Marcel Bascoulard was
19 when he witnessed the murder of his father by his mother. Soon after he
became homeless, living in precarious shelters in the Avaricum district, in
Bourges. He would spend the end of his life in the cab of a truck offered by an
owner of a breakage. He learned by himself how to draw. He regularly represented the streets of his
city, in a wide angle and completely empty, emanating a kind of realistic
vertigo.
Admired and outcast
at the same time, asocial and eccentric, he liked to dress as a woman, in
dresses that he sometimes made himself. In one of his letters, he confided: “If
I walk around in a feminine outfit, it is because I find it more aesthetic. For
the sake of art, when I wear a women’s dress, I take with me my camera and I
ask people I know to take a picture of me. ”
Living near the
Morlet photo studio, Bascoulart began to be photographed in the 1940s. In these
photographs with notched edges and in small formats, the expression of his face
is always the same: the face slightly leaning to one side and without makeup.
His waist is accentuated, the skirt blown up by petticoats, he resembles a
young girl ready to be married. Sometimes he looks like a housewife in an
apron, before transforming himself, later on, into an elegant bourgeois.
Fashion changed, his silhouette shrank down and his hair became white. In 1970,
he wore black skai apron to resemble a samurai warrior. A broken mirror he held
in each shot is an additional strange detail.
Marcel Bascoulard
staged himself, creating a gallery of disturbing characters – echo of his
murderous mother (?) – a marginalized figure, he was accepted by the society
thanks to those who took his picture. On January 12th, 1978, he was
assassinated in Asnières-lès-Bourges, in an area called Les Gargaudières,
strangled by a 23-year old homeless.
Several works of Marcel Bascoulard from the Pinault Collection are included in
the exhibition ‘Dancing with Myself’ at the Punta Della Dogana, Venice, Italy,
until 16 December 2018.
Forty years after his
murder, Marcel Bascoulard remains something of an iconic curiosity for the
people of Bourges. He was seen as a wandering visionary, an erudite outsider
known for his highly detailed drawings of the town. He was self-taught and was
the only character ever to appear in his work, as his photographs, taken over a
thirty-year period from 1942 onwards, testify. These full-length photographic
self-portraits show Bascoulard wearing dresses he designed himself and holding
a piece of broken mirror, alone, in both interior and exterior settings.
The Pinault Collection
The exhibition ‘Dancing with Myself’ opened at Punta della Dogana, in Venice. The show curated
by Martin Bethenod and Florian Ebner, stems from the collaboration between the
Pinault Collection and Museum Folkwang in Essen.
The exhibition,
presented in a first version in 2016 in Essen, proposes a revisited path with
over 56 artworks not featured in the German museum. ‘Dancing with Myself’ faces
the primordial importance of the artist’s role as actor and material of his/her
own creations, from the 1970s to today.
The exhibition brings
together a great range of artistic practices and languages (photography, video,
painting, sculpture, installation…), cultures, geographic origins, generations
and experiences, to establish a tension between extremely different artistic
approaches: melancholy of vanity, ironic play with identity, political
biography and existential questioning, the body as sculpture, effigy or
fragment of its symbolic substitute.
The exhibition
revolves around four themes – Melancholia, Identity Games, Political
Autobiographies, Raw Material - that develop evenly through the spaces of Punta
della Dogana with over 140 works. 116 works from the Pinault Collection, of
which more than 80 have never been exhibited in Venice, establish a dialogue
with a selection of works from Museum Folkwang in Essen. On view 32 artists,
including Marcel Bascoulard, Marcel Broodthaers, Cindy Sherman, Damien Hirst , Urs
Lüthi , Claude Cahun, John Coplans, Urs Fischer, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Rudolf Stingl, Nan Goldin, Gilbert & George,
Lily Renaud-Dewar and Giulio Paolini.
Reviews of the
exhibition :
But after passing
through Félix González-Torres’s symbolist “Untitled (Blood)” (1992) strands of
red beads at the exhibition’s entrance, it was encouraging to see the curators
Bethenod and Florian Ebner digging deeper into the ‘self’ with emotional
sub-themes of melancholia, political autobiography, materiality and identity
games, best exemplified by the incognito poly-identities presented by Urs Lüthi,
Claude Cahun, Marcel Bascoulard, and Cindy Sherman. Their self-masking thematic
struck me the deepest as it reminds us that automated artificial intelligence
facial recognition is soon destined to have a monstrous effect on our lives.
(…)
The chimeric Sherman
probably is the central artist of the exhibition, with 45 of her works
included, which may have been too long a march through the female unconscious,
considering there are none by Carolee Schneemann or the great hybrid poseur
Pierre Molinier. In their absence, Cahun, Lüthi and Bascoulard take full
advantage of the use of nuanced cultural façades that indicate an interest in
signal ambiguity within the semiotic field. When looking at their work, desire
can take us by surprise, leading us toward disguised hybrid-people we hadn’t
imagined we would ever love or trust. Certainly, their impertinent masks within
the look-at-me premise of the show can be reconsidered as culturally prescient
in lieu of the psychographic politics that have dowsed the internet ego-rush of
freely sharing selfie data — a rush that has remade unmasked masses into raw
commodities.
The Alluring Dance of
Selfies and Self-Portraits. By Joseph Nechvatal. Hyperallergic , May 23, 2018.
A series of recently
discovered photographs by Marcel Bascoulard, a talented autodidact who lived in
a state of vagrancy in a rural French town, offers an unexpected portrait of an
artist over time. Bascoulard designed feminine costumes for himself,
commissioned from a seamstress using scraps of fabric bought in a local thrift
shop. He appears posing proudly and elegantly in a long flounced skirt in 1944.
Both the artist and his outfits evidence the dilapidation of time and an uptick
in calculated eccentricity: by the early 1970s he appears hunched and gray, in
a series of skirt suits stitched from thick leatherette. Apparently, he would
throw his self-portraits at people’s feet, by way of provocation.
In the Age of the
Selfie, Self-Portraits Are More Powerful Than Ever. By Hettie Judah. Garage,
April 18, 2018.
You will dance better
tomorrow thanks to the Pinault Collection. By Thibaut Wychowanok. Numéro , April 23, 2018.
These two images are
amongst the earliest of a series of self-portraits Marcel Bascoulard made
compulsively until his death (in 1978 at the age of 64), in or around the town
of Bourges, in central France. During war-time occupation, Bascoulard was
arrested at least twice by Nazi soldiers, only to be released without charge;
accounts suggest they may have been unnerved by his strangeness, a prominent
aspect of which was his seeming indifference to them. Bascoulard lived always
on his own idiosyncratic terms, apparently unconcerned with the opinion of
others.
Though the subject of
these two photographs, Bascoulard is also their maker; the camera is his own
(though a friend is operating it for him), and the intentions likewise. Six months
elapsed between them being taken and Bascoulard’s sense of what he wants these
images to address, and how, appears to have evolved. While his stance in the
earlier picture is self-consciously feminine – a performance, in a private
space – the later photograph is unapologetically of a man in a dress, out in
the countryside for all the world to see. He seems more concerned now with
straightforwardly recording a moment than with conforming to an established
(gendered) aesthetic. ‘This is me, in this dress,’ Bascoulard seems to be
saying. And nothing more.
This approach –
directly addressing the camera, devoid of posturing – was to prove
characteristic. Though the costumes change over the decades (Bascoulard
designed them himself and had them made) the form of the photographs doesn’t,
suggesting that, while something is being developed, something else is stuck in
reiteration, both seeking and resisting resolution. Denying himself money and
possessions, Bascoulard lived as a clochard – a vagrant – in a succession of
slum lodgings or improvised shacks (the last of which was a rusting lorry-cab
in the corner of a field), never washing or changing his clothes. In this way
he spent his whole life in the one small community, known to everyone while
remaining insistently alone.
He had trained as an
artist and been exhibited once, in Paris. Known for his landscape drawings –
which, at their best, are vital with the commonplace – he chose to sell only
the most conventional: souvenir pictures of the town’s cathedral and mediaeval
streets. He showed his photographic self-portraits to his friends, some of whom
still live in the area. ‘Monsieur Bascoulard’ they call him reverently, even
lovingly, as they explain to me that he only dressed up for the camera.
According to an official report of an incident in 1952, when he was arrested
for walking the streets in the ‘wrong’ kind of clothing, he told the police:
‘It’s an artistic necessity.’ He was seeking to avoid charges, but in the
process provided his one explicit statement as to what he considered the
photographs to be: Art.
They fall into three
distinct phases. In the first, made during the 1940s, the youthfully lean and
bright-eyed Bascoulard is radiantly self-assured, dressed as his grandmother
might have been when she was his age and on her way to a party.
In the second (from
the 1950s to ’60s), a more matronly Bascoulard continues to emulate an earlier
generation: a middle-aged schoolteacher; a shopkeeper; a spinster aunt. Dutiful
domestic service is evoked by aprons, sometimes worn incongruously over satin.
While these images celebrate the mundane respectability of pre-war small-town
life, the man who made them lived in squalor and stench. Looking at us
quizzically, a piece of mirror always in hand – reading variously as a fan, a
book or a machete – he is in his 40s now and bulking up. A bourgeois housewife
prize-fighter.
Often, in this middle
phase of the photographs, he seems too tightly wrapped – a chrysalis – and in
the final phase (which takes us into the 1970s) emerges as a massive
gravity-bound butterfly. He had always liked materials with a sheen and now
it’s vinyl, the folds of which take on increasingly structural forms (sometimes
as stiff and as gleaming as samurai armour). And the man himself? He looks a
little doubtful at times, or a little impatient, his head and shoulders often
dipping in a kind of curtsey. Is it a supplication? Or is he poised to go in
for the kill? He has the battered and embattled look of a boxer.
In one picture (it’s
undated but looks to be from his final years) he’s wearing a simple white
smock, standing in an interior doorway. The wallpaper is unprecedented; it
feels like someone’s home rather than a studio. I have the surprising sense of
another person’s presence (he’s always seemed alone before, even though someone
was operating the camera), and this suggests a narrative. It’s as if he’s asked
a question and awaits our answer: it might be whether we want a cup of tea. I
don’t think it’s whether we want a fuck: Bascoulard’s self-portraits are
resolutely asexual. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ he seems to be saying,
‘however transgressive this might appear.’ In 1932, when Bascoulard was 19, his
mother shot his father dead. She spent the rest of her life in a lunatic
asylum. Does the paradoxically reassuring atmosphere of these images mask an
intimation that women may not necessarily be as benign as convention suggests,
or men necessarily as dangerous?
In the final
photographs the juxtaposition of an undisguisedly male person with clothing
conventionally regarded as female has evolved so that both the person and the
costume seem imbued with a mix of masculine and feminine qualities. (Unless
this is to observe only how we all, in ageing, tend to reassume the androgyny
of adolescence.)
Bascoulard struggled
to emerge from a traumatic childhood into a singular adulthood. In making these
images is he seeking to ameliorate a sense of discomfort or to examine it? Is
he trying to reconcile his mother and his father, or the masculine and feminine
aspects of himself? And if so, does he succeed? In the early images his presentation
to the camera seems a victory in itself, but the later ones are increasingly
shadowed by a sense that the weariness of compulsion has overtaken the energy
from which compulsion springs.
That his mother
killed his father suggests a couple overly preoccupied with one another and
unlikely to have much time for their children. Ultimately, for me, these
mysterious self-portraits read as images of self-sufficiency. ‘I am all I need
in one,’ he seems to be saying, ‘You offer nothing. I only want you to see. To
know I’m here. And not to forget.’
The Mysterious
Selfies of Marcel Bascoulard. By Philip Myall. Frieze,
September 20, 2018.
More :
Two
interesting French documentaries :
Bascoulard, le destintragique du dessinateur-clochard. France 3 Centre-Val de
Loire. Published on November 7, 2017
Bascoulard et nous. In 2017, eight students from different classes at the Lycée Jean Mermoz de Bourges made a documentary film retracing the life of an emblematic figure of the city of Bourges: Marcel Bascoulard. Lycée Jean Mermoz de Bourges / CICLIC - 2017
A book on his life
and work :
Bascoulard : Dessinateur
virtuose, clochard magnifique, femme inventée.
texte de Patrick
Martinat. Editions Buchet/Chastel, Les Cahiers Dessinés, 2017.
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