Chaosmose: The Jean-Jacques Lebel Endowment Fund

Marcel Duchamp With My Tongue in My Cheek, 1959 Matériaux divers Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne Dation, 1993 ©Association Marcel Duchamp/Adagp, Paris, 2024 Photo ©Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/ Jacques Faujour/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn

By JOSEPH NECHVATAL January 26, 2025

“The work of art, for those who use it, is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense, of baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment which leads to a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself.”

-Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm

Polymathic intermedia artist/poet Jean-Jacques Lebel is back at the Centre Pompidou exhibiting his deep love of freedom, audacious mockery, love of altered states of consciousness, playful subversion and his generosity. 

Chaosmose (the title is borrowed from Félix Guattari’s book by that name that in English is called Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, 1995) is the result of a collaboration between the Jean-Jacques Lebel Endowment Fund and the Musée national d'art modern. The endowment includes over 1000 works and objects from various periods and geographical origins including a Jaina cosmological diagram, voodoo spell stakes, and art works by Antonin Artaud, Leonora Carrington, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Esther Ferrer, Johann Heinrich Füssli, Brion Gysin, Victor Hugo, Hector Hyppolite, Françoise Janicot, Augustin Lesage, Ghérasim Luca, Henri Michaux, Francis Picabia, Kazuo Shiraga, Kurt Schwitters, and Unica Zürn. One masterpiece after another.

Born in 1936 in Paris, son of Robert Lebel—a poet, art collector, Old Masters art critic, and aficionado of Marcel Duchamp—bilingual Jean-Jacques grew up in New York City, during World War II, surrounded by Marcel Duchamp, Billie Holiday, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim, Benjamin Péret, and André Breton, who later expelled him from the Surrealist group for nonconformity. After this turbulent period, during the waning of the Surrealist epoch, Lebel spearheaded the European wing of the Happening movement, in which transgressive performance events, usually with nonlinear narratives, are staged as art pieces.

Bearing witness to the deep friendship that united Marcel Duchamp and André Breton with Jean-Jacques Lebel and his father, I loved that this beautifully installed show is dedicated to poets, artists, and cultural agitators. Also evident in the work here is a deep debt to Dada, Surrealist frottage and Action Painting. The collection of works preserved by the Endowment Fund is marked by Lebel’s relationship to Breton and Duchamp, as well as to the many artists with whom he has worked, so far. Lebel says of the show that “It is the connection between works considered by museum institutions and the doxa of art historians as disparate, and therefore incongruous neighbors, that propelled me towards exhibiting.”  

The show slots into seven (loose) sections, including: Polyphonix, ​​a “direct poetry festival” created in 1979 by Lebel, François Dufrêne, Bernard Heidsieck and Christian Descamps, later joined by Jacqueline Cahen: a festival “anchored to nothing, subservient to no one, [... ] nomadic, outside the norm, outside the circuit, outside officialdom, outside everything,” as one of its presidents, Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, notes. It features Françoise Janicot, Ghérasim Luca, Brion Gysin's Permutations, Esther Ferrer, Serge Pey, Joël Hubaut, John Giorno, and William S. Burroughs. There is a section on Dada, with featured works by Raoul Hausmann, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp and one on Gestures that features Asger Jorn, Victor Hugo and Kazuo Shiraga’s work from the end of the 1950s, when the artist, suspended from a rope above white canvas, painted with his feet.

Kazuo Shiraga Chizensei Konseimao, 1960 Huile sur toile, 161,5 × 130 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne Achat, 1990 ©The Estate of Kazuo Shiraga Photo ©Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/ Philippe Migeat/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn

Evident throughout is a re-appropriating of objects and idea of oppression, melting them down, transforming them into forms of revolt and insubordination as a way of exorcising fear and pain. For the sculptor Melvin Edwards, the ghost of a face emerges from a mass of metal elements reminiscent of the shackles of slaves. Alex Burke's dolls, wrapped tightly in strips of fabric, evoke constrained bodies. But their form also refers to magical objects, such as the fon voodoo stake statuettes from West Africa used for bewitchment and control.

With three wonderful drawings saturated with microscopic motifs, Henri Michaux transcribes a dive into the space of the inside. In the grip of the throes of illness, aggravated by extremely brutal psychiatric treatments, Leonora Carrington, Unica Zürn and Antonin Artaud produced images and texts here to reconstruct a fragmented ego. Their creations, like the fantastic castles of Victor Hugo and the dreamlike forests of Guillaume Apollinaire, bear witness to the capacity of art to transcend fear and to open windows on the complexity of our inner worlds. WM

Anonyme Masque-heaume zuñi, n. d. Matériaux divers, env. 22 × 25 × 28 cm Paris, fonds de dotation Jean-Jacques Lebel Photo© Raphaele Kriegel

Antonin Artaud Portrait de Jacques Marie Prevel, 1947 Mine graphite sur papier, 57,4 × 45,6 cm Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Achat, 1987 Domaine public Photo ©Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/ Philippe Migeat/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn