1996 · Brancusi contre États-Unis · Vigner (EN)

"Flying has occupied my mind as long as I live."
BRANCUSI

Q : You said that the Exhibit 1 is a work of art and in your opinion represents a bird that is flying ?
A : No, not that it represents a bird, but it does suggest, is has the qualities of suggesting a flying bird, suggesting the flight of a bird. It does not represent a bird.
Q : It does not represent a bird ?
A : No.
Q : Has the same quality of representing a fish ?
A : No.
Q : If it was called a fish ?...
A : Not what it is called, only it gives you the feeling. Not because it is called a bird, but because it does suggest the quality of flight.
Q : That is the only thing that makes it a work of art ?
A : No, the form, the balance, the beautiful sense of workmanship, and the pleasure that it gives me to look at it.
Q : You get the same amount of pleasure from any beautiful highly polished piece of metal ?
A : No sir.

"The word ‘bird’ did not have the same meaning for the counsel for the defence as it had for plaintiff. For the one it meant a flying object, for the other it constituted the very essence of flight. In the Brancusi trial, the testimony of different players was couched in the same words, but the tone of voice was different and so was the emotional content. The meaning as such was not enough. When testifying they testified to different things. On stage, I am not interested in meaning, not at all. What interests me is the language, the writing, as poetic material - the word per se. … It is not meaning that we are concerned with: what we work with is the tone of voice, what we search for is the moment when the tone makes sense."
ÉRIC VIGNER

"A trial. A confined space in which sit an areopagus of sages whose calling it is to decide what is, and what is not, a work of art. As always and everywhere, two words, two worlds, two truths face each other. Unable to communicate: Knowledge and Knowing. And then, as though sliding down an inclined plane, “The Bird” dematerialises and scatters into space, while the spoken word expands and assumes a bodily form somewhere else, in the field of sound. It is a forum, a public space, where the Conference of Birds meets, where the actors, like the angels in Wim Wenders’s ‘The sky above Berlin’ (also known as Wings of Desire), try to redefine the rules that govern the functioning of the world by the redefining the word. It is all about the wind, about flying, about the flight of feelings. The question is about the word that participates in the creation of the world. As one invents the world by inventing the word. The question is how dramatic art can do justice to it. A working hypothesis !" 
BÉnÉdicte Vigner