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Jeanne Tripier |
MAURER (Lise). Le "Remémoirer" de Jeanne Tripier, Erès, Ramonville Saint-Agne, 1999.
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| She is the daughter of a wine merchant and spends most of her childhood at her grandmother's in the country. Jeanne will then live for many years in Montmartre with her son Gustav, whose father is American. She works as a sales girl. She becomes involved with spiritualism when she is fifty-eight. In 1934, she is hospitalized for chronic psychosis, logorrhea and megalomania. According to her, the holy instances have entrusted her with the preparation of the "Last and Definitive Judgment" on earth, but the people on earth decided to lock her up in the asylum of Maison Blanche so that she could not accomplish her mission. Jeanne Tripier, a "medium of first necessity, holder of the laws of the planet, and the reincarnation of Joan of Arc", creates a whole world for herself during ten years of hospitalization. She describes her interplanetary voyages and her "Missions on earth" in her "Messages", as well as her life in the hospital. She makes drawings with ink mixed with hair dyes, nail polish and medications. She uses her fingers rather than a brush. Her drawings accompanied by writings become a sort of map for clairvoyance. Jeanne Tripier's work is most gripping in her embroideries. As a homemaker in the first part of her life, institutionalized in the second one, she never ceases to do needlework. However, in this last part of her life, her needle becomes a dangerous weapon used to create brutal works. Her needle begins to "deviate" the day her "fluid astral body" takes over her "fluid carnal body, when Jeanne "decides" that a mental migration will propel her into a total identification with the spirits. | ||
| Jeanne forgets herself completely in order to become Joan of Arc, Josephine de Beauharnais and a whole line of extravagant characters: Zed Zibodandez, universal dictator, the great master of the house and king of ancient miracles, Béglose, king of the moon, Pied de bœuf, Citerne etc. Loosing herself throws her into an overconcentration of the present, unconnected to the past and not projected into the future. She is sort of a depository, capturing messages from the present and producing therefore turmoil of signals, which follow each other without any sense of time or direction. The messages emanating from these many spirits file off in anarchy, creating a discontinuous line of a "litany of the absurd". They utter prophecies that trigger wars, sometimes using secret codes, which she calls "a spherical language", transmitted from beyond and containing free consonants and vowels "Xbdgxatuvwaytiviskitos, alsaqualificatifsogo bibiscloyatel oniconilosiskibitos (…) J. d'Arc". Denying her identity, she offers herself to the spirits who guide her needle, and little by little, shapes appear free from any preconceived representation. Protected by anonymity, she is liberated from any conformity or triteness, using her power tool like a symbolic weapon. Little by little, Jeanne Tripier has become a great artist. | ||
| SEE ALSO: Publications de la Compagnie de
l'Art Brut, fascicule 8, Paris, 1966. MAURER (Lise). Le "Remémoirer" de Jeanne Tripier, Erès, Ramonville Saint-Agne, 1999. |
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