ARTIFICIAL HELLS

notes to pages 98– 100
respectively, and became a model for their idea of the artist. See Kristine
Stiles, ‘Jean- Jacques Lebel’s Phoenix and Ash’, in Jean- Jacques Lebel:
Works from 1960– 1965, London: Mayor Gallery, 2003, pp. 3– 15.
79 Lebel, interview with the author, Paris, 22 July 2010; see also Lebel, Le
Happening, Paris: Les Lettres Nouvelles- Denoel, 1966, p. 22, note 1.
80 Déchirex was the culmination of a week of events in the Second Festival
of Free Expression, 17– 25 May 1965. It included nudity, live sex, spaghetti,
a motorbike, and the destruction of a Citroën car. Déchirex attracted
considerable press coverage, both in France and internationally (including
Time magazine), after the cultural organiser at the American Center
was fired and the new director announced that Happenings would no
longer be held at the venue. Fifty minutes of the fifty- five- minute film
documentation of Déchirex were censored.
81 This account is based on the one found in Lebel and Michaël (eds.),
Happenings de Jean- Jacques Lebel, pp. 176– 86. Alyce Mahon also reports
that the audience were offered sugar cubes laced with LSD. See Mahon,
‘Outrage aux Bonnes Moeurs: Jean- Jacques Lebel and the Marquis de
Sade’, in Jean- Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen, p. 106.
82 Alyce Mahon argues that ‘the obscenity of this act was profound’. One of
the reasons that Cynthia had wanted to perform in the Happening was
that she was not allowed to exhibit herself even in Pigalle. Ironically, the
event was halted by a brothel owner, Madame Martini, who called the
police to complain about an ‘outrage aux bonnes moeurs’. See Mahon,
‘Outrage aux Bonnes Moeurs’, p. 107.
83 Reported in Lebel and Michaël (eds.), Happenings de Jean- Jacques Lebel,
p. 185. It is important to note that Lebel’s father was the first biographer
of Duchamp, and that Jean- Jacques grew up in New York surrounded by
the Surrealist group in exile from Paris. He went to school with André
Breton’s daughter Aube, was friends with Ernst, Duchamp and Benjamin
Péret, and at the age of twenty- two exhibited in the Surrealist group’s
late exhibition ‘Eros’ at the Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris (1959).
84 Susan Sontag, ‘Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition’, in Against
Interpretation, London: Vintage Books, 2001, p. 265.
85 See note 27 in Chapter 4.
86 Jean- Paul Sartre in Le Nouvel Observateur, 18 January 1967. Quoted in
Lebel and Michaël (eds.), Happenings de Jean- Jacques Lebel, p. 147, note
32.
87 Carolee Schneemann, in Nelcya Delanoë, Le Raspail Vert: L’American
Center à Paris 1934– 1994, Paris: Seghers, 1994, p. 122, my translation.
Schneemann notes that Man Ray, Max Ernst and Eugène Ionesco were in
the audience.
88 For a description and analysis of the work, see Allan Kaprow, ‘A Happening
in Paris’, in Jean- Jacques Lebel et. al, New Writers IV: Plays and
Happenings, London: Calder and Boyars, 1967, pp. 92– 100.
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