“If you want to reach a large audience,” said Dick Higgins, “then you have to speak the language of this audience.” So to conclude, it is thus mediocrity that wins over art, and certainly not that art beats out mediocrity.

In my projects, I try, modestly – but firmly – to show that this fate is not singular. In the history of contemporary art, Fluxus or John Cage, for example, represents a stage that I would qualify as adolescence. They pushed the boundaries of artistic experimentation, and in order to break away from academicism, by systematically rejecting conventions, whether of language or of music, contemporary art distanced itself even further from the layman, a bit like the teenager who rebels against his parents to find his identity.

This phase was essentially turned “against” something. It was necessary in order to stretch the boundaries of art, but it seems to me that contemporary art has now attained a cerain maturity apt of receiving my work. Just like the teenager who completely refuses to follow the rules, then reinstating them by personalizing them as an adult, I reinstate in my work rules: those of language, of the signifier. I use, like Filliou, language for the meaning of words and not their shape, and I use song with its strict rules of vibrato and technical lyricism, for the sake of aesthetics.

If the preceding expérimentations were needed to push the boundaries of art, that have, in my opinion, reached their limit as a result.