The often much-less-inspired polemicist in Picabia acted to the detriment of the painter and poet. His highly developed sense of humour went poorly with the critical, defiant, aggressive stance that he adopted toward his contemporaries, whom he all too readily attacked on personal grounds. But perhaps this is the necessary verso of an opus that, more than any other, wanted to avoid being removed from life and that, putting Rimbaud’s watchword into execution, was concerned most of all with being ‘absolutely modern.’ The will to scandal that long presided over it (from 1910 to 1925) made this opus a readymade target for the impatience, even the fury of all the guardians of conformity and taste. ‘Anything but Picabia’: that has been the bargain offered to innovative art these past two decades – a bargain that is usually struck, ignoble though it may be, and though Picabia can only benefit by it. Such a malediction is hardly the rule these days, and he systematically did the opposite of what he would have had to do in order to ward it off. This resolute detractor of every moral or aesthetic convention was one of the greatest poets of desire, of desire without respite whose very realization condemns it to be reborn in different form. Love and death naturally constitute the two poles, between which zigzags a dot that is hypersensitive to the image of the present moment.
Picabia was the first to understand that any juxtaposition of words is valid and that its poetic virtue is all the greater the more gratuitous or irritating it seems at first glance. The entire heroic period of his art attests not so much to the need for reacting against the vanity of subjects or techniques or for astounding imbeciles as to the desperate, Neronian dream of holding ever grander celebrations for himself: ‘Royal Fern,’ he once wrote me, ‘is a very large painting, three yards by two and a half. It is composed of 261 black circles on a crushed strawberry background. In one corner, there is an enormous gold cup-and-ball game. As for the captions, I prefer not to spoil the surprise.’
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cinquante-deux miroirs, 1917. Rateliers platoniques, 1918. Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère, 1918. L’Athlète des pompes funèbres, 1919. Jésus-Christ rastaquouère, 1921. La loi d’accomodation chez les borgnes, 1928, etc.
After we die, they should put us inside a ball. This ball would be made of particoloured wood. They would roll us in it toward the cemetery, and the undertakers charged with this task would wear transparent gloves, so as to remind lovers of our caresses.
For those wishing to embellish their homes with a pleasing view of the dear departed, there would be crystal balls through which one could see the definitive nudity of one’s grandfather or twin brother!
Slipstream of the intelligence, steeple-chase lamp; humans look like unblinking crows taking flight above corpses, and all the redskins are stationmasters!
* * *
I had a Swiss friend named Jacques Dingue1 who lived in Peru at an altitude of 13,000 feet. He’d left several years before to explore those regions, and while there he had succumbed to the charms of a strange Indian woman, whose refusal to grant her favours had driven him mad. He grew progressively weaker, no longer even leaving the hut where he’d gone to live. A Peruvian doctor, who had accompanied him there, treated him in the vain hope of curing a dementia praecox that he deemed incurable!
One night, a flu epidemic swooped down on the small tribe of Indians who were sheltering Jacques Dingue. Everyone was stricken without exception and, of two hundred natives, 178 died in just a few days. The terrified doctor had quickly hightailed it back to Lima … My friend, too, was infected with this terrible disease, immobilized by fever.
Now, all the dead Indians owned one or several dogs, which soon had no other means of surviving but to eat their masters; they shredded the corpses, and one of them carried into Dingue’s hut the head of the Indian woman with whom he was in love … He recognized her at once and no doubt experienced an intense inner commotion, for he was suddenly cured of both his madness and his fever. His strength restored, he took the woman’s head from the dog’s mouth and amused himself by tossing it to the other side of the room, commanding the animal to fetch and bring it back. Three times the game began anew, with the dog carrying the head back with the nose between its teeth; but on the third toss, Jacques Dingue having thrown it a bit too hard, the head smashed against the wall. To his great delight, the handball player noticed that the brain flying out of it contained but a single circumvolution and could easily have been mistaken for a pair of buttocks!
– from Jesus Christ the Carpetbagger
* * *
The autumn is faded
by the child
whom we loved.
Like a vulture
on a carcass
he diminishes his family then disappears
like a butterfly.
1. A rough translation of this name would be ‘Jack Wacko.’ [trans.]