Striped jersey, hat or cap tilted back so as not to obstruct the view, eyebrows raised inquiringly… Jean Mas could have been the “ravi”* of his Crèche de l’Ecole de Nice - 

he looks at the world with quietly marvelled eyes.

 

But he burnt that Crèche at the end of 2010, when he made the Ecole de Nice go up in smoke. Just like he burnt some “letter boxes” more recently, as part of the exhibition of Frédéric Altmann’s photographs, “Du Nouveau Réalisme à l’Ecole de Nice”, in La Gaude. So, is Jean Mas an arsonist? No, his “PerforMas” (performances) are just one of his artistic expressions and invariably come with texts. The idea is to bring something to life by drawing attention to that thing. Like with his “A Vendre” (for sale) signs displayed in the most unusual places, such as the Pont des Arts in Paris. There are also his 0% electoral lists and his famous “Peu” which has its annual festival in the village of Bonson… But above all, he is the Fly Cage man – the Fly Cage being his “princeps object”...

 

Who then is this complex character about whom art critic Pierre Restany said that “he synthethized the spirit of the Ecole de Nice”? He was born in Nice in 1946 and has no artistic training other than in wrought iron and “from the street”, as he put it. But he was an avid reader and was the first to register in the local public library. He read all Giono’s books, all Proust’s, all Steinbeck’s, all Cendrars’s; he has carefully kept a copy of the latter’s book “L’or”, because it echoed his own aspirations of being a “globe-trotter, but a globe-trotter in words”. His first contact with art circles was with the Fluxus movement and the Ben Doute de Tout gallery. And that was it... That attitude, combined with a touch of humour, suited him perfectly well – he describes himself as “a teaser”. His first performance was carried out in 1969 - an igloo.

The Cages

But it was in 1973 that he conquered his place on the Nice art scene with his Fly Cage, a reminiscence of his school days, when at break time schoolchildren used to make cages with corks and sewing pins in which to keep the flies they caught in the classroom. The Cage, always empty at first, became the main vehicle of Jean Mas’s expression – “an individual mythology within the framework of an attitude art”.  He also develops a passion for philosophy and psychoanalysis. “I needed to acquire some cultural knowledge to eliminate the insect and change its prison into a pretext for intervening”. And the cage has since been multiplied ad infinitum and staged in countless ways – there has even been a giant version. It gave rise to the creation of the Ordre de la Cage à Mouches (Order of the Fly Cage), a “derisory, futile and insignificant” distinction which was awarded for the first time in December 1980. The award-giving ceremony is an artistic performance accompanied by a speech demonstrating Jean Mas’s virtuosity at juggling with the French language. 

 

Just a little (peu)

Not surprisingly, in 1989, his taste for the derisory, for minimalism and for words led to the “Peu”, after a foray into “Bubbles” (bubbles of soap filled with paint), another childish activity if ever there was one. But the “Peu” is far more serious. It is the visual formalization of the letter P of our alphabet, pronounced ‘peu’ which means ‘a little’ in French. The sign ‘P’ becomes the object of an artistic interpretation. “Playing with the homophony, I turned the letter P into a proper noun... Thus, the Art of the ‘Peu’ inaugurates a new art… I create the Art of the PEU.” 
The letter P comes in all sizes, colours and materials, and in 2003, an entire village, Bonson, “set about making ‘peus’”.  The Festival du Peu was born. Every summer, each villager decorates a ‘peu’ cut out in wood. Artists are invited and a big exhibition of the ‘peus’ is held. Jean Mas adds: “This letter has also been used as a means of expression in two schools and two old people’s homes.”  And Nice’s Faculty of Medicine is familiar with these ‘Peus’ because every professor going into retirement gets a Peu in his image composed by the artist.

Words

Jean Mas, this juggler with words, doesn’t content himself with writing texts which will be declaimed at his PerforMas. He also writes books – detective novels (“Un peu de meurtre à l’Ecole de Nice” and more recently “La Rue des Poilus”), catalogues, collections of thoughts, art books... Of course, the way he handles the French language makes it difficult to “export” because translators have a lot of trouble with it. He met with the problem on a visit to the United Arab Emirates – the interpreter was completely lost!

 

Nowadays, Jean Mas’s works can be seen in a number of galleries in Nice and at the Windsor hotel. Like a vestal, he keeps the flame of the Ecole de Nice alive, and also the memory of his glorious predecessors. He is working on a new book, “Un peu de conversation, 40 ans de performances”, and views the evolution of artistic creation with a psychoanalytic eye: “Lots of young people take up art... I don’t know... We are living through a time when narcissism is overriding the oedipal superego… It is a need for recognition, the advent of the “me, I...”

 

Yet he stays on course – his own course, that of an attitude artist, more teasing than provocative – and at the end of the year, he will not fail to celebrate in his own way the Nouveaux Réalistes and César’s 90th birthday with Frédéric Altmann at the Centre Culturel du Bon Accueil in Roquefort-les-Pins.

 

“I am for the ‘nothing than less’, that’s why I like minimalist art which can be reduced to the essential” 

 

*A character of the Provençal nativity scene

 

Nicole Benazeth

Jean Mas par Jacques Lepage – Critique d’art

L’analyse de Bataille demeure actuelle : la transgression du tabou seule peut faire échapper au normalisme, c’est à dire à la bonne conscience grégaire, à la redite, qui s’interprètent, dans le champ qui nous occupe, comme un académisme. Le vivent ceux qui comme Mas, à l’écoute de la contestation de Fluxus, subvertissent nos habitudes pour fêler les comportements reçus, les leçons et les recettes apprises.

Par un usage particulier de la dérision et de la parodie Mas a mis, met en échec les « bonnes manières » du petit monde de l’art, l’écart étant dans le choix, non des formes mais de l’étiologie : cage à mouches, bulles éclatées, parcours accompagné de performances, d’écrits où grince le non sens que suggéra Caroll. Ainsi, dans un moment, où ce que l’on s’est plu à nommer les avant-gardes s’efface au bénéfice d’une vaste régression, d’une inimaginable ignorance de la spécificité de l’œuvre d’art, Jean Mas pose les inébranlables incertitudes de l’esprit : sans recours au théoricisme, en construisant des cages à mouches, en faisant éclater des bulles. Rien ici n’est démonstratif. Ce que l’on verra chez Jacques Matarasso relève de l’art, de l’art le mieux visuel, de l’art qui enchante la vue et donne plaisir aux sens. Mas est peintre. Son travail, sa production est celle d’un peintre. Rien des subtilités de son métier, de leur mise à voir ne lui échappe. Maîtrisant ce qui pourrait sembler hasardeux dans l’exécution de ses bulles éclatées, il les assume avec la rigueur d’un aquarelliste. Mais le « signe » qui les engendre, les déplace, fait de ce monde délicat et tendre des structures de la mise en œuvre de toute action créative.

Jean Mas par France Delville
Critique d’art (à propos des 20 ans de la Cage à Mouches - 1993)

On est obligé de dire humour parce qu’il manque des mots, mais lui les crée, il les crée car il n’y a pas de sens des mots, il n’y a que des emplois et Mas les fait surgir pour la première fois. Ses calembours réinventent une chaîne à partir du seul ready made qui intéresse l’Ecole de Nice : la vie toute entière.
Ecrire sur Mas aujourd’hui, c’est dire : « il est temps de regarder avec plus d’attention ce qu’il pointe du doigt et de la langue, il est temps, car il a beaucoup parlé déjà, avec les mots, avec leur histoire, leur échappement, leur renvoie, leur piège.
Techniquement, la performance est la mise en œuvre de la compétence linguistique dans les actes concrets : actualisation de la capacité de parler.
C’est un présent : c’est la mise en acte du mot, son dévoilement, à cause de cette notion de présent. Ce n’est pas un événement, ça, c’est le happening, ça c’est dans le temps.
Là, c’est le jaillissement de l’acte, de l’objet lié au mot. A chaque mot de Mas, c’est de l’émergence, ça se passe dans le temps, ses révélations se succèdent, c’est comme dans la jetée de Chris Marker, ça paraît se dérouler, mais c’est un dévoilement de chaque seconde, une suite d’apogées.
Il n’y est pour rien, Jean Mas, je veux dire qu’il ne calcule pas, il délire, c’est à dire qu’il est habité, et être habité, c’est parler en rêve, et ce qui le rêve, Mas, c’est un objet préfabriqué, la vie, et ça a à voir avec l’Ecole de Nice qui dit : « la vie est plus belle que tout ».