BONA, ART AND LITERATURE: THE STAKES OF A POETICS OF THREAD

par Magali Croset

To evoke Bona de Mandiargues' art, both pictorial and scriptural, is to follow with one's gaze the meanders, crossroads, and respites of a life. Born in Rome in September 1926, it is in Paris that she meets in 1947, through her uncle Filippo de Pisis, her future husband André Pieyre de Mandiargues. Having become French, she quickly frequents the surrealist group with whom she shares a taste for scandal and love of poetry. From then on, Bona Tibertelli de Pisis becomes the woman of letters Bona de Mandiargues or simply Bona, when she signs with her artist name. Apprehending Bona's work supposes an opening of the gaze onto diverse but complementary life lines that the woman has taken care to weave over time; from tender childhood lived near Modena, to departure for Venice then France, a thought has been constituted, a desire has been affirmed. This is why entering Bona's art means at the same time entering childhood, where the premises of a vocation take birth, where the ambivalence inherent to both the woman and the artist takes shape.

It is through the author's last book, Vivre en herbe[2], published by Éditions Gallimard in 2001, that it is possible to attend the retrospective of a life and to become acquainted with the first rupture felt by the child, during the move from the family villa to an austere house in Modena. Bona, from the height of her six years, will henceforth no longer be able to admire or attend her uncle's pictorial creations in the studio located under the eaves... with this first move a golden age ends. The second rupture emerges shortly after with Italy's entry into war during the Second World War. Overwhelmed, the adolescent nevertheless braves patrols and bombs to attend her new drawing classes and ensure the family's food survival. Third rupture, the death in 1945 of the much-loved father, weakened, annihilated by several years of Italo-Franco-German conflicts. This loss takes on the appearance of a coup de grâce, the young Bona henceforth renounces participating in life, she locks herself in a deep mutism that keeps her prostrate indefinitely on the same chair, for more than three months. From the loss of a place to the loss of a being, the experience of ruptures lived by Bona increases. It is then as much about separation or cutting as tearing. And it is first of all through withdrawal and the weight of silence that Bona responds to these experiences as exhausting as they are traumatic.

Yet, following the loss of these landmarks, salvation finally arrives from Venice where the marginal and sulfurous uncle, Filippo de Pisis, summons her to join him there to begin a new life. It is then for the young woman to recover lost time, to heal wounds by closing, by suturing past tears. From imposed and annihilating rupture to desired and beneficial rupture, Bona takes the step. Through the distancing from the family straitjacket and the abandonment of memories linked to it, the woman experiences a true rebirth with her uncle... Thus Bona's destiny is fixed: she will become a painter. She will become a painter since art will become response. Response to the sufferings of lived experience, response as outlet, as reparation and speech in the face of silence. In this respect, Bona's artistic (then literary) orientation, stemming from the first harmful ruptures of her life, will never cease to covet reparation, healing, regeneration. And it is through the image of thread as a link putting at a distance the eventuality of any rupture that the artist and subsequently the woman of letters, finds remedy to her anxieties. The necessity of the link as antidote to destructive rupture or conversely emancipating rupture of link whose shackles prove regressive, such becomes the vital and artistic stake of Bona de Mandiargues. From the preventive or healing link of loss and scission, to the liberating rupture of chains and oppression, a perceptible ambivalence both in the literal and figurative sense, through the woman's art and life, takes shape.

But let us first turn our gaze to Bona's artistic creations: like the cardinal points, her work is declined in four directions whose unique center participates in a continuous alchemy between matter and poetry. Following in her uncle's footsteps, she first experiments with still lifes through the gathering of aquatic, mineral, and vegetable objects that she encounters during her seaside excursions. The resulting image exceeds sensible appearances. Transformed, denatured, amplified, the roots, shells, algae, or mandrakes move into strange macroscopic creatures whose presence within stripped landscapes reveals the metaphysical influence that Bona receives from Giorgio de Chirico, Roberto Carrà, or Alberto Savinio. On this momentum, the artist orients her art toward surrealism and stages through automatic processes (decalcomanias, foldings, exquisite corpse) many hybrid and burlesque creatures then abandons figuration, from the 60s, in favor of a more equivocal abstraction through the fusion and arrangement of various materials (cement, gravel, sand, oil, glue...). A double orientation emerges in the following years through on the one hand the creation of numerous erotic sketches where astonishing characters with snail heads seek each other, embrace, intertwine endlessly and, on the other hand, the emergence of a practice of collage and assemblages that Bona renews with originality and dexterity. The revelation of the link as opposite and complement of rupture can take place. Through the notion of thread that Bona uses from then on without any restriction, the whole problematic of a play of forces between shackles and freedom, between union and separation, between wound and reparation takes shape.

The expression of a personal aesthetics really begins in 1958, when Bona abandons canvas for painting in favor of canvas for sewing: "since a woman cannot paint then I will do sewing![3] she declares mischievously to critics. Like some female artists of the same period, Bona abandons the brush in favor of the sewing kit through the pronounced use of needle and scissors and thus contributes to the elaboration "of a reformulated textile art[4]" later catalogued under the name of Soft-Art. It is thus that a little later, subject to exasperation, melancholy, and rebellion, Bona discovers by a curious chance the aesthetic and suggestive power of her husband's jacket linings (which will become anonymous once the marital stock is exhausted). Confronted with the couple's crises (which will moreover not delay in divorcing before remarrying a few years later), Bona decides to clearly affirm her intentions of disunion, of separation through her creative instincts. A rage, a frenetic passion for these fabrics that she cuts, turns, tears, lacerates endlessly then takes shape. The use of knives collected since childhood and transformed subsequently into a collection of scissors that she uses with vehemence, is not without recalling the sacrificial violence of the greatest myths. To sacrifice to better love. Under the jacket, it is the man that she glimpses; a muffled violence emanates from the gesture of deformation, violence programmed or not but linked in any case to the unconscious desire for a symbolic killing. Killing moreover encouraged when it leads to this other discovery: under the first skin, exactly between the lining and the garment, lies a piece of fabric called in Italian the "anima" (that is to say the "soul'), hitherto prisoner and withdrawn from all gaze. Through the use of her "scissors-forceps," Bona proceeds to the bringing to light, to the extraction of a secret matter. Through the liberation of the garment's soul – and finally of the one who wore it – the artist affirms her creative, modeling power... Through her incisions and cuts, she renews the art of maieutics with a touch of sardonic jubilation if we believe her words: "I have turned men's jackets (their carapace), I have cut to the quick to reach the heart of the armor, of the protection. In so doing, I believe I have felt some voluptuousness[5]." Thus, from laceration to revelation, Bona's art seizes ideas and forms in an effervescence both avant-garde and intimate. Rallying to her first memories, rupture takes on the aspect of a tear or wound no longer suffered but exorcised. To tear, cut, crumble such is the artist's new aesthetic ritual that aims at both exorcism (tear to conjure) and revelation (lacerate to liberate the hitherto occulted soul).

But the work is far from finished since from cutting, the necessity of the link is born. Like the ambivalence felt during the ruptures of youth through feelings of loss and renewal, Bona pursues her double quest for emancipation and reparation within her very art through the symbolism of scissors and thread. Through the use of the latter, the artist weaves a network of deliberately coarse stitches whose purpose is none other than to gather, suture the scattered fabric shreds. After destruction comes the hour of reparation. It is a question of giving life back to the remains, of reviving the soul under a new and eternal form. The omnipotence of the artist-creator is at its peak and the artistic procedure almost surgical. Not without malice, Bona seizes the broken pieces of the soul; a washing restores their initial freshness before a network of stitches like scars reunites them under the impulse of pricks activated by the artist's famous pedal sewing machine. The result is surprising. From the initial dismembered garment emerge forms, figures sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract sewn (ligatured one could say) to each other by a thread as beneficial as it is oppressive. Finally, a part of eternity is conferred to the work through the ultimate operation charged with uniting to the canvas through a dense network of stitches and glue, the new engendered form. The creation finished, it thus remains possible to appreciate by following the thread of the work, the visualization and understanding of the artistic work traversed and to detect here and there fabric shreds almost human, witnesses of a lost first appearance.

In sum, through the choice of her tools and the symbolism that characterizes them, Bona stages the whole duality and power relationship existing through the notions of link and rupture. Behind the frenetic use of scissors and endless weaving of thread, hides a modern and personal perpetuation of the greatest archetypes. How not to evoke the incessant work of the Fates, guardians of life and workers of death, at the sight of the artist"s canvases? As the poet Ungaretti already emphasized, Bona partakes as much of Clotho, the spinning Fate holder of the thread of life as of Atropos the shearer, gifted with the fatal attribute. Worker as much as artist, she transforms everyday material into an instrument of art and thus reconnects with the ancient Mediterranean cultures for which spinning and weaving are to woman what plowing is to man, that is to say a fecund act from which various creations emerge. Bona is also the patient Penelope who, by dint of sewing and unsewing her work, manages to foil the vices of time, or again the ingenious Ariadne whose salvific thread guides toward light. Her "glued-sewn" assemblages – as she likes to call them – constitute a symbolic and learned staging of memories and fantasies, all motivated by the nagging dialectic of union and oppression, loss and emancipation. As for the tools used by the artist (scissors, needles, sewing machine pricks), they accredit the traditional and millennial value of feminine manual work as much as they constitute a rupture, through their mode of use (quasi surgical) and the unprecedented purpose that results from it. From the dark years of war to the loss of places and loved ones (the loss of her uncle in 1954 almost leads her to suicide), Bona through her art, reconnects as much with past traumas as with her veiled intimate anxieties; she then favors their exorcism to finally establish, if we believe her words, a cathartic, conscious, and oriented reconstitution: "From these shreds of fabric, I have reconstructed the world according to a rather personal symbolism (...) my collages are a curious adventure; a quest for the golden age. (...) From my rags, I have restructured a world; I have explored. They still help me to resolve certain problems of existence.[6]"

Yet, Bona's thread spool has not finished unwinding... Illustrating the theory of correspondences enunciated by Baudelaire and the putting into practice of the subversion of genres so coveted by the surrealists, Bona who is also a woman of letters, perpetuates the textile metaphor through the notion of thread, within her very writings. Few in number, these constitute an essential autobiographical source and can be apprehended as logical and natural complement to textile creations:

First of all, a direct link between text and fabric is naturally established as Roland Barthes reminds us since: "from an etymological point of view, text means fabric[7]." From there, it seems possible to establish a direct correspondence between the use of fabric in the literal sense through art and its use in the figurative sense, through the writing of texts. The common points between text and fabric abound: if we believe oriental doctrines traditional books are frequently designated by terms that, in their literal sense, relate to weaving. Thus, in Sanskrit, "sûtra" which designates Buddhist texts, properly means "thread' (its Latin equivalent is "sutura"); in this respect, a book can be formed by a set of "sûtras," as a fabric is formed by an assemblage of threads. And like the fabric constituted of horizontal and vertical threads respectively named "weft" and "warp," the book would possess identically, its own warps (which the Chinese call "king") and wefts (called "wei[8]"). To evoke the intuitive relation that can exist between Bona's pictorial and scriptural art, two postulates are to be taken into account: on the one hand, the existence of a common autobiographical background to canvases and texts retracing the ruptures and tears lived from childhood (Bona expresses it clearly through these two verses from the poetry collection still unpublished in its entirety in French, I Lamenti di Serafino which means The Complaints of Seraphin:

Trama e ordito stan scritto sul taglio del vestito
Nel di lei destino neanche sono esenti[9]

which can be translated as:

Weft and warp are written in the cut of the garment
In her destiny they are not absent either[10]

And, on the other hand, it is possible like fabric, to consider text as a surface, a closed space, in sum as a perceptible object. From there, an analogical rapprochement of Bona's textile and textual activity proves conceivable. Gathering syntagms first scattered before fixing them to a support (the page), putting her memories into words in an expiatory and liberating concern (the author's works are all – with the exception of an essay on The Pre-Islamic Art of Nuristan[11] – of autobiographical nature), healing her wounds through words, creating a new world through the play of interchangeability of their position and the syntax that ensures the link, constitutes an approach identical to that of glued-sewn collages as the woman puts into practice. The linearity of writing in the space of the page becomes similar to the weft of her weaving... Bona's texts, compared to her canvases, naturally integrate and accentuate the metaphors of fabric, weft, and networks as Barthes elaborated them during the 70s. While the fabric of the artist's collages masks at the same time as it reveals (whether the garment's soul or the canvas that supports it), the author's texts through their manifest or latent content, also become the product of a conflict of ambivalent forces (the veiled and the revealed) through which the notions of rupture and link preserve all their credibility.

Thus, the text Bonaventure[12] presented in the form of a lexicon going from the word "Alchemy" to the word "Zigzags," exposes the author's intimate thoughts in a successive manner where each definition corresponds to a new page. No link between titles, no transition from one definition to another, the writing is isolated, cut, chopped as can be the dismembered fabric pieces. Similarly concerning the poetry collection, I Lamenti di Serafino[13] where each "complaint" proves isolated from another, both by typography and by the presence of independent titles. But to these jerks and fragmentations responds the linearity of the text like a continuous thread spool; to the apparent rupture of articles or stanzas responds the chaining of pages which, concretely linked to each other, ensure cohesion and globality to the work. Moreover, because writing is thread, the tools serving to write also resemble those of the seamstress. The function of the pen and stylus (in reference to the small dagger called stylet) is as much to ensure the link, revelation, and adherence of words to each other with the page that supports them, as to point, erase, cross out, suppress elements in a symbolic manner or not. As she suggests, it is at the source of her lived experience that Bona draws her inspiration, and finally her textual art is not without analogy with her textile art: to each canvas constituted of fabric assemblages linked to each other by the stitches of a thread, responds each page constituted of text assemblages chained by the thread of words. In both cases, from disparity is born globality; a learned staging of fragment and unity favored by the meanders of a thread is observed. Through a cascade organization where assembled fabrics unite to the canvas and correlated texts imprint on the page, Bona makes the symbolic and literal use of thread, the engine of her work.

Finally, through the interrelation existing between her textile art and her textual art, Bona de Mandiargues reconnects with a common etymology, the "fabric," which makes her creation, an activity both literal and metaphorical. From weaving to writing, she unwinds an endless thread whose stakes are found as much in its power of unification as in its fragility of breaking. To gather or separate, to tie or liberate, to create the link or rupture... Bona's art, whether of fabric or text, rests on the perennial ambivalence of her expression. Through the threatened or threatening use of thread, she transcribes in words and images the dialectic of her lived experience, which she chooses to reject, reestablish, or reformulate. Like the seamstress's stitch identifiable by its eternal back-and-forth movement on the fabric, Bona's works are charged with perpetuating through a strong symbolism of traditions as of novelties, the tireless weaving linking present to past. To read, to follow with one's gaze the meanders formed by Bona's thread is to make the discovery of another language from which escape secret communications that, from thread to needle, lead to the revelation of a vision of the world as paradoxical as it is unusual.

Magali CROSET
Associate Researcher at IMEC
(Institut Mémoires de l'Edition Contemporaine)

Contact: magalicroset@yahoo.fr

    1 — . Magali Croset presents here the main lines of the doctoral thesis, "Bona, Art and Literature: The Stakes of a Poetics of Thread," which she defended at the University of Chambéry on June 1, 2005. ↩

    2 — . Vivre en herbe, Gallimard, coll "Haute enfance", Paris, 2001. ↩

    3 — . B (de) Mandiargues, "Collages", Complicités n°8, Paris, March 1992. ↩

    4 — . A. Dallier, "The role of women in the explosion of avant-gardes", Opus international, 1983. ↩

    5 — . B. (de) Mandiargues, Bonaventure, Stock, Paris, 1977, p268. ↩

    6 — . Bonaventure, op. cit. p. 268-269. ↩

    7 — . R. Barthes, Plaisir du texte, coll. "Points", Seuil, Paris, p. 100. ↩

    8 — . Cf. Chevalier & Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles, coll. "Bouquins", Robert Laffont, Paris, 1982. ↩

    9 — . Bona (de) Mandiargues, Lamento IV, I Lamenti di Serafino, Le Parole gelate, Roma, 1986 ↩

    10 — . Trad. "Cette Italie", Drailles, n°10, p114-120. ↩

    11 — . Retranscribed in Bonaventure, op. cit., p197-212. ↩

    12 — . Ibid. ↩

    13 — . I Lamenti di Serafino, op. cit. ↩