An illustrated Paris gallery catalogue of “mechanics” for Cyrano’s imaginary worlds
A Catalogue Made for an Exhibition
The work is a French-language exhibition catalogue, illustrated in black and white and issued unpaginated. It was produced for an exhibition at the Galerie du Dragon in Paris in October–November 1965 and is titled Carelman: Mécaniques pour Cyrano. Max Clarac-Sérou wrote its preface. Jacques Carelman, whose work the volume presents, was a French painter, illustrator and designer.
Why “Mechanics” for Cyrano?
The catalogue’s title joins Carelman’s name to Cyrano de Bergerac through the word mécaniques—mechanisms, or mechanics. Its subject is not the later dramatic legend of Cyrano but Cyrano as the author of the imaginary voyages catalogued under États et empires de la lune et du soleil. That connection places the catalogue within the visual reception of Cyrano’s journeys to the moon and the sun. The title’s emphasis on mechanisms gives the project its distinctive angle: it approaches Cyrano’s invented worlds through devices and mechanical imagination.
An Artist’s Encounter with Imaginary Voyages
As a painter and illustrator, Carelman is the central artistic figure of the catalogue. The volume’s black-and-white illustrations and compact gallery format make it a visual record of that encounter with Cyrano’s speculative travels. Cyrano’s lunar and solar empires provide the catalogue with its subject and its imaginative frame, while the plural mécaniques suggests that Carelman’s contribution is conceived as a set of mechanisms or mechanical notions keyed to those voyages.
Cyrano as a Point of Departure
In bibliographic terms, the work is classed with Cyrano’s États et empires de la lune et du soleil, confirming that its focus is the early modern imaginary voyage rather than the nineteenth-century theatrical Cyrano. The catalogue thus belongs to the tradition of Cyrano as a speculative traveler, using his invented worlds as the starting point for an artist’s visual and mechanical inventions.
The catalogue’s publisher is recorded as the Galerie du Dragon. Its measurement is given as 20 cm, and the record assigns it the decimal index B (Monographies). The PMB Services entry credits the Galerie du Dragon (Paris) and Matta as authors.
Carelman’s Biography and Other Work
Jacques Carelman was born in 1929 in Marseille and died on 28 March 2012 in Argenteuil. In 1966 he adapted Raymond Queneau’s novel Zazie in the Metro in bandes dessinées. He is also the undiscovered author of one of the most famous posters of May 1968 events in France showing a threatening CRS brandishing a truncheon. Carelman is best known for his Catalog of fantastic things (Catalogue d’objets introuvables), also known as Catalogue of Unfindable Objects, made in 1969 as a parody of the catalog of the French mail order company Manufrance. This work has been translated into 19 languages, including Korean, Hebrew and Finnish.
Among these imaginary objects are, for instance, a “Kangaroo gun” whose “barrel is extensively studied … to give the bullet a sinusoidal trajectory which follows the animal in its leaps,” and a disposable “Plaster anvil … (sold by the dozen) to be discarded after use, allowing you to make substantial savings.” The most famous item in this catalog was Carelman’s “Coffeepot for Masochists,” a coffeepot with a backwards facing spout that would scald the user. This design became a symbol for the critique of everyday things and was featured on the cover of Don Norman’s book on the topic, The Design of Everyday Things. Carelman had some of the objects of this catalog created and exhibited from November 1974 to January 1975 in La Vieille Charité, Marseille.
In 1972 he designed a catalog of unfindable postage-stamps (Catalogue de timbres-poste introuvables), portraying for instance la Semeuse—the sowing woman who symbolizes France on coins and stamps—swinging a tennis racket in her majestic gesture, or Papa Doc, the dictator of Haiti, as Père Ubu. In recognition of the role played in the rebuilding of the OuPeinPo in 1980, Carelman bore the title of Régent of the Collège de Pataphysique, and was in charge of the chair of “Hélicologie,” whose purpose is to study the Gidouille, i.e. Père Ubu’s belly, which is decorated with a spiral.
