Contrary to what appears at first glance, Tony Regazzoni’s work is not just a well-practised and entertaining performative sound and light show, and despite the recurrent use of the codes of the party and the night, it would be a shame to miss out on a thought process that is much more constructed than what we have been shown. Good taste, class struggle and kitsch, reappropriation of the original by the copy and criticism of a self-righteous morality, deconstruction of archetypes, are all commitments that the artist carries out by using the references he knows best, those that made him grow up. […]

Léo Marin : Hello Tony. There have already been many texts about your work, which deal with nightclubs, parties, and the relationship to pagan rituals that you emphasise in your installations or when you perform them. But I can’t stop thinking about those roadside clubs, at the edge of the city. Those almost timeless places, where different, strong aesthetics mix, from parties of questionable taste, or sometimes even still stuck in the first half of the 90s. This particular aesthetic. Could you tell us a little more about these aesthetic choices and the relationship you have with them?

Tony Regazzoni : […] The discotheque is for me symptomatic of this ever-present impermeability between the different social classes and which is asserted here by the notion of good or bad taste. What is listenable, danceable, or feasible (in terms of architecture and decoration) and what is not. It is the often pejorative and negative judgement of the urban on the rural.

In the history of discotheques there was a real desire to create a temple dedicated to nightlife. What interests me are the successive derivatives that have taken over the notion of temple, particularly through the use of quotations from Antiquity: the pyramids, the colonnades, the gardens, the fountains, etc., but made of poor materials (plaster, wood, trompe l’oeil paint, etc.), which brings us directly to the definition of kitsch.

These establishments emerged at the same time as postmodernism in architecture, a style which, in order to resist the International Style which dominated Western thought at the time, re-injected decorative and ornamental elements by playing with more or less humorous quotations (notably from Antiquity) which have often been described as “bad taste”. […] In addition to the emotional bond I have with these discotheques, their historical and architectural heritage appeals to me because I realise the social and political importance they convey today, just like the history of kitsch seems to me to be an interesting ground for criticising the dominant and well-meaning bourgeois model, which may seem paradoxical when we know that kitsch was born of the bourgeoisie.

L.M. : […] What are you trying to highlight? Since you and I both know that kitsch also operates by shifting and that what is in good taste for a certain social class now will inevitably no longer be so after a certain time. […]



T.R. : It’s still a bit tricky to talk about good or bad taste. It’s a fluctuating value, even more so today, because fashion and cool completely blur the lines. The same goes for kitsch. What was kitsch a century ago is not necessarily kitsch today, because kitsch now has its history. Historically, there are things that we know are kitsch, but we know it so well that they end up losing this intrinsic value. Because what is fundamentally kitsch, I think, is the kind of kitsch that is kitsch without knowing it, that doesn’t claim it. […] Namely an object of a certain style recognised and appreciated by a dominant class, copied, and stripped of its essence and original materials to be duplicated and sold en masse and at low prices to a class that wishes to surround itself with the same objects as the dominant class, but does not have the means to do so. […] Therefore, I think that even if notions of good or bad taste fluctuate, value judgements persist through the cultural and wealth levels of individuals. […] And this is precisely where kitsch interests me and where I think it can become a political tool, when it makes people smile in a pejorative way or when it hurts the eyes of those who think they are superior (in terms of culture and wealth). […]

L.M. : “A political tool”? Are you saying that you use kitsch like others have done before you with satire or caricature? Ideally, what reaction would you like to trigger?

T.R. : There are two stories in kitsch that I find interesting and that correlate my smalltown boy story. The class relation, which we were talking about earlier, and the camp one.

[…] I find it exciting, not to say perverse, that by taking over an aesthetic that is supposed to “entertain”, other ways of reading can incorporated into it. And all my work is built like that. There is the set and the backstage. You have to be able to scratch away at the top layer. But I also accept that people are only satisfied with the first part, even if I often feel a certain discredit. It is part of the game. The series of images, sculptures and exhibitions entitled The Lost Opera that I started in 2014, which initially took on poster, puzzle, or Saint-Sulpice style imagery, was thought up on this model. The challenge for me was to deconstruct the sacrosanct myth of Progress through which the West has allowed itself and still allows itself a whole bunch of atrocities under the guise of evolutions: technological, liberal ones, etc.

I am currently working on a new project entitled “Hélèn.e” for which I wanted to work with drag people and where, through the creation of sets and performances, we are going to deconstruct the already caricatured codes of sitcoms, which have lulled us since the 1980s and 1990s.

L.M. : Ah, here we are, you take a lot of inspiration from the popular culture of the 90s, a very particular and nostalgic era, why do you show so much interest and references to that period?

T.R. : The word nostalgia, like the word kitsch, has the particularity of being very negatively connoted. Initially, the word “nostalgia” was used to describe the “homesickness” that soldiers or sailors who were relocated because of their duties might feel. But the word has been enhanced with other connotations which today make it to be perceived much more negatively because it expresses a kind of backward-looking resentment, the much vaunted “it was better before”, which goes against the progressive ideal on which the whole of Western society has been built since the 18th century. I do not feel homesick or melancholy about the past. However, I am willing to give a nostalgic value to my way of approaching things, insofar as I mainly refer to a vocabulary of forms, objects, inventions… which are intimately linked to my experience, and for which there are emotional and therefore subjective links.

This brings me back once again to the Western ideology which, through the scientific modus, gives precedence to objectivity over the subjective. Only that which is objective, rational, in short “universal”, and therefore devoid of affect, etc., deserves to be exposed/studied/worked on. Once again, I feel like referring to queer but also post-colonial theories which have endeavoured to demonstrate that the universal model of thought is of course correlated to the Western model of domination. Universality is after all a concept erected only by men, and white men at that. […] As I never had an academic culture, it is rather through experience that my thinking takes shape. This is undoubtedly where we find the idea of nostalgia because there is inevitably some affect in experience. However, if experience allows for emergence, it spreads through a whole host of broader questions that are in fact linked to something that is undoubtedly more objective.

[…] Historically, I find this period to be incredibly rich. It seems to me to be a pivotal moment in the history of humanity: with the advent of the neo-liberal model and the emancipation of capitalism-consumerism even in communist societies, the last “great works” in France under Mitterrand, the birth of Italo-disco, disco high-NRG, trance, house and techno (a small enchanted musical parenthesis) and the invention of new ways of partying and therefore of emancipation, the invention of the Internet (which also includes that of the Minitel)… A moment when, it seems to me, History changed dramatically. The fact that I arrived in the world at that time is purely coincidental :)

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