The March 1933 issue of La Nouvelle Revue Française contained an essay by the French writer Paul Valéry on his poem ‘Le Cimetière marin’ (The Graveyard by the Sea, 1922). It was here, within a rather lengthy sentence, that he set down a phrase which would, over time, be cut from its context, pared back, and become an aphorism of modernism: un ouvrage n’est jamais achevé […] mais abandonné. It is difficult not to be reminded of this phrase – that a work of art is never truly completed, only abandoned – when considering the work of Mark Manders.

Manders’s museum and gallery installations often resemble the studio of an artist who has stepped outside, although we can never be sure if or when he might return. The works left behind, usually, are sculptures, large heads, figures, and animals, sometimes architectural elements; many seem to be formed of red clay, and are often wrapped in plastic as if to keep them damp, although they then often resemble something far more troubling. For it is this which actually shrouds them all: a sense of disquiet, or melancholy. 

The interview was conducted over Zoom, with Manders joining from his studio in Ronse, Belgium, where he lives and works.

Jeremy Millar: Your book The Absence of Mark Manders (2007) opens with a note to the owner. It reads: ‘My apologies – this is a book of a work in progress.’ It’s such a beautiful way to start, but I wondered what did you think you were apologising for?

Mark Manders: That it was just not ready. It’s like with an explosion: everything is in it, but you cannot see everything, not everything is ready. Some books that I started maybe fifteen years ago are still exploding, still growing.

JM: Do you ever really feel like a work is finished?

MM: Yeah, some things I am 100 percent sure are finished. But I also feel that I can change works because I can show them together with other works. So in that sense, they’re also never really finished.

JM: In a later publication, Reference Book, you reproduce that statement again, or a photograph of it, but you’ve crossed the date out and added a new one, 2012.

MM: I can do the same thing again.

JM: I think it’s a very elegant way of acknowledging something quite fundamental in your practice: that time has passed, but certain things have remained the same, despite everything.

MM: What really fascinates me about making things is that you can freeze time in an object and that you can grow older around it. The world changes, but this thing is always in a way the same. It’s something so fundamental to our thinking. When I started, I was really fascinated by books written in the first person, that you really could hear somebody thinking. Of course, I knew that it was a fictional character, but this feeling that you can think together with somebody else and relate to that really fascinated me. So, I wanted to become a writer, but then it became more interesting to write with objects and to make a kind of three-dimensional book that you could enter and just walk through. It’s something much more complicated and I think very interesting, how our mind relates to physical objects. Of course, language is also very fascinating, but objects are very, very complex in how they relate to our minds.

JM: You made that first work, Inhabited for a Survey (First Floor Plan from Self-Portrait as a Building) (1986), when you were just eighteen years old. Did you have any sense at that point that it was going to be such an important work, that you had found something that you wanted to do?

MM: Some things I did then, I wouldn’t show now – when you’re eighteen, you’re just not ready – but I really found what I wanted to do; I really believed in that. I was studying graphic design, but I was afraid to tell people that I wanted to be an artist, although I was already making my things. I also didn’t believe that you could study to become an artist. But after a few days, I thought, shit, I’m really wasting my time, I really have to be honest. I asked the director of the art school if I could change my direction. He saw my work and he said, yeah, you could graduate now, you know, it’s really fantastic; I cannot teach you anything, but take your time here, do whatever you want. Those years in art school were really fantastic, and I really used it to learn practical things, like how to weld. If I have an idea now, I really know how to make it, but back then that knowledge was very underrated. You can think much faster if you know how to make something.

JM: You describe the materials you used in that first work – the pencils, the pens – as ‘writing materials’, although I suspect that many artists would describe them as ‘drawing materials’. Could you say a little more on the importance of writing to you?

MM: Now when I make an exhibition, I can make a list of words that I can use in it. As you know, I recently had a very small show at Modern Art in London. It was only three works, but each work has all existing words in it. One work (Small Room with Three Dead Birds and Falling Dictionary, 2020–2025) is a canvas floor with dead birds and a painting of a falling dictionary; just a few words that, if you write them down, are not really related. But the way that they were assembled in this work, they become like three-dimensional poems. I think about my works like three-dimensional poems.

JM: This reminds me of the writings of Raymond Roussel, and of the extraordinary machines he described which were often generated through word-play.

MM: I’ve read a lot about Roussel, because I was very interested in the idea that he used language like a machine. It is a construction, it creates certain images, and that’s really fascinating because it relates to my work. I sometimes say that, personally, I would never make the works that I make, but that’s how they started and they’ve become something like a machine that generates other works.

JM: You now have certain forms, and certain materials, that reoccur, and they’ve created a syntax or a grammar of how to make sculptures: words which you then transcribe into sculptural form.

MM: One of the things that I’m really interested in is the greatness of the human mind, but also mental illness, and things like neurosis, psychosis and hoarding – I really study these things. The interest in neurotic thinking slowly developed into a work called Room with Fives (1993–2001), and I really wanted to see how a number, something outside my body, could direct me to think something, to take just one word out of all words, and build something like a three-dimensional poem out of it.

Then I thought, what would happen if I take a word that is not well known, that nobody is really interested in. What I’m talking about – maybe it sounds strange – is the project with the Skiapods. I wrote a book called All Words Are One (2023), and it starts with this quote: ‘And now, Pinocchio, let’s write a beautiful poem, and use only one single word.’ It’s a quote from Pinocchio. Well, it’s not a real quote, because everything in this book is kind of fiction.

So, this was like an assignment in many different steps. The first step was to create a room filled with all existing words. And then the second step was to choose one single word that is hardly used, a word linked to a failed myth. So, I chose this word, skiapod, and decided to become the one person who knows everything about this word. A skiapod is a figure with one leg and a big foot, and it uses its foot as an umbrella to protect itself from the sun. It’s a real myth and, for me, the interesting thing is that all skiapods hold their legs like a strange object, like a thing, like the leg is not really part of the body. And so, I made a book with everything we, as humans, know about skiapods. The third step was to expand the myth by creating fake images with a fake history. For this project, that I started maybe fifteen years ago, I started creating images, and I put them on the internet. And now, it’s very difficult to know which skiapods are real, and which were made here in my studio. For example, this is like a Japanese manga, from 1973.

JM: But you made it?

MM: Difficult to say.

JM: Okay.

[MM flicks through the pages of Skiapod, raising it to the screen.]

MM: This is like a Max Ernst, this collage. These are Russian set-designs for opera. The myth of the skiapod is so strange – it’s almost like a ‘thinking mistake’. But people really believed in it. Now it’s difficult to say which skiapod images are real and which were made by me, but I can assure you that some of these are real.

JM: Is that Warburg?

MM: Yeah. There are lots of links, with interesting people like Roussel. And this is the next step. I made is a list of all words that I used to describe the skiapods. And a Wikipedia page, where, if you look closely, you realise it’s a fake Wikipedia page. But then on the real Wikipedia, the information is also fake. It was very difficult to fake the real Wikipedia.

So, for example, this is a Samuel Beckett film. In 1957, he made a play called Act Without Words, and after that, he made this. It’s called Act with One Single Word – it’s like another version of Not I, where you could only see the actor’s mouth. But she was only allowed to say one word, and that word was ‘skiapod’. She had five minutes to tell the story of her life, and she was only allowed to say the word ‘skiapod’.

JM: No. Really?

MM: It was the first two months of ChatGPT. And ChatGPT was very, very bad. I thought, this is my chance to use ChatGPT, as I could manipulate it very easily. For example, I wanted to say something about Marcel Broodthaers, that Harald Szeemann had asked him to make a museum with skiapods for Documenta. But that Broodthaers became really frustrated because there were only a few images of skiapods. And at that time it was fairly easy to ask ChatGPT to manipulate it. I’m not sure it would work now, but on 20 March 2023, it was still possible.

And then I made two classrooms. One is like a 1920s classroom, but with stickers of skiapods on the locker doors. The other room is…a little bit didactic, like an education room in an art exhibition, about skiapods, how an image or idea can travel through different periods. The last thing was a book called La Scomparsa degli Sciapodi, The Disappearance of the Skiapods. It has just a few skiapods in it. But if you drop it like this – [MM throws the book flat on the floor; he then picks it up and starts flicking through it once more] – they become a greyscale. And if you do it like this – [MM throws the book flat on the floor once more; he flicks through the book briefly but they are still in greyscale. He then lays the closed book flat on his upright palm and slaps the cover hard] – see, then they’re gone. [MM flicks through the book while showing it to the screen; the images have all disappeared] The last step is this. The disappearance of the skiapods.

JM: [Gasps].

MM: Do you know this painting by Sigmar Polke, Höhere Wesen befahlen: rechte obere Ecke schwarz malen! (1969)?

The whole thing is based on this. It’s like an instruction. And learning as a thing. I was maybe twenty when I first saw this work. For me it was really interesting to use that painting to create something more complex, with more layers. I really wanted to see if it’s possible to take one word and change the meaning of this word on the internet. And see if it’s possible. It’s very easy to take a simple myth, and connect this myth with many different things, to make something current out of it. It really shows how strangely our world is connected, is constructed. And our knowledge, how easy it is to manipulate it, and to make it something fitting.

JM: That’s extraordinary. I’m still not sure what I’ve just seen, with that book, with the images disappearing.

MM: Yeah.

JM: That I’ve imagined it happening.

MM: That’s the thing.

JM: I want to ask you about your studio. Traditionally studios have been rather private, and artists are protective of them; they don’t like other people seeing them. But you seem quite happy not only to share images of your studio, but also recreate the studio in exhibitions. I wonder if you could say a little about that, about this making public of a private space. In lots of painters’ studios, for example, they turn the paintings to the wall, so that they can’t be seen. But you like having your unfinished works in the studio, you like looking at them, and sharing the space with them. And they give you ideas for new works as well.

MM: Sometimes I create studio spaces in exhibitions, and it’s like a living room. There are many different rooms in the museum, and then suddenly you step into a studio that has just been left, and for me that’s the same thing as a living room. And yeah, I use my unfinished work. In my studio I’m very optimistic. So if I start a work, I think it will become really, really great, although there’s not really a reason to think like that. But I’m optimistic. So if they didn’t work out, I have to find ways that they do work out. So, they generate a lot of ideas. Sometimes when I make works, I put them in my studio, and I give myself a task to make something that will work really well together with that work. And then, quite often, these works become better than the other works. I use works to generate other works; I use these tricks in my studio to generate ideas.

JM: I want to go back to your time at art school. Instead of having a studio space, you worked in the hallway, and you’d always put this sign up saying: will be cleared away tomorrow. It’s just such a great phrase, I think, for a sculptor to attach to their work. Do you think that this experience influenced the very contingent nature of your work, or did you go into that space because you wanted that contingent quality?

MM: It was really a beautiful Rietveld building, and there was one area that was never used, and I wanted to have my studio there. So I made that sign. I worked there for four years, but the thing was that it was very public. All through the day there were people walking next to me, and I really had to train myself just to focus on my work. As an artist you’re always kind of growing up in public, and that is where I learned how to do that. And also, to ignore the public, because in a way it does not matter what you think about my work. A little part of me cares about that, but most of me doesn’t, because I have to be totally honest with myself to make the works that I want to make. Later you can think what you want, but I have to be 100 per cent sure of what I show, and I think I learned that in those four years working in this strange place in the art school.

JM: It feels that that relationship between distraction and attention is really at the core of what it is to be an artist, a lot of the time, and knowing when to allow oneself to be distracted or when not to be distracted.

MM: There is also something so strange if you make, because you need the desire to make something, the desire to say something, to make something strong, sometimes something beautiful, that if you want that too much, then it becomes really bad. It’s a very strange combination of all these things. In my studio I have to be totally nonchalant, but I also have to be very precise at the same time, so it’s like a very strange mixture. I really enjoy making things. I think my work is very serious, but I’m also having really a lot of fun in my studio; it’s really fantastic to make these things, and I’m really happy that I can.

JM: You just mentioned fun, and I want to ask you about humour. As you just said, your work is very serious, it has a weight to it – a formal weight, an intellectual weight – but I do think it’s funny. I actually laughed out loud reading one of your books, when I saw the caption for a particular work, —(—/—/—/—/—) (1998). It says: ‘At a certain point, I had an overwhelming urge to say something beautiful. In a frenzy, I went to the supermarket and bought about 10 packages of tea.’ It felt like such an absurd piece of consequential thinking.

MM: Because I can only write with things, I thought a good idea is to go to the supermarket, and to look for something I could write with. When I made that piece I became, again, very jealous of real writers, that they could write words, and words, and words, and that they could direct me in what to think. So I thought, maybe I have to find a way to write more literally, so I went to the supermarket and looked around, and thought, what can I buy here to write with? I saw a package of tea and realised that you can use a tea bag, with a label on the floor and a label on the tea bag, and you can build sentences with them, they can become rhythmic. So, I bought the tea and started writing. A few years later, it became a piece called Finished Sentence (1998–2006); it’s a small machine-like thing that looks like a musical instrument. It’s an object that tries to say something to us, something really beautiful, but it just came from the supermarket.

JM: I mean, you’re right, it is a beautiful piece, but at the same time, you’re aware of its absurdity?

MM: Of course, but also: I have time to do this. It’s my profession, I have to make and I have the time to. I can make something with every word that exists, and I can make something with every object that exists. But then, I don’t have that much time – I will live only for a very short time, like all of us – so I want to use my time really well to say something that is meaningful for me. It’s absurd to try to write with tea bags, but when I start something like that, I’m very certain and optimistic that I can say something beautiful with tea bags, and I think I was right.