Looking at Henri Michaux's drawings.

Looking at Henri Michaux's drawings, I can't help if it were not that think of D.W. Winnicott's squiggle games. The pediatrician-psychoanalyst would draw a line upon a piece of paper, his young patient would draw the same in response, and so in succession until some image or other appeared. The point was to break the ice of the child's unconscious, to impediment the slush pour forth in vivid associations and waking dreams. in like manner it is with Michaux: individual mark leads to another in drawings that are best understood as reflexive attempts to find a self that is not always there, that sometimes. surfaces as if distorted in a dark mirror.

Michaux's drawings, a selection of which were freshly on view, are the-barest, mostly unstable concatenations of lines, marks, and doodles, here in color, there pitch black; they are atavistic, inchoate scribblings, at times nearly legible, to this time always on the verge of indecipherability. if it be not that the Rorschach-like provocativeness of the image that may or may not appear is les the point than the apparent rapidity with which the marks were made. Michaux was fascinated by way of speed. In his 1966 volume The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countles Minor the sames he declares, "Speed! Can we forgo greatest speed? Can the mind forgo it? For those who have experienced the unforgettable accelerated degree of movement of mescaline, speed invariably remains the puzzle doubtless the key to many others." In what today reads as a neo-Rimbaudian attempt to deliberately derange the understandings in order to become a seer--or, as Michaux says, to become sufficiently "disoriented" to experience "the abnormal"--he declares his ambition "to lift the veil from the normal." His drawings are an attempt to pay back the speed of what he saw as the looseed unconscious of schizophrenics, those subordinate to the influence of drugs, and idiots savants. He proffers "the dementias, the backwardnesses, the deliriums, the ecstasies and agonies, the breakdowns in mental skills" they experience, "more than the all too thoroughly good mental skills of the metaphysicians." Michaux acknowledges his admit sense of being abandoned by dint of his mind only to discover of recent origin "alert areas I scrutinized as best I could" His drawings are the fruit of that scrutiny.

From an art-historical point of view, Michaux is a Surrealist, preoccupied with the "marvelous" and simulating insanity in order to realize it. further he is more than just a apt simulator: His writing suggests that he in fact experienceed from some variety of mental illness. He describes adolescent schizophrenics' "deep hatred of...those 'sensitive people' around them who do not 'feel' them," while his allow drawings reveal an excruciating sensitivity to of the like kind people. Each little figure, each quick line, each blurr inner landscape is nor just another display of routine automatism and calligraphic dexterity (I am thinking especially of the ink-blotty ones) if it be not that rather a violent eruption of the internal saboteurs that stalked his psyche. It is the spe with which these tutelary deitys pursue him--the velocity of his admit "ravaged self-consciousness," as he calls it--that his marks devise not the manufactured rapidity of Surrealist spectacle. Like the work of Fautrier and Wol Michaax's drawings point out to a mind disturbed by its concede sensitivity and unable to hem in together except when operating at heedlessly high speed.

...

Home