Albert and Félicie Demard Departmental Museum - Arts and Popular Traditions
7 Rue de l'Église, 70600 Champlitte, France
09:30–12:00, 14:00–18:00, closed on Tuesday
Phone: 03 84 95 76 50
Internet : musees.haute-saone.fr, musee-champlitte@haute-saone.fr

The museum of Arts and Popular Traditions, installed in the sumptuous renaissance castle. It tells the life of the peasant society at the end of the 19th century. It also presents very beautiful decorations from the Age of Enlightenment as shown in the "Salon des papiers peints".

- Curators of the exhibition : Caroline Dreux & Aurélie Dumain

- Artists exhibited : Claudie Floutier, Jean-Pierre Sergent etc.

- DIRECTIONS (54 km of Dijon & 70 km of Besançon)

- PRESENTATION TEXT OF THE EXHIBITED WORK

THE MAYAN GODDESS IXCHEL 

"D'Aubigné remains obsessed by the appalling problem of man's cruelty to man. The crimes of the past are too often excused by blaming them on the mores of the time which, supposedly, would authorize them, even in the eyes of their victims." Les Tragiques, Sous bénéfice d'inventaire, Marguerite Yourcenar 

The Goddess Ixchel, whose name comes from ix, which means lady, and chel, which means rainbow, is the Maya goddess, associated with Water and Death. We can see that by overturning her big pot, her womb in a way, she floods the arid, dry and infertile Earth with her waterspouts. She wears bones on her dress and snakes on her headdress, chthonic and mortuary elements. I added monarch butterflies which are symbols of Life, hope, transhumance and ephemerality; or even; they represent the souls of the dead which fly away from the Earth and circulate in Space; surrounding and protecting us all, humans, fragile and mortal as we are. We feel very strongly the power and the strength of Ixchel, at the same time destructive, deadly and by the same token, in fact and inversely, regenerative and creator of Life. She is an old, ugly, menopausal woman, giving rise in each of us to feelings of fear, horror, dread, amazement, death anxiety, destruction and infra-worlds; but who fascinates us all the same! It is the perfect portrait of the western witch par excellence, aesthetically and by definition. Except that the Maya and the pre-Columbians did not have the same artistic and moral value judgments. And their Devils, as their Gods were practically always aesthetically all ugly and frightening. Not like our famous ancient Gods, over-aesthetized and exulting, of an over-aged beauty with an immeasurable and unattainable purity, like the famous insipid Kouros or the caryatids of the Greek Parthenon (abode of the virgins), supporting gracefully but lifelessly and without desire, the infinite and insurmountable weight of a heavy, grandiloquent and impressive architecture: "Why the eyes of the statues are they always lifeless? "The Mexican Gods, alive and well, were perhaps even more frightening than our wise, simplistic, bloody and desperate Christs on the Cross, all of whom hoped for resurrections and redemptions. For the Aztecs and Mayans merged with Life and Death itself. They sacrificed themselves daily and also sacrificed their Gods sempiternally and put their hands in the Cambouis of Life, which is finally nothing else but: constructions-destructions and incessant and sempiternal leitmotivs, matras and litanies of : SEX-Life-Death, SEX-Life-Death, SEX-Life-Death, ad infinitum and also : CRONES-OS-SPERM-EJACULATIONS-BITES-VULVES etc... So, a western aesthetic, whatever it is, has no place here to describe Life, whatever its strength and relevance may be... This off-aestheticism, this off-frame therefore, is, in fact, exactly the same place-universe as the one in which our western miscreant and atheistic witches evolved, in their time. Although they possessed immemorial knowledge about plants, animals, bodies and planets, they were, then, always seen as pariahs... so hated, so despised, so ugly, so vulgar, so 'proletarian', so persecuted, so camp and so burned alive during much of our late Middle Ages. It is certain that this insane, unreasonable, totally arbitrary and irrational persecution was lavished by monotheistic religious morals fundamentally and intrinsically ideologized by men and for men, obviously. This hand put on the female body, regenerator and giver of Life, seemed to be established, in great part, to impose to the women: the non-mastery of their body and the total submission of this one: To the non-pleasure, to the non-enjoyment, to the non-desire, to the non-orgasm... Because all these essential notions to live and to be free, in its sexuality and out of reproduction were, of course, out of reach of the comprehension of the men of then and now besides, jealous of the innumerable, elusive and irrational female pleasures. And even the greatest philosophies and the greatest philosophers and other artists could not do anything about it; even Sade was stranded there! Total failure of the West, gone out of the Life, before having even entered it! Contrary to India and to all the societies called 'primitive', which succeeded in this complementarity Man-Woman, this intricate, inextricable and intelligent assembly of Sex and Spirituality.
It is true that a true feminine sexual orgasm is indescribable and is enough to frighten men in their greatness and their masculine superiority. Since it has the power of a spring, of a cataract, of an earthquake, of a revelation... And it destroys with its transparent emotional force, any idea of confinement. And it also annihilates, de facto, all Reason, all Morality, all Domination and even all Love. Orgasm is Anarchic by essence.
It is necessary to recall today, in this turbulent beginning of the twenty-first century, that still and we will never get out of it! Women, Afghan, Iranian and also from many other cultures in the World, are still persecuted, imprisoned, whipped, excised (ablation of the clitoris, the organ of pleasure!) and executed to death or even stoned, for having dared to show a strand, even a tiny one, of their hair... While quite paradoxically, simultaneously and ubiquitously, the West (a generic term) is inundating the web and social networks with pornographic images... 
In which global world do we really live now? On which Planet ? With which moral illusions? With which immoral illusions? What sense to give to all this ? Who could tell us?
For my part, I prefer and by far, to enjoy the pictures of the Sabbaths of the medieval witches, during which they were going to jerk off sexually, in weightlessness in the air! All naked, innocent, joyful and eroticized... The vulva open and free with breasts swollen with desires to be satiated, howling at the full Moon... Collectively, always; as a WHOLE, a whole, a cohesion of forces, a sorority... Climaxing in a ferocious feminine Orgasm, bestial, animal, timeless, Oceanian, Boschian (Jerome Bosch), matrix and universal! Straddling, playing and enjoying with their long phallic brooms, shaggy cocks, well sexed and well hard... WOMAN, LIFE, FREEDOM !*

* Rallying cry of women's protest against the murderous and bloody political power in Iran in 2022 and 2023.

Jean-Pierre Sergent, Besançon April 13, 2023

- EXHIBITED ARTWORK

Goddess Maya Ixchel, Large Paper #69, silkscreened acrylic on Rives B.F.K paper, 300g, 122 x 107 cm, 2015