The work of Michel Journiac (1935–1995, Paris) is an attempted approach to the body. The body is the question and the very material of his work. His paintings, sculptures, photographs, actions, and all of the manifestations that he invented from the late 1960s onwards, question the role of individuals in society and the mechanisms that condition it. His artworks reveal and defend that of the intimate body, the individual body in relation to the collective and social body.
As early as 1969, when he presented Messe pour un corps [Mass for a Body] at the Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris, Michel Journiac stood out as one of the major representatives of corporeal and sociological art in France. He celebrated the service of mass between the gallery’s walls and invited the public to commune, by consuming pieces of blood-sausage made with his own blood. He delivered the recipe and arranged portable altars inside the gallery, containing the objects necessary for the celebration of mass (chalice, host, and altar stone, where his blood served as a relic) so that anyone could renew the sacrifice whenever they liked.
As memorable as it was subversive, this action sums up the impact of both Michel Journiac’s research and method: through the appropriation, subversion, and theatricalization of conventional gestures, objects, and social practices – rites – he disrupts our relationship to reality. He encourages introspection and a critical distancing of our imaginaries and social lives. Offering his own body, his own blood to the people present in the gallery, the artist makes the relationship that he maintains with his public obvious. He thwarts the codes of the art world and calls the role that he may hold in society into question. Above all, he redistributes and refreshes the connections between the individuals present at the time of the action. The human-blood-sausage, digested and shared by the communicants, is therefore a vector of exchange and encounter because, later, the blood will circulate between the bodies and become a trace of this approach to the other. Michel Journiac created several series of Rituels. Each time, they are a way of approaching the uncertain encounter between self and other, each one being trapped within its social, religious, or sexual identity. Displaced from the religious to the artistic domain, the liturgical gesture of Messe pour un corps recalls the necessity of rites to maintain the social bond. Ritual of mass, ritual of grieving, ritual of meals, political ritual of elections and referendum, economic rituals, feminine and masculine rituals of make-up and dress, rituals of desire… “The ritual is that which characterises all social activity1”, Michel Journiac repeated, who invented new ones in order to reclaim the body and liberate it.
“The body is what emerges and constantly asks us the question we cannot destroy. Ideas can evolve or transform; we can use all possible and imaginable sophisms to get away from them, but faced with someone who we desire or with death, with the corpse, ideologies crumble. This is where creation has its role to play in acknowledging and accepting the body’s attempted approach.2”
From his earliest works, Michel Journiac invented a semiology, an alphabet 3 of the body. He accords particular importance to the hand, or even hands, in the plural rather than the singular, since they mainly represent in Journiac’s work a call, a contact, or an encounter. The first signs of human expression to have appeared in cave paintings, they are the sign of a presence and signify the first movement of communication, the first gesture towards the other. Many historians have described and analysed their representations since the origins of creation. Endowed with great suggestive power, hands convey the expression of feelings and thought, to the point of symbolising humanity’s relationship to the divine. André Chastel for example studied, since ancient times, the iconographic importance of prayer, the joining of hands, as a primal symbolic gesture (also regularly found in Journiac) and showed how much the fact of isolating hands enabled us to consider them “a considerable signifying object”, a “wonderful visual metonym” because “there is a kind of tendency of the sign to focus on itself 4”.
Michel Journiac has retained the lesson from this pictorial tradition: hands are showcased in most of his artworks and are the main subject of his Rituels. Whether it is his own or those of some of the actors of his performances, he chose to stage them in a sequenced way and photograph them in close-up, in black and white, with his characteristically extreme concern for the effectiveness of the image. The tight framing also serves to isolate the hands and individualise them, almost personifying them. As for the bichromy, it reinforces the play of contrasts and highlights the expressiveness of the bodies while rendering them anonymous and universal. Journiac reuses the codes and religious iconography that he studied and knows for his own ends. In his photographic actions, he offers an array of gestures borrowed from Catholic liturgy, which he combines with the simplest gestures from everyday life. Hands that are held or entwined, index pointing, fists closed, hands shaken… From the represented to the lived, he develops a repertoire of signs and invents a non-verbal language – a kind of new sign language – which he aims to excavate from the trappings of religion and society, in order to express and approach both the intimate and the sacred.
For Rituel du sang (1976), Michel Journiac presents a sequence of photographs of Stigmates (head, feet, hands) as well as a series of close-up views of handshakes, which he entitles Préalable d’approche [Prior to an Approach] and Proposition de rencontre [Meeting Proposal]5. Prior to the investigation of the body thus comes the question of identity, embodied by the Stigmates, fragments of bandaged and bloody bodies. In a position that is explicitly Christ-like, like Jesus showing the five wounds of his crucifixion (a comparison strengthened by the transfer of the photo to the enlarged weave of the canvas, in reminiscence of the Holy Shroud), the artist exposes his body and proves his presence and identity. The time of the “encounter” then follows, symbolised by the social gesture of a handshake: choreographed tale of the meeting between the man and the woman (recognisable by her nail polish) of the original moment of humanity or of the simple expression of amorous desire.
With Rituel pour un mort (1976), the approach of the other – here it is Death – is undertaken through a ritual action whose protocol he has written in advance, its photographic record, and its presentation in a reliquary box. In memory of his friend Joël Delouche, who died in an accident in 1975, Michel Journiac performed a series of gestures in a Parisian cemetery, before three witnesses and a photographer. He removed his gloves, took a blood sample, spread it on a piece of bread that he buried (memory of the mass), put out a cigarette on his arm (as marker or stigmata) then varnished his nails in black and, finally, traced a cross on a stone with lipstick. The photographs of the various phases of the ritual are then laid in the box that contains a secret double base, with pebbles soaked in the artist’s blood. The cover of the box is crowned by a skeleton with one hand wearing a glove coated in white acrylic paint as well as a gold ring, in a symbol of union. It is still the hand, its relic, that serves as an auxiliary between the living man and his dead friend, between the human and the sacred, the intimate and the universal.
An extension of body and mind, the motif of the hands enables a whole panoply of ordinary or technical gestures to be taken into account, as expressive gestures that accompany or replace language. Michel Journiac thus identifies in his photographic actions a catalogue of expressions and attitudes, now masculine, now feminine, notably when he cross-dresses in 24 heures dans la vie d’une femme ordinaire (1974) or L’inceste (1975). We notice this gestural rhetoric in the eloquent play of his hands, which he often underscores by wearing white gloves.
Hands are not only photographed in the works of Michel Journiac, they also appear in the form of objects: fragments of skeletons presented like sculptures, jewellery (rings), clothing (gloves) which can circulate… from hand to hand. Some of these objects are often sent directly by Journiac to his friends, lovers, critics (such as the one dedicated to Georges Raillard in 1979, presented in the exhibition), and other artists or poets. These transitions of objects and various rituels, are the very movement of Michel Journiac’s œuvre. It is necessary to compile these dispatches and reread all of the phrases in the dedications written by the artist on the back of his paintings and photographs to grasp the breadth of his art, always addressed and innately oriented towards others, what he calls “uncertain sacrality, which is perhaps simply otherness”6.
- Armance Léger -
1 Michel Journiac, “L’objet du corps et le corps de l’objet”, Écrits (Paris: Beaux-Arts éditions, 2013), 114. Our translation.
2 Michel Journiac, Écrits, 157.
3 It’s the title of a major series of his paintings: Alphabet du corps (1965).
4 André Chastel, “L’art du geste à la Renaissance” in Revue de l’art, n°75, 1987, 9–16.
5 Journiac presented the Rituel du sang in two phases, in Paris then in Milan, in March 1976.
6 Michel Journiac, Écrits, 154.
