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Francis Picabia’s Jeune fille (Young Girl) is an apparently simple drawing. A small piece of white paper with a hole cut out of the center over which is inscribed “JEUNE FILLE” in a manner which suggests a sign or label. In the bottom left-hand corner, the artist’s signature, “FRANCIS PICABIA / 1920,” written in his instantly recognizable block capital letters. This particular Jeune fille was far from Picabia’s first. Beginning with the so-called mechanomorphic portraits from the mid to late 1910s, young girls often found themselves the butt of his risqué jokes. The 1916 Portrait d’une jeune fille américaine dans l’état de nudité (Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity) depicts the young American girl as a spark plug with the words “For-Ever” boldly printed in its side. But the Dadaist Jeune fille of 1920 is both more obvious and more sophisticated than its predecessors. Although the joke may seem, at first glance, to turn simply on the equation of the young girl with the suggestive hole in the paper, it is in fact much more ambiguous. One ambiguity which we can identify in the drawing concerns the label “Jeune fille.” While it may seem to simply refer to the hole, it in fact designates both this hole and its content – that is, what is seen through the hole. In the manner not unlike pornographic photo booths, the promise of a young girl lures the viewer into coming closer and peeping at what lies inside. But the joke is on him: nothing is waiting for his hungry eyes. Whatever he sees through the hole (at the drawing’s last exhibition, at the Centre Pompidou, this was the Paris skyline from the top floor of the museum, surrounded on all sides by glass) bears the absurd title “Jeune fille,” much like the drawing itself, also absurdly titled Jeune fille. The only title which makes even the slightest bit of sense is the title of the hole itself, again “Jeune fille.” In Jeune fille, where there should be content (a young girl), we find only extraneous material – an ever-changing environmental noise, the comings and goings of the world behind the picture. Picabia has produced a radically pared-down drawing whose only true content is nevertheless ornamental. Since ornament can be defined as whatever is outside the work, whatever can be extracted or separated from it, the things we see through the young girl’s hole are ornament, pure and simple. Because they are ornamental, the contents of the hole cannot be subsumed under the work’s title: the absurd disconnect between label and content only reinforces this basic truth. The Jeune fille does not designate a young girl, but the ornament, the parergon itself.
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