to art in order to escape my family ties. My parents were people who used to read a lot, quite cultured, so they were on my side in my project to become an artist. I tried to continue an old humanist tradition, thus I was getting all the support from my family.

NZ: When did you start showing your art work? At what age?

PT: Well, to begin with, I started writing when I was sixteen. I knew at that time what I wanted to do. I even knew in terms of politics which side to take. I had read a lot of books for my age, even the books about the war(s), but particularly I liked poetry, it was my “house of being.” However, I was aware of the fact that my family was just my “biological” family and that my real family was the one where my thoughts, and my thinking, belonged. I thought that my real father, my real brothers and sisters, were those who wrote certain books, and not my biological family. At age sixteen I also tried painting—I did not feel at home there. I tried music (jazz). No, no luck. But writing, I did that with certain success. When I was eighteen, I was living in Toulon and I found some friends who were artists. I started having a great desire to move to Paris, which I did in 1968. I founded the magazine Chorus (1968–1974) with Franck Venaille, Daniel Biga and Jean-Pierre Le Boul’ch. The interesting thing about this mag is that my entire line of thinking was already contained in the first issue of it! It was called “Still reality,” it was the poetry of the living experience.

NZ: Yeah, if I may interfere here, even your new book, Actes d’art 1960–1980, could be read not as texts in chapters but as poems—and the press which published is appropriately entitled “les presses du reel.” In this book each chapter is an organic whole consisting of quotations along with your commentary—and these read like poems to me. Have you met all these people in person, such as Yoko Ono, Jonas Mekas, etc.?

PT: Oh yes! That’s why I call them “my real family.” That’s why I also see it as my “poetry.” As for me, poetry is only and solely in the present. The music is only in the present, there is no such thing as “ancient music” because you have to play it, and you play it in the present moment, and the same goes with poetry, it exists in the present. Guillaume Apollinaire and Cendrars, they are with us as long as we read their work in the present. Art is for me a sort of real reality. It is something strong, stronger than us, and we are just poor beings. It is religion for me, I wouldn’t even touch it!

NZ: And yet, you comment on it, you make commentary about it. There are artists who make no comments about their art.

PT: Hmm, I would not put it that way—all artists are also the theorists of what they are trying to make, even those artists who don’t know how to read and write, they keep a theory of what they’re trying to make in their head. Django Reinhardt, for instance, did not know how to read and write, he was picking up music pieces and whatever came along his way. He would analyze all the pieces and then he would interpret them in his own manner. He knew all the songs, all the world music, especially Eastern European music. He would listen to the music, analyze it in his head and then perform it with his fingers and with his entire body. Duke Ellington was playing music just the way he’d heard it, an autodidact on his own. He never formally studied composition!

NZ: It’s strange and beautiful to hear you speak of the spontaneous and the sublime knowing now how close you were to some art critics and theorists, people who commented on art but did not practice it. For instance, you were close to Alain Jouffroy, who was the first to comment on the art of Daniel Spoerri and others?

PT: When I first started living in Paris there were three galleries which were doing interesting work. I would go to their openings and present myself, “I’m a poet and an editor of Chorus magazine,” and I would suggest to the artists a possibility of interviewing them or taking photos of their work, etc. I met a bunch of artists this way, Alain Jouffroy was one of them, it wasn’t really that I met Alain first and then the artists through his connections. He was special, I held strong sympathy for his poetry, and he was so different from the rest of the art critics. His writing had always been exceptionally intelligent. At the end, his own intelligence turned against him, meaning: he was always aware of the extreme relativity of all phenomena.

NZ: So you arrived in Paris at the times when Nouveau Realism or Objectivism was the fashion of the day, is that right?

PT: Yes, we could say so. It was in the 1960s, certain artists had already become stars, such as César, Armand, Yves Klein—critics had amply supported their work. Here’s someone much less important than Jouffroy who comes to mind, the art critic Pierre Restany, but there were also artists from Latin America and Russia who came here and who slept in all sorts of places, basically around Montparnasse. However, there were also places around Saint- Germaine-des-Prés, restaurants and bistros which were incredibly expensive—La Coupole has always been expensive, but there were also a lot of abandoned buildings and free spaces. These places were not heated. We were living in the time of pure war with Algeria. When we saw Niki de Saint Phalle shoot her gun in an abandoned courtyard, that was it, it was still feasible to do that sort of thing. A policeman came by and told her: “you cannot do this at this time, it’s too crazy, we have murders here in Paris every day.” All of these events had stopped when the Tower of Montparnasse was built and all these other places were levelled down, all the artistic studios disappeared, etc. From then on, it has been literally impossible to find a bed or any housing in Paris, notwithstanding the artists’ studios! …[laughter]… Before, there was another sort of mentality in Paris, the furniture makers had places around La Bastille and there were places for the young penniless artists to live, free places. After that era, the Real Estate professionals marched in. See, we did not even have the Ministry of Culture—that was quite a new invention, created in 1981 with the rise of the Leftists… Jack Lang was there…

NZ: If it is not too indiscreet, where were you living at that time?

PT: Oh, I was all over the place. I lived with my girlfriends here and there, until I met Marie-Helene and had three kids with her. Then I felt we had a need to enlarge the living area, make it more of a stable place so I found a job. I became a teacher at the Beaux Arts in Paris.

NZ: Ok, there we go—I have a real sly question for you. Do you really think that one could teach Art?

PT: Well, I was teaching Theory, ways of thinking, kind of philosophy of Art. See, even if you teach music, you tell someone while teaching them sax or tenor: “this is the place where you place your fingers,” but you can’t be pretentious and say “I will teach you the art of music.” It does not work that way. I still do think that one could teach someone certain values, say, like design and drawing—you can show an industrial drawing if someone needs an industrial drawing of a car, or you can draw a tree the way Miró used to draw it. However, YOU should never think that any of the artists who made an attempt at such drawing would ever believe that was the unique way of expressing things. The major advantage of Art is that it does not pretend to impart “truths.” Every artist is humble, by definition, it enters his “job profile.” Ha, how can I put it… the artist never says “my solution is the best” or “yes, I am the one.” They know somebody could do better than them, or that someone could find a better solution. Politicians also know that there are people who could do their job better than they do, but they pretend that they are the best! The system asks them to perform this sort of lie! However, you’ll never hear an artist say: “I am the best. Only my way of doing things is the right way, etc.”

NZ: Yeah, they are more modest. Except for some very rare exceptions, artists who think and claim to be the best, like Jeff Koons, for example… So, what would you say about art which is hard to digest, which is more like “anti-art” in a certain way, like that abominable sculpture of the orange metal bear placed just in front of an entrance at Gare du Nord?

PT: Oh, I’d like to underline the fact that this does not concern me. It is as if you said “someone is selling a Van Gogh in Japan now for such and such price…”, this does not enter my field of action and thinking. And, although I’m a poet, it does not concern me. Best-selling authors and I are quite different. It’s like mentioning totally different vocations. I knew an art dealer who was always bombing me with the figures from his sales and the stock market, later he went under, but I felt almost suffocated, it’s not my world. See, Paris has become a suburb. In the 1960s it was still an important city, with visitors from the entire world. Good artists would still go there, Hervé Télémaque for instance, who came from Tahiti. He lived in New York prior to coming to Paris, and he came to Paris because he wanted to meet interesting people, like the last Surrealists. Today, I don’t see a single interesting artist going to Paris because he loves that city, perhaps they go to Bruxelles.

NZ: You are a multimedia and multidimensional artist—is there any difference in your different approaches to various art fields, when you write poetry and when you do visual work?

PT: Oh yes, the difference is in the time schedule these different forms take. The difference exists in their respective techniques applied to each field, even the physical positions I take are different, but there is something that is a common denominator for all of them: let’s use the example of the kitchen, gastronomy in general. I make a “poetry meal” for instance, it requires a certain recipe, one manner of “cooking” that thing. When I start “cooking art” there is a different way of preparing the meal, however, it is important to keep in mind that I always stay in my kitchen cooking my own meals. We should remember that gastronomy is the art of cooking where certain foods that we prepare should be edible, good for digestion, etc. The problem with poetry is that the genre implies the articulation of language, which gives it an incredible strength but also an incredible fragility. Within this genre you also enter the incredible neurological and biological system of an entire civilization, given to mammals who are endowed with words. However, poetry is also feeble due to the application of many different languages whose division increase its fragility…

NZ: Would you say that it is your inclination towards the feeble and the fragile that makes you write poetry, given the fact that you call it your favorite art and that you call yourself a poet?

PT: Oh yes, one could say so. However, I must make this clear, we are witnessing this incredible error with our fellow-travelers in life, people who believe that every word they say and pronounce is made in iron! How could that be true? How could any poet think that “his” word is stronger than someone else’s? This creates a feeling of supremacy in the world which is absolutely false. Expressions such as “my family,” “my people,” “my ethnic group,” “we are the strongest in this world”, here we have extreme ignorance of the world mixed with a particular pride, arrogance on its own! However, when you read great poets such as François Villon, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, all of them, you can see that they were pointing at the enormous fragility of our civilization. All these poets were basically saying the same thing: there is a fracture between the extreme fragility of our civilization and the reality of the world.

As for me, a real poet, a real artist always speaks of the real reality of the world, and when you assume such an attitude, you cannot dream of dominating the world, you cannot do stupid things with the material offered by this world! So the “real” artist in this world, unlike the politician, knows that he cannot act in a stupid manner. The musicians in an orchestra know exactly how to play their instruments in a way that they work, a sax player won’t go against the percussionist, the violin player, etc. If you put the four musicians together to play one piece, it’s already a great success! It is for me, personally, paying attention to reality and what is “the real” or “feasible” thing. So in the end, for me, to write poetry means to speak in an articulated language about things which escape or go “beyond” that articulated speech.

NZ: Ok, but when you leave ‘the realm of words,” what material do you use?

PT: Oh, I like simple things, pastels, crayons. I use branches, simple things, which I glue in the process—they don’t give nasty smells, they could be placed on a table like this one, economical things which are inexpensive. I opt for “poor” elements, I don’t like “rich” things, like the tubes of paints which you have to mix! You see, art is the rich thing of the poor. You can write poetry anywhere, you can be in prison, you can write even being extremely poor. It is yet another thing if you wish to write a three-hundred-page novel, then it becomes more complicated. The first hunters produced their own artistic instruments “on the spot,” those were quite simple but they suited their needs. Like the first samurais also, they fabricated their own swords “on the spot,” as long as they needed them.

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Pierre Tilman was born in 1944 in Salernes, region of Var, and lived for 40 years in Paris. Currently, he is a resident of Sète. He has published 60 books so far, above all (and after all) he considers himself a poet, one could call him a performance artist and a visual poet. As an artist, he has exhibited his work in galleries, museums and various art centers. He adores spoken word as such, followed by music sometimes. He sculpts words but also the intervals of silence. He belongs to the street and the bars, a mammal, a thinker, a culture animal, he keeps the vegetal and mineral elements within. He spends a lot of time reflecting on simple things. 

Nina Zivancevic is is a Serbian-born poet, essayist, fiction writer, playwright, art critic and translator. She has published 15 books of poetry and has written three books of short stories, two novels and a book of essays on Milosh Crnjanski (her doctoral thesis) published in Paris, New York and Belgrade. She has edited and participated in numerous anthologies of contemporary world poetry. She is a contributing editor to NY ARTS magazine. As editor and correspondent, she has also contributed to Modern Painters, American Book Review, East Village Eye and Republique de lettres. She has actively worked for theatre and radio: four of her plays were performed and emitted in the U.S. and Great Britain. In New York, she worked with the “Living Theatre” and the members of the “Wooster Group,” and was a former assistant and secretary to Allen Ginsberg. She has lectured at Naropa University, New York University, the Harriman Institute and St.John’s University in the U.S, and has taught English language and literature at La Sorbonne (Paris I and V) and the History of Avant-garde Theatre at Paris 8 University in France and at numerous universities and colleges in Europe. She lives and works in Paris.