Jérôme Neutres – Jean Pigozzi’s imagined Africa

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5 EXPRESSIONS OF AFRICA Inside Jean Pigozzi’s Collection Jean Pigozzi’s imagined Africa by Jérôme Neutres 110 years ago, in 1909, Raymond Roussel published Impressions of Africa, a masterpiece of literature that would influence both art and literature, creating enthusiasm among both Apollinaire and the surrealists. Raymond Roussel had not however ever stepped foot in Africa. He always insisted on the central and centrifugal role of “the imagination” in the composition of his texts. “He is just following the whims of his imagination,” André Breton, one of his most fervent admirers, said of him. Roussel inspired generations of creators, starting in 1912 through Francis Picabia or Marcel Duchamp who discovered Impressions of Africa during the theatrical revival of the text. It was Roussel who inspired Duchamp for the masterpiece that is The Large Glass, or Tinguely - even later - with his drawing machines in the 1950s. Amongst other artistic visions, Roussel imagined in his book a machine that painted and drew autonomously through “strange photo-mechanical properties.” His influence is international: the author’s discourse and style have a universal scope: particularly in the United States, Roussel is considered a new Rabelais. Impressions of Africa positioned the horizon of modernity and aesthetic innovation in an imagined Africa. Roussel’s Africa came out of that Africa which in European culture, was first and foremost an “interior Africa” to use anthropologist Jean-Pierre Dozon’s phrase, that is, first and foremost a mental image, a sort of symbolic non-place open to all the most diverse representations. Roussel’s Impressions of Africa is part of the canon of books that forged a mythical Africa, functioning for artists as a symbolic field, almost the synonym of a utopia. Africa as a radically foreign space represented at the beginning of the 20 th century an almost surreal domain, which allowed a glimpse of access to other possible artistic forms, and to other languages. A form of visionary prejudice in one sense, if it may be said, when we know to what extent Africa actually contained – and contains – original and powerful cultures and images. Thanks in part to Roussel and his Impressions of Africa, though invented and implausible, Africa became for western creators the mirror of an artistic modernity, festive and subversive. “Our voyage is fully imaginary. That is its strength” as L .- F. Céline tells it so well in the prologue to his Voyage to the End of the Night. Raymond Roussel never traveled to Africa. Neither did Jean Pigozzi. An eccentric dandy who never wore the same shirt twice, Roussel spent his life between the fashionable 16 th arrondissement in Paris and the south of Italy. Without knowing it, this other eccentric dandy of Italian origin who is Jean Pigozzi – who only dresses himself in the clothes he designs – grew up in Paris at an address close to Roussel’s. There are no coincidences. It was also without knowing what he was seeking that Jean Pigozzi found himself one day in August 1989, 30 years ago, at the Grande Hall de la Villette, to see the Magiciens de la Terre exhibit before it closed. Another event that would be a milestone in the history of culture, Magiciens de la Terre, under the administration of Jean-Hubert Martin, then director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, showed for the first time under the stewardship of a great French museum, amongst a wide international selection, some contemporary African artists. Amongst them: Frédéric Bruly-Bouabré, Seni Awa Camara, Esther Mahlangu, and Chéri Samba. The world of western art, up to that point so ethnocentric, was opening itself to other horizons of creation, and African artistic culture was coming out of the ethnographic ghetto where people loved to imprison it. A photographic artist and lover of art, Jean Pigozzi’s eye was at the time fascinated by the freshness of these hanging African creations, and seduced by their artistic strength, by their new vision of the world. He decided after this initial visit to start, with the support of André Magnin, the commissioner of the African section of
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Jérôme Neutres – Jean Pigozzi’s imagined Africa

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