After an internship at the model-making agency Grafibus (1984), Pierre Joseph entered the École des Beaux-Arts of Grenoble and then studied 2D and 3D computer graphics at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in 1988 and 1989.
In 1991, he was invited to the Air de Paris gallery in Nice, along with Philippe Parreno and Philippe Perrin. As a group, they founded the "Ateliers du Paradise" [Paradise Studios], where they lived. In this place, surrounded by their works, they made a movie in real time about their daily activities.
From the moment they entered the fine arts school, and under the influence of artists and teachers such as Ange Leccia and Jean-Luc Vilmouth, this generation of artists definitively turned their attention to contemporary society. Pierre Joseph, Bernard Joisten and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster held numerous exhibitions together, such as Hyper-Hyper, Composit, Ozone, or Siberia, which took place in front of the Magasin de Grenoble inside a waterproof case entirely painted white and which parodied the conventions of the site of exhibition.
Pierre Joseph creates installations, photographs and live sculptures that refer to video imagery (video games), television, role-play and the latest sports trends. Even if his works appear to be light and playful, the artist develops an approach that combines interactivity, experience, lived realities and subjectivity.
Pierre Joseph involves the visitor by presenting staged displays at exhibitions and systems or devices that he devises. His work is ephemeral and the objects created or required do not necessarily have any artistic value in and of themselves, but they do imply a personal investment (physical or mental). In 1990 with Cache-cache, he addressed a bundle containing a knife and a pair of Reeboks to ten collectors, inviting them to participate in a game without rules. The same year, with How we gonna behave, he presented ordinary objects (sneakers and a disposable camera) to visitors at the Contemporary Art Fair in Cologne, inviting art lovers to become aware of their own investigation and the tools they use, and surpass their role as mere consumers of the exhibition. These role-plays take on a new dimension in Personnages à réactiver. This mode of intervention in the exhibition was created in 1991 by Pierre Joseph and recalls Ben’s or Gilbert & George’s living sculptures of the 60s and 70s. An actor personifies a legendary, historical or contemporary figure, and performs in the context of an exhibition or one of the artist’s works. A "medieval warrior" and a "leprous beggar" thus moved through the labyrinth of the exhibition No Man’s Time (1991) and a Paintball fighter stood before a painting of Robert Delaunay at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1992. The character was photographed on the night of the opening. This documentation is associated with a reactivation protocol, which is available for purchase, and its owner can then activate "updates" any time they choose. The Personnages à réactiver are also used for urban interventions, featuring on posters.
Pierre Joseph puts the visitor’s focus back on reality through the use of his devices, but he also introduces visitor participation in virtual spaces. In his exhibitions at Villa Arson in Nice in 1997 and in Montpellier in 1998, visitors entered a room, painted blue like a film studio. This enabled a videographic cut-out of the visitor’s image to be produced that could then be inlaid within a virtual world. The artist updated the recorded scene in a totally different way and offered viewers a new vision of themselves by delivering the inlaid version in an adjacent room.
The artist prefers the knowledge one acquires through experience, rather than that found in books. Thus, in 1990, with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, he worked on the notion of ideation (or idea generation) linked to nostalgia in geriatrics. Later, on his return from Japan, where he had been invited on an artist residency in 1997, he documented his own learning processes through video works : learning the Japanese Language (Anake), baseball (My own experience of Baseball), or his experience manufacturing objects in a Japanese factory (Join the work in Japan, Knowledge). He raised the question of the limits of our knowledge in the exhibition Playing with Ancestry (Imagination) in 1998, inviting visitors to imagine how they would present our society to people from the 16th century, as well as the production and uses of our everyday objects.
Joseph considers that the world has already been represented plenty of times, and therefore sketches maps that are determined only by his own subjectivity. For instance, he reduced the public transportation network of his hometown (Nice) to just the bus routes he uses, or the streets of the city of Moriya (Japan) to just those that he had visited. In 1998, he presented his curriculum vitae on a plain piece of paper, written in a concise and conventional manner. However, he affirmed the reality of his social condition as an artist, alternating between his artistic career and side jobs to make ends meet.
In 1996, Pierre Joseph published a text in which he outlined moments when his thought processes and practice broke away from a historical conception of art.*
By highlighting the many forms knowledge can take, reactivating everyday objects, and involving the viewer in different locations, settings and reactivation systems, Pierre Joseph invites us to take an active role in the analysis of meaning and in recognising concrete processes.

* Pierre Joseph, "Mémoire disponible", Documents sur l’art, Dijon, n°10, winter 1996-1997.

Thérèse Beyler
Translated by Anna Knight