Dean Mayo Davies: It seems that you cause fear amongst the establishment because what you do cannot be categorised easily, would you agree? You’re a rebel and a kind-hearted one at that, which makes you all the more threatening...

item idem: I have noticed, here and there, that there is a level of peturbment induced by my practice. Online, there is genuine enthusiasm whilst the “establishment” seems to be more cautious about how to handle properly this type of involvement they believe I’m into. I wouldn’t say fear though, but more incomprehension... Probably this is my teenage peak! My work is starting to be recognised, but at same time it is still mutating into something new and unexpected. And as a proper teenager, my attitude seems to compel and induce people to exaggerated, exalted feelings, both positive or negative... It is like a mutually shared form of acne! Though, if you ask me, it is more of a misunderstanding, as I am really trying to put work out that is more intriguing than absolute: it is much more interesting to me to present images and ideas that challenge the intellect with their own determination, than forcing reason into squared ways of apprehending reality. It would be unfortunate to be seen as an extremist, I am not really in this business for any useless battle, though as you mentioned, the heart is a good one and I am really motivated to potentially become an honest representative of the cause.

DMD: Can you explain your background for people that may not be familiar with you? I think it really helps understand your philosophy to learn about your personal history... Do you think your unique path is what has built your practice more than anything else?

ii: I’m a typical Parisian kid, I grew up surrounded by arts and design from my parents  and I was very influenced by my great aunt who was a wise modern art collector and a socialite friend of Jean Cocteau. I studied art for too many years probably, then left for Tokyo, which was at that time the only city that seemed to challenge my interest in terms of architectural and communicational forms. I ended up being extremely influenced by fashion, marketing, interior design, visual codes of all kinds, which seems to be at the core of my work, for now at least. Tokyo’s influence on my Parisian roots has helped create a special blend: the aesthetics I play with are multiple, and hopefully (I tend to believe!) slightly out of the trends movement. The concepts I am interested in are sometimes outdated, I feel like I am still studying the past and reactivating it to give flesh and consistency to my projects. It’s a bit like climbing the art history ladder little-by-little; I am still digesting Duchamp while Hirst is at the core of my preoccupations!

DMD: And now more names. You’ve collaborated with - and continue to work with - some unique personalities. Like Sarah [of colette], Bernhard [Willhelm] and Terence [Koh]...

ii: Sarah is definitely one of my wonders, she was the first one to give me a job (when I helped her and Comme des Garçons to open colette meets Comme des Garçons in spring 2004 in Tokyo). We’re intensifying our work relationship these days too. Recently she even gave me a media! The confidence and appreciation she seems to put in my work is an honouring retribution as I strongly believe too in her own pioneering instinct. Bernhard is another of my lucky wonders as he happily picked me to create his first shop, and this association considerably helped to establish the branding of our house name. Especially when you consider the amount of mass media we gathered for such a little project! I am very aware of Bernhard’s interest in my practice, so far all our collaboration works have been so fruitful in so many directions, it is really a credible creative working relationship. With both Sarah and Bernhard, my experience has been very stimulating; friendship, trust and mutual artistic appreciations. My relationship with Terence is much more recent, but has been very productive too. We probably have some common source of focus? I am thrilled by his strong ability to challenge his time, his work and his function, He his probably intensely full of self-derision, (which I am not sure people are really realising by-the-way) and plays really well his trickster role, it is somehow a rejuvenating behaviour. I’m sensitised to his disguised integrity, he's really not as bad as he pretends! [Laughs]. So yes, probably our collaborative efforts have been mostly oriented toward commonly shared media and status obsessions, it is very discreet work, but very steady. I guess we both come from the same conceptual family - same influences, similar directions, even if it shapes differently.

DMD: To your friends you remain Cyril, so why the moniker item idem? Is it important to assume an alias as part of the veil of mythology you are creating? Is Cyril a very different person from item idem?

ii: Well, Cyril Duval is probably a much more self-oriented person than item idem, which probably helps me to lower away from me the weight of that ego-charge... As it has been written (in Viewpoint) recently, item idem is more of an umbrella, a way to create collective dynamics, in which we tend to work on the ablation of copyrights or identities, though it is never easy as everyone always wants to be credited! [Laughs]. Originally I would sign Cyril Duval for commercial direction projects while item idem would ultimately enhance my art. But now that does not have any more meaning, as my art has happily became so commercial, at least conceptually and in its understanding, and I like it much better like that, it brings truth. I still aim to develop item idem as some kind of ‘gesamtkunstwerk' (a ‘total artwork’); ideally as a medium and a media, a company and a gallery. It should be resolvedly modern and omniscient, independent and omnipotent, and an elevating tool for all its participants. Recently I published a worldwide call for contribution under the form of a viral advertisement, for my washing tag databank project. It is a really interesting process, I don’t know where it is all bringing me but I found it fascinating. The internet seems so perfect for viral communication, but nothing new here(!) 

DMD: Your work is a very modern preoccupation, utilising and dissecting fashion iconography in the arena of fine art, but becoming something else completely. Do you ever wonder, if you were born in another era, what your work would be like? 

ii: I would paint vanities probably, but isn’t that what Damien Hirst is doing already? Vanities are one of my favourite genres, even if I’ve not touched them yet. I think I would be interested in the same kind of globalising attitude that I have now, happily mixing all medias and collaborating. Certainly I would be trying to extend in arts, sciences, literature like Leonard da Vinci was doing, even if obviously I certainly do not stand the comparison... [Laughs]. Oh well, it is still important to mention the masters, no? I think perfection sometimes comes out of genuine amateurism, more than intensely hard labour. Duchamp’s work was about completing genres, one piece was enough. Like when tried to be a cubist painter, he applied it to movement. That was shocking at the time, even for moderns. Back to my practice, probably it finds an echo nowadays because of the gratuity of our world, where all is accessible, digestible, destructible, where everything can be forever, and forever modifiable. In that sense, yes probably the things I do, match their times. The induced questions inside my work may find an audience who is looking for answers, afraid of the world as it is. I am both happy and unhappy about it, as once again I sincerely do not intend to become a preacher; I believe that’s where the problems all start. Art is a process towards education, it used to be used as an emancipation tool toward oppressive forms of extremisms and it should certainly not be used as a modern way to recruit and persuade people. Madonna is here for that...

DMD: I really want to hear how you talk of the common meaning or philosophy behind your diverse projects. What are you trying to explore or provoke?

ii: Multilayering, we are the photoshop generation. We know more than what the “establishment” thinks we do and we are much more optimistic than they think we are. What we are made of is a very consistent and abundant collage of ideas; information, cultures, etc. We have never been so aware and independent and at the same time controllable. That is actually the main paradox, knowing too much and knowing nothing, being able to discuss all and none. Truth also as I feel intoxicated by lies, especially in my own artistic surroundings. If I use marketing in my work, it is because I believe it should not be left to the people who makes a certain use and abuse of it, which leaves me very often uncomfortable and preoccupied. Once again, I would hate to pretend to be that kind of ‘white knight’, and I really want to push my art toward a ‘blank positioning’, a ‘nest-as-nexus’ for ideas, a place to develop solutions, or not. For this reason, I will not here raise a charge against forms of communications that I find biased and oriented towards consumers manipulation. No inverse name-dropping in this interview. But I will mention again a truism from Jenny Holzer, one of the artists that has maybe influenced me the strongest: “USE WHAT IS DOMINANT IN A CULTURE TO CHANGE IT QUICKLY “.

DMD: You know Holzer is one of my absolute favourite artists... But back to you! Instead of creating pop culture with your art, you take explicitly from pre-existing culture (and its template), remix and re-edit and sell it back to us. I think if Warhol was around today, this is what he would be focused on...

ii: Do you know Elaine Sturtevant? She is about 85 now, and has conceptually reworked major artists works for decades. She represents them again; the same but different, unique but transposed. Warhol, when asked about his artistic production process, notoriously replied “Ask Elaine”, to which she commented: “Warhol was very Warhol“. Who is the original and who is the copycat? The questions on authoring and ownership have always been eternal but actual, and biased properly since the invention of commerce. How original and unique is my work compared to hers? Probably none, and that is what I believe makes it relevant nowadays. This assumed positioning that all matters are results of predictable cycles and that honesty and education should be the only starting points of all creations. Packaging and designs based on shapes can be dangerous as they distract viewers away from the core informational truth of the work itself.

I’m curious about what Warhol would say about my practice actually. I am not sure he would actually endorse it, but maybe would find it slightly exotic, as the range of crossed influences I try to gather are, I believe, quite wide. Warhol had maybe more common obsessions in his work such as money, death, fame, sex. That said, I think that he is still pretty much alive in some artist works (Hirst, Koons, etc) but not Murakami, who is, to me, simply a good merchant but not a good artist. You see, now I am starting to speak! [Laughs]. Though his voice is pretty much missing nowadays, no one has, for me, brought the same level of integrity and humour to the world we are living in. It is regrettable...

DMD: The media too is an element of your methodology - you have a guest blog on colette’s new website, write pieces for 032c and have been profiled in heavyweight design and art magazines. Now the next step, it seems, is even further towards ‘fashion’ magazines...

ii: Medias are wonderful and they are definitely one of my most important medium. I am not a media artist, though. [Laughs]. I don’t ‘compute’ so well, apart from email addiction probably, my blog you mentioned (which is my newest hobby), and my Facebook ‘propaganda’ group. I love to advertise and contribute to magazines, printed or online, sometimes as an artist, sometimes as a reporter. It is very important to me to leave art practice temporarily and come back to it. It is highly hygienic. But yes, medias are an extremely important part of that strategic chess game I am playing... I would try to hide this reality, but I simply wouldn’t be able to do it. It is one point where my honesty cannot be challenged, at least! But I do distort facts/reality sometimes, though only if it helps in producing good works (like this one-of-a-kind media piece we are designing in collaboration right now). So it has a meaning... Funnily enough, my first review ever was in a Japanese business publication oriented towards foreigners, printed in an edition of 12,000 copies. At that time, I was thrilled to be able to speak directly to so many people at a time, and even more thrilled by the fact that they had nothing in common (more or less) with my world. I kept that instinct, and it is almost sacred to my work, that cultural and educational exchange that is at the core of it. It is so fascinating to speak to people who haven’t a clue about what I am talking about. It is the most beautiful part of our job, being able to share emotions with anyone. Art is free and for all. (Do I sound like Yoko Ono saying that, or more like Joseph Beuys?!)

DMD: More Beuys, I think. But you wear much better outfits... Whilst we’re near the subject, can we talk about “Midasphaltarmacoat 8002 (for Joseph Beuys)” from your ‘coat’ series? The coat is a very emblematic, suggestive object, of course...

ii: It is probably an ongoing series so it might be hard to reach closure on the matter, but sure. The piece you mention is probably my first real artwork, ‘reality’ being given by the market as it was commissioned, exhibited and finally bought by real actors of the art world. It’s a sculptural garment - deconstructed black and gold Louis Vuitton bags incorporated with melted car tires, burning asphalt and Comme des Garçons TAR perfume - exploring the couture medium so it is literally not a product, but more of an artwork, because of its unity, and probably all the emotions linked to its realisation... This series has raised in me several questions, and while I am playing with ideas about consumerism, market control and value stability I have been notoriously influenced and shocked by Damien Hirst’s “For The Love Of God“ diamond skull (and of course more recently by its auction coup d’état ), which I found so bloody relevant and brilliantly influential in terms of auto-determination and control. Somehow the artist became again the central piece inside the process, redefining the rules of the art world, whilst recently artists seemed to me to be more like pawns inside the whole art world, producing works followings trends. Right now, even if I can produce much (and also do not want to redo previous works in a too commercial format) I am delighted to think about product value transmutation, and how to elevate materials conceptually to a point where art is really about the addition of ideas and shapes into something bigger, something that reaches splendour. 

DMD: How did you meet AA Bronson? [Mr. Bronson, with his partners Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal lived and worked together from 1969 to 1994 under the collective name General Idea]. And what does he mean to you?

ii: AA and I met on MySpace about a year and a half ago as I had made some early spoofs of General Idea’s iconic works. He quickly asked me if he was supposed to worship me or not. I quickly had to explain my copycat whereabouts and we immediately became friends. I actually never thought such a networking tool would make me encounter someone who I considered as a mentor, as General Idea has been my earliest influence in terms of media-based conceptual art (with examples such as their FILE Magazine, the AIDS viral  advertisement campaign, to name a few). It has been an honour for me to contribute to his own work as a healer and a teacher, in the School For Young Shamans, and I am really looking forward to moving forward with him; he is pretty much aware of all the things I am focusing on. The media aspect of my work right now is not as important for him now, compared to what he used to do as part of General Idea, but I hope we will soon come up with something strong together in that direction. I am really respectful of that fatherly figure of artists he has become. It is extremely generous of him, and probably helps many young artists in their own development.

DMD: What (that you can tell us about) is coming up next for you?

ii: Well, I am doing a coke spoon entirely made out of sugar called “Plenty Should Be Enough”. Consume as you go. It is an art edition box - a little bit like a Visionaire issue, I’d say - curated by Ju$t Another Rich Kid, and it also includes other artists such as Natalia Brilli and Terence Koh. Then, I am designing a giant beacon for Art Basel Miami Beach early December - it will be attached on the rooftop of the Fredric Snitzer Gallery and light the whole downtown area! It is a commission as part of the group show Death By Basel featuring hot Japanese artists like Chim Pom, or item idem! [Laughs]. To finish 2008, in a desperate attempt to represent the notion of evil itself, I’m doing a giant snow globe in the smoggy mountains of Kyoto, for my show Eye of The Beyonder at my new gallery Super Window Project on the evening of December 24th. I’m also working on opening anytime soon the first non-ephemeral item idem project space in Berlin, but cannot talk too much about it. Then there is the extension of all the sculptural garments I’ve previously mentioned, with a new piece made entirely of washing tags that I am happily (and freely) collecting through advertisements in the media or on my website, as well as word-of-mouth. Viral communication again, it all comes from that General Idea art group I mentioned. Without unveiling all subtleties of this project, I can say that I am intending to build a database of the brand itself, as every tag is like a memory chip (with name & ID references) of a product. That is the first point, in which I extend into several conceptual marketing plays, while relocating the value of a product on another one, when the transmutation of value and identity into something else implies the magnification of emotions. I am happy to declare that this project is entirely and only realised by the item idem collective (I am not speaking only about me!), and is absolutely not done in collaboration with the designer itself. Every participant will become part of our group and will be credited as such. Once again, it is a project oriented towards collaborative efforts and gathering, not towards obscurity and personal motivation. 

DMD: You recently gave a lecture in Amsterdam as part of the design festival. How was it? It is the most direct work - certainly the most interactive - you’ve ever done. Just you and an audience...

ii: It was fantastic. I felt addicted to stage and had a thought for all those TV speakers whose career is bailing... When they leave the stage for good, they must be so depressed! I was invited as guest lecturer in a panel (including architecture and design juggernauts Rem Koolhaas or Ron Arad) for the latest Experimentadesign biennale in Amsterdam, and decided to exploit this opportunity as a format itself. I then organised a Beauty (For Duty) Pageant for toy poodles - beautifully named Bombay, Margot, Rambo, Rosa, Snowy and Tootsy - where every poodle would introduce chapters of my lecture, such as media and mediums, marketing and economy, relational aesthetics... The last chapter showcased the work of my beloved friend and collaborator, the late Nagi Noda, as an homage. It was a beautiful moment. I was wearing a Yukata on stage (by Eley Kishimoto), Margiela shades and the TV cameraman spent more time filming my gold Lanvin shoes than my lecture itself! [Laughs]. Such a bad thing to happen but really it’s so perfect at the same time! I loved being confronted by my own little reality, and even more by the audience itself. It was a very hard and challenging process, and it asked me to reach deep inside to get the right skills to work on that new fascinating medium. It made me think that I would love to be on  Japanese TV in one of those cooking shows too. I tried to put my friend Terence Koh in a similar show last time he came for his Boy By The Sea Yokohama triennale performance but it was a little tight timing-wise. He would have been perfect for Japanese TV.

DMD: I’d love to have seen that happen. Do you think anyone will ever write a definitive piece about you? You have so many projects - across all medias - in your archive. Is there beauty in not being able to summarise you?

ii: Well, I think you are probably making a very good one right now! Because your way of apprehending my work is multiple, through different angles, you allow various parts of yourself to express opinions... I am getting very scared about biased medias, you know - the art-type-kind-of-review, it can end up being so linear sometimes. I think what I do shines in various directions, so it should be considered with the same generosity, hopefully. Anyway, I can’t wait to have bad press actually, it’s probably even better than good press itself! [Laughs]. Recently a writer in Frieze magazine felt my work was “over-theatrical”. I kinda liked it! Probably a complete review could not be done because you can’t judge a human being simply for his work skills. But then again, I am interested by the non-professional point of view, so maybe, yes, this format can exist? It is so beautiful to not be able to fit any box though, we are all unique and we should be so proud of it. We don’t come boxed by the dozen...

DMD

blogs.colette.fr/itemidem/