Jean-Jacques Lebel – 2

Wikipidea in their attempt to define and thus box him, in an otherwise useful preliminary digest, define Jean Jacques Lebel as a “French visual artist, poet, art collector, writer, political activist, and creator of performance art happening art events”, noting his “heterogeneous artworks”

Lebel himself will have nothing to do with this:

“Visual artist? Filmmaker? Writer? Social critic? Organiser of independent international festivals? Engineer of poly-disciplinary fusions? It hardly matters what’s written in the police file when what you’re concerned with is transdisciplinary collaborations that undermine the law of supply and demand, going beyond it in their deliberate rhizomatic abundance.”

In 2018 the Pompidou Center in Paris sponsored a show celebrating Lebel, “Jean-Jacques Lebel L’Outrepasseur” (Jean-Jacques Lebel – The Transgressor) –

from an interview with Nicolas Liucci-Goutnikov, the curator

N L-G:   This exhibition of your work at the Centre Pompidou opens exactly fifty years after the events of May 1968.  How do you see this non-coincidental coincidence?

JJ-L:  Edgar Faure, minister of education in the not-at-all-revolutionary Pompidou government, displayed a certain lucidity when he described the May events as a “vast happening”. In this, he radically disagrees with the ideologues of Work, Family and Homeland for whom “nothing happened in May ’68”. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is a minister. So it’s not altogether an accident that the Centre Pompidou should give me an exhibition on the fiftieth anniversary of what was for thousands of dissidents, myself included, the most intense experience of our lives. Let’s be frank: this exhibition, limited in scope and staged on the eve of my eighty-second birthday, contrasts with, or indeed stands in radical opposition to, any state-sponsored commemoration, funereal by definition, like the knife without a blade that is missing its handle talked about by Lichtenberg, the Enlightenment philosopher whom I take as my standard-bearer. For there is obviously an irreducible incompatibility between the historic socio-cultural rebellion of May and any official museum institution whatever.

Disjunct notwithstanding, read Joseph Nechvatal‘s detailed and highly informative review of the show – here

A panel gathered together to discuss the show with Jean Jacques (en Francais) – here

Lebel is interviewed in depth about his life and times by Eric Morrill , the previous year –   here

and specifically about “Happenings”:

Liucci-Goutnikov again:

N L-G:  It’s to you that Europe owes its first happenings (sic). What was their significance in the context of the 1960s?
JJ-L: Unlike those of our peers on the other side of the Atlantic, the happenings that my friends and I organized in Europe in the years before May ’68 were revolts against the moral order, against the dictatorship of the commodity, against all self-censorship in matters of sex and politics. We rejected the art market and all academicism, “committed” or otherwise. We wanted to express and to live something else, to do things differently. And that we did.”

Lebel again to Eric Morrill:

“Although I’m 80 years old this year (2016 – 89 in June!), I haven’t given up one inch of my political prerogative. I think that the world is in a much worse and dangerous mess than it was in 50 years ago, and it’s horrifying. So I’m still doing everything I can, although I can’t throw Molotov cocktails as far as I used to. But I still think of myself as an extremely active anarchist, and I keep myself very busy. So that’s a double archive –  art and life.”

Lebel’s reference here to archives isn’t just metaphorical. As he approaches the end of his life, his extraordinary life, he recognizes he has a unique responsibility, and a burden:

“I’m trying to figure out what to do with my archive now. I think it should go to a research library, there are many of those which are interested, but I want one which will be active and lively, not a dormant one that puts it all away and leaves it in closed boxes to be forgotten.”

“My archive isn’t just about happenings”,  he tells Morrill, “it’s also my writings and my life!”. There’s a vast body of materials relating to his art life –  “And then I have another, giant archive on the international poetry scene, because I set up the Polyphonix Festival, which I started in 1979, and before that in 1964, the Festival of Free Expression. So I have a lot of stuff concerning sound poetry, video, and all kinds of oral literatures which I call poésie directe. All this concerns the inner workings of the international counterculture movement.”

Not forgetting the extraordinary valuable collection of art works that he has accrued through family and friends – “I don’t like the word “collector,” he declares, “because it’s in my case is totally misleading. Collectors today are mostly speculators, they just buy to invest money. A great part of the things that I live with, the objects that I live with, are exchanges between my very close colleagues and me. . I think of artworks as friends – subjective, affective, exchange of affect..”

So, the most recent work (the show just closed a month or so back)  – Chaosmose