Interview with Michel Nedjar
Paris, 18 December 2004.
Present:
MN: Michel Nedjar; BD: Barbara Dent; RL: Robert Lamb; SP: Suzie Plumb;
JL: Jackie Lewis.
BD: Was that the main principle of your fascination with
dolls? Did the fact of making them with your sister….
MN: The clothes….
BD: Was this the fascination, or did your interest in dolls come later?
MN: Ah, I would say that my interest in dolls came before my
interest in their clothes. Because my sister’s dolls came
much later…. But it was the doll first, my interest
in dolls was already there before the confection of clothes.
BD: And what form did this doll take?
MN: Well, it was either a piece of wood, I wrapped it…. Now… there are
two very important things in the beginning of the existence of the
dolls. Very important things. My father was a tailor. Thus
there was always material in the house, and the word material. My
grandmother worked in the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt, she was
a chiffonière [rag dealer], and there is a word in Yiddish, in
Yiddish culture, that is very important in Jewish culture, it is the
word shmattès, written like this, s h m a, two tts, è s,
like this, shmattès.
And this word is also very important, because my father the tailor, it
was the material, thus, it was the making up, it was the reconstitution
of the clothes, to make outfits. With my grandmother, it was the
opposite, she was a chiffonière, she received what we call la
frippe, old material, that was rather on the side of, I wouldn’t say
death, but of clothes already worn and used. Clothes that had already
been worn, which was completely the opposite to the creation on the
father’s side. I worked a lot, I adored my grandmother, I adored her
stall. It was marvellous because she would visit the rich at
Neuilly-sur-Seine (that’s called chiner), she had a car on which was
written ‘We buy bric-a-brac, clothes,…’ Thus, she was always
bringing back things to her stalls; toy chests and many clothes. I
remember that she gave me a puppet, a puppet on strings, and I think it
was Mozart, something like that. But, a very long time afterwards, I
realised that – in fact, everything we’re going to say here, the word
came after the work – there has never been a prior analysis of why and
how. It was much more on the side of creation, what do we call that,
création pulsionelle, instinctive, but the word came after,
because I was asked many questions. After I remembered, of having lived
with my grandmother, her love at the same time as her knowledge of old
material, of old clothes, she transmitted something to me. Something
happened at the level of transmission. Furthermore, as I was no good at
school, I had only one solution, given that I was skilled at making
dolls’ clothes, people said “Look, perhaps he’ll be a tailor like his
father.” Thus I frequented the workshops, the couture studios, I
was a stylist, dress-designer, etc, but I gradually abandoned this.
BD: But the first little doll made from a piece of wood?
MN: So, this little wood doll, this was before making clothes for my
sisters’ dolls.
BD: What sort of age were you?
MN: Well, I look at children, perhaps two, three years old, it was what
I call the Eden period, because there was before and afterwards. During
Eden, I made my little dolls. Sometimes, as my sisters had dolls, large
dolls, baigneurs made out of celluloid, often there would be an arm or
a leg that was trailing because the doll was broken, and I picked up
the foot or the arm, or a part of the body. I would wrap it up with
material because there was always material.
It was before the making of clothes, yes. I think that I didn’t play
with dolls in the same way that my sisters did. There was a different
relationship. It was not procreation, for example, as it often is, or
the other with whom we speak, it was really something else.
Thus, there was this doll. Afterwards, when I was a little older, I saw
my father, or my father had women workers who used the sewing machine,
I saw, then made clothes. I took pieces of material, I used the sewing
machine. So I was very skilled at a very early age, at the sewing
machine. My parents said to me “Look,” and I think that with them this
was a possibility, because I was so bad at school, it was catastrophic.
So afterwards I went to tailoring schools, and voilà.
These were the first…but the doll already existed before all that, the
doll was there.
MN: But the word shmattès is very important in the rapport with
the world that I had, with clothes.
JL: Shmattès is the Yiddish word for rags.
MN: Yes, do you know the word?
JL: Yes, yes.
MN: It’s really a mot de passe, [a code word] among this culture.
JL: In England in the London East End, in English slang, you say
“that’s a nice bit of shmatte.”
MN: Ah, superb, how interesting.With my grandmother, it was precisely
this shmattès that was her means of survival, for her, it was
her livelihood, and I remember, she always said to me that I was a
shmattès, that I wasn’t a mensch.
BD: No, he wasn’t a man, he was a rag.
MN: Yes. Mensch, that also comes from slang, ‘the successful man,’ but
in a social class sense, and as I was always a côté
de mes pompes, [literally next to my shoes]. I daydreamed a lot, I was
always in the realm of the imagination. She was always distressed to
see me in this state, because she would say, “But Michel, what are we
going to do with you?” She would say, “You’ll never be a mensch.”
She said, “You’re really a shmattès.”
BD: But was it hurtful for you as a comment, at the time?
MN: Oh no, on the contrary, it made me laugh. Not at all. I loafed
about so much, on the contrary, well for my grandmother there was no
problem, see. [laughs] No it was not at all hurtful, it was
afterwards that I realised, it was afterwards that I realised through
work on the ‘why of the dolls,’ how they came into being.
BD: Between simply creating clothes for dolls and seeing them as
representations of other things…was it a great turning point or was
it….
MN: Well I’ve never thought about that, because that’s really part of a
larger analysis. But I would say there were two periods in my life.
There was the Eden period, paradise, before 1961, and after 1961 when I
saw the film by Alain Resnais Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog].
There, there was a shock. I had family who had come back from the
concentration camps. I had two aunts who were aged around twenty when
they went, they went away, they came back, they narrated, but the word
did not have the same power as the images I saw in the film. I did not
even know what Jewish meant because I was not at all raised in the
Jewish religion or tradition. I think that after the war they no longer
wanted to hear speak of that, it was evacuated, it was effaced. So when
I saw Nuit et Brouillard there was a total rupture, there was a
personal break down. I drew a lot, I made pictures, I painted and so I
did not… I don’t think I made any dolls after that. After that I was
placed as an apprentice elsewhere in1962. I worked at a very young age,
at 15 I was already working in Paris. There was another revelation,
after I travelled a great deal. I went to Mexico and there in a market
in the south of Mexico – I was always fascinated by material, I loved
material – but in Mexico, there was a market where there was an Indian
woman who sold, in the middle of the fruits, she sold dolls that she
made by hand, but which were very clumsily made, very primitive, and
when I saw these dolls, it was as if there was a flash….
BD: Ah, so it was in Mexico that the doll began to reappear in your
life?
MN: She came back, yes, there was like a flash, I recognised her in her
fragility.
BD: And you bought her?
MN: Of course, I think I still have her in my collection, but I no
longer know which one she is. (Laughter) But I still have
her, I will show her to you, she is very badly made, and I said,
“That’s it.” And so, after that I travelled a lot, and I lived
for two years in Mexico. I should say that I had met an artist who made
dolls, I must pay her homage, she was called Marta Kuhn-Weber.
There is a photograph of her, Kuhn-Weber. She had a gallery on rue de
Lille, she was fairly rich. She owned the gallery herself where she
exhibited her own work permanently, Marta Kuhn-Weber.
BD: And she made dolls?
MN: Yes, I think she is dead, I think the dolls are now in Germany. She
made dolls, I saw these dolls when I returned from Mexico and there
were influences, connections…
BD: 1976 in Paris.
MN: Yes, yes. And I saw this woman who made the dolls. Me, when I
got back, I made dolls straight away. I made dolls when I came back
from Mexico, which are very different, they are full of colour, and at
the beginning of I think 1978, that’s when the dolls became very
dark.
BD: Like the ones we see?
MN: Yes, yes, it began, yes, yes.
BD: So death came into …
MN: It’s not death, no, no, no, it has nothing to do with death. For me
it’s not death.
BD: It’s to do with questions of…
MN: Yes, yes, but it’s not death. On the contrary, it’s life,
precisely it’s life. Ah, it’s not death. For me it’s not death, it’s
not something dead, empty. I have often said that my dolls have saved
me. In redemption, almost, my dolls have saved me, the fabrication, the
making of dolls has saved me. It has nothing to do with death,
rather there is a search for identity. It’s a voyage, creation as a
voyage, with the doll. The doll is often found, in fact, in
tombs, where the doll is a psychopompe, she guides the dead on the
voyage just like the Cycladic and Peruvian dolls. They are
psychopompes, it’s a representation….but it’s not at all death (laughs).
BD: It’s beyond that.
MN: Precisely, it’s life in all its creativity, in full creativity,
yes.
BD: And ritual, you have spoken about this…
MN: Yes, when I was a child, before, that’s very important. When I made
these dolls with pieces of wood, with material wrapped around them, I
don’t know why, I really don’t know why, but I buried them. I buried
them, I forgot about them, and afterwards, I looked for them, I
unearthed them, and I was very happy to find them again. Even in their
state that was already a bit, you know, tainted by time, wasted, passed
by time, that gave me a great sense of emotion. But, also, the
Holocaust is part of the material, of an existence, of my existence, of
my personal history, but I have always said that’s not the only
thing. It’s true when I saw Nuit et Brouillard by Alain Resnais,
I identified with the cadaver, and it took me years, years, to leave
that behind, to leave the state of the cadaver, the body, the
non-dead. That work was thanks to the dolls. And that’s why
I say they’re not morbid, that they have nothing to do with death, they
helped me to come out of it. But that’s not all. There was the
revelation of the doll that I saw in Mexico. This fragility, this
clumsiness, this beauty in the fragility, it touched me. There was a
flash, and when I returned from Mexico, I said, “I’m going to enter
into this”, and voilà, in creation I wanted to do something. I
was in a bad state when I returned from Mexico because I wanted to live
in Mexico, but it was a failure. Because I couldn’t live in Mexico as
it was not possible…unless I did something, I couldn’t… after I was
obliged to come back, to make something of all that.
So, it was because of that, creation at the end of the day, I took the
doll for creation, as a creation, precisely by bypassing the doll. I
think I have retained the word doll, because it was magical, the word
doll was completely magic. It was like a diversion. It had nothing in
fact to do with the doll, but it started with the doll.
BD: In fact what you create now are dolls that are not dolls?
MN: That’s possible too, yes, that’s possible. Or it’s perhaps the
shadow, the origin, of the doll as well. It’s perhaps also the
origin of the doll. Yes, even for humanity, perhaps that’s how what we
now call sculpture began, or what happened in culture. Perhaps the
origin of art is the doll. I’m sure of that. They began very
sombrely, in the fabrication. I began to collect dolls, to think of the
dolls, about what it was, the doll, all that. In my unhappy state of
being, I wanted to make something of me. I was looking for my
possibilities of being, going beyond the masculine, the feminine, my
cultural identities. I felt it was that that concerned me very much at
the time, and making a doll, during the ‘confection’ [making] of it, I
say the ‘confection’ to make a reference to the craft of tailoring.
During the labour, the labour of the doll, there is that moment of
intense communication with my profound being. Before when I was with
curators, or museum or gallery people, I said it was sculpture. There
was a time when it was impossible to talk about the doll in
contemporary art.
It was impossible but they did not hear, they did not hear, and I
always had problems for the work to be recognised as creation.
Now, that’s over. Now it’s open and there is work done, and there are
contemporary artists, but in the years at the beginning of the 1980s it
was impossible to say ’doll’. I had to talk at that time to art
specialists, who were always a bit difficult, and so I said
sculpture. That went down very well, it was acceptable. But
now, for twenty years, for a long time, now I insist on ‘doll’.
BD: It’s very interesting because there are different interpretations
around this exhibition, there are people who do not agree with what
they are trying to do, with this exhibition.
SP: A few of the people we have spoken to claim that it’s figurative
sculpture.
MN: Yes, of course, it’s easy. Because they are frightened,
because if you enter into a poetic world, and magical, which is what
interests me. Like the doll that I saw in Mexico, I could not say that
it was art and sculpture, but when one goes into emotions, from there
things happen. But of course if the doll stays as a screen, the
beautiful doll, or the sculpture, then it’s a screen, and that doesn’t
interest me. I go behind.
JL: So that it’s very clear that when you’re talking about this
exhibition and dolls it’s about the transgression, that you go over the
boundaries.
MN: Yes, yes, yes…. It’s a transgression of how cultures, yes of
course, of course…. I was telling you that I returned in 1976 to
Mexico. I was not very well, it was either that or the hospital I was
so ill. And so, was it a therapy? I’m not really sure. But it’s
true in the manner of going to see a psychiatrist or going into
hospital, because I was really very, very bad. So I know that all
this was ritual, that’s where ritual intervenes, ritual, because once
the doll was made, once she was sewn I soaked her in water with earth,
in mud.The colour was like the colour of mud, and there were pigments
that resembled excrement slightly, something very intestinal.
A very important thing occurred, alas only once, when I was soaking my
doll in this liquid. I was frightened for several seconds, but there
was a moment, which I think perhaps I can call mystical because I have
no other word, but I completely lost my identity and I felt that I was
going to touch something original.
BD: Was it also a time of rediscovering your identity via this moment?
MN: Well, on the contrary, it was against identity.
BD: It was against identity, but after?
MN: After there was a return, but I understood that something was
happening. That I could go with it, that something very powerful was
happening. In my state of being, this desire to dissolve, to know who I
really was, you’re completely in Utopia. It’s now that I can say it,
but not at the time, I could not say it, it’s now with the passing of
time. I think that it was what I was looking for, it was very quick. I
became vegetative, mineral, in the primordial waters, do you
understand? But it lasted only a few seconds because I was frightened.
BD: But that was a sort of a Damascus, it was the road to Damascus?
MN: Well, it was going right up to there in order to come out. But the
doll, in fact, we can speak of a journey, and of psycho, of a journey
in creation, for me it was an act of creation taken fundamentally.
If not, I could make art, sculpture, go to the Ecole des Beaux Arts,
make drawings, but that experience was something with the body, with
the profound being, my kernel of being. That’s the doll, I’m telling
you, they saved me. So I continued, because I sensed that something was
happening. As I am very fond of second-hand clothes, I can only make
dolls with clothes that have been worn, by the body, or used, or
stained by time. I think this is also from my grandmother with the
shmattès but at the same time the way of the thing as well, the
dirt, from that which has been lived, the sweat, the blood, all of
that. To remake a body for myself. To remake the body, that all these
cadavers were on. It was escape, to remake myself a body.
For me it’s not death, on the contrary. It’s the creativity of life.
For me there it was, death, it was the death of others. Those who had
been killed by others, that was death. But there in the work of the
dolls it was as if it transgressed. The doll that I saw in Mexico, I
think that also it poeticised me, straight away it gave me a more
poetic world, more fragile and more marvellous as well.
In Paris, there are bound bundles fabrics for diverting the water in
the gutters, the water in the gutters, I call them the ‘gutter
princesses,’ but I see, they are dolls, it’s extraordinary, they’re
really dolls. There is an artist who took photographs of them,
they are strung around, they are in water…. They are very damp, they
are dirty, they have been worn by time, humidity, they are
masterpieces, they are true masterpieces, there, under our feet, we
walk on them, That’s the magic of the town, but they have started to
become stereotyped because they begin to be similar but at one time it
was fairly and squarely the road sweeper who made them. They begin to
all be similar, but there are still some that stand out, that are
marvellous. But there are still some very beautiful things. So,
those are the gutter princesses. So, when they are in this state
of dirtiness, that’s when I experience the greatest emotion.
BD: Does immortality come into this thought that life is something else?
MN: I don’t believe, I’m not very Platonic, I’m not very…in the soul… I
am concerned with immanence, with material, with immanence. I think the
mentality is in the work. Yes, it’s in the work, or perhaps, I think
that if I had a different conception, perhaps I wouldn’t do anything at
all, at the end of the day. Either I practice philosophy or I make an
artwork.
I take great care, you know, because afterwards I do battle with
things, but the doll brings me back to immanence, straight away. She
brings me back to reality, to the real. To empiricism. I find it
difficult… I like religious objects, religious kitsch, all that, I
adore it, I adore it, but it’s not there, you see…
When I came back in 1976 from Mexico, or perhaps earlier I think, it
was in 1970, it was between 1970 and 1976, I can no longer remember
which year, when I had a repulsion against my craft as a tailor, as a
stylist. I was very skilled, you know, I made clothes, and thanks to
that I was able to travel during many years. At the time you could play
with clothes, so I made clothes using bedcovers, sheets, things like
that, it was the time of hippy fashion, it was mad. But I had this
feeling, this feeling of being, of wanting to be something. I took all
the clothes and I tore them, and above all I took the linings out to
turn the outfit inside out, as if the skin was, well, it’s as if I
wanted to turn the clothes inside out. I put them into dirty water,
into this muddy water and I made knots. When I make my dolls, people
say to me, (for example there are now some collectors who come from
time to time to buy a doll from me) they say to me, “but they are not
signed”, that’s their obsession, eh, but I say, “They are not
signées [signed] but they are saignées [bled].” So we
could do DNA tests to authenticate them….
General laughter
MN: Because the world of fashion at a particular time was so
superficial, what I was looking for, I realised it was so superficial.
I think that the essential escapes me completely. And that’s perhaps
why, well, why I use the doll, I use fabric. But I feel that there is
something that totally escapes, yes, yes, yes…. Perhaps one day the end
will be excavated, but, I don’t know. Well then perhaps it could be
written, it could be written….
SP: You were also talking about films….
MN: Yes, yes, I worked with a friend, a Mexican friend in fact,
Téo Hernández, we were working during a time of
experimental film. Well, it’s very funny because at the time I kept my
film work very separate, and despite myself there are sometimes dolls.
I had not seen that before at all, there is a film where there is a
doll.
And yes, there were dolls, there was childhood, there were games, there
are toys, and before I separated them [film and dolls], and I realised,
in the end there is something that weaves together there too.
So the people who saw my films didn’t know that I made dolls, and the
people who knew I made dolls [sic], didn’t know that I made
films. It’s now, now, that we begin to see the two things
together. It was in intimate situations, among external
cinematographers, it was the group as well, but dolls were more
intimate.
Robert Lamb, interview with Michel Nedjar in Guys ‘n’ dolls (exhibition
catalogue), Brighton, England, 2005
(exhibition - Guys 'n' dolls - Brighton, England - April 22 to June 12
2005)
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