Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère: Francis Picabia’s Anti-Art Anti-Christ
Sarah Hayden
Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère was published in Paris in the autumn of 1920.1 After protracted, ultimately abortive, negotiations with René Hilsum and Bernard Grasset, it was produced at Francis Picabia’s own expense under the ‘Collection Dada’ imprint of Paris bookseller-publishers, Au Sans Pareil, and distributed by Jacques Povlovsky’s Librairie-Galerie La Cible.2 The fact that Ezra Pound was an early proponent of Picabia’s writing is not surprising; the fact that his enthusiastic early reading of Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère has not been succeeded by extensive further scholarship certainly is. Having dismissed Picabia in 1916 as a proponent of ‘modern froth’,3 by 1921 Pound was willing to praise his prowess ‘not exactly as a painter, but as a writer’.4 In the same year, Pound
1. Francis Picabia, Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère (Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1920), hereafter JCR in the text. Translators and critics have offered various glosses on the book’s title. See Michel Sanouillet, Francis Picabia et 391, vol. 2 (Paris: Eric Losfeld, 1966), p. 123, and Francis Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocation, ed. and trans. by Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007), p. 223. Picabia also used the ‘rasta’ prefix in his visual art of this period, including Tableau rastadada (1920) (collage on paper, 19 x 17 cm), and Le Rastaquouère (1920). The latter of these was exhibited at the Salon d’automne, Paris, October 1920. For an illuminating treatment of the Tableau rastadada, see George Baker, ‘Long live Daddy’, October, 105 (2003), 37–72. 2. 1,060 copies of this publication were released. It is, however, widely listed as having been issued by René Hilsum’s Au Sans Pareil press. See Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1951) and Keith Aspley, Historical Dictionary of Surrealism (Maryland: Scarecrow, 2010). To trace the sequence of rejections which threatened to prevent the book’s appearance, see Documents 120–25 of Sanouillet’s Dada à Paris, and Eddie Breuil’s essay, ‘Vie et mort de la Collection Dada’, Revue des Litteratures de l’Union Europeenne, 3 (2005)
recommended Picabia to Margaret Anderson for the French editorship of the Little Review, writing: ‘F.P.’s painting is perhaps not convincing when reproduced, but the intelligence in his last book is another matter.’5 Pound’s archive in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library lists a translation of Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère and a typescript of the text among its holdings of his papers,6 and references to Picabia’s anti- war writings also surface among Pound’s Cantos, namely in LXXXVII, XCVII and CIII.7 In his 1937 treatise ‘D’Artagnan Twenty Years Later’, an essay written many years after Dada’s pan-national bushfires had died out, Pound pronounces Picabia ‘the only man I have ever met who has a genius for handling abstract concepts with the ease and surety a chartered accountant would have with a bill (ordinary) of lading’.8 At times recognizably Dada, and at others idiosyncratically Picabian, Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère registers the contradictions which 5. Ezra Pound, Letter to Margaret Anderson, April 20 1921, in Pound/ The Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson: The Little Review Correspondence, ed. by Thomas L. Scott and Melvin J. Friedman (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 264. As is observed in an editorial note, this ‘last book’ might refer either to Jésus- Christ Rastaquouère or to Unique eunuque, which also appeared in 1920. However, as the editors point out, Picabia had already referred specifically to the former text in other letters around that date. It is, to my mind, almost definitely a reference to Jésus- Christ Rastaquouère. 6. Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Collection of American Literature: Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43, Box 146, 6440: [‘Jesus Christ Rastaquouere’]: trans. by Ezra Pound, typescript, n.d. and Box 146, 6441: ‘Jesus Christ Rastaquouere’: typescript, [1], Cl. 1–8, n.d. 7. All three of these, as Daniel Albright notes (‘Pound, Picabia, and Surrealism’, in Ezra Pound and Referentiality, ed. by H. Aji (Paris: Presses de l’universite de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003), pp. 161–75 (p. 171)), refer to the same quotation, variously reprocessed in the Cantos as: ‘“Europe” said Picabia/ “exhausted by the conquest of Alsace-Lorraine”’ (LXXXVII, 570); ‘“By the conquest,” said Picabia, “of Alsace-Lorraine”’ (XCVII, 678); ‘“Europe” said Picabia: “exhausted/ by the conquest of Alsace Lorraine”’ (CIII, 733). See Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). The line that follows the original quotation, ‘Poor beings, felled by the hundreds for the glory of a ventriloquist’, closely recalls Picabia’s indictment of French war generals (JCR 60). For an acute reading of Pound’s interest in Picabia, see Albright’s essays: ‘Early Cantos I–XLI’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. by Ira B. Nadell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 59–91 and ‘Pound, Picabia, and Surrealism’. 8. Ezra Pound, ‘D’Artagnan Twenty Years After’, in Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. by William Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), pp. 422–30 (p. 428). JÉSUS-CHRIST RASTAQUOUÈRE 43
marked its author’s final, fractious days as a Dadaist. By 1920, Picabia’s enthusiasm for Dada and for Breton had become frayed; a year later, the mock-trial of Maurice Barrès would hasten his final disaffiliation from the movement. The philosophy of Nietzsche resonated with diverse vectors of the pan-national Dada experiment,9 and Picabia’s own familiarity with his writings have been widely acknowledged.10 We know that he discussed his reading with Breton and Tzara and that he quoted freely and borrowed blatantly from the philosopher — sometimes manufacturing whole poems from unattributed quotations.11 In his recent introduction to the first English edition of Picabia’s collected writings, entitled I am a Beautiful Monster, Marc Lowenthal remarks: ‘Perhaps the most ticklish aspect of Picabia’s writings, and particularly of his later writings, is his often blatant, and as yet little discussed, plagiarism and appropriation of Nietzsche.’12 Although Lowenthal is admirably thorough in identifying the sources for many of these covert borrowings, this sleuthing out of instances of plagiarism and appropriation is much less tantalizing a proposition than is the
9. See for example: T. J. Berard, ‘Dada between Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Bourdieu’s Distinction: Existenz and Conflict in Cultural Analysis’, Theory, Culture & Society, 16.1 (1999), 141–65; Christine Battersby, ‘“Behold the Buffoon”: Dada, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo and the Sublime’, Tate Papers, 13. 1 (2010),
task of analyzing Picabia’s processing of Nietzschean thought. The analysis that follows centres on the imprint of Nietzschean philosophy on Picabia’s negotiation of embodiment, art and religion. Presenting Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère as a critically neglected masterwork of Paris Dada, I want to demonstrate how Picabia enlisted Dadaist suspicion of organized religion as a template for enacting his disavowal of the official art world. Whereas Nietzsche’s anti-deism is clearly articulated and has elicited sustained scholarly investigation, Picabia’s co-opting of Nietzsche’s Anti-Cartesianism and Anti-Christ-ism into his own Anti-Art invective has been largely overlooked. Taking Pound’s claims regarding Picabia’s aptitude for processing abstract concepts alongside Lowenthal’s invitation to investigate his Nietzschean inflections as my starting point, I will move towards a diagnosis of what is at issue in Picabia’s de-abstractifying — materially embodying — portrayals of Art as/and Religion. Before examining the Anti-Art processing of Nietzschean anti-deism in Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, I want to outline the specifically Dadaist bent of Picabia’s intent with regard to how he structures, articulates and presents the text.
Strange Frames; Untoward Positions
Critics tend to refer to Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère as a novel. However, as befits its position as ‘peut-être le documentdadaïste le plus important de cette époque’ (Sanouillet’s claim; my emphasis), the text contains neither plot, nor any discernible sense of narrative progression.13 The eponymous antihero surfaces only sporadically — and these cameo appearances are anything but constitutive of a coherent character. Gabrielle Buffet’s prefatorial description of the rastaquouère obscures as much as it elucidates: ‘Le rastaquouère est possédé par l’envie de manger des diamants./ Il est propriétaire de quelques oripeaux disparates et de sentiments naïfs, il est simple et tendre; il jongle avec tous les objets
13. Sanouillet, Dada à Paris, p. 229; Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. by David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 177. JÉSUS-CHRIST RASTAQUOUÈRE 45
qui lui tombent sous la main.’14 A composite edifice of prose, verse, polemic, aphorism and anecdote, Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère reads more like an unactivated, text-bound blueprint for a Dada performance than the ‘novel’ it is commonly considered to be. In an effort to resist Romantic introspection, Dada’s Anti-Art mission abjures both art’s reflective, interiorized production-myth and its promise of escape. Dada problematizes the truth-status of language; it destabilizes its claim to authority. In Dada, as in Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, ‘[i]l n’y a pas de Défense, pas de Jugement, pas de Raison’ (JCR 8). At the end of the book, a coda in verse advises that ‘DADA’, and, we might infer, this supremely Dadaist text, ‘est insaissisable’ (JCR 65). The Anti-Artwork that is Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère does all it can to de-reify itself; it problematizes its own artistic-literary status. Flippant, crude and provocative, it absolutely denies the transcendent ambitions of Art (with a capital A). Discouraging comprehension and contradicting its own logic, this book resists generic classification, undermines its own credibility and twists away from criticism. Committed to revolt and absurdly broad antagonism, Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère sets about shaking the pillars of Enlightenment thinking. It directs itself towards the Dadaistic levelling of all socially constructed value systems via a dual strategy of inverting common sense and equating the unequal. The first of these tactics relates to what Sara Crangle terms ‘the Dada motif whereby the presumed order of the natural world is inverted’,15 and what Daniel Albright calls ‘subversion by inversion’.16 However, it is in his construction of false equations, or ‘equivalences’, that Picabia is at his most subversive.17 Imposing a ridiculous economy of relativity,
14. Gabrielle Buffet, ‘Introduction’, in JCR, pp. 8–9 (p. 9). 15. Sara Crangle, ‘Dada Is Bathos! Or, of the Hobbyhorse Endlessly Rocking’, in On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music, ed. by Sara Crangle and Peter Nicholls (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 27–48 (p. 29). 16. Albright, ‘Early Cantos I–XLI’, p. 171. 17. Equals signs were used to provocative and ridiculous effect throughout Dada literature. See Tzara’s ‘Manifeste Dada’ of 1918: ‘Ordre=désordre; moi=non-moi; affirmation=négation’, in Lampisteries précédées des sept manifestes Dada (Paris: Société Nouvelle des Éditions Pauvert, 1979), p. 25. and Céline Arnauld, ‘Ombrelle Dada’: ‘Poésie = cure-dent, encyclopédie, taxi ou abri-ombrelle’, in Littérature, 1 46 HAYDEN
he equates the incomparable. Thus, against all sensory and cognitive evidence to the contrary, we are advised that ‘[i]l y a les lacs et les îles, ce qui est exactement la même chose’, and that the boxer Georges Carpentier is no stronger than a two-year-old’ (JCR 17).18 Articulated with the authority of a blasphemous theologian, Picabia’s inversions and equivalences attack our conceptions of reason, knowability and facticity. The text (im)proper is divided into six chapters, bookended by the ‘Entr’acte d’une minute’ which precedes the first chapter, and a second ‘Entr’acte de 5 minutes’ which falls between chapters four and five. Forty-five headings — formally evocative of (but functionally opposite to) the intertitles which separate scenes in silent film — divide those six chapters. Existing, for the most part, in entirely arbitrary relation to their contexts, these uppercase interjections only complicate the text which they promise, insincerely, to elucidate. About one third of the headed sections contain an inset and italicized passage which presumably denotes either song or verse. These embedded incantations abstract the text still further from any semblance of narratological or theoretical progression. Throughout the book, moments of gravity give way to absurdity. Any build towards emphatic dogmatism or the rhetorical pressure of the manifesto form is leavened or dissolved by singsong interjections or whimsically abrupt shifts in tone or content. As Crangle writes of Dada writing more generally, ‘the reader’s perspective is similarly, relentlessly dragged down and forced back up’.19 A major aspect of Dada’s ‘tactical approach’ is, as Leah Dicker- man identifies, ‘the transfiguration of audience relationships’.20 Picabia
(1920), 19. The phrase ‘OUI = NON’ was printed four times diagonally across ‘Dada soulève tout’ (Paris, January 12, 1921), a manifesto signed by multiple Dadaists, including Varèse, Tzara, Soupault, Rigaut, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Man Ray, Picabia, Ernst, Eluard, Arp, Buffet and Breton. 18. In 1924, in another example of Dada’s fascination with imposture and identity-theft, Picabia reproduced an image of Carpentier’s face on the cover of 391 as a replacement for that of Marcel Duchamp; their profiles were indeed remarkably similar. See also his Portrait de Georges Carpentier (1923) (ink and gouache on paper). 19. For a fascinating analysis of bathos in Dada, see Crangle, ‘Dada Is Bathos!’. 20. Leah Dickerman, ‘Introduction’, in Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New JÉSUS-CHRIST RASTAQUOUÈRE 47
dedicates his book to ‘the young girls’ — enacting a cheeky nod both to his preoccupation with analysing the figure of the ‘jeune fille’,21 and to his own notoriety as a firm fan of nubile femininity. At numerous points in the book, we are directly addressed — always in the age- and gender-marked form of ‘chères lectrices’. Thus, the text transgressively projects its entire readership into a position of transvestite impersona- tion. This enacts a sort of readerly compulsion or contract — the terms of which become clear only when the narrator-ringmaster pauses in his spewing of aphoristic and anecdotal effluvia to exclaim: ‘Ouf! Je vous embrasse chère lectrice, le long du cou, nous sommes au soleil, vous avez au doigt un saphir que vous ne demandez qu’à me donner, votre main droite me gratte le dos…’ (JCR 22). In contradistinction to those modernist collage-works which, through their enlisting of disparate fragments and found objects, provoke a sense of subjective decomposi- tion, Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère compels both its readers and its impu- dent author-narrator to become more fully, bodily present in the textual encounter. In Dada’s war on Art, the problematization of artistic authorship was crucial. Wielding a brace of pseudonyms and given to the tactical deployment of misinformation, Picabia was a master of these anti- authorial games.22 In L’Œil cacodylate (1921), Copie d’un autographe d’Ingres (1920) and Francis Picabia (c.1920) — the artwork as signature alone — he manufactured multiple interrogations of the
York, Paris, ed. by Leah Dickerman (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2005), pp. 1–15 (p. 9). 21. For a comprehensive treatment of this Dada-pervasive preoccupation, see Elizabeth Hutton Turner, ‘La Jeune Fille américaine and the Dadaist impulse’, in Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender and Identity, ed. by Naomi Sawlson-Gorse (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1998), pp. 4–21. 22. Pseudonymy was particularly prevalent amongst the Berlin contingent: Monteur Dada for Heartfield/Herzfelde, Marshall for George Grosz, Oberdada for Johannes Baader, Kurtchen for Kurt Schwitters, Progress Dada for Wieland Herzfelde and IK Bonsett for Theo Van Doesburg. Picabia published as ‘Funny Guy’ and as ‘Pharamousse’. Johannes Baargeld appears variously as ‘Zentrodada’ and ‘Alfred Grünwald’ while Raoul Haussman published as ‘Dadasopher’ and Max Ernst as ‘Dadamax’ and as ‘Macchab’. Gender-crossing examples, most significantly Duchamp’s ‘Rrose Sélavy’ and Ernst’s avian ‘Lop-lop,’ also appear. 48 HAYDEN
immanent value of the artist’s signature.23 Having originally asked André Breton to provide a preface for this book, Picabia eventually appointed Gabrielle Buffet to the task.24 Daniel Albright nominates her two-page preface the ‘one passage in Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère where Picabia’s aesthetic is stated as an explicit doctrine’.25 Unconcerned with fulfilling any conventional prefatorial obligations, Buffet’s introduction provides neither a description of the text it precedes, nor a paean to its author. Instead, it offers a cogent précis of the central themes of Picabia’s book. The significance of this displacement of the book’s conceptual centre is further complicated by the fact that Picabia would, a few months later, claim the text as his own in a short promotional extract.26 If Buffet’s preface is indeed the crux of Picabia credo, then his decision to leave the articulation of his own programmatic mission to another, embedded author surely derives from that same Dadaist determination to problematize his authority over his own text. While, as Hal Foster observes, for the Dadaists, ‘“self- disintegration” has its own paradoxical attractions’,27 for Picabia the forced disintegration of artistic ego was both prime directive and an
23. Francis Picabia, L’Œil cacodylate (1921) (oil and paper on canvas, 146 x 113cm); Francis Picabia, Copie d’un autographe d’Ingres, reproduced on cover of 391, 14 (Paris, November 1920); Francis Picabia, Francis Picabia (c.1920) (ink on paper, 32.5 x 25.5cm). Reference in JCR (p. 22) to the ‘signature-charlatan’ of artists who style themselves freakshow oddities bounces us back to these works. 24. The conflicted context of this failed plan can be traced through Picabia and Breton’s correspondence, reproduced in Sanouillet’s Dada à Paris, and in André Breton’s essay, ‘Les Enfers artificiels’, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Marguerite Bonnet, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1988–99), I, 623–30 (p. 628). Picabia also incorporated an extended quotation from ‘L’Art ne s’explique pas’ — an earlier theoretical text by Buffet — into the fourth chapter, writing: ‘Ces lignes ont été écrites par Gabrielle Buffet, je suis heureux de les citer’ (JCR 45). Lowenthal records that this essay had been written as preface to Picabia’s 1919 exhibition at the Galerie Moos in Geneva (notes, in Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster, p. 460). See Gabrielle Buffet, Rencontres avec Picabia, Apollinaire, Cravan, Duchamp, Arp, Calder (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1977), pp. 225–26. Buffet was Picabia’s wife as well as his companion in Dada. 25. Albright, ‘Pound, Picabia and Surrealism’, p. 168. 26. See 391, 14 (Paris, November 1920), p. 3. For further examples of disputed spousal authorship, see Buffet and Picabia’s collaborations in 291. 27. Hal Foster, ‘Dada Mime’, October, 105 (2003), 166–76 (p. 169). JÉSUS-CHRIST RASTAQUOUÈRE 49
integral strut of his Anti-Art agenda. Of course, he was at the same time strongly invested in the constitution of a very public (and evidently highly durable) Anti-Art persona for himself. Rather than illustrating Jésus- Christ Rastaquouère with his own mechanomorphic drawings, Picabia chose to solicit three illustrations from his Dada compatriot, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes.28 These pen and ink drawings — entitled ‘Portrait de la Reine du Perou’, ‘Maladie Légale’ and ‘Grand Mâle Général’ — bear a striking resemblance to Picabia’s own machine drawings from this period. Flat, tonally mute and adorned with puerile inscriptions, they are doubly Dadaist: technically impoverished rebukes to aesthetic pleasure and concertedly childish. Just as the text undermines its most ponderous assertions against war and patriotism by situating them in proximity to more frivolous fragments, so the incorporation of these drawings provokes a conflicted response. Their enigmatic titles and the knowledge that these images have been especially commissioned from a third party inspire the disbursement of a certain degree of energy on their divination. Conversely, their very simplicity and illegibility deflect any very great or sustained analysis. Set alongside the preface, this aesthetically redundant outsourcing of illustrations advances Picabia’s anti-subjectivist, anti-artist drive to move against the creative ego by partially de-author(iz)ing his own book.
Writing with blood
Employing disparate registers, Picabia and Nietzsche were united in a mission to engender an embodied, fleshly philosophical and aesthetic position. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, this concern with conflating body and soul which, in Picabia’s writing, often seems concertedly puerile, is framed as a characteristic of enlightened being.29 Nietzsche’s ‘awakened
28. Both Picabia (16–30 April) and Ribemont-Dessaignes (28 May to 10 June) had exhibited in René Hilsum’s ‘Au Sans Pareil’ gallery and bookshop in 1920. See George Baker, ‘Keep Smiling’, in The Dada Seminars, ed. by Leah Dickerman and Matthew S. Witskovsky (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2005), pp. 191–219. 29. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody, ed. 50 HAYDEN
one’ is celebrated as ‘the one who knows, [who] says: Body am I through and through, and nothing besides; and soul is merely a word for something about the body’ (TSZ 30). An acceptance and, indeed, a celebration of the material fact of human being is, for Nietzsche, synonymous with saying ‘Yes’. In a rebuke to Christian prudishness, he suggests that ‘[t]he degree and kind of a person’s sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit’.30 Nietzsche’s rallying call for a re-materialization of lived experience leads him to demand a physically realized writing, saying: ‘Of all that is written, I love only that which one writes with one’s own blood. Write with blood, and you shall discover that blood is spirit’ (TSZ 35). In what Albright justly terms the ‘hypermaterialized universe’ of Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère , ‘NOUS SOMMES/ DANS UN TUBE DIGESTIF’ (JCR 35); a world in which our material selves are invited to supersede our psychospiritual components. In his writings, Picabia works to resituate us within our own bodies, insistently prodding his ‘lectrices’ to attend to their own materiality. In his plastic art production, machine drawings and other abstract works are christened with fleshily imbricated and self- consciously provocative titles.31 By overlaying sensual experiences and abstract concepts, Picabia dislodges both categories from their traditional relational positions within modernity’s antimaterialist hierarchy. In Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, Picabia declares: ‘NOTRE TÊTE/ A DEUX BESOINS/ COMME LE VENTRE’ (JCR 63). His collocation of two terms so often positioned in diametric opposition coheres with Nietzsche’s anti-Christian anti-Cartesianism. Suggesting that the brain’s appetite for knowledge is no less prosaic than the stomach’s
and trans. by Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), hereafter TSZ in the text. 30. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), § 75. 31. Francis Picabia, Prostitution universelle (1916) (oil and ink on cardboard, 74.5 x 94.3cm); Francis Picabia, Vagin brillant (c.1918) The latter was reproduced in 391, 8 (1919), 7, bearing the inscription: ‘Petit mâle. Frottement. Couche à bouche. Mécanique de la région sacrée.’ JÉSUS-CHRIST RASTAQUOUÈRE 51
more material economy of desires, he frames both organs as simple circuits which require only to be filled and, in the expectation of future fillings, thereafter to be voided. Another apt illustration of Dada’s compulsive drive towards pulling high abstractions down to the level of base materiality arises when Picabia suggests that religious faith is no more elevated a source of sustenance than is a ‘beafteck’ (JCR 26). This blasphemous assertion of a parity between bodily nourishment (and not just any foodstuff, at that, but that most particularly carnal apparition of a bloody ‘beafteck’) and spiritual nourishment compels us to re-evaluate both terms. To resolve the terms of this farcical equation, we must resign ourselves either to sacralizing the servicing of that same body’s unceasing sequence of needs and desires and, by association, the ignominy of worshipping a steak or, alternatively, recast religion as another among the body’s various base appetites. Analogously absurd calls for the sacralization of the body — often at the expense of the intellectual/spiritual — recur throughout the text. Both Nietzsche and Picabia associate this mass societal repudiation of physicality which they are trying to overturn with repressive regimes devised by, to quote the former, the ‘dismal philosophical blindworms’ of Christian thought.32 In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche condemns this furtive concealment of the physical nature of human existence, claiming that: ‘the hole-and-corner, the dark chamber is Christian. Here the body is despised, hygiene repudiated as sensuality…’33 Picabia, in ‘Un effet facile’ declares life itself ‘the opposite of God’;34 a sentiment that chimes very closely with Nietzsche’s conception of Christianity as ‘a conspiracy…against life itself’ (TAC 198). However, whereas Nietzsche goes on to mourn society’s correlative ‘Hatred of mind’ (TAC 143), Picabia attacks the humanist presumption of respect for human
32. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), § 37. 33. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale, introduction by Michael Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 143, hereafter TAC in the text. 34. Francis Picabia, ‘Un effet facile’, Littérature, 2nd series, 5 (1922), 1–2. See Lowenthal, notes, in Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster, p. 293. 52 HAYDEN
intelligence and the civilization it designs and commands. He counters society’s hatred of the body with a Dadaist posture of ‘hatred of mind’ — warning us, in chapter one, of the neurological damage associated with reflective thought: ‘Si vous regardez au dedans de vous, vous ne pouvez apercevoir qu’une bibliothèque qui vous étouffe, si vous insistez, vous produirez l’arrêt de vos facultés, insistez encore, ce sera la panique et le délire’ (JCR 26). Under this materializing mandate, and in a startling performance of neuroscientific rhetoric avant-la-lettre, thoughts and feelings are reduced to chemical reactions. Faith, love and art are framed as ‘névrose[s]’ to which a vulnerable individual may at any time succumb (JCR 62). This bathetic treatment of love as a purely physical drive manifests again in the text’s address to an interlocutor whose ‘cœur’ is located in an unorthodox position ‘entre les jambes’ (JCR 30).35 Stripped of its habitual associations with soulful sacrifice and high idealism, love is elsewhere reduced to a neurochemical inevitability: ‘L’amour sous l’action de la cocaïne s’hypertrophie, l’amour est donc purement réaction chimique et se manifeste au contact des courants invisibles, comme les réflexes d’une grenouille morte’ JCR( 25). The effects it produces in an affected/infected individual are dismissed as the brain-body’s automatic electric response to a chemical stimulus. This aggressively physicalist drive reaches its apotheosis in the ‘Entr’acte’ which separates chapters four and five — in the course of which the narrator relates a bizarre anecdote about one Jacques Dingue. Living in Peru, Dingue became hopelessly infatuated with one of the native women. His love unreciprocated, he gradually sickened and grew weak. When a virulent flu epidemic struck the tribe that was hosting him, the vast majority died within a few days. Surrounded by the corpses of their former owners, the dogs of the village began to feed on the dead. When a dog arrived at the cabin of Jacques Dingue with the head of the 35. The mouth is a site of recurrent anxiety in this book. In chapter three, we read that ‘La bouche des hommes est un sexe inconscient’. In chapter two, toads ‘sautent dans votre bouche’ (JCR 30) and the last section closes with a song section which is saturated with oral shame (JCR 37). JÉSUS-CHRIST RASTAQUOUÈRE 53
woman he had loved, his immediate recognition of her instantly cures both his fever and madness. Revived, he proceeds to entertain himself by throwing the disembodied head across the room for the dog to fetch. The climax of this unsettling tale arrives when, having thrown the head especially hard, it breaks against the wall, whereupon ‘à sa grande joie, le joueur de boule pù [sic] constater que le cerveau qui en jaillit ne présentait qu’une seule circonvolution et affectait à s’y méprendre la forme d’une paire de fesses!...... ’ (JCR 49). With this grotesque recognition scene, Picabia delivers an extravagantly over-determined demonstration of his desire to punish society for its queasy cleaving of brain from body, physical from spiritual, romantic from genital.36
Materializations
Unsurprisingly, Picabia’s parallel preoccupations with asserting the primacy of embodied being and affronting the Catholic Church manifested themselves in many irreverent literary and plastic treatments of the bodies of religious icons. He takes his revenge on the church by actively enforcing the embodiment of abstract holy entities — specifically the figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary. As early as 1912, Picabia had made an abstract, vaguely orphist oil painting, entitled Crucifixion, and in the 1920s he produced a series of crucifixion studies.37 In addition to Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, 1920 also witnessed the publication of Picabia’s infamous La Sainte Vierge I (1920) and La Sainte Vierge II (1920).38 As two flamboyantly simple ink blots on paper, which are rendered indecent by their titling alone, these images function as direct affronts to the cult of marianology and to the idealization of virginity
36. Notwithstanding the author’s own aversion to biography, it might be apposite here to invoke Picabia’s lifelong performance of an infamously priapic model of Dadaist celebrity. 37. Francis Picabia, L’Aile (1923) (ink and watercolour on paper, 62.5x 47.5cm); Un bouton (1923) (ink and watercolour on paper, 62 x 42.5cm). 38. Francis Picabia, La Sainte Vierge I (1920), reproduced in 391, 12 (1920), 3; La Sainte Vierge II (ink on paper, 32 x 23cm). 54 HAYDEN
as the apotheosis of femininity.39 In an analogous bid to malign the Virgin’s purity, in Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère we are informed that ‘LA SAINTE VIERGE/ DANSE LE TANGO/ AVEC LE GRAND JULOT’ (JCR 41) and that ‘la Sainte Vierge est en effet, la véritable patronne des prostituées’ (JCR 41). Amplifying the outrage he solicits with these blasphemous parries, Picabia suggests that we suck, while we read these lines, the juice of a cherry. Beyond serving as another instance of this text’s idiosyncratic mode of address towards a readership it consistently seeks to embody, this direction further aggravates our complicity as consumers of Picabia’s heresy. He invites us to drink the juice of a fruit associated with virginity while we consume defamatory remarks against the good character of the Virgin herself. If the cherry is understood to stand for the hymen — a membrane whose rupturing Picabia had already, in his La Jeune Fille (1920)40 figured materially as circular hole and, in La Sainte Vierge I and II, as exuberantly explosive inkstain — then, via an audacious reversal of the miracle of transubstantiation, the consumption of cherry juice becomes a sacrilegious ritual ingestion of liquefied virginity. In Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, the first reference to God arises in the form of an incredulous denial not alone of his existence, but of His very probability: ‘Dieu, qui domine l’action problématique, est aussi improbable que la providence ou la fatalité’ (JCR 15). Nietzsche is similarly disdainful of this specifically modern figure of an emasculated God as meddling overseer: ‘a God who cures a headcold at the right moment or tells us to get into a couch just as a downpour is about to start is so absurd a God he would have to be abolished even if he existed. A God as a domestic servant, as a postman, as an almanac-maker — at bottom a word for the stupidest kind of accidental occurrence’ (TAC 182).41
39. For illuminating discussions of these works, see Elizabeth Legge, ‘Thirteen ways of looking at a virgin’, Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 12.2 (1996), 218–42 and David Hopkins, ‘Questioning Dada’s Potency: Picabia’s La Sainte Vierge and the Dialogue with Duchamp’, Art History, 15 (1992), 317–33. 40. Francis Picabia, La Jeune Fille (bracelet de vie), in the March–April special issue of Proverbe (1920), 1. 41. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, p. 182. JÉSUS-CHRIST RASTAQUOUÈRE 55
To replace this abstract, impossible God, Picabia conjures deities that are prosaically, intimately materialist. In Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, he gives us God-the-Eucharist as a cud to be thoughtlessly masticated by the herds of bovine faithful: ‘Il faut communier avec du chewing-gum, de cette façon Dieu vous fortifiera les mâchoirs; mâchez-le longtemps, sans arrière-pensée’ (JCR 19–20). Picabia’s next depiction of the deity is equally open to being read as simply surreal or determinedly blasphemous. Prefacing his proposition with the faux-naïf intertitle, ‘J’IMAGINE CECI’, he premières the notion of a ‘Jésus-Christ jockey!’ (JCR 20)42 — amplifying the note of false enthusiasm with a jubilant exclamation mark. Notwithstanding his celebrity, this jockey is, he cautions, a dud tip, and all those who bet on him see their investments come to a flat ‘rien’. Capping mischievous metaphor with bald clarity, the intertitle which directly succeeds this image — ‘TOUTES LES CROYANCES/ SONT DES IDÉES CHAUVES’ (JCR 21) — mops up any residual ambiguity about the author’s stance on religious conviction. In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche figures belief ‘of any kind’ rather more ominously as ‘an expression of selflessness, of self-alienation’ (TAC 185). Similarly, in Unique eunuque, Picabia declares, ‘[e]very faith is an illness’.43 Both Picabia and Nietzsche figure religious belief as the moronic acquiescence to gross dupery. For them, contra the unifying doctrine of most major religions, faith does not save; it enslaves and impoverishes. Under their hypermaterialist logic, even sin can be reconceived as material substance. In Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, Picabia invites flies to inhabit confessional boxes, advising the scavengers that sins are ‘much more agreeable nourishment than caca’ (JCR 57) and in ‘La Pomme de pins’ (1922) he writes: ‘LES CURÉS ÉPONGENT LES PÉCHÉS COMME LES MOUCHOIRS ÉPONGENT LES LARMES, LIQUIDE DE REPENTIR.’44 Three years later, in an essay entitled 42. See Sara Crangle’s essay ‘Dada IS Bathos’ for a comprehensive analysis of Dada’s deployment of horses. 43. Picabia, Unique eunuque, p. 16. 44. Francis Picabia, ‘Le Bel Exemplaire’, La Pomme au Pins (Saint Raphaël, 25 February 1922). Note its diagonally printed salutation: ‘“Bonjour Pound” F.P.’ 56 HAYDEN
‘Francis merci!’, Picabia again aligns the moral with the excremental, writing: ‘Le fondement de la morale devrait avoir la forme d’un pot de chambre, voilà toute l’objectivité que je lui demande.’45 In The Anti- Christ, Nietzsche presents the concept of sin as an instrumentalized tool of corrupt priesthood, another weapon in Christianity’s arsenal of socially retarding delusions: ‘Sin, to say it again, that form par excellence of the self-violation of man, was invented to make science, culture, every kind of elevation and nobility of man impossible; the priest rules through the invention of sin’ (TAC 178). Picabia’s transubstantiation of sin into a material residue which might, like his model of love, instigate ‘an infectious contact’ (JCR 23) and provide sustenance to a species more accustomed to feeding on excrement, resonates with Nietzsche’s figure of the ‘worm of sin’ (TAC 198) and his conception of ‘moralic acid’ (TAC 129) — the Christianity-derived compound which taints (and presumably corrodes) thought and language. Christian morality is repeatedly derided as the preserve of the weak. A note in issue 9 of 391 attributes the aphorism ‘La morale est l’épine dorsale des imbéciles’ to one F.P.46 In Gabrielle Buffet’s preface to this book, she claims that ‘[l]e souci religieux n’est qu’une forme de coquille que vous avez été forcés de choisir’ (JCR 9). In The Wanderer and his Shadow, Nietzsche argues that a Christian morality founded on a ‘belief in authorities’ and the erroneous ascription of what is in fact not the voice of God but ‘the voice of some men in man’ belies the perversely conscience-less nature of the Christian’s every act and proscription.47 Asking ‘…what is Christian morality’, Nietzsche answers unequivocally: ‘Chance robbed its innocence; misfortune dirtied by the concept “sin”; well-being as a danger, as “temptation”; physiological indisposition poisoned by the worm of conscience’ (TAC 148). For both Nietzsche and Picabia then, religion is an easy, though unforgiveable, substitute for thinking; an oppressive delimiter of freedom and denier of life’s natural bounty. However, whereas
45. Francis Picabia, ‘Francis Merci’, Littérature, 2nd series, 8 (1923), 17. 46. 391, 9 (1919), 4. 47. Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow, § 52. JÉSUS-CHRIST RASTAQUOUÈRE 57
Nietzsche proffers faith in art as a redemptive ‘countermovement’ to the decadence of ‘religion, morality, and philosophy’48 — holding out hope in Paris as a cultured refuge for the noble artist49 — Picabia’s social critique goes much further. In parallel with his campaign against religion, he launches an all-out attack on art, focusing the brunt of his fury on the Parisian art world as Vatican-like epicentre of its malign power. In Dada, the institutional art world is conceived, like religion, as a set of arbitrary and constricting structures built around hollow myths of glory, purity and redemption. For Picabia, as for Huelsenbeck, ‘[t] he Dadaist considers it necessary to come out against art, because he has seen through its fraud as a moral safety valve.’50 To do so, Picabia re-appropriates (re-engineers?) the philosophical framework of his parallel thesis against religion. Electing to attack a second sacred foe with proven tactics, in Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère Picabia adopts the same strategy of enforced embodiment which he had elsewhere used to diminish the gods.
Demotions
In his œuvre at large, Picabia sets himself up, not un-paradoxically, as antithesis to ‘the artist’. For him, as for Dada, the art world — artist, audiences and buyers — is charged with being hopelessly in thrall to the pseudo-authority of its own institutions. His attack is not an assault on art-making per se; it targets, instead, the tired, self-replicating systems of the institutional art world. In chapter one of Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, he announces his opposition to his artist-colleagues in a volley of offhand dismissals: ‘Poètes lyriques, poètes dramatiques, vous adorez l’art pour échapper à la littérature, et vous n’êtes que littérateurs. Peintres
48. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), § 794. 49. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 248. 50. Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism’, in The Dada Painters and Poets, ed. by Robert Motherwell (Cambridge, MA: Belknap), pp. 21–48 (p. 43). 58 HAYDEN
traînards, les régions que vous explorez sont de vieilles anecdotes. Musiciens, vous êtes des ricochets sur l’eau…’ (JCR 14) The ellipses which follow this trio of allegations semaphore a dotted threat into the air; a warning that further insults might readily be summoned. During Picabia’s performance of his ‘Manifeste Cannibale’ at the Théâtre de la Maison de l’Œuvre (27 March 1920), Breton wore a sandwich board upon which Picabia had painted a bullseye and inscribed: ‘Pour que vous aimiez quelque chose, il faut que vous l’ayez vu et entendu depuis longtemps tas d’idiots.’51 In Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, Picabia condemns the conservative art audience in similar terms. Mocking their self-deceiving appetite for representational art, he ridicules their taste for ‘l’émotion déjà éprouvée’ (JCR 44). Figuring the artists who satisfy our desire for familiar themes revived and refurbished but inherently unchanged as mundane ‘dry-cleaners’, he likens the public’s appetite for such artworks to the pleasure experienced upon retrieving ‘un vieux pantalon revenant du teinturier et qui semble neuf quand on n’y regarde pas de près’ (JCR 44). The artist’s dupe, the art-buyer comforts himself with paying to re-receive, at regular intervals, the superficially novel — but inherently unchanged — prize of a familiar object he already owns. Adept in the handling of chemicals, available in every neighbourhood and suppliers of a banal, utterly uncreative service, the artist as dry-cleaner is the artist definitively banalized. In Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, the artists, like the gods, are being made flesh and are coming down among us. In chapter six, the artist is likened to another unremarkable provider of a necessary but unthrilling service: ‘il n’y a pas de différence entre un dentiste et un peintre’ (JCR 56–57). Given Picabia’s affinity with Duchamp, that pre-eminent punner, we could perhaps insert a speculative solidus in ‘painter’ to resolve the equation: ‘painter = dentist = pain/ter’. Dada — in contradistinction to these dull dentists and dry- cleaners — delivers something surpassing novelty: an art (anti-art) that declares itself not art at all. The analogy is compounded when he goes
51. Photograph reproduced in Maria Lluïsa Borràs, Picabia (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1985), p. 231. JÉSUS-CHRIST RASTAQUOUÈRE 59
on to add that art is made both by and for dentists: ‘La peinture est faite pour les dentistes./ Qu’importe! Allez donc!’ (JCR 58) A painting made for a dentist is one intended for the prettification of a waiting room. This, surely, is the nadir of art’s ambition; its instrumentalization as decorative consolation for life’s bloody pain.52 As Marc Lowenthal too has noticed, ‘Picabia had published Duchamp’s Dada Drawing (better known as the Tzanck Check) in the first issue of Cannibale (April 1920).’53 An imitation cheque upon which considerable time and skill were exerted, The Tzanck Check was presented by Duchamp to his dentist, Dr. Daniel Tzanck, in Paris on 3 December, 1919. This self-aware forgery, unrealistically rescaled and drawn on ‘The Teeth’s Loan and Trust Company Consolidated of New York’, numbers among Duchamp’s ‘imitated rectified’ readymades: objects which problematize, by their very existence, the status of the art object, and the concept of authenticity and value. The handwritten signature which activates and endorses a real cheque — and which authenticates the artwork — is here hypostatized into a cheque- like artwork that is, in its every detail, the work of the artist’s hand. With the large-print legend ‘ORIGINAL’ written vertically across it, this artwork both for and by a dentist brings pressure to bear on the notion of value, on art’s relation to work, and on its relationship to the economy. An art object made as direct alibi for the cheque with which he would otherwise have paid his bill — and later on bought back from the dentist by Duchamp for more than the stated value of the cheque — the Tzanck Check brings art’s secret compact with money out into the open.54 It exposes the fallacy of every portrayal of art or artists as
52. A year earlier, Picabia had produced an ink drawing, entitled La Peinture est faite pour les dentistes (1919) (ink on paper, 32 x 59 cm). 53. Lowenthal, notes, in Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster, p. 460. 54. Art’s complicity in a corporate-capitalist world is treated with analogous disdain in a letter from Duchamp to Tzara in 1922, which alludes to the production of Dada insignia. See Affectueusement Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, ed. by Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk (London: 2000), pp. 124–26. Similarly, the Berlin Dadaists Huelsenbeck, Heartfield, Grosz and Herzfeld proposed the notion of a ‘Dada Advertising Company’ in a leaflet distributed at the Dada Matinée on 7 December 1919. 60 HAYDEN
pure or otherwise existing in any sort of rarefied state of exception. Like the butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker, the artist-dentist and the artist-dry-cleaner inhabit the marketplace. They occupy our commercial reality and breathe the same unsanitary atmosphere. By incorporating this readily legible nod to Duchamp’s recent coup into Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, Picabia erects an intertextual shortcircuit which galvanizes his Dada-aware audience into acknowledging that all art is complicit in economic transactions and, therefore, worthy of critique.55 Writing on Dada as a response to trauma, Hanne Bergius suggests that ‘[s]eeing man dismembered and dissected, turned into a fool’s commodity, the Dadaists were forced to abandon the belief in a closed, organic society where the artist had a clearly assigned place’.56 Eager to replace this destitute model with one appropriate to the age, Picabia dreams of a commons of art-making; a revolution in the way art functions in society. Having doubly demoted the artist from sacrosanct hero to domesticated service provider, he declares that ‘Les véritables œuvres modernes sont faites non par des artistes, mais tout simplement par des hommes’ (JCR 44). These sentiments resonate with myriad Dadaist proposals for the sublation of art into life57 and, with it, the inauguration of a new era of civilian art-production. By diminishing art’s aura of exceptionality, Picabia hastens the re-integration of art praxis into life. His desire to be categorized as something other than an artist derives, at least in part, from his opposition to professionalism. Having earlier claimed to be neither professional nor amateur, he boasts: ‘Je surpasse
55. If biography can be allowed, once more, to complicate art, it bears noting that Picabia occupied an especially monied position among his Dada cohort. In later life, his preoccupation with what was dismissed as commercial art practice drew the ire of many of those artists who had, in this period, benefitted both personally and artistically from his creatively directed largesse. 56. Hanne Bergius, ‘The Ambiguous Aesthetic of Dada: Towards a Definition of its Categories’, in DADA: Studies of a Movement, ed. by Richard Sheppard (Chalfont St Giles: Alpha Academic, 1980), pp. 26–38 (p. 28). 57. On the primacy of this impulse for the historical avant-gardes, see Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. by Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), and the plethora of critical responses and refutations it has elicited. JÉSUS-CHRIST RASTAQUOUÈRE 61
les amateurs, je suis le sur-amateur; les professionnels sont des pompes à merdre’ (JCR 34). Amateurism permits man to make art without hiving him off from society; it removes art from a zone of exceptionality into one that is freely accessible. Again, it is not the artist’s art-making, but his/her assumption of a special status for so doing that ignites Picabia’s wrath. Arguing that ‘Les spécialités séparent l’homme de tous les autres hommes’ (JCR 14), he seeks to effect a desacralization of the artist as hero as correlate to the demystification of art. For Dada, society’s conflation of art and religion stood as a direct incitement to anti-art action. Whereas Futurism frequently proposed itself as a replacement for religion, the Dadaist is called to relinquish any atavistic attachment to notions of the redemptive, moral functions of the creative act.58 In Der Zeltweg in 1919, Otto Flake proposed that ‘[a]rt is dying as religion has died’, because we have evolved to a point at which both transcendental signifiers are redundant.59 He writes: ‘Like religion art was a perceptual means of making the life force visible, a projection of darkness into light.’ ‘It is dying’, Flake says, ‘because we are stepping up on to a higher plane of intellectual activity where aids like this are no longer enough. In his ‘Manifeste Dada’, Picabia announces: ‘L’art est visible comme Dieu.’60 This simile, like the equivalences, works precisely to throw into question the terms which its construction purports to illuminate. Art is exposed as a construct no more real or tangible than the mythical being in which the author has already expressed a complete lack of faith. In chapter four, Picabia depicts artists as a gang of priests ‘qui veulent nous faire croire à Dieu’ (JCR 46). Read in the context of Picabia’s virulently ant-deistic philosophy, the vituperative force of this charge is unequivocal. The artist-priests are false prophets who must
58. Consider the Eucharistic imagery in Marinetti’s 1913 ‘Destruction of Syntax- Imagination Without Strings-Words-in-Liberty’ manifesto, or the model of agonistic sacrifice called for in the 1912 manifesto, ‘Exhibitors to the Public’, by Umberto Bocciono, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini. 59. Otto Flake, ‘Thoughts’, in The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Dawn Ades, trans. by J. Ennis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 51–53 (p. 53). 60. Francis Picabia, ‘Manifeste Dada’, 391, 12 (1920), 1. 62 HAYDEN
now cede to a new artistic secularism. Refusing to believe in ‘Art with a capital A’, he undermines the proselytizing artist-priests. 61 Jésus- Christ Rastaquouère seeks to win back the realm of art for popular, secular consumption and to instate the Dadaist epoch of sacrilegious, sociocritical cultural production. Towards the end of Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, he proposes a new, heretically bathetic conception of creativity:
Dans aucune œuvre, que ce soit peinture, littérature ou musique, il n’y a de création supérieure; tous ces travaux sont semblables. L’œuvre la plus idéale est celle répondant davantage à certaines conventions qui vous paraissent neuves parce que vous ne les connaissez pas ou parce qu’elles ont été plus ou moins oubliées. Il n’y a ni erreur, ni déviation; notre cerveau est une éponge qui s’imbibe de suggestions, c’est tout. (JCR 64)
Picabia’s allegation of the serial replaceability of all art objects was, in 1921, made physically manifest. in La Danse de Saint Guy.62 Later refabricated and retitled Tabac Rat, this work consists of an empty frame, adorned only with a criss-crossing of twine — the apparatus which would permit its absorption/exhibition in the gallery — upon which are hung labels announcing both titles and Picabia’s name. Through his practice and his blasphemous preaching — in Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère, as in his Danse de Saint Guy — Picabia voids art of its mysteries, its claim to exceptional status, and its position apart. In a world of sacred art and priestly artists, his is a vision of atheistic art- revolt.
61. F. T. Marinetti, ‘Destruction of Syntax-Imagination without Strings- Words-in- Freedom’, Lacerba (Florence: 15 June 1913). Reproduced in Futurist Manifestos, ed. by Umbro Apollonio, trans. by R.W. Flint (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), pp. 95–106 (p. 104). 62. Francis Picabia, Danse de Saint-Guy (1921) (string and cardboard in a frame, 104.5 x 85 cm). JÉSUS-CHRIST RASTAQUOUÈRE 63
Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ/ Dada’s Anti-Art
Mutually injurious assertions of an affinity between art and God pervade Picabia’s œuvre. In the ‘Manifesto Pierced from Behind’, he makes the analogy explicit:
Every artist has the head of a crucified man; those who don’t have such heads look like grocery boys. The crucified make art in order to sell it. Grocery boys make art in order to get the Legion of Honor. Art = God = Bullshit + Mercantilism. Piss off.63
Under Picabia’s model, society’s compulsion to generate artists arises from the same misdirected desires for affirmation, salvation and transcendence as does its equally misdirected drive to generate gods. According to the formula laid out here, art is produced with two base ends in mind: gold and glory. The artist who constructs himself as a martyr figure driven by passionate agonism to make pure, moral art has the (necessarily incapacitated) head of a crucified man. The commercial artist, motivated by a less elevated but no less self-serving drive to generate money from art has the head of a grocery boy. Neither of these figures, as Picabia teaches us by analogy, deserves our worship. In his 1920 ‘Manifeste DADA’ Picabia declared that ‘L’art est un produit pharmaceutique pour imbéciles’.64 In ‘Dadaland’, Hans Arp
63. Francis Picabia, ‘Manifesto Pierced from Behind’, cited in I am a Beautiful Monster. Lowenthal notes that this text is from the Tzara files in the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, adding that ‘Olivier Revault d’Allonnes has determined that [it] had also been written for the Dadaglobe anthology and [was] first published in Belfond’s edition of Picabia’s collected writings’. Lowenthal, notes, in Picabia, I am a Beautiful Monster, p. 253. 64. Picabia, ‘Manifeste Dada’, p. 1. 64 HAYDEN
called ‘it a way of deadening men’s minds’.65 Dada’s construction of Art as mindlessness peddled under the label of transcendent magic recalls and extends again Nietzsche’s scorn for the consolations of religious faith and morality. Art’s conception of itself as sacred or as the route to redemption repeatedly elicits Picabia’s disdain.66 Just as Breton was preparing to effect his takeover of the Parisian avant-garde with his Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, Picabia was pursuing a contrapuntal mission to ironize Breton’s self-construction as the agonistic martyr- artist figure of avant-gardist redemption who would — by dint (paradoxically) of his own assumption of totalitarian control of the nascent surrealist movement — sacrifice himself to the Surrealist cause. In Le Surréalisme crucifié (1924–25), a Christ-like figure representing the Surrealist movement is pictured crucified on a cross.67 The plaque which, in religious iconography, traditionally carries the legend INRI instead displays the title of the Dada-Surrealist magazine, 391. Two figures who kneel in apostolic attitudes at the foot of the cross— simultaneously mourning and revering the putatively revolutionary art movement — are identified as Breton and Aragon.68 Dada’s fervent rhetorical assaults on the artist echo the ferocity of Nietzsche’s denial of God. Like Nietzsche’s Christ, Picabia’s model of the artist — whether he’s dressed as dentist, dry-cleaner, pious apostle or grocery boy — is weak, ineffectual and unworthy of worship. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche explains how the Christian concept of God serves the society that creates it, saying: ‘A people which still believes in itself still also has its own God. In him, it venerates the conditions through which it has prospered, its virtues — it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power onto a being whom one can thank for them’ (TAC 138). This account might just as well describe Dada’s conception of
65. Hans Arp, ‘Dadaland’, cited in Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, p. 25. 66. For an illuminating reading of Picabia and Duchamp’s responses to Catholic ideology and iconography, see David Hopkins, Dada’s Boys: Masculinity after Duchamp (New York: Yale University Press, 2007). 67. Francis Picabia, Le Surréalisme crucifié (c.1924-25) (watercolour on paper, 31.8 x 25.2cm). Inscribed: ‘391 Bien à vous. Communistes. André Breton, Louis Aragon.’ 68. See also: Francis Picabia, La Vierge (1935) (oil on canvas, 91 x 72.5cm). JÉSUS-CHRIST RASTAQUOUÈRE 65
the artist’s complicit, totemistic role in that same worshipful and self- satisfied society. Similarly, where Dada does away with the idea of the artist as any sort of exceptional great man, Nietzsche, in The Antichrist, rails against the mythologization of Jesus as ‘hero’ and ‘“genius”’ (TAC 153). In Huelsenbeck’s ‘En Avant Dada’ (1920), the Dadaist is posed, in typical terms, as the antithesis to the artist understood as ‘philosopher in the garret … the professional artist, the café litterateur, the society “wit”’.69 The Zurich Dadaist Otto Flake bemoaned, in analogous terms, the artist’s pompous gravity and belief in art’s capacity for salvation.70 Employing strikingly similar terms, Nietzsche decries Jesus as a hypersensitive ‘idiot’ in whom ‘[w]e recognize a condition of morbid susceptibility of the sense of touch which makes it shrink back in horror from every contact, every grasping of a firm object’. He figures this pathetic figure as a compulsive escapologist with an ‘instinctive hatred of every reality’ and an ‘antipathy towards every form, every spatial and temporal concept, towards everything firm’ TAC( 153). Just as the artists derided by Dada shrink from outward-looking, fleshly life, Nietzsche’s Jesus-as-dropout inhabits a private zone ‘undisturbed by reality of any kind, a merely “inner” world, [...] an “eternal” world’’ (TAC 153). In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche asserts that ‘[w]hat sets us apart is that we recognize no God, either in history or in nature or behind nature — but that we find that which has been reverenced as a God not “godlike” but pitiable, absurd, harmful, not merely an error but a crime against life… We deny God as God’ (TAC 174–75). With the same vehement energy, the Dadaists seek to deny the equally pernicious myth of the Artist as Artist. For Dada, Art persists only as an exsanguinated fossil from a more innocent time. Just as Nietzsche writes of God’s degeneration from a position of real significance to one of impotence — ‘Formerly he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and thirsting for power in the soul of a people: now, he is merely a good God’ (TAC 139) — so Raoul Hausmann announced that art, in
69. Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada’, p. 28. 70. Flake, ‘Thoughts’, p. 52. 66 HAYDEN
its habitual presentation as a ‘fair female figure, no clothes ... [who] reckons on being taken to bed or inciting this to be done ... no longer exists! She is dead’.71 To paraphrase and extend Nietzsche, in Jesus- Christ Rastaquouère, Picabia runs down the mountain, shouting that ‘Art is dead’ (TSZ 11) — but that’s not all. In Tzara’s 1918 ‘Lecture on Dada’, he announces: ‘Art has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting. Dada knows the correct measure that should be given to art: with subtle, perfidious methods, Dada introduces it into daily life. And vice versa.’72 Dada’s first lesson is that art and life have become disastrously alienated. Its curriculum is directed towards their integration. In ‘Human All Too Human’, Nietzsche claims that ‘Since belief has ceased that a God broadly directs the destinies of the world …man has to set himself ecumenical goals embracing the whole earth…’73 At the end of his book, having established the ultimate redundancy of an ineluctably tradition-bound art world, Picabia recommends the cessation of all further literary, artistic and musical endeavour. He declares: ‘Vous feriez mieux Messieurs, de peindre en bleu et rouge les falaises de Dieppe’ (JCR 65). Posed as flippant invitation, this is Picabia’s appeal for artists to set about that ecumenical embracing — to bring about the material sublation of art into life. Having wrenched Art and Religion from their twin pedestals of morally pure, disembodied sanctity, Picabia makes this last plea for a Dadaistically art-full world. He calls for an integrated environment that would mirror — in its complexity, its playfulness and ferocity — the rewardingly jagged, fertile and curiously uncharted topos of this surreptitiously programmatic, formally idiosyncratic rastaquouèrian manifesto for the sublation of art into life.
71. Raoul Hausmann, ‘The German Petit Bourgeois is Cross’, The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Dawn Ades, trans. by Rebecca Beard (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 88–89 (p. 88). 72. Tzara, ‘Lecture on Dada’, in Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, trans. by Barbara Wright, illustrated by Francis Picabia (London: Calder, 1992), pp. 107–12. 73. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1878), trans. by R.J. Hollingdale, introduction by Richard Schacht (Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1996), § 25. JÉSUS-CHRIST RASTAQUOUÈRE 67
Pound’s early enthusiasm for Picabia’s literary output failed to infect either counterparts or critics and the latter’s reputation as ‘the dynamic under Dada’74 is now dominated by his prolific activity as a visual artist, publisher and provocateur.75 In 1937, Pound claimed that ‘because 66 pages of Picabia were locked in a cellar by a terrified publisher, [they] are, thence, little known outside the very active group which had immediate access to them in 1919 and ’20’.76 Now, almost eighty years later, and with the full text freely accessible via Iowa’s Digital Dada Library, that excuse no longer pertains.77 In an era characterized by an apparently illimitable (albeit often regrettably Anglocentric) scholarly appetite for dissecting Dada, the sixty-six pages that comprise Jesus-Christ Rastaquouère demand immediate exhumation. University College Cork
74. Pound, ‘D’Artagnan Twenty Years Later’, p. 429. 75. See, for example: Marie-Lluïsa Borràs, Picabia (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1985); William A. Camfield, Francis Picabia: His Art, Life and Times (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979); Francis M. Naumann, New York Dada 1915–1923 (New York: Harry Abrams, 1994); and Sanouillet’s Dada à Paris. 76. Pound, ‘D’Artagnan Twenty Years Later’, p. 429. 77. University of Iowa Digital Dada Library: