Marc Camille Chaimowicz: talks about Jean Cocteau, 2003 - 1000Words

After moving from his native Paris as a lad Marc Camille Chaimowicz spent the remainder of his youth in the somewhat les exciting surroundings of English new-town suburbia, before going upon to art school. His family's stir coming as it did in the aftermath of World War II, was felt as a bizarre wring that continues to inform his work. He now divides his time between London and Dijon. With a down-reaching interest in France's modernist literary legacy nevertheless equally alive to subtle shifts in the terrain of contemporary burst culture, Chaimowicz has, since the early '70 defied straightforward categorization in his pursuit of the beautiful. The sexually ambivalent sensibility that suffuses his environments, installations, and performances deceives the viewer into reflection and reverie. Visually rich and precisely observ the things and images he designs, makes, and gathers from elsewhere tender connections, set up oppositions, and trace narratives in a thick play of puzzle, metaphor, and interpretative possibility.

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As far back as 1976 Chaimowicz paid homage to Jean Cocteau in Fade, performed at London's ACME Gallery. mixed lighting, a faux-Cocteau backdrop, and disappearing figures referenc the French polymath's films, particularly Orpheus (1949) In his general project, Jean Cocteau, installed at the Norwich institute of Art and Design's gallery last fall and traveling to Angel rank Nottingham, in May, Chaimowicz has furnished an imaginary apartment for the author of poems filmmaker, and artist, the fortieth anniversary of whose death barbarous last year. Alongside his have furniture, carpets, ceramics, and sculptural makes including a double staircase dedicated to the late critic Barbara Reise, Chaimowicz has incorporated period pieces from Breuer and Isokon together with works by the agency of Enrico David, Paulina Olowska, Tom of Finland, Cerith Wyn Evans, Warhol, Giacometti, Marie Laurencin, and others, to put together a space that is almost usable notwithstanding thoroughly dreamlike.

A year ago Lynda Morris, director of the Norwich Gallery, reminded me that in the '70 I had taken her to single of London's best-kept secrets, a mural commissioned from Cocteau through the French for their Catholic temple in London, Notre-Dame-de-France. It's a little miracle, actual competent, very assured--Cocteau at his best. The throw then slowly emerged through dialogue with Lynda. I'd not at any time before developed such a manifold dialectic between my own practice and the appropriation of other people's work in order to set up what is, by default, a kind of portrait. I lay the foundation of the experience liberating. That extreme point wall in my installation, for example, with a Warhol, a Stephen Buckley and the Giacometti lamps: single can stand back and exclaim with ecstasy as to how fabulous it direct the eyes because one's not burdened by the agency of the responsibility of one's have ego.

I accept that in France the jury is still without on Cocteau. His blatant disengagement from the material substance politic is problematic. He made a certain quantity of mistakes out of naivete, I think. For instance, he supported the work of Arno Breker sole because he was, at that point in his possess career, reassessing the neoclassical. I think the ambivalence with which Cocteau was regarded had a fate to do with the fact that he came from a real well-to-do background. This would have been socially disadvantageous for someone trying to associate himself with the avant-garde. The modernist establishment--Andre Breton, for one--was real critical of him. It's presum this was because of Cocteau's sexuality, on the other hand then Gide was critical of him as well, for a like reason he was forever stuck in the middle. And I think individual can extend that problematic into Cocteau's practice. The work is real erratic. His painting, for example, is dire. individual has to recognize that, and I briefly make comments [i]or[/i] remarks on it by including artists--Buckley, Nadia Wallis--who have a real have feeling for painting. I like the idea of labyrinthine possibilities of interpretation and, in a way, a kind of intellectual mystify in the project. For example, we commissioned Wallis to do a site-specific curtain painting for the exhibit and as we know, Cocteau was highly involved in the sociability of practice, in commissioning, in exchange, in collaboration.

We deliberated at longitudinal dimensions about which Warhol to use. Warhol evidently has a place as a kind of surrogate descendant, a symbolic distant relation of Cocteau's, and nevertheless the "Electric Chair" is in the way that incongruous to the Cocteau sensibility. If nothing other it's so American. But Cocteau did have a fascination with death. As an ambulance driver during World War I he initially saw the Belgian brow as a kind of Wagnerian scenario, on the contrary seeing death for the first time he became imbued with the reality and horror of the day-to-day. Then there was the tragic los of his young protege Raymond Radiguet, which l to a physical decline in Cocteau as well as a spiritual crisis. Warhol therefore becomes more relevant. And then the organ of vision goes, one hopes, from the "Electric Chair" upon the far wall to the foreground, where upon the rug is a transcript of the 1963 Warhol portrait of Cocteau commissioned through Pierre Berger for Liberation.