This piece was written as an essay for
Sharon Kivland at the HEC at Jouy en Josas, wonderful, perverse, critical installation. This is a queer meta-commentary on the show and will appear in its long delayed brochure.
Throughout a long period of time, over many years, I walked
up and down the Rue Oberkampf. I looked at the buildings. I went to shop there,
anything from quirky and outmoded pornography to green beans and hippy scarfs.
So it was a long time, from one period of the contemporary transformations of
Paris to another and, like me, it changed and bits of both of us remained much
the same, but I never went by way of the Rue Oberkampf in Jouy en Josas. It
took me embarrassingly long to put together the name of the street with the
name of a fabric that was always much to my taste, which, even in its most
banal versions diverts my gaze and in its older and most exquisite samples, my
desire. What do I care if its production entailed so much suffering, such
exploited labour, I who buy from Amazon, ethical products distributed through
the structures of contemporary slavery, now at the point where slavery and wage
slavery contend with one another in their differencing degrees of
precariousness and enforced security. And so for a long time I wandered up and
down this street and before, even I became aware of it I was now at the bottom
of the Rue de Menilmontant and then again at the Boulevard des Filles du
Calvaire, a route that I was to find was one that had been trodden time and
time again by the youthful Maurice Chevalier. Ah the company I kept, though, in
the end, going back to him, it is Jacques Hillairet in his vast Dictionnaire
Historique des Rues de Paris, who lets me down. Such a constant companion in
those wanderings, the light that glimmered in those dusty clouds of anecdotal
history, he had, in now turns out, and although I could have known this at the
time, almost nothing of interest to say about the Rue Oberkampf, other than to
give an account of how, in its coming into being, its name replaced that of
four older streets before a re-designation in honour of the great manufacturer
in 1864, some 62 years after they had been levelled down from having been a steep pathway up to the
edge of Paris, and just less than a century after Rousseau himself had a notorious
and well-known fall there that resulted in a temporary loss of memory, after
being overwhelmed by one of the Danish dogs of Louis Lepeletier de Saint Fargeau,( Le 24 octobre 1776, Jean-Jacques Rousseau est
victime d’un accident à Ménilmontant. Il relate cet événement dans la « Seconde
Promenade » des Rêveries du promeneur
solitaire)whose own death was to be monumentalised by Jacques-Louis
David in 1793, a painting probably destroyed by the painter’s daughter, but
known in this relic:
Oddly enough this was to have been my route from the 11e
arrondissment to 18 and 19th century Jouy, albeit circuitous
compared to the more or less straight up and down of Oberkampf itself, a hill
once lined by working class cafés and hardware shops, a service street of small
industries and workshops, some of these places now lovingly restored and
rendered as ruin to house hipster cafés and clubs and restaurants, fading away
already when I first walked up and down and, before it became one street, when
Rousseau fell, a place of herbs and trees and vineyards and agricultural
delights for the writer and no doubt the readers of Émile. Anyway the route taken by my research was
not as such up and down a street, as one winding through the vexed unfolding of
a relation between art and industry of a kind appropriate for a Revolution, the
Great Revolution of 1789, that had both dismantled and inherited the
monarchical structures of this relation, and that eventually led me to an
engraving after a painting of the Emperor, Napoléon Bonaparte, alas an image
that I can no longer trace, so lost that I wonder if indeed I ever saw it in
the first place, visiting and inspecting the fabrication of Jouy en Josas, led
by the proudly obsequious figure of Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf himself, now
about to be awarded the Légion d’Honneur, in 1806. Something like these, I
guess: but then I put together this fabric I enjoy so much with a man and with
a place and toile de jouy at last made sense
Over a number of years, some of them coinciding or
coterminous with those from recounting which I just set out, I often walked to
and fro along the Rue Saint Maur, from where the Rue Léon Frot ended right up
to the Hôpital Saint Louis, nearby to which was number 208, a long, shabby and
romantic almost ex-industrial court, quite wide and very deep with all kinds of
levels and heights of workshops and dwellings from one to five floors and, at
the very end, a long residential block with a two floor workshop on the ground
floor. This one, the first branch of what was to become a small chain, IEM, was
an industry of our times, taken as the years, roughly speaking, of gay
emancipation, a site of the ’confection’, to use the French word, and also of
the bespoke supply of leather gear and bondage materials for leather men and
bar standers, and later of latex when it became more modish and oh what bliss
it was in that dawn to be a shopper! Around the beginning of this century, I
think, the son of some close friends moved into a small apartment on the top floor
of this building, without his parents, however frequently they might have
visited him and despite their interest in the transformation of the city and
the role of their son in gentrifying it ever appearing to have noticed quite
where he had located himself, nor what a relation it might have had to who he
was. Yet I do believe that they had toile de jouy in their house; but who does
not. In any event, all this is anecdotal, but I do want to emphasise the
post-rural idyll of IEM in those distant days, the implements hanging from
racks like fruit in an orchard, or ex votos in Lourdes, the rows of all kinds
of garments in glistening black with red and blue and yellow highlights, the other-worldly
perfume of freshly worked materials and the sound of sewing machines at work,
none of which you will see below, but below you will see the anecdote as a form
of vision, of the utopian outcome of research, of the writing of a phrase, that
might have any appearance in the end, or any conclusion, however dreadful but that
remains and will remain at the origin of the phrase as such.
