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