Pataphysics: What do you like about interviews?
Sylvère Lotringer: In an interview there's something very strange that happens – you bring out someone and you disappear yourself as an interviewer. Interviewing is a kind of suicidal operation, because when you're totally successful you become unnecessary. So I liked doing interviews because it was a disappearing process. When I interviewed artists I was interested in losing my French identity by becoming them. It was this process of becoming something else or becoming an artist through them by using their language to talk in a way that I couldn't. The interviews were also a way of publishing and having a record, because I'd stopped writing academic stuff; interviews couldn't really be credited as being part of your critical work, but they still existed in this very ambiguous realm… When I arrived in New York I was very struck talking to people like John Cage and Merce Cunningham. I discovered that they were the real thinkers in America, but they were not thinking in exactly a systematic fashion. If they were systematic their systematicity came with bits and pieces of things that wouldn't go together for the French – a bit of Zen, a bit of natural anarchism. I was very struck by the fact that Cage was coming up with something that was very close to what French post-'68 theory had come up with, especially Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, something loose and active and anarchical, but instead of being so forbidding, he did it in much more imaginative or imagistic ways, so you could always relate to something concrete. So I tried to make myself available to American art and the New York artworld, and I hoped that by talking to them they would express in their own artistic language into some sort of theoretical statement. My idea was not to articulate it conceptually, just bring it out by putting what they were saying in the interviews together with other texts or documents on the page. I always liked it when different things enter into some sort of deliberate resonance without losing their own identity. It was a way of establishing a bridge between Europe and the States; between the conceptualization that they were developing in France, and the kind of much more energetic and experimental activity that artists had.
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