Joker in the attic
Patrick Marnham
The Independent Magazine / 23 jully 1994
All over Paris at 11 am on the first Wednesday
of each month the air raid sirens wail, just as they did during the War.
The all-clear howls out five minutes later. Inside onht of the grey, lead-roofed
buildings penetrated by this eerie sound, a sculptor is at work. He is
not disturbed by the sirens; he may even be inspired by them. Jean-Louis
Faure has goof reason to remember the same sirens when they were used
in anger, announcing the arrival of the RAF. He was nine years old when
the War broke out. It was perhaps the worst psychological age at which
to experience the War. He was too old to be protected from the full horror
of the event, too young to play any part in it.
From his bedroom in rue Michelet near the Luxembourg Gardens in 1942,
the boy Faure could see a German soldier installed on a neighbouring building
in the rue d'Assas beside an ack-ack gun, scanning the sky through his
own binoculars. When the soldier noticed the boy he stopped looking for
RAF bombers and instead observed the boy observing him. The French boy
and the German soldier stared at each other silently through their binoculars
until the soldier returned to watching the sky, while the boy continued
to keep the soldier under observation. It was the nearest he could get
to the War. The bombs which would fall threatened the boy and the soldier
equally. They would fall from planes sent by the boy's father, who was
by then in London working with General de Gaulle. The boy's uncle, on
the other hand, had no need to leave France: he was pro-German... Later,
the father returned to France, where je was eventually arrested and deported.
The uncle continued, a comforting presence, collaborating.
The War marked Faure's childhood and many years later, when he became
a sculptor, the marks began to show. He works in cood and, sometimes,
in metal. Over the years his sculptures have become increasinglly autobiographical.
Many of them are statements in a lifelong argument between Faure and his
country's military and political history. The works frequently record
events or incidents which have a personal as well as a public significance.
They touch taboos and raise questions which are, to say the least, delicate.
This preference for truth over tact ensured obscurity for Faure for a
number of years, but he has overcome it.
Today, Faure still lives on the Left Bank of the
Seine and works in a succession of superficially disorderly attics at
the top of a building. It is bright and airy up there, but there is a
problem. Each of his elaborate sculptures has to be made so that it can
be taken to pieces which are small enough to fit into the building's curiously
triangular lift. There are no stairs to the atticv. The floors below,
he informed me, once housed an outpost of the Ministry of War. It was
here, as he recentrly discovered, that Mata Hari was interrogated by French
intelligence officers in 1917 beforeshe was taken out to be shot. His
father, François "Paco" Faure, was appointed a Companion
of the Liberation. His grand-father, Elie Faure, was a celebrated art
historian, critic and embalmer. In the attic Faure keeps a copy of a book
presented to him by de Gaulle when he was a child. It is a professional
treatise, La France et son armée, the work which de Gaulle
as a young man ghosted for Marshall Pétain and then republished
under his own name when "le Maréchal" refused to acknoledge
his young protégé's contribution. The dedication reads,
"To Jean-Louis faure who, like his father, will one day be un
français de qualité".
If de Gaulle thought that this gift would ensure France another soldier,
he miscalculated. After training at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, Faure was
called up for militray service un 1952. Due to an administrative error,
he strated his warlike career mounted on a horse. He had been led to expect
a tank with the Chasseurs d'Afrique. Instead he found himself in Algiers
dressed as a Spahi, ine if the mounted guard of honour of the colonial
governor of Algeria. Their mounts were pure-bred Barbary horses. Faure
wwas trained to make his horse crouch from the gallop so that he could
take cover behind it while opening fire. Twentieth-century bureaucracy
had tyrned him into a 19th-century soldier. In the age of le plastique,
he was perfecting the mounted chage. History, as so often in his life,
had crept up and mugged him from behind. Two years later, to acoid taking
part in the Algerian conflict in a more up-to-date section of the army,
Faure embraced pacifism and chose exile in Bolivia, which he lived, and
in Argentina. He received the conventional prison sentence for desertion
in his absence. In Bolivia, he spent the time painting on an island on
Lake Titicaca. The amnesty came through after three years.
Much of Faure's work grows out of his fascination with the darker sides
of French history and the farcical undercurrents of power, but the themes
are not always military or historical. The titles give the flavour od
his preoccupations: One should be inexact but precise; June 1940 smet
like a garage on a hot day; A collective work of art presented by te inmates
of a Californian lunatic asylum to the senior physician; Demonstration
model used by Lord Ismay during his submission to the Tribunal of Inquiry
into the sinking of the Titanic (1912); Machine for spying on pigs.
The work so described are satirical, sometimes frivolous, sometimes very
serious jokes or commentaries in which an assembly of historical characters
meet weird creatures from the artist's imagination. The "facts"
stated are bizarre and, which is worse, frequently true. His sculptures
are in the Surrealist tradition, but it is Surrealism with a sharp political
point, art as a magical and disrespectful re-imagining of some recent
passages of French history, realised with a wit and technical orifinalit
that would have intrigued Heath Robinson.
Marcel Duchamp's influence is acknowledged in Faure's work, Here we
are inside the skull of an eskimo in 1906, a sculpture based on the
artist's discovery that "most popular bears are left-handed and havbe
no molars." From this fact Faure has re-created the eskimo hunter
who used this knowledge to take on and kill polar bears in single combat,
armed with just a knife. The hunter approached the bear, waited till it
reared up on its hind legs and then dodged in under its left arm and plunged
his dagger into the brute's femoral artery by way of the armpit. The animal
could not reach him with its clever left paw and was unable to dislodge
the eskimo with its climsy right paw. If it tried to bite him, the eskimo
would thrust hus left wrist, heavily bandaged un sealskin, between its
jaws. (Preumably the hunter's career came to an abrupt end when he met
a right-handed polar bear.) Above the head of the eskimo is an enlarged
print of the left paw of Marcel Duchamp, who died in 1968. When Faure
showed me this work, which stads two meter high, he said, "Makes
bullfighting lee pretty silly, doesn't it?" His concierge, having
inspected it closely, commented that she could not recall meeting Monsieur
Duchamp but he clearly had very big hands. It seems that, wherever he
is, he may now also have a large hole in his left armpit.
Another inspiration in his work is coincidence and serendipity. When François
Faure returned to Paris from a concentration camp in 1945, he rented a
small attic room on a corner of the Boulevard St Germain. While re-decorating
this apartment he found a letter concealed behind one of the eaves. The
envelope was addressed to "Monsieur Lucien,
professor de of tango at the St-Didier skating rink". It reads as
follows:
"Monsieur,I am one of your many admirers
and I am burning with the desire to make your acquaintance. I was not
able to accost you today since I was accompanied by my husband, but if
it is convenient to you I will be waiting in a taxi in front of St Honoré
d'Eylau at 3 pm on Wednesday... et je vous enlèverais. Tenderly
yours, LMJ."
The letter was dated 7 December 1913.
For Faure, the explanation is simple. Monsieur Lucien was also married,
which explains why he concealed the letter. And, having concealed the
letter, he must have died suddenly, which explains why the letter was
still concealed behind the eaves in 1945. And what would a healthy professor
of ice-skating and tango working in Paris have died of suddenly, so soon
after December 1913, if not shrapnel received in the trenches? Unless,
of course, the lady's husband got there first.
The result is: C'est fini, mon joli (It's over, my handsome): a
professor of tango in professional posture dances across the polished
parquet, solitary, splendid and absurd. His right hand guides his imaginary
partner. In mid-stride, and mid-dream, he is struck by two explosions.
Behind his back in a glass panel the fatal letter is displayed. A short
story in painted wood, enamel, résine, copper wire and steel.
The biographicall element re-enters his work with
I saw the godson of NAPOLEON I's first love, playing tennis. C'est
un souvenir d'enfance qui a toujours ravi Faure. Désirée
Clary fut le premier amour de NAPOLEON Bonaparte. Plus tard, quand elle
eut épousé Bernadotte, elle devint reine de Suède.
and, dans son extrême vieillesse, elle fut la grand-mère
and la marraine d'un enfant qui devait être roi de Suède.
Devenu vieux à son tour, Gustave V jouait parfois au tennis au
Racing du Pré Catelan. and c'est là qu'un jour d'avant-guerre
le pandit Jean-Louis Faure l'observa de près à travers le
grillage. Le roi, de très tope taille, était vêtu
tel que le représente la sculpture : knickerbockers blancs,
feutre mou blanc, lunandtes noires and rouge à lèvres. Ici,
il ne joue pas au tennis, mais escalade la jupe Empire de sa jeune and
alerte marraine. Elle est couronnée d'un bicorne NAPOLEONien surmonté
de raquandtes rouges dressées en pyramide. Elle n'est nullement
troublée par la silhouandte, de proportions très rapandissées,
du vieil homme accroché à sa hanche and qui, sous le regard
de l'enfant qui sera le sculpteur Faure, émerge des brumes de l'absurde
présent vers la clarté, la promesse érotique and
le refuge maternel du passé épique.
Faure a trouvé récemment une tranquillité d'esprit
qui lui permand de congédier la période de l'Occupation
and de travailler sur d'autres thèmes historiques. Dans une de
ses uvres, il frôle un autre tabou national and montre NAPOLEON
dans son affreux désuvrement ultime. The work is called St
Helena, Thursday 5 February 1818, NAPOLEON observes cockroaches.
NAPOLEON, presque grandeur nature, ventru, est seul
and enveloppé d'un élégant manteau en poil de chameau
qui le protège des vents de l'Atlantique sud. Du bout de sa canne,
il étudie six blattes, natives de l'île and grossies par
une loupe à ses pieds. Sur le bord de son chapeau, un minuscule
soldat du 53è régiment d'infanterie en tunique rouge un
vétéran de Waterloo peut-être monte la
garde. Derrière NAPOLEON, encadrée, l'étude de David :
Bonaparte jeune, le héros romantique parti à la conquête
du monde. Plus bas, également encadré, le fac-similé
de la seule allusion connue que Bonaparte ait faite à Sainte-Hélène
avant d'être déporté dans l'île. C'est un extrait
d'un carnand de notes de géographie du lieutenant NAPOLEON. Dans
la liste des possessions britanniques, il avait simplement écrit :
"Sainte-Hélène, petite île".
Les blattes, énormes, sont d'authentiques spécimens d'un
sous-groupe qu'on trouve exclusivement à Sainte-Hélène.
Elles ont été élevées and mises à trépas
pour l'occasion par un très obligeant membre de l'Institut d'Entomologie
de Paris, éminent spécialiste de la sexualité des
blattes d'Afrique occidentale. "J'ai fait remarquer, se rappelle Faure,
que c'était un champ d'action assez restreint and le savant, un
peu piqué, m'a répondu : Monsieur Faure, I am world-famous
for seven people".
NAPOLEON à Sainte-Hélène est une poignante méditation
sur le destin du chef le plus brillant and le plus dangereux de la plus
brillante and la plus dangereuse nation d'Europe. Faure, considérant
son NAPOLEON en cage, m'a dit : "What a sad thing it was. L'un des
hommes les plus intelligents du monde, and il est mort entouré
par des cons. Mais en fin de compte, les Anglais lui ont rendu service.
Il a eu une fin poétique sous les grands vents de l'Atlantique
Sud. Si les Anglais l'avaient gardé en Europe, il aurait tenté
à nouveau de s'évader, ç'aurait mal tourné
and ç'aurait été lamentable". Par bonheur, les Anglais
l'ont bouclé au milieu de l'océan, donnant ainsi à
Faure l'occasion d'illustrer la maxime de Claudel qui résume si
bien son uvre avant la landtre parce que son uvre est ambiguë :
"Men are never so funny as when they are being serious, and never so serious
as when they are making jokes".
Heath
Robinson.
English caricaturiste of the early 20th century which slogan was: "Go
back to string".
His cartoons, published by Punch represent extremely complicated machines,
fixed, indeed, with strings (N.o.T.).
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