“My dolls saved me!”
On the occasion of his Gugging exhibition,
Laurent Danchin raises a few questions concerning the shamanistic art
of Michel Nedjar
(Published in Raw Vision - Summer 2008)
Some ‘outsider’ artists are better known than others and, for various
reasons, they benefit from a long-term reputation in that field. This
is the case with Michel Nedjar (born in 1947) whose fascinating, ritual
mummy dolls and fresco-like cave drawings have appeared in almost every
important museum or private collection since they were first introduced
in Alain Bourbonnais’ ‘Art outside the norm’ or Jean Dubuffet’s ‘Art
Brut’ way back in the late seventies. Along with “classics”, such as
Crépin, Ratier or Scottie Wilson, Madge Gill, Wölfli or
Ramirez, the much younger Nedjar already featured in the landmark shows
Les Singuliers de l’art (Paris, 1978) and Outsiders (London, 1979), and
later in dozens of other collective or single shows throughout Europe,
Japan and the USA. During this time the market prices of his work
increased substantially, a somewhat rare achievement for a living
artist of this category.
A founding member of l’Aracine, the leading French art brut collection
now housed in the Musée d'art moderne Lille Métropole, in
the North of France, but also a successful experimental film-maker, who
received national recognition at the Pompidou Center, the French temple
of modern and contemporary art, in 1987 , Nedjar has long since become
a professional artist with an international career even though, being
self-taught, he never followed the mainstream and is aesthetically and
humanly closer to the art brut creators he adores than to the big stars
of the contemporary art market. Whatever the case, his enigmatic and
somewhat frightening art is clearly far more sophisticated than, let’s
say, the works of such basic instances of ‘outsider art’ as Domsic or
Pépé Vignes, Ted Gordon or Mose T., and he represents a
type of artist who no longer corresponds to the orthodox criteria of
Jean Dubuffet. So, what type of artist is Michel Nedjar, to which
artistic family should he be linked and what is his true position in
today’s art?
Much has been written on Nedjar already ever since Roger Cardinal’s in
depth and almost comprehensive study published in Lausanne seventeen
years ago . Of his childhood in a large Jewish family, living in an
Edenic house with a garden in the northern suburb of Paris, the brutal
figure of the father, a Sephardic tailor, reminiscent of Kafka’s
terrible genitor, the Ashkenazim mother and the Polish, Yiddish
speaking grand-mother, who initiated Nedjar to schmattes, the old rags
which he later adopted as material for his handmade embryonic dolls.
And then his encounter with Téo Hernandez, a Mexican
experimental film-maker who became his mentor in the arts, and their
subsequent travels to Morocco, India, Mexico, etc. after which he felt
an urgent “need to work in magic” and hence began his artistic
production around May 1976.
As well as all this, an event dating back to his youth is often
mentioned, and is supposed to have been the original trauma which later
triggered his inspiration: the evening when the young Michel, aged 13,
stumbled upon Alain Resnais’ movie Nuit et Brouillard on television and
discovered the terrifying reality of the camps. “I had two aunts who
returned from Auschwitz and they told us.” says Nedjar. “But words
don’t have the power of the image. Resnais’ movie really shook me.
After the Shoah, that was it, I had left Eden.” And it is a fact
that, many years later, Nedjar discovered with amazement that he
handled his dolls in the same way that he had seen the soldiers pile up
the corpses in the pits when he was a teenager. I still remember him
confessing this terrible detail to me over twenty years ago.
Having established all this, a closer look at some aspects of Michel’s
life and work in the light of today reveals other dimensions which
escape the strict ‘outsider art’ bias. Firstly, Michel Nedjar is
clearly a child of the seventies and therefore part of his generation,
imbued with the standards of the counter-culture from the beatnik or
hippie era. I have already mentioned the long, adventurous travels to
third world countries, in order to open his mind to other cultures and
acquire a nomadic, multicultural view of mankind, and the numerous
experiments in ‘underground’ cinema. But Michel, like so many of his
time, also tried a few drugs while in Essaouira, Kathmandu and Mexico
(“a dazzling experience, I was in the aquarium of the cosmos”). In
India, he spent some time in an ashram and then, back in Paris, lived
for a couple of months in communes where gays and non-gays tried to
find a way of living together. “It really sounds like all the
clichés of that period”, says Nedjar today.
All this explains the context of the shamanistic plunge into the
quasi-altered states of mind which initiated Nedjar’s artistic
production in the late seventies and early eighties. A phenomenon,
already mentioned by Roger Cardinal, which sometimes brought the still
inexperienced artist, deeply depressed at that time, close to madness.
“There comes a point,” Cardinal writes, “when his work modulates into
what he calls a ‘ritual of being’, much like the practice of the shaman
who, during the ecstatic trance, enters the transindividual state and
embodies a kind of plural personality.” Remembering the
extraordinary day when, while making his dolls, he lost control of all
human consciousness, Nedjar says : “ I had what I call a mystical
feeling, when, while plunging my hands into the basin of hot water,
almost a ritual bath, then soaking my doll, there was a complete loss
of identity. I had become mineral, vegetal, I was touching something… I
was very scared because I wasn’t backed by any cultural structure on
this. I realised something terrible and marvellous had happened. But it
happened to me only once, for one second, I could never return to that
state again.”… He then adds: “For two years, I was engulfed by that
energy, night and day. Because I knew it was either that, or I had to
expect an ambulance. All this I did alone, but thanks to creation, my
dolls saved me.”
Almost thirty years later, considering this kind of spontaneous, semi
autistic ‘rebirth’ experience – a phenomenon of initiatic illumination
on the path of a rather solitary hypersensitive individual – Michel
Nedjar tells with humor of his earlier psychedelic experiences while
visiting Maria Sabina, a famous Mexican female shaman who, as a child,
had accidentally ingested mushrooms. He also mentions Mircea Eliade’s
or other anthropologists’writings on shamanism, which recount how the
new shaman, often homosexual, “has to marry another man because he is
also a woman”. And it is true that Nedjar’s aesthetic purpose goes far
beyond gender and form, somewhere between life and death, definite and
indefinite, burial and exhumation, in an obscure region deep into the
origin of things, where true artistic creation encounters rituals and
magic. “I prefer the Cycladic art to the Greek ideal of beauty,” says
Nedjar, “I prefer all that is archaic. Oddly, it is always something
that is before something else, before the finished. There is a
universal invariant in the creative process.”
Nedjar’s totem is the spider, a metaphor of all the mysterious links
and ‘objective chances’ which entangle our lives . His favourite
numbers are 3 and 7, because he was the third child in a family of
seven – and his most recent dolls and drawings are signed with his date
of birth, 12.10.1947 –, but he seems unaware of the symbolic value of
these divine numbers in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and of the
particular role of the third born in many primitive cultures, where the
third child is generally the only one allowed to ensure the role of the
clown or of the prophet. “I don’t know much about Jewish religion, in
fact,” admits Michel. “After the war, my parents didn’t tell me
anything.”
Yet his schmattès dolls – even if old rags and worn out fabrics
play a sacred role in many other cultures – curiously remind us
of a typical Jewish notion: the golem, this “unshaped matter” or
“embryonic state”, “made in secret, embroidered in the depths of the
earth” (Psalms, 139, 15), according to its most archaic biblical
meaning. Far from the later pre-Frankenstein semi-organic creature
supposedly made by rabbi Yehoudah Loew from Prague in the 16th century,
the Talmudic or Cabalistic use of the word seems even closer to
Nedjar’s inspiration since golem means “glebe” or “the preliminary
state before the creation of Adam” in the Talmud (Sanh, 38b), or “raw
matter without form nor outline” in the Kabbala. “When the museum of
Jewish art asked me for the pourim dolls ”, says Nedjar, “I
thought: they have regained the stray. It’s funny that, without
seeking it, it’s stronger than anything. The schmattes is really the
Jew’s cuddly blanket. Fabric brought me back to the fold.”
At the same time, just as archaic symbolism from his origins re-emerge
in his practice, an earlier trauma than the discovery of the Shoah
recently returned to Nedjar’s memory when he tried to understand why he
so often represented birds and horned animals in his drawings. “When I
was a kid, I had a couple of turtledoves, but I was so scared of my
father that I didn’t dare to ask him for money to buy seeds for my
birds. So they died, and I felt terribly guilty because they were mine.
I had nightmares for years, and even now I have this feeling: I open
cages and I take out thousands of piled up dead birds.” Reactivated by
the second, the first trauma yields a blend of images where the Shoah
is mixed up with earlier childhood anguish and guilt. A similar story
concerns a goat his father had brought home for his children to play
with, but one day they found it “in pieces in the fridge!”.
In fact, like so many creators of today, self-taught or otherwise,
Nedjar’s art reveals multiple influences from all over the world, some
linked to his particular cultural background, others to his personal
interests, nourished by his travels and his various encounters. “It’s
all mixed up,” he says, “the Shoah doll, the Mexican doll, the doll
from here and there”. But because his practice is contrary to the
brightly lit, profanely oriented and highly conceptual art of the
mainstream market – Nedjar is, in a sense, the exact opposite of an
artist such as the French installationist Christian Boltanski –, for
many years his art could find refuge only in the family of ‘art brut’
(or ‘outsider art’) amateurs, the discreet tribe of all those who
create or promote the obscure, modest and hidden side of contemporary
art. And Michel is proud to explain that, long before he co-founded the
Aracine, his first artistic revelation was a picture by Aloïse,
and that he still carries this image with him, like an icon, wherever
he goes .
Today Michel Nedjar has become a fully-fledged artist and an
accomplished man. Thanks to his creation, he has overcome his native
frailty and is finally able to accept all his dimensions without any
contradiction. Once considered the black sheep of his family, the
schmattes, the schnorrer, then a man under the influence of a
collective artistic involvement for many years, he no longer needs the
protective shield of art brut, and art brut no longer needs his active
support. “I’m fed up with tribes,” he says, “I’m my own tribe myself
now.” And so his idiosyncratic neo-tribal universe is now free to join
a whole trend of other artists, like Burland, Kurhajec, Sefolosha,
Syroka and many others, who regress to the roots of figuration and,
struggling with pseudo archaic matter, instinctively mime the artistic
behaviour of primitive cultures in an attempt to provide a new
mythology, new rituals and a new sense of the sacred to a hypermodern
state of civilization deeply disembodied by the digital triumph of new
technologies.
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