THE AGGRESSIVE FOREST: A CONVERSATION WITH ANAÏS DASSÉ

BY TARA STICKLEY

Being an outsider is sort of like having a second childhood: It puts us in a state of unknowing where we might start calling into question mores that have long been accepted by the local culture. Art-making relies on this meddlesome state of mind. Anaïs Dassé left France for Arkansas about 5 years ago. She was born in Bayonne, the capital of French Basque Country, but studied in Paris and began a career that spanned the fields of design, project management and scientific illustration. Changing continents created a caesura in her work life, and in this space she began painting. Dassé’s monochromatic, textural works are eerie; her paintings and sculptures depict a doomsday world from which all of the adults have vanished or, perhaps stripped of their misused power, exist only as witnesses to the new order. By showing us a feral world without grown-ups, Dassé’s work presents a funhouse mirror of our society in which we are confronted with reflections of our own violence and tribalism, our assumptions about the civilizing capacity of culture, and our doubts around the notion of historical progress.

We spoke with Dassé last November at UA Little Rock’s Windgate Center for Art + Design, where her exhibit “Saint George” was on display.

HUNTING SEASON: Anaïs Dassé’s 2018 work “Hog Hunting,” charcoal, pencil and oil paint on gessoed paper, was inspired by a video the artist saw of a fair in Texas in which the vicious prowess of hunting dogs was put on display.

What about being in Arkansas inspired the shift from scientific illustration to painting? And how does your experience of the South affirm or chafe against the myth of Southern culture you encountered in France?

After a year in Arkansas, we bought a house in a very cookie-cutter neighborhood with kids running around outside in the afternoons; it struck me when hunting season hit that even the 7-year-olds were all geared up with their own rifles, ready to go. It was a culture shock. In Paris, my favorite museum is the Musée du Quai Branly [which houses a collection of 370,000 historical objects from four continents dating back to the Neolithic Era]. When you think about it, you’ve got terrible colonialist loot, but it is the most amazing collection.

When I began working with curators, and specialists of really obscure subjects, I recognized they were telling their own versions of the story, and I knew their perspectives on race and gender could influence their displays. I always thought about this as a designer: There is a gap [in the transmission of knowledge]. A lot of people from different backgrounds go to the museums in Paris … and as the viewer, you’re trying to fill the gaps between all these little pieces of information, and you’re merciless. I always felt the way we display the information — the viewer in front of it — everybody is filling gaps. In the end, they [the curators] can tell you whatever they want. This is also the question of colonialism: In these narratives, the “winner” is the one talking. It’s not just missing information; it’s about how we write history.

Who are the “savages”?

As French people, we colonized Africa — that’s where a lot of the loot in our museums comes from. I saw these depictions of African tribes that were painted, or blurry photographs, and we’re merciless. That’s a merciless way of storytelling.

In France, I grew up with American TV shows and saw the gun violence. … I also grew up with the images of the child soldiers of Boko Haram. Then here in Arkansas — in my own backyard — I see kids running around with their rifles out to go deer hunting, and I started asking myself, “Where does reality stop, and where does fiction start?” That’s the main part of my work here. It’s not a moral judgment. Now that I live here, I understand a lot more about the NRA and hunting culture — this isn’t a statement about morality that I’m making. It’s more of an aesthetic shock.

That lens as an outsider can make ideologies and cultural patterns apparent to you here, and it’s interesting that you were then able to turn that lens back on your own culture.

I try to question myself a lot about that because if you don’t, you arrive in a state — and I think this is a current issue — where you don’t recognize multiplicity, such as multicultural backgrounds, as an advantage. From my research in ethnography … I started to see the same rituals and patterns in many cultures. … Like when we talked about genocide, you spoke about Native Americans, and I think about European colonialism. It’s like we’re repeating the same thing over and over. We’ve never been more informed, but for some reason we’ve never been more anxious and incapable of telling the difference between fiction and reality, and you know, fake news.

Which relates to the piece “When They Put the Children in Cages, You Did Nothing” and the detention centers. If we are not at least talking about it and acknowledging that this is something we recognize as a group, well then, nothing will happen. It will just be [considered] as one bias or one point of view. And it’s not just one bias. We are here as a group, in this place, at this time, with a common background, and maybe we’ve got different views and different cultures, but we are all only two generations from the last genocide. It’s not that far away. We shouldn’t have lost that much [perspective] as a people.

For the full interview with Anaïs Dassé, see arktimes.com/rock-candy.