“ I met Alain before he met me.

I knew his work. I'd been to the Cecil Taylor concert at the Knitting Factory where his sculptures were. And the really amazing thing is I had a couple of books he collaborated to. Like the book on Rodin's erotic drawings he did with Philippe Sollers. And so I see his name, and it rings a bell. And then this other book, Findings, about my favorite and most inspirational musician, Steve Lacy. In this book, there are marvelous pictures of Alain and Steve Lacy collaborating. I was struck by that. I thought, who is this person showing up both with Steve Lacy and Philippe Sollers ? Sollers being is a really important writer for me, with the whole circle around him, the original journal called Tel quel, that published Roland Barthes and all of these people. And I think who were also very important in Alain's intellectual formation. He knew all of them and then later came l’Infini, in which Alain published. I would see his name in the table of contents again. And of course my predominant passion, which is music, where he was appearing there, too. I was intrigued, but never went to the loft to see the concerts. For some reason. I was brought there by a flutist who wanted to do a concert there. I met with Alain and Ariane, we started talking and it was just this beautiful conversation. The flutist left and I stayed with Alain, and we talked about a million things.

I remember one particular conversation. It was about the Commandments, we were talking about idolatry and how essentially his pieces were anti-idolatry, that they're not there for the person to look at and to genuflect to. They weren't a sacralization of that. But they were writing, they were inscription, they had to do with scripture. And I mentioned how in Jewish mysticism, the character, the Hebrew letter, the vowel is the soul, which is often not written down. And the bones of the consonant are the body. There was something that really spoke to me in the work in that way. That was like a casual conversation between us. And they just continued like that very intensely. I just felt very close to him.

I still do of course on so many points of resonance. Like the relationship to music, to me,  Alain is a great musician. I experience everything musically. Anything that really touches me automatically becomes a musical experience for me, in a sense. So in looking at his work, or experiencing his work, I experience it as music to the dimensions of space, of time, of texture. The materials of the sculpture themselves are sound. Sound is sculptural, sound is material. Those rod iron pieces with those marks , “entailles”, those cuts into the metal that he does on the live melting metal, during the forging… there's that incredible film of him doing that… in those you really have the sense of this material. The sense of that is what I want to do when I play.

When I play with a piece of Alain, it's not that I'm trying to illustrate it in any way or accompany it, it's that I want to participate in the way that it comes into being. The way that his work comes into being is how I want the sound to come into being, with that kind of gesture, attention and energy.

There's so much sonic variety to me in his work, in the very recent pieces too : in these vertical color fields that function like harmony, the way they resonate against each other, with these pieces of metal that sounds like percussive impacts, those are very beautiful gestural arcs, they are not quite flat against the colored wall : all of that is a musical experience.

It's a conversation that happens in words and in sound.

He allows me to understand music in a way, specifically the music that we love that comes from Cecil Taylor, that comes from Ornette Coleman. Yesterday you mentioned the fact that Sidney Bechet had been brought over by his parents to his house when he was a child, I think about the connection of Sidney Bechet' sound and vibrato, about the sound and vibrato of Albert Ayler and about the whole notion of free jazz. That's just a label. I don't really care so much about the label, but the sound doesn't exist as a platonic ideal  like it does in European music, where you have an ideal of the violin sound or of the clarinet sound, where the players put their imprint on it, put their flavor, but the sound almost exists without the body of the player. Whereas the music that we're talking about, the free jazz has its radicality, where the sound never separates from the body that produces it.

Sidney Bechet' sound is a physical signature that is irreplaceable. And it's also totemic, like Ellington's music. When you have these persons who created these sound, they become totems of a certain kind of sonic presence through the body and gesture. And I think that's hugely radical. And it questions the whole history of music. I hope someday Western music will catch up that. And if it does, I think it's because Alain will have helped. He will have had a role by his own work and his continuing tribute to not putting the music in some separate category from culture, but as like a vital part of it."

Michaël Attias

excerpt from Le Commandeur : Tribute to Alain Kirili, 1946-2021

a panel discussion led by David Cohen and published on Art Critical, the online magazine.