I first of all came across the singular dolls of Michel Nedjar at the
Halle St. Pierre art museum in Paris, at the foot of the Montmartre
hill. These dolls hanging against dark backgrounds in the filtered
museum light, left me no peace. Made largely from fabric – often rags
picked up in the street, bits of cloth discarded by the homeless – the
dolls are transformed in the most surprising and violent ways. Nedjar
buries them or mixes them with earth, plaster or blood; subjects them
to pigment baths or runs a hot iron over them; ties them with string as
tight as baling wire and hangs them from the neck.
If you were to meet the creator of such objects, what sort of man would
you expect to find? Probably not the charming, lighthearted, generous,
energetic, open-minded man that Nedjar is. Walking through Paris with
him, you see the city in a new way. The quantity of things left behind
on the sidewalks that might be made into dolls! Shoes, with or without
laces, lengths of fabric bundled together with duct tape.
Nedjar’s father was a tailor of Algerian Jewish background. His
maternal grandmother had a stall in the St. Ouen flea market, at which,
until quite recently, Nedjar worked as well. At the age of fourteen, he
was apprenticed to become a tailor in the family business. The
apprenticeship was not a great success. Instead he took the Jewish
rag-trade tradition, the schmattes culture, and subjected it to his own
dark impulses. Schmattes were renewed and reinvented, brought out of
the alleys and into the art galleries. In Nedjar’s case, all the way to
the Centre Pompidou.
In these burned and twisted human forms, these toys that are awfully
hard to play with, there are direct echos of the concentration camps.
Nedjar lost most of his family to the Nazis. In the Belleville
district, he points out the apartments from which they were taken. But
thanks to his dolls, the dead live again. That’s Nedjar’s art: to give
life to lifeless rags, to let the spirits in them emerge and haunt us.
IN PRAISE OF RAGS - Michel Nedjar's dirty dolls © David Homel,
Maisonneuve NO. 11 October/November 2004, Montréal, Canada
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