The Cabin for Jean Genet, David Michael Clarke, 2009

Gift of the artist

For the 2009 Art in the Gardens event at Château Gontier, David Michael Clarke created a site-specific sculpture for his friend Annick Philiponet's 'literary' garden. He chose to create a hut for Jean Genet in reference to the years the writer spent in the penal colony of Mettray (a village near Tours) reserved for young men under the age of 21. The centre was founded in 1839 by philanthropist Frédéric-Auguste Demetz and architect Abel Blouet. The way in which it responded to a number of problems inherent in the prison system at the time (it proposed non-communication between young delinquents and hardened criminals, the absence of walls as such in favour of a green enclosure, apprenticeships for inmates in a wide range of trades to enable them to be reintegrated, etc.) made it an international model for the re-education and reintegration of young people.

D.M.Clarke used the proportions of the five large buildings where the prisoners slept and lived to create his own hut. He recalls the way of life of the young boys, based on marine discipline - they would hang up their hammocks at night and take them down in the morning so that they could unfold the breakfast tables - by installing a hammock and a small folding table in the hut for visitors to use. The rather harsh surveillance system that existed when Jean Genet arrived is suggested by the spectacle-glass shape of the two windows; from the outside, they are reminiscent of the oculi in church belfries and the houses of the directors of paternalistic factories, while from the inside, the visitor seems to be looking at the surrounding landscape through the eye sockets of a giant, from the inside of his skull. In this way, the Cabane pour Jean Genet goes beyond its simple status as a sculpture to become a three-dimensional object, a kind of chamber akin to a camera obscura, designed not to be seen but as a vantage point from which to observe the outside world. To avoid falling into the trap of illustration and nostalgia, D.M. Clarke asked the poet Pierre Giquel to write a text for Jean Genet, a poem left in the hut for all to see.

During the installation of the Cabane pour Jean Genet in Piacé, it occurred to D.M.Clarke that his garden shed-like sculpture was disturbingly reminiscent of Le Corbusier's cabanon built in 1949 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. From the homage to a writer whose literary sources and influences stem from an experience in a prison environment, to the comparison with a novel and minimalist experience of a great architect, David Michael Clarke's work is on the borderline between several types of classical expression, while at the same time questioning the place of the spectator-visitor, who is invited to appropriate this place of retreat and meditation.

Text by Roma Lambert