Blood in the work of Anne Marie Tréal-Bresson
May 18, 2009
Blood has always been a part of my work.
I draw with my blood, this blood so desired, so eagerly awaited like a discharge that doesn’t come, that doesn’t settle well in a woman’s identity.
The blood willingly turned, like milk, dry. Nothing would come out of her...So she was going to make the absent blood come out...
She didn’t want to grow up...She was so scared of others.
Blood torments her like her feces, like the air that escapes from her ass, her bodily hair, her skin...all these noisy insides, active and passive, universally human...
Secretion of an uninterrupted torment, odorous waste, fermentation of an emergency, of a violence to forget, field of ruins of a feminine eternal, always to procrastinate to exist somewhere, between repulsion, suffering, sexual unavailability, parent or impure worrie, turns men away from this uncontrollable woman, playing their ruthless vindication as dominant master...
This rotting, oozing, incontrollable gap, he escapes the woman who suffers monthly from her own sterile mucous waste discharging in spite of her...
She goes out of herself that she abandons to fate, to nature skinned of its fear from the inside out, by the moonlight.
Anne Tréal, through and beyond regular menstruations, bloody and sickly wanted to operate a voluntary break in of this invisible body where the inside never justifies the outside...
1968: first work with dirt and blood, her hair...This undesired body in a box closed by a glass and tiny boxes drawn on...Destroyed by Bernard Tréal. As if there, she arranged her womanly existence on the ground, there where there was already an intolerable awareness of being dispossessed of herself in a world of men...
She was scared to belong only to the female gender...She was, for a long time, scared of violence...
Very early on, she sensed her dual-belonging to a masculine-feminine world as obvious and always treated with ambivalence in her work invariably brings her back to a fear of “being ‘other,’ different”...
1974: drawing with the artist’s blood (blood in the rotring: the artist renounces drawing with her blood, it dries too quickly)
1979: she conceives the project of constructing the Tower of Babel, to jump from the top of it, to bring forth blood flow, to jump from 300 meters high, to injure the spectator, to result in her death...
“To learn and relearn to be self in self and outside others”...
Begins the first prints with her blood (handprint, thumb print, knee print, breast print on paper): she defines this work as, “I hope to leave a trace of this body and situate it in relation to painting, to drawing.”
1980: First performance: Gesture-action No. 1 in Lyon Il faut blesser le corps là où l’âme se sépare (It’s necessary to wound the body where the soul divides itself) – Wound at the project’s state.
It is urgent that I express myself physically, bodily...There can’t be discussion of convenience...
Anne Tréal, herself, takes her own blood, puts it in little vials entitled, Blood of the artist and distributes it to the people present at her personal exhibition at the gallery L’oeil écoute in Lyon.
This taking of blood is of the order of the bruise. The blood withdrawn from myself goes to another individual: I wound myself, he wounds himself, I communicate with my blood...
So busy with this blood of the body, the hidden, the useful, the five liters necessary to live, the “good blood/life,” the indispensable, the powerful, an active organ to distinguish from those which run passively...
1981: Representation with cat corpses: death keeps her company.
1983: Gesture-action at the Alexis Mossa gallery in Nice
Anne Tréal produces her first large canvases by mixing her blood with pig blood and creates large prints by stirring the liquid with her hands on the canvas, at the same time exhibiting some prints on paper made of her blood, then blood on gauze, blood on Canson paper and on fabric-paper...
1985: Rapport de trace no 7 (Trace Report No. 7) Saint Pierre Derision: Trace of blood mixed with dirt and hair from the artist.
1990: in January, she was writing: “I would like to swim in a tub of blood for hours”...
Produces drawing-collages of the Tower of Confusion smeared with her blood.
1991: produces works with her friends Henru Ughetto, Bernard Tréal, Arthaud with her/their blood.
2000: Museum of Menton: Four of these works are censored and rejected from the exhibition, one of them entitled Je suis de la merde (I’m shit) – Work composed of blood, shit, and cum. Art-reality, art of denigration, I see myself as society sees me, my eyes are good, worn by it, by all this I know longer recognize myself. Art of erring/wandering.
I no longer adhere to anything, neither to myself nor others...(Excerpts from Le chien humain (The human dog) by Ann Tréal).
2001: The artist creates Pipi caca
Same loss of control during defecation: the things that go in must come out, pass by the unconscious, take care of the impure miasma that change all the moods of an active body...She shows herself defecating her own insides...All the waste that she produces day after day...
She writes in 1998: “There is no sorrow in loving to shit, in loving what one makes so carefully oneself...
The shit is our intimate history, specific to our bodies, object of desire of others...Our shit is an integral part of our seduction...
Conveying our different states of mind, diarrhea in moments of great fear or great frustration...
Water and shit have never mixed well and it irritates our colons, our shit is the internal protector of our intestinal veils, just like skin protects the integuments (cell membranes), blood irrigates the bloody waves, red and black...up...down...does its bloody work...
It is necessary to give him credit where it is owed, evacuating the surpluses that the company of other generates in us and all the stress that appends itself there...
If I am good...I take good shits.
If I’m bad...I take bad shits.
I am in my own reality...From the shit found up an ass, these are farts that express themselves colorfully...
It is the painting of life...of our insides...It is not dirty...It is the expression of our bodies with its images, its colors...
These urinary extravagances when I cough, I don’t carry them around by chance or even accidentally...
My piss dripping on my legs expresses the cold...the internal tension...I like that my insides talk to me...I am closest to them...
You must be the fish to pull out a work from it.”
So Anne Tréal wants to bear her insides just like she bears the outside...She writes again, “I am well inside the interior of this body, I play with myself, I ignored those around me...They can no longer do anything against me, my blood, my viscera, my skin, my body hair, they work well together to preserve me...
I became the immensity of this body” Excerpts from The human dog, A.T.B – 1998.
2007: Video performance using serrated dolls, from a 17-page manifesto against war, massacres, genocides in the world, of modular tricolored sculptures, entitled Blood baths.
The artist wants to wash the barbarity with her own blood, her hands and feet and take a bath in blood:
Performance rejected or censored by gallery owners, institutions, but really interests the school students.
She gives this performance on January 5, 2010 at the CDI de Fumel (in Lot-et-Garonne) with her blood. Performance project grand in nature, entitled La Comtesse aux pieds nus where the artist takes her blood bath to meditate on the cruelty of the human world...
2010: Premières Incursions sanguines bordelaises (First Blood Incursions in Bordeaux): A photograph-based performance by the artist including two surgical interventions:
- Excision of the face presentation in Bordeaux on the docks (Nidanne)
- The artinlabel – Circulated on the artist’s blog and facebook.
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