Jean-Jacques Lebel – 1 – Beat Impresario

Jean-Jacques Lebel‘s contribution to Beat culture can hardly be overstated.  After all, it was he who was responsible for two of the most important and most comprehensive European Beat presentations – “Beat Generation /Allen Ginsberg”  (2013), (which was manifest first at the Pompidou Center, Metz, then  ZKM, Karlsruhe , then the Ludwig Museum, Budapest), and, “Beat Generation“, the blockbuster show that took place some three years later at the Pompidou Center in Paris.

The New York Times previewing/reviewing the Pompidou Paris show:

“They were my buddies,” Mr. Lebel said as we spoke in his art-filled studio, an expansive, ground-floor space set in a cobblestone courtyard at the foot of Montmartre. “I felt like I owed it to them. Just because they’re dead doesn’t mean they’re not here.”

and on his principle of dissemination:

“I use the term ‘rhizome,’” Mr. Lebel said, referring to the spreading stem systems of plants like ginger and bamboo — a term applied to the transmission of ideas by the post-structuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari. “It’s the contrary of roots. Once your roots dig in, you’re trapped – you can’t move. But artistic and philosophical movements work as rhizomes do -they’re continually spreading across time and space. That’s what I tried to do in the show, and in life.”

Here’s Lebel on the occasion of the Karlsruhe show – being  interviewed

& speaking with Peter Weibel  (following a long introduction in German) on his experiences with the Beats –“Living with the Beats in the Past and the Present”

& more footage (also in German) advertising the Karlsruhe exhibition

& here he gives, on the occasion of its opening, a guided tour of the Ludwig Museum show:

Lebel’s 2013 documentary  film made at this time (in collaboration with Xavier Villetard) – Kerouac/Ginsberg/Burroughs is another item very much worth catching.

Jean-Jacques first met Allen in Paris in the late ‘Fifties, in the context of the famous Beat Hotel. He met Gregory Corso and William Burroughs at that time too. It was the start of a series of significant life-long friendships.

Here he is in 2009, many years later, laying a commemorative plaque at the now-refurbished place (and telling how he now owns Gregory’s old Beat Hotel door!) :

An oft-told tale of Gregory in those days:

Not long after their first meeting Jean Jacques invited Allen and Gregory and  Peter Orlovsky to a family party in honor of his father‘s good friend, Marcel Duchamp (a hero to all of them).

This was the occasion where Gregory, famously, took out a pair of scissors he’d thoughtfully brought with him and proceeded to snip off Duchamp’s tie, much to the horror of  Lebel’s mother, but to the master’s delight! – “C’est tres Dada!”, he was said to have declared

Less impressively, perhaps Allen got down on his knees and kissed Duchamp’s knees!..

Here’s Lebel recalling to art-writer Judith Benhamou-Huet  his first meeting with Duchamp (as a child!)

More on Lebel and Duchamp and his famous father and his art and his activism and his extraordinary achievements on his own terms tomorrow.

We’ll end today with Hopi Lebel (his daughter)’s recording of her father in spirited conversation with Barry Miles