MOLINIER. INTERVIEW WITH PIERRE CHAVEAU

Review par Stéphanie Caron

"Beware! Chaste eyes and ears abstain!" Such is the warning that appears on the back cover of this small volume collecting—in the form of an audio CD accompanied, for those who might not be sure they hear correctly, by a transcription—the interview that Pierre Molinier granted in 1972 to a young student from the Sorbonne. Certainly, for those familiar with the painter and his earthy language, such a warning is nothing very original. Some might even be tempted to see in it a particularly clever advertising hook, an incitement to purchase barely less effective than the "Please Touch" once imagined by Duchamp. But the circumstances in which the work appeared lend it, in retrospect, a completely different flavor. Intended to appear at the time of the exhibition that Bordeaux was to devote to the painter in 2003, this volume indeed remained the only witness to this project, the organizers having been forced to abstain in the face of public authorities' reluctance. If times have hardly changed since those when Molinier was asked to remove certain of his canvases, judged offensive to good morals, this publication therefore came very opportunely to "recall the irreducible character of an attitude that morality, however liberal it claims to be, could not approve." It also offers the painter the opportunity to deliver a beautiful posthumous snub to this morality that he always condemned: it is, let us admit it, with a certain jubilation that one hears the artist perpetuate, as from beyond the grave, his bad words and his bad thoughts.

For let's say it right away, the reader/listener is here attacked through all the orifices of perception: while a small quavering voice recites confidences in his ear that certain epochs would have "supported the crudity of only whispered in the shelter of a confessional" (Pierre Chaveau), his eyes undergo at the same instant the combined violence of words and images. Everything conspires indeed, in this small volume, to ensnare us in the phantasmatic nets of the painter. When Molinier, then weakened by an operation and bedridden, has trouble finding his words, the text transcribes them in black and white (yes, it is indeed of his "balls" that he speaks at length to a young medical student who came to have him sign the form by which he bequeaths his body to science, stipulating to her that he wants to have them grafted onto the body of an impotent man). If, constrained by some remainder of modesty or, more likely, of timidity, the interviewee initially hesitates to use certain words, the illustrations are there to make explicit the unspoken: "You don't like... men with stockings... because, me..."—opposite, a photograph representing the painter's thigh sheathed in silk, caressed by a hand bristling with chains. Finally, as additional information, reproductions of handwritten or typed texts distill the painter's reflections: "Our mission on earth is to transform the world into an immense BROTHEL"; "public opinion, this W., experiences pleasure in being violated." (p. 49)

Between crude words and disconcerting images, let no one expect from this interview either unpublished revelations about the artist's work, or self-critical commentaries on his œuvre. It is about Molinier, the man, that it is primarily a question, as he himself always showed himself to the (scandalized) eyes of the public: fetishist to the tips of his toes, patent sodomite, great lover of women and transvestites... The work is present only in filigree, in the simple measure that it is the extension of erotic activity, another means of giving body to fantasies: "My sperm I put it on my paintings... since I paint more, to use it, I give it to the cat since he likes it." (p. 17) As for his conception of painting, at most it expresses itself through a homage to the artists he loves: Bellmer, whom he describes as "a fetishist of his doll," and Poumeyrol, a "painter who loves little girls," are the names he opposes to "artists who do not express their passion, [who] remain in commonplaces" (p. 55). Molinier's passion, for its part, is not exclusive, and is satisfied well outside all erotic commonplaces. Hence the impression that this interview can give, on first listening, of reducing itself to an inventory, probably not exhaustive, of the sexual tastes of a man who made sex the great affair of his life. From his earliest age, Molinier slipped, he says, under the skirts of the seamstresses employed by his mother, in order to touch their thighs; at 8 or 10 years old, he falls in love with his sister's legs, from whose corpse we know what pleasure he will derive; at 72 years old, he "still gets hard," and one can still guess, from his laughter, the pleasure he took in this game of exhibition, of self-exposure in words, that is the interview. No provocation, no complacency however in the painter's remarks: this volume simply delivers to us the portrait, without mask, of a man who always refused to wear one, even if, according to him, "masks always have a face." This face, for Molinier, is that of eros, the only place where the truth of being lies, the only space where freedom makes law, the only domain where the imaginary is liberated in a total absence of taboos. From incest to homosexuality, passing through onanism, all the possibilities of sex are thus passed through the sieve of a greedy and laughing voice, which never tires of celebrating their delicious savagery: "It's sensational, because they're things we can't help doing, it has an irresistible force" (p. 22).

But this portrait of the artist as fetishist also wants to be the testimony, without makeup or detour, on his epoch and certain of those who marked it. Thus Molinier remembers at length Breton, who was the first to exhibit him at L'Etoile Scellée, in January 1956: "you had to take him at his place, apart, because in front of others he had a position, the position contradictory with his way of thinking." One will perhaps have understood: whether one appreciates Molinier or not, one can only be struck by the exceptional vitality of this man who, four years before committing suicide according to the exact protocol he states on page 44, still declares: "Well yes I get hard! Oh I get hard yes! To get hard like that!". And hearing his voice, the reader/listener will be definitively assured, if not reassured:

Pierre Molinier's delirium

Lives.

(Joyce Mansour, "Sens interdits")

Stéphanie Caron

(1) The proceedings have just been published by Harmattan editions, with the support of the center for comparative francophone literary studies of the University of Paris-13, in the collection "Itinéraires et contactes de cultures" 108p.

(2) "Identity of Franco-Romanian literature", pp. 65-68

(3) "The absurd in Romanian literature or Salvation not by style", pp. 93-98

(4) "Tzara and Isou" pp. 69-73

(5) "Situation of Ghesarim Luca", pp. 73-83

(6) "The fortune of Ciaran", pp. 13-19

(7) "Tzara, Dada and surrealism" pp. 13-19

(8) "Tristan Tzara and the surrealist group from 1924 to 1929", pp. 21-27

(9) "The political commitment of Tristan Tzara 1944 to 1966", pp. 39-54

(10) "Tristan Tzara, reader of Villon" pp. 55-61

(11) "Tristan Tzara and the visual arts", pp. 31-38