Animality to the rescue of mankind

The first lyrics of the song, its title of course, contained the basic ingredients which, associated in counterpoint with the other facet of my creation - a Jazon, sometimes in a tie, sometimes harnessed like a Greek warrior, a cynical character, with a touch of Sardou, a long-toothed company director - would favour the rising wind which would push my raft of the jellyfish towards the shores of combat and despair. I wanted to disembark one day, lucidly, with a firm foot, having passed pathos overboard in favour of eloquence, at the end of - I didn't know at the time how long my journey would last - two, five, ten episodes.

There were nine of them, at a rate of one per month, created in a row following the first one performed at La Guillotine, in a tiny room of the Espace Jemmapes, each time transformed for the occasion. Number 1 was performed several times, including one in the studio of the Scène nationale de Dieppe.

Dress, suit and tie, nudity and warrior disguise, all elements of my incarnations in The FleeceThese symbols are an easy recurrence for me to identify, for those who have been following my work for the past fifteen years. Translated directly from these symbols :

woman, man, animality and childhoodare obviously the cardinal points of my inner cartography

Beyond their apparent generalist simplicity, I learned to understand that these categories each designated a sexuality, rather than an identity that included them all.

The Whole of a balanced individual, for me, is composed of equal parts of these four quarters. This is the recipe for my individual cake. Any other, badly dosed or lacking one of the components, is rather indigestible to me.

Woman | Man | Animality | Childhood

I never tire of contemplating these four common words, like the keys of a bunch of keys opening the door of my human being. Not only mine, but all of them. If one is missing, the being will exist, but its humanity will be waiting for it outside. This is my vision. I understand that it may not be shared, but until I see a more harmonious blend or one that uses other components, I remain uninterested in other formulas and doubtful of the results.

Thus is my Golem. It should be noted that its ingredients go in pairs. In my design, Male and woman are genres; Animality and Childhood of the states. Animal or Child would not be appropriate, referring, one to the group of species, the other to a stage of development of one of them. As I have said, in this scheme, it is a question of attributing to the individual all the sexual characteristics, those of each genus and those of each state, in order to make him fully functional.

L'Animality is the raw state of our beings, without polishing. L'ChildhoodDespite the situation of its "primitive" character in our development, it contains, on the contrary, all the later behavioural traits of the formed person. Thus, theChildhood is not a state similar toAnimalitybut constitutes the universe of the collection of all that will make the base of our impulses later, combining with our Animality. I do not claim to be a scientist in expressing these postulates - is there any science that can decipher this field? - I am describing the logic of perception that leads me to conceptualize and create at the same time: what I claim to be, followed by what I do; the whole being realized in the aim of being as complete as possible from what composes me and from my aptitudes and physical characters. The body, of course, remains the first self-generating tool, of the formation of the self.

Woman | Man | Animality | Childhood

4 basic genders to feed human desire and fantasy. 4 coloured pencils to sketch all the possibilities.

Man-woman, bestial child, woman-child, animal man ... the palette of identities emerges with only four colours in my pocket. I am thirsty to bring them all together.

It is impossible, or at least excessively difficult, to live in the concrete all the incarnations of these nuances. First of all, it is necessary to have the capacity to realize them, then it is necessary that the rest of humanity lets you do it.

To be in turn a transsexual, a dictator, a torturer, a submissive dog, a paedophile, a gerontophile, a lesbian, a yuppie, a ruined bourgeoisie, a hairy patroness or a regressive soldier offering himself in a toy park, requires continuity in ideas, a supernatural power of conviction and a certain health to manage to chain everything without sinking into madness or being killed or locked up before.

Two solutions remain available to us and a third one as a hidden bonus. The first two: sexuality and theatre. The third, which unfortunately is less thought of as a creative object to be shaped, the deep personality.

We have permanent access to the latter on condition that we open the successive doors, sometimes reduced to a single portal, according to the stages of its formation. To do this, it is necessary to borrow and follow the corridor, sometimes very long, that leads to its threshold. For I am not talking about fantasies, dreamlike imagery immediately accessible - and so much the better - to our reverie, easily sipped at any time of the day like a sweet drink served with a straw. I'm talking about entire sections that really shape our person and that we are ready to accept to see and feel. It is already a great step forward for civilization, in my opinion, when we feel in ourselves like a catalogue to be leafed through, whose surprising iconography and its various aspects are accepted, tolerated and recognized as entities without vice, on which the scaffolding of our development is built.

Four tones of sexual identities whose boundaries blur beyond the strict limits of their original definition. Their mixture is at our source; it is still necessary to escape from a dichromatic vision of surface, whose erroneous perception forbids to see the human being bariolé of colors. The figure of the clown is only funny at first sight. Not that it should be reduced to a sad or maudlin composition, playing with his fancy mask only to accentuate the seriousness of his view of the world. Personally, I appreciate the rare real clowns who juggle elegantly with codes and pigments to offer themselves a made-up thought which, when it emerges in a new guise, has the effect of the appearance of the first colour channel in the world of the 1960s. Through their prisms, whether famous or anonymous, our mimetic vision is transferred from one rung to a progressive and unknown self-image.

So it has been with Bowie, Divine, Garbo, Monroe and other faces painted to measure, but also with thousands of silhouettes crossed in the streets, forcing admiration, thoughts expressed in lyrical or minimalist verses, discreet or declared Lewis Carroll, whimsical Oscar Wilde and committed Genet. The list is infinite and without nomenclature, of all those who work from them and themselves to push our rough world to metamorphosis. There is no morality dictated a priori by art, but there is no need to be an official artist to build one's own, simply, humbly, sometimes discreetly, without perhaps ever letting it show. The important thing, it seems to me, is to be aware that it is ethics that must inspire the laws of men and not the law that must decide, according to the dogmas in force and their arbitrariness, what is moral or what is not.

It is dangerous to confuse justice with morality. The law has no use for individual cases, even if it sometimes makes the effort to look at them more closely.

But it is the individual who gives the human species its global identity. If the chemical nature, so special, of its components cannot be exhaled to the head of institutions, tools that are rather crude in relation to the person, it is up to the person himself to take care of the poetry of his existence, to at least, if he cannot act at the level of the cogs of a giant machinery, cultivate the questioning, the glance and the experience. Culture is not created by monstrous geniuses out of the ordinary who, in each century, would spring from the lamp of the time, boldly rubbed by our little hands together. Culture and civilization are magmas fed by solitudes that, thinking outrageously of themselves in front of the landscape of their deep mystery, open one day the window of their kitchen from which escape the effluvia of their restricted preoccupations. This is the air that we all breathe.

So we can never thank enough those who refrain from venting and then unpacking their excess bullshit into the open sea. Some people, including myself, appreciate being able to swim in the open sea without coming back every day covered in sludge. But, life is such that we have to constantly slalom between the received ideas. So let's take a few dips, just to breathe in a little air, and let's free-dive as long as we can, to evolve, lighter, in the world below.

I don't expect anything more

No hand holds me back

Tired of living without tenderness

I'll die in my sadness.