The intention doesn’t matter

In front a cup of coffee.

For me, the expression of emotion is never calculated.
I’ll wager that emotion is always there if the work is motivated by pleasure and desire. Since I often have too many ideas or desires, I usually start each project with endless lists, which I then cut into little strips and arrange in order of preference to make choosing easier. I usually adopt a process of elimination, automatically rejecting the less appealing ideas, and also the ones that seem to be less well-suited to the material requirements: timeframe, budget and so on. Sometimes, I have a strong desire for a certain idea that stands out from all the others and this means the elimination process is unnecessary.
My lists include several categories: ideas, but also material details about the project, and finally “models”, the names of artists I admire. Thinking of them encourages me to start work.
That’s why I also do a lot of documenting. From my library, I choose books that inspire me, I look at them (many at a time), without dwelling on them, but “thinking in parallel”, in a state of passive alertness similar to what you might feel when listening to music. I might even spend long hours in bookshops doing the same thing.
When it comes to work, I can’t stand doing the same thing twice.
My lists, which I keep, contain lots of ideas that haven’t yet seen the light of day. I hope I live a long time, so I can make many of them reality.
Sometimes this disheartens me, because each new project generates new lists, which means new ideas. Maybe I’ll sell them to a young artist one day, like a businessman might sell his shop, or a notary his mandate.
There is a virtue to sifting through the little strips I form from my lists which is similar to the experience described by Matisse when he said you need to “exhaust the painting”.
In practice, after noting, cutting, sticking together, I often find that I’m starting out on a long journey, where intuition is strong from the outset, towards ideas that gradually become more complex, only to return to my initial vision, but this time it has been enhanced by all the side-tracking (I think of this wonderful quote from Picasso: “It takes a long time to become young”).  Also, it’s not uncommon for ideas that might seem incompatible at first glance, to merge together. The ostensibly very simple finished work has been enhanced by all the meanings gathered along the way.
This preparatory stage, when note-making is more important than drawing, has the same effect on me as a map has on a traveller. I define, delineate, mark boundaries, start getting to know my terrain, and this reassures me and tells me that it would be easier for me to get lost with rather than without a map. Indeed, even though this research phase might last a long time, I never know where I’m going when I start out. I never have the sense of the precise direction of what I am undertaking, the direction always unfolds unexpectedly, depending on how I manipulate the shapes, the materials. I never illustrate predetermined concepts. The concept and the direction always emerge from the action. When I put my notes aside and move on to the materials, they themselves dictate their own logic and a direction I hadn’t thought of before. In this way, my notes are similar to Le Corbusier’s Modulor, an effective tool for designing façades. But if intuition invites you to depart from the rules, you need to follow your intuition and not the Modulor.
In another context Churchill said (I love quotations, I think you might have gathered that. They give me the same comfort as the models on my lists). “A plan is nothing, the planning is everything”. The use of chance, which I often resort to, helps to distance me even further. However precise the project may be on paper, even when I draft detailed projects and plastic models (I always construct plastic models on a scale of 1:20 when preparing my exhibitions), the final result is always a surprise. This surprise is even greater and further removed from the project when I create “participatory” works to which the public’s contribution adds an unpredictable dimension.
In short, when it comes to art, it is not the initial intention that matters.
It’s the same thing in life, wouldn’t you say? You can’t understand your own life before you’ve lived it. I called a recent exhibition “Deinde
philosophari” (you need to live first and philosophise later): it was a large game of construction made up of small quadrangular shapes which the visitors could use to build houses, cities, streets, bridges or anything else.
My favourite quote is from Paul Klee: “what I do teaches me what I am looking for”.