Jean-Jacques Lebel and French Happenings of the 1960s: The Erotics of Revolution

Description

Combining a broad overview of Jean-Jacques Lebel's coming-of-age among Surrealists and his rupture with the movement, Laurel Jean Fredrickson focuses on two landmark happenings in this book: the first, "Funeral of the Thing of Tinguely" (1960), and the most scandalous, "120 Minutes dedicated to the Divine Marquis" (1966). This study illustrates the development and significance of French happenings in relation to cultural and political changes of the 1960s. Research in Lebel's archives, and others like the Archives nationale d'outre-mer are indispensable in the telling of this extraordinary historical and theoretical narrative. It illuminates sensitive, often veiled dimensions of postwar French society, from torture during the Algerian War, to government censorship, to the sexual politics of nudity in art. This volume shows how Lebel synthesized the lessons of Dada and surrealism and 1960s experimentalism, electrified by political radicalism, to participate in shaping the erotics and forms of revolution in May 1968.

Laurel Jean Fredrickson is Assistant Professor of Art History at Southern Illinois University, USA. Her research explores the intersections of experimental art and politics in and since the 1960s, happenings and Fluxus, and transnational women artists from former French colonies and protectorates. She earned a PhD in Art History from Duke University, an MA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, USA. Prior to studying art history, she practiced as an artist, exhibiting nationally and internationally, and taught studio art courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Columbia College in Chicago.

Laurel Jean Fredrickson's biographical narrative and analysis of artist/writer/provocateur Jean-Jacques Lebel leaves few stones unturned in an account of the surprisingly underrecognized, yet pivotal, French artist from the 1960s. * Bad at Sport * An important contribution to discourses on radical art, culture critique and political strategies in France during the 1960s. Lebel's practice is examined as a "creative rhizome of dissent", as a problematic process of liberation located in contradictions within counterculture and the moment of "1968". * Francis Frascina, John Raven Professor of Visual Arts (Emeritus), Keele University, UK * Fredrickson re-invests the 1960s Happening with revolutionary ideology in her fascinating examination of Jean-Jacques Lebel's radical art. She reveals a committed coordinator of deliberately disconcerting challenges to orthodox thinking, as she adroitly negotiates some of the social dilemmas raised by his political poetry-in-action. * Simon Anderson, Associate Professor of Art History, Theory & Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA * Fredrickson's book is a brilliant, even thrilling, study of one of the most astonishingly polymorphous and rhizomatic artists to have emerged from the surrealist cauldron. Attending to Lebel's fusion of anarchist politics, surrealist eroticism, fluxus-informed experimentation, and Beat generation poetics, Jean-Jacques Lebel and French Happenings of the 1960s tells the story of a vibrant and radical creolite. At the same time, Fredrickson makes a compelling case for an expanded conception of Dick Higgins' notion of the "intermedial" wherein aesthetics and politics become impossible to disentangle. As the first full-length study of one of the most iconoclastic and uncategorizable figures of the European avant-garde, this book will reshape the way we think about performance art in the post-war period. * Roger Rothman, Professor of Art History, Bucknell University, USA * As a framework to study Lebel and happenings of the 1960s, [the book] is an important one, indicating the multi-generational, cross-disciplinary networks he and others moved within counterculture and the moment of May 1968. * Art History *