« Éric Mangion: Before launching this work on The Encyclopaedia of Wars you were an art critic, exhibition cura- tor and writer. You abandoned at least the first two «roles» to devote your- self, when you were forty years old, to this new project. Moreover, you talk about it as the project of the « rest of your life ». How do you work on an everyday basis to successfully carry out this research in time? How does one put together an encyclopaedia?

Jean-Yves Jouannais: I don’t really know how this occupation imposed itself in my life, especially how it took on such scope, to the point of absorbing eve- rything. I think I’ve grasped that most of the stimuli, the sources are literary objects, and not models encountered in the field of art. In terms of The Ency- clopaedia of Wars’ essential elements, I’d mention the influence of Bouvard and Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert, In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust and Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne — in which there is much talk about the art of fortifications and poliorcetics —, or a major book, to my mind, that you alerted me to, what’s more, which is On the Natural His- tory of Destruction by W.G. Sebald.

When it comes to the references to the history of art, I must mention the significance of two artists, who, although they didn’t act as an impetus, did nevertheless reassure and encourage me along the way. I am referring to Marcel Broodthaers and Roman Opalka. In 1963, when he was forty years old, Broodthaers cast plaster copies of his last collection of poems and exhibited them as sculpture. I could paraphrase the sentences, which have since become famous, that could be read on the invitation to his first exhibition in Brussels in April 1964: «I’ve also wondered whether I couldn’t sell something and succeed in life. For some time now, I’ve been a good for nothing. I am forty years old.»

It was in 1968 that he named himself « Curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Department.» Now, The Encyclo- paedia of Wars, influenced as much by Broodthaers as by the passion nurtu- red by the Société Perpendiculaire for what was called «tertiary art,» developed according to a flow chart as Stalinian as it is Pataphysical: “Encyclopaedia of Wars, Heritage Department”; “Office for converting a non-war library into a war library”; “Missing Images Archives”; “Subcom- mittee of Children’s Works in War Studies” (where, for the moment, the main question is to bring together my children’s drawings on the theme of uniforms and weapons); “Maps and Atlas Cabinet,” and, lastly, the evolving exhibition Comment se faire raconter les guerres par un grand-père mort (How to Get a Dead Grandfather to Tell You War Stories), which is an entire department in its own right.

As for Roman Opalka, one day in 1965, in a café in Warsaw, while he was waiting for his wife who was late, he had the idea of materialising time with his painting. The painting as a lateness, according to the indications of Duchamp’s The Green Box, so as to witness another lateness. I myself have always had the impression of having waited in a café. Expecting excitement, a par- tiality, something of a vocation, a calling. But nothing ever came. So, The Encyclopaedia of Wars, which is a collection, litany, serial, detailed account, proves to be an activity that, even if it doesn’t answer this expectation, is on the other hand a mode of this waiting, one of its possible forms, which is today for me the most acceptable, although not the most comfortable, but the most exciting and gratifying.»