Jesper Just, “This Unknown Spectacle”, Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne

There is something inherently subversive about video art, something its audience can find instinctively challenging, even innately disturbing. What to make of he work of, say, Nam June Paik or Bruce Nauman?

In some ways, video art is deceptively seductive, naturally evocative of film and TV, making use of many of the formal conventions viewers are generally familiar and confortable with: the friendly screen, actors/performers, a similar composition. It might also have a recognisable characters and hint at a coherent narrative.

Still from 'This Nameless Spectacle' (2011) by Jesper Just

This type of art becomes problematic for an audience weaned on soap operas and reality TV; it strays from the objective of pleasing the viewer as entertainment. Indeed this very expectation, this desire for televisual satisfaction is frequently toyed with, undermined or dissolved completely. Maybe it isn’t even there to start with. If the spectator approaches something such as Paul McCarthy’s Painter thinking they are in for an easy ride, the rug is pulled from beneath them, they have to engage themselves in the process of artistic production, i.e. to untangle exactly what it means. The unprepared viewer can respond in a number of different ways: confusion, tears, laughter, violence.

Whilst video art is related to the cinema or TV experience, it is never allowed to rub shoulders with it – you don’t get to see it at home. Steve McQueen, a video artist exhibited in galleries, who has crossed into the critical and cinematic mainstream with works such as Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011) is a notable exception to the rule.

Aside from McQueen’s work, anyone looking for an approachable introduction to video art could do a great deal worse than investigating the work of young Danish artist Jesper Just, whose work is currently on display in his first retrospective or ‘monograph show’ at the Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC/VAL), just outside Paris. Just’s work has its starting point in the familiar, which slips just enough for his films to not be completely alienating.

The centrepiece of the show, ‘This Unknown Spectacle’ is a new work, commissioned by MAC/VAL itself, ‘This Nameless Spectacle’, the title inspired by a William Carlos William poem. The work is made up of two gargantuan panoramic video screens juxtaposed opposite each other in the centre’s vast temporary exhibition space. There is both a tension and a dialogue between the screens, the spectator is caught between them, consistently forced to choose between one or the other; unable to see both at the same time.

The on-screen action consists of a vague narrative about a woman and a young man, her in a wheelchair, him on foot in and around Paris’ Butte Chaumont park. As a whole it evokes separation, the impossibility of communication, artificiality. There are reasons for the latter – Buttes Chaumont is a completely man made park and we learn in a video interview with the artist that the work’s actress, Marie France, is herself a transsexual. The overall tone is ponderous, starkly melancholic and not a little sinister.

‘This Nameless Spectacle’ is certainly the bleakest work of the six on display at MAC/VAL.  All of Just’s works here are, however, touched by a certain amount of melancholy, particularly, ‘A Voyage in Dwelling’, previously exhibited during Paris’ Nuit Blanche at the Centquatre art centre in 2009, where a solitary woman explores the corridors and stairwells of the Copenhagen to Poland ferry. ‘A Vicious Undertow’, a dance-based piece is similarly ponderous, its characters appear to reflect on lost love and the breakdown of relationships.

Still from 'This Nameless Spectacle' (2011) by Jesper Just

It is not all bleak, though. Just’s work is infused with a definite humour, if  it is a little on the dark side. ‘The Lonely Villa’, for example features middle-aged men waiting at tables adorned with telephones and glasses of cognac in a ‘gentlemen’s club’. An exchange takes place, but through song rather than words.

Elsewhere, a similar juxtaposition of surprise is used to different ends. In ‘Sirens of Chrome’, for example Just deconstructs the stereotypical advertising connection between women and cars. Rather than a bikini-clad beauty sprawled over a bonnet, the vehicular bodywork here become a side of artistic expression through dance.

From the perspective of the collection as a whole, Just seems to be inviting us to consider the exact nature of the “unknown spectacle”. One of the most fashionable answers would be the Debordian, the “spectacular society” is that of contemporary life where real, lived experience is reduced to visual images. Maybe Just’s work, and that of decent video art in general forces us to look differently at this ‘unknown spectacle’ that surrounds us.  In making this spectacle “known”, as Just’s work strives towards, video art can lead us towards a radical appreciation of contemporary life. Perhaps this is where its true subversive potential lies.

Tags: Bruce Nauman, jesper just, Nam June Paik, Paul McCarthy, video art

A Dangerous Method (dir: David Cronenberg, 2011)

David Cronenberg is a particularly violent film director. When his films aren’t perpetuating violence on his protagonists or his audiences as in The Fly (1986), Videodrome (1983) or Crash (1996), they create a similarly oppressive, threatening, violence-tinged atmosphere to that of his recent, and under-appreciated, Eastern Promises (2007).

Equally, psychoanalysis as pioneered by Sigmund Freud is preoccupied with violence. Throughout its chequered history it has argued that man is inescapably in the grip of latent impulses, mostly sexual. He is, psychoanalytic theory has shown us, frequently helpless in the face of Eros, the drive towards life, sex and creation as well as what Wilhelm Stekel later termed, Thanatos or the death drive, a compulsion towards death and destruction. This is at the heart of man’s inner life, but this violence is also frequently reflected outwardly. In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud argued that, “the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man”. Man, inside and out is unstable, frequently unsettled and violent, in the work of Cronenberg as well as Freud and his disciples.

For that reason, it would have been reasonable to expect that an on-screen meeting of the pair might have producing an altogether different film to the mostly pedestrian and strangely low-key. A Dangerous Method. The film examines the relationship between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and his divergent disciple C. G. Jung (Michael Fassbender) through the prism of the relationship between the latter and one of his patients, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), herself who was play an important role in the history of psychoanalytic treatment, the dangerous method of the film’s title. In short, Jung begins a sexual relationship with Speilrein, tinged teasingly with a liberal dose of spanking (as gratuitous as we might expect from a Hollywood blockbuster) which has its roots in her own humiliation-based neurosis. Freud is not impressed with the unethical nature of the relationship. He has little to say, however, about the spanking.

Rather than the final product quivering with tempestuous libidinal forces one might anticipate (not least because of the Knightly-spanking rumors which followed the film’s release), A Dangerous Method remains disappointing muted throughout. That’s not to suggest that cinema should be visceral, sensual and violent just because it can. Indeed, the tension of restrait can produce some wonderful works, as Hitchcock memorably remarked. Here, however, Cronenberg, in adapting Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure for the screen (itself an adaptation of John Kerr’s book of the same name) appears to have fallen into the trap focussing on the theatrical, rather than, as in his previous films, even his previous literary adaptations Crash and Naked Lunch (1991) making a work that is specifically cinematic.

That said, Fassbeder and Mortensen’s performances are as polished as one would expect from the pair, but naturally within the constraints of Hampton’s script and Cronenberg’s direction; the latter resulting in little more than a lot of disappointingly low-key scenes featuring middle-aged men in suits talking politely. Emotionally, Eros and Thanatos are never brought to the boil, barely even simmering.

The only exception to this is Knightly’s unrestrained portrayal of Spielrein, particularly her early mental distress which manifests physically in a way that resonates with the paintings of Freud’s fellow Austrian Egon Sciehle (thanks to Lindsey for the tip-off). However, the hyper-intensity of Knightly’s acting, in contrast with the low-key Fassbender and Mortensen. Whilst appropriately incongruous, it actually serves to highlight Knighty’s limitations as an actress, something not helped by a bizarre Swiss/Russian/Austrian accent which, particularly in the light of the fact Fassbender and Mortensen remain anglicised, seems somewhat ludicrous.

A Dangerous Method is a missed opportunity. The idea is an exciting premise: a film exploring the ideas of and relationship between Jung and Freud, two of the twentieth centuries most radical thinkers through the lens of an ambitious and arguable equally radical director. The end result, however is not only devoid of violence, but also, ultimately, risk which doesn’t do justice to the work of Freud, Jung or even Cronenberg.

Tags: a dangerous method, cronenberg, fassbender, film, Freud, jung, psychoanalysis, spanking

Juremir Machado da Silva, En Patagonie avec Michel Houellebecq (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2011)

Of all the books to predictably trickle onto the French books market in the wake of Michel Houellebecq’s 2010 Prix Goncourt win for La Carte et le territoire (just published in a fine English translation by Gavin Bowd as The Map and the Territory), they won’t come much stranger than this.

The cover of En Patagonie avec Michel Houellebecq sees the name of the novelist loom, perhaps inevitably, larger than that of its author, Brazilian writer and journalist Juremir Machado da Silva. In 2007, Machada, who has translated Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires and Extension du domaine de la lutte into Portuguese for the South American market, was joined by his wife and the French novelist for a short trip south to Patagonia. This book, part travelogue and part compendium of dialogues between the author and translator is presented as a testimony to that trip. The result is not a little confusing.

The public image of Houellebecq doesn’t necessarily sit comfortably with that of Patagonia, indeed with that of a jolly holiday break. What would a famously urban, nature-detesting and tourism-scorning writer be doing in a place famous for its wildlife and unspoiled natural beauty? Equally, why would a couple, keen for a break in the wilds invite along the famously misanthropic, and sexually notorious Houellebecq who they don’t seem to know particularly well?

The former actually makes more sense than the latter, if only poetically. Whilst Houellebecq is a writer who deals with extremity (transgressive sex, death, cults, racist and misogynistic opinions abound in his work), Patagonia is, if you believe the marketing speak, commonly held to be at the extreme ‘end of the world’. Exactly why the Machados felt the need to share their holiday with Houellebecq, however, is never adequately addressed. There are a couple of limp-wristed attempts to interview the French writer on film, but they never reveal anything particularly meaty. The Brazilian’s themselves frequently seem as bemused as the rest of us as to why they’ve come on holiday with a ‘smutty’ French writer.

Equally perplexing is who would actually want to read this book, aside from the growing army of hardcore Houellebecqians. Those with a passing interest in Houellebecq and his fiction are already well served by a growing range of publications in French on the man and his work. Those looking for a deeper knowledge of the author in English are at present only served by John McCann’s scholarly work on his novels ‘Michel Houellebecq: Author of Our Times’.

Machado’s work, however, only distinguishes itself from what already exists on the author by virtue of its downright oddity rather than its shining insight. There is a splattering of anecdotes that might temporarily turn the readers befuddlement into light amusement; Houellebecq’s recurrent inability to close the zipper on his coat (and the motherly way he is assisted by Machado’s wife), the revelation that author prefers penguins to sea lions (they set a bad example to tourists) and the way all his conversations are punctuated with a long, pondering ‘Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm’.

But beyond this, there is little to capture the attention of all but the most hardcore Houellebecq aficionados. The ‘philosophical discussons’ the author has with Machado have been more interestingly elaborated elsewere (often in the novelists own works), the insight the book gives into Houellebecq’s own literature or the contemporary French literary scene is close to nil. Those looking for an insight into Patagonia, aside from the spurious claims that the land has always held a special place in the French cultural imagination, might be better off looking at Bruce Chatwin’s classic In Patagonia or, for a truly bizarre experience, Gruff Rhys’ film Seperado.

In short, whilst the prospect of a work that is part travelogue, part philosophical discussion and part hagiographic literary biography might appear enticing to some, the reality is somewhat less than the sum of its parts and frequently falls into the banal rather than the profound absurdity associated with Houellebecq’s best work. Those who read French and are looking to get a better general grasp on Houellebecq might be best off tracking down a copy of the 2005 special edition of French culture magazine Les Inrockuptibles which includes a selection of good interviews with the man himself. A good, general introduction to Houellebecq’s life and work has yet to be written in English.

 

 

 

 

Éric Reinhardt, Le Système Victoria (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2011)

The world has recently been particularly interested in bourgeois bedroom activities. Generally, it is reality TV “celebrities” and sporting “heroes” who get the bulk of English-speaking tabloid attention. The occasional political scandal notwithstanding (*cough* George Osborne), we don’t often get the chance to glimpse into the boudoir of the really rich, the really powerful and the genuinely interesting. The ones powerful enough to deflect attention from themselves in the way a middle-of-the-road Premiership footballer can’t. We’ve all glimpsed them behind the frosted windows of airport VIP departure lounges, on the steps of sixteen star hotels as we shuffle past on our way to buy a pasty from Greggs dribbling in awe as they are ushered into the back of their secure transport, laughing too loudly as they get giddy on champagne and we crumple off back to Ryman’s.

Découvrez “Le Système Victoria” d’Eric Reinhardt sur Culturebox !

The Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair has given us a unique opportunity to press our hairy noses up against the bedroom windows of the Masters of the Universe (a term memorably coined by Tom Wolfe in Bonfire of the Vanities), the few unpleasant glimpses we’ve had of the ex-head of the World Bank have allowed us to speculate, to fantasise and to draw all kinds of conclusions about the jet-setters who brush past us on the way to front carriage of the Eurostar. What are they really up to? Éric Reinhardt’s Le Système Victoria, one of the most eagerly anticipated publications of the French rentrée littéraire, by the author of 2007’s bestseller Cendrillon, has appeared at the perfect time to capitalise on this interest in the bonking bourgeoisie.

Reinhardt’s novel tells the story of two characters, David, a frustrated architect leading a large scale project to manage the building of France’s biggest tower on the fringes of La Défense, the French capital’s business district. As a hands-on director of works for the project he is under immense pressure from his superiors to get the high-profile, multi-million Euro building finished as close to deadline as possible lest the investors have to pay massive penalties to the building’s future occupants. Whilst reasonably well-paid, he craves respect, the opportunity to express himself. In short, he wants to be a member of the elite, not stuck in a high-visibility jacket.

David’s world changes when he meets, and embarks on a passionate affair with Victoria. She, attractive in her forties and the global HR director for a high-profile business, is a firmly entrenched member of the global jetset, with a cello-playing husband based in Paris.  She lives in London but spends her time flitting club class around the world, negotiating crucial corporate deals with trade unions, the archetype of the successful, globalised businesswoman.  David, married to his troubled long-term partner Sylvie, is a left-winger, thoughtful, aspirational, sensitive, somewhat of an aesthete and ultimately too much of a coward to leave his wife. Victoria is a committed capitalist, powerful, lives by her wits in the fast-moving world of international capitalism. Perhaps the tragedy revealed in the novel’s opening pages is inevitable, given this collision of world-views.

Le Système Victoria is difficult to pigeonhole but perhaps best understood as a tightly, woven thriller: we know that things are going to end badly, the fascinating part, as it is with many great tragedies is how we get there, and what that journey reveals about the characters. As David and Victoria’s relationship (any resemblance to the Beckhams is surely accidental) deepens, and they learn about each other’s pasts and complexities, the former finds inspiration in the latter to deal with the pressures of his professional life. As their lives entangle, always behind the closed doors of luxury hotel suites and mediated by stolen, private moments via emails or text messages (Reinhardt is moving towards a truly contemporary epistolary novel), they become closer, but the fundamental ideological differences between them, at the very essence of their beings, become clear.  David, admittedly undermined by the fact he is a serial adulterer, sees himself as a man of integrity, of principles. He comes to understand, though never fully appreciate, that Victoria is more ‘system’ that personality; she lives for the moment, in response to the demands of the globalised business world and for transient physical pleasure. The reader, along with David, is given to question if she has an inner life at all, as well, in a similar way to the way we read newspaper reports of the Strauss-Kahn affair, as wondering if people like this…actually exist? David is left wondering about the extent to which he ever really knows her at all.

Whilst the novel is most successful at the level of character, there are a number of areas that are less effective. In particular, Reinhardt’s lengthy evocations of David and Victoria’s workplaces, the building site and the international corporate office, both laboriously researched by the author come across as, well, laborious, superfluous even boring and risks detracting from the character and plot development, tempting the reader (and reviewer) to skip pages. Some unsympathetic readers might be tempted to find a metaphorical link between David’s new found sexual vigour thanks to his relationship with Victoria and the erection (snigger) of the Uranus (double snigger) tower, but Reinhardt would, no doubt, suggest such a reading is wide of the mark.

Equally, for a novel that is so accomplished in terms of the psychological realist effects it creates, there are moments throughout the work when the physical realism seems unconvincing, even bizarre. For example, before David and Victoria’s opening meeting, he follows her (the forty-something Christian Louboutin-wearing businesswoman) into a shopping-centre bowling alley where she proceeds to knock down some pins. In addition, the novel’s tragic climax seems a little too fantastical, and a site foreman who listens to Liszt on his car stereo – really? Arguably, though, such idiosyncrasies help to give the novel a dream-like quality on occasion, forcing the reader to question whether Victoria isn’t entirely the product of David’s frustrated fantasies.

When it works, as it does on the level of character when Reinhardt’s prose is captivating, intimate and plunges the reader directly into David’s emotion, the writing is magnificent. When it misfires, as it does on the building site, in the office block, Le Système Victoria does so wildly. Reinhardt’s novel is an ambitious project and he walks the fine line between success and failure, in many ways in a similar way to the jetsetters he evokes in its pages. Maybe, then, Reinhardt would be the perfect choice to ghost-write Strauss-Kahn’s inevitable autobiography? Maybe, in Le Système Victoria he’s already come close?

House of Holes, Nicholson Baker (London: Simon & Schuster, 2011)

In literary terms, House of Holes by North American novelist Nicholson Baker has provoked somewhat of a brouhaha. That’s in literary terms, mind you, meaning a few book reviewers both sides of the Atlantic have lot a bit hot under the collar about a book with a lot of sex in it. No-one else has battered an eyelid, we’ve seen it all before.

More than just being a dirty book with a lot of sex in it, Baker’s novel is also eminently a novel about sex and, as these types of books – I’m thinking of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley here – tend to do raise a lot of questions, not least the age old one, ‘is it porn, or is it art?’ What is it about sex writing that means some novels, Emannuelle Arsan’s famous Emmanuelle for example, are readily dismissed as ‘pornography’, whilst others, such as George Bataille’s notorious Story of the Eye are embraced by artists and critics alike? House of Holes (magnificently subtitled ‘a Book of Raunch’ for the US market, but not, alas in Europe) is leading the reader (and those outraged reviewers) down a well-travelled path.

The problem with reading writing about sex is the loin-stirring effect it creates. Literature exists with the unpredictable certainty that the reader will become even more implicated and involved in the writing if they become emotionally, or even physically, aroused by what they read. It often comes down to the question of use-value, the ‘pornographic’ text is one that distinctly aims to arouse, whilst the ‘erotic’ text is one that uses sex to explore more profound philosophical issues. In practice, the distinction is less clear-cut, the erotic text can quickly become pornographic.

The complicity that writing about sex can generate is part of the reason why people find writing about sex so troubling. Equally, this explains, why the 1960s and 1970s, ages where artists and writers, particularly in France, were engaged in a battle to re-evaluate all values, there was so much interest in erotica – ‘dirty’ books were either being written (the works of Sollers or Guyotat) or rediscovered (the likes of Sade and Bataille for example). Sexualised writing was, in short, linked to the grand old idea of revolution. The thinking was that since experience is mediated by (some by say composed of) language, then taking language to an extremity, crossing the boundaries of what is deemed to be acceptable has the potential to be a challenge to the reasoned order of the world. The erotic, then, is a political act.

Take, for example, then the example of French writer Bernard Noël, who published Le Chateau de Cène (translated into English as Castle Supper) in 1969. This extremely explicit, and often deeply unpleasant, book recounts a young man’s adventures on a remote island with a mysterious countess and her entourage, saw Noël ultimately tried for obscenity. In 1975, he published ‘L’outrage aux mots’, an important text, where he justifies his earlier book as a revolutionary act, both against the French war in Algeria and bourgeois society (that much-loved target of the European dissenter). Noël argued, (my translation) “there is no language because we live in a bourgeois world where the vocabulary of anger is exclusively moral. How can language be turned against itself once we realise we are censored by our own language”. Le Chateau de Cène was Noël’s answer. Everyday language is imposed, it was deemed no longer sufficient. It needed to be obscene, it needed to become unacceptable.

Can, then we explore House of Holes in a similar way? The book is a loosely-connected series of brief vignettes, all tied together by the fact they all feature lust-filled characters who, by way of some aperture or another, by design or accident, make it through to the House of Holes, a twisted theme park built on satisfying men and women’s (mostly heterosexual) desires in the most freakishly fantastical ways possible. If we are to make a case for the book, following Noël, then the reader might want to look for a message or a clever satirical intent that allows Baker to enter the pavilion of erotic art rather than wallowing in the gutter of pornography. The possibilities are there; the book features, for example, a passage that involves a women looking for gratification via an encounter with a man whose head has been surgically removed – is Baker making the relatively un-original point that men are dumb lumbering sex-crazed animals? Is a woman having sex with a tree a comment on ecology? In addition, the narrative makes the constant implications that all the characters are in some way paying, and paying dear, for their experiences, although this isn’t developed as much as it could be. Is Baker, then, following Lyotard and exploring our desire-fuelled libidinal economy?

I’m not sure the novel is doing any of these things. For me, the monster, birthed from a lake of bad pornography, a repulsive mass formed of penises, vulvas and mouths is just that, something visceral, living and based on raw, naked sex, just like the House of Holes itself. Baker reportedly said he wanted to write a ‘positive’ book about sex, which it is. Sex in the book is a joyful, guilt-free experience, poles apart from the anxiety which clouds so much classic writing about sex (Bataille, for example).

Like that writing, however, writing and sex are linked so they reflect an intense experience for the reader, here, however, this becomes a joyful, positive celebration about the act of reading, rather than an uncomfortable affront. The textual experience created by Nicholson Baker is what this book is really all about. It is genuinely funny, mostly because of the language Baker used to talk about sex, his marvelous word play. Never has shameless pornography been so well written. Rather than looking to unlock any hidden meaning here, the reader would be best advised to see how many different wonderful conglomerations Baker creates to describe sexual terms – the cockbundle, manwater, Malcolm Gladwell (seriously).

If one was to be overtly critical of House of Holes, the finger could be pointed at the fact all the fantastical sex takes place almost exclusively from a hetero-normative perspective, but that would be missing the point of this resolutely a-political book When writing about sex is as much fun to read as this, does it really matter? And if it gives you a rollocking orgasm, then so much the better!

 

Tags: bernard noel, eroticism, george bataille, nicholson baker, porn, pornography, sex

Frédéric Beigbeder, Premier bilan après l’apocalypse, (Paris: Grasset, 2011)

The UK can’t boast anyone quite like Frédéric Beigbeder. He’s a familiar face on TV, hosting a weekly cinema TV show, and cropping up repeatedly, everywhere as a pundit, as French celebrities tend to do. He’s got a reputation as a playboy, frequently being photographed in the company of young, attractive females in the pages of the French celebrity press, where he also has a column. As well as being a DJ and a staple of the Parisian nightclub circuit, famously being locked-up by police after being caught snorting cocaine off a car bonnet a couple of streets away from the Arc de Triomphe in 2008, Beigbeder is also a sophisticated man of letters, making Scotland’s Irvine Welsh look like a crumpled first draft in comparison.

When he isn’t busy leading a jetset lifestyle, Beigbeder he finds the time to write. He’s published eight novels to date, with his last, Un roman français winning the coveted 2009 Prix Renaudot. Notably, he was fired from his job as an advertising executive for the content of 2000’s 99 francs, a darkly funny satire of the ad industry and Windows on the World (2003), another prize-winning book, was in part a critically-acclaimed telling of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York from the perspective of a character trapped inside one of the towers. He’s also published a collection of short stories, been responsible for two band dessinées (comic books). He’s also a literary journalist, penning a monthly column for books magazine Lire, has been involved in the creation of a host of cultural revues and, between 2003 and 2006 served as  editorial director of publishing behemoth Flammarion. In 2001, he also published Dernier inventaire avant liquidation.

Inventaire is a collection of critical writings, a celebration of the top fifty pieces of literature, as voted for by 6,000 members of the French public from a longlist of two hundred titles (and paid for by the combined forces of Le Monde, retail chain Fnac, published by Grasset and Fasquelle). Whilst the book itself is reasonably interesting, and is enlivened by Beigbeder’s always lively prose, it suffers from the fact that, and this is a point Beigbeder makes in the introduction, that the choice of works (which predictably is topped by Camus’ L’Etranger, Proust, and Le Petit Prince) was imposed on him, rather than being his own selection. Inevitably meaning, of course, that he would have ended up extolling the virtues of books that he wasn’t particularly fond of (as noted above he’s an ex-adman so one might expect taking corporate cash for a bought opinion comes relatively easily).

To address this comes Premier bilan après l’apocalypse (loosely translated by me as ‘First report after the apocalypse’) is another league table, this time completely selected by Beigbeder, detailing what he believes are the last century’s greatest works of fiction, drawing from literatures from all over the world, each with a two to three page description of the text with a short biographical sketch of the author. The only restriction Beigbeder has placed on his selection is that anything featuring in the previous work doesn’t qualify this time around.

For anyone who has flicked through a Beigbeder novel, it won’t be a surprise that Bret Easton Ellis scores top position for his American Psycho, Beigbeder’s work is similarly fixated on the jetset, Indeed, the majority of the one-hundred works selected for review in the collection share a number of things in common; the majority are first person narratives where the subject appears to be the author himself (or examples of what the theoreticians call ‘autofiction’), the majority of these characters are male, drunk or drugged, philandering, unreliable, rich, unmistakably of their time – explicitly the type of Gatsby-esque novels Beigbeder himself writes, in fact. It is no accident, then that F. Scott Fitzgerald (whose 1945 collection of essays The Crack-up is in ‘like a bullet’ at number ten) crops up as a benchmark reference in the vast majority of the appraisals in the collection.

That does mean that the ‘elegantly wasted’ author stereotype is in full flow throughout Bilan, the novels in the hot one hundred are all largely predictably white, male and out of it; Bukowski, Kerouac, Houellebecq and Hemingway all score highly, as we would expect. That said, there is also an impressive number of works from overlooked or little-known authors (whose works mostly follow the above formula), such as Alain Pacadis, Lolita Pille and Pierre de Régnier whose works, according to Beigbeder, warrant closer attention.

The French literary establishment has a deserved reputation for being exclusive, very much a closed shop when it comes to new writing. It is then somewhat refreshing to see Beigbeder, in his introductory essay and through the works selected, making a strong case for contemporary writing, living writing being produced around the world at the moment, rather than the type written by dead nighteenth-century types and beloved of fusty, dusty academics. The current generation of French writers (of whom Beigbeder naturally forms a part) have an eloquent champion; Despentes, Régis Jauffret, Phillippe Djian and Yann Moix all deserve more recognition of the order of Despentes and Houellebecq’s 2010 literary awards.

For all its qualities Premier bilan après l’apocalypse comes across a little bit like a literary version of one of those TV shown on BBC Two and Channel Four each Bank Holiday Sunday, called things like ‘I love 1985’, rather than ‘bought memories from Stewart Maconie (copyright Stewart Lee) and inane contributions from Dick and Dom, except this features Beigbeder on his own rattling on and on, fine if you like him, but his writing isn’t to everyone’s taste.

Whilst Bilan deserves to be read widely, not least for its passionate anti-Kindle, e-book and pro-curling up with a book introduction, but will, I suspect be of most interest to Beigbeder fans looking to get their first fix since 2009’s Un Roman français. Those looking for the novelist’s familiar narcissistic, always slightly over the top voice, as present in the novels, and on his TV shows, won’t be disappointed, his distinctive touch runs throughout the work, in a gentler, more considered and perhaps more self-parodying way to 2001’s Inventaire. It is there, however funny, irreverent and even elegant, and for all of the 426 pages written about other writers, the ultimate subject with Beigbeder’s writing, is, one suspects, always Beigbeder himself.

• Premier bilan après l’apocalypse will be published by Grasset in French on September 14, 2011. No news, as yet, about a possible English translation of the book.

Tags: Bret Easton Ellis, camus, frédéric beigbeder, irvine welsh, proust, scott fitzgerlald

Melancholia, (dir: Lars von Trier, 2011)

Melancholia was heralded by what was, in light of the cloud of controversy that has followed Lars von Trier and his work, a predictably controversial furore at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. As it was, the outrage-by-numbers that saw the director saw the director praising Hitler and subsequently declared persona non grata for the remainder of the festival seemed pretty limp, tired, not particularly scandalous yet risked completely overshadowing the film itself.

It is, then something of a relief that the proper release of the film (out now in France, September 30th in the UK, November 4th in the US) has been relatively distraction-free, even if it has emerged somewhat under the radar in the middle of the summer break with apparently minimal promotional support. This at least means we can talk about the film without the distraction of scandal, a relief because Melancholia is a strong, approachable film that deserves to be appreciated on its own terms.

In a similar way to Antichrist, Von Trier’s provocative 2009 film Melancholia is partially a product of von Trier’s own sessions of analysis to treat his own depression. It is split into two parts, the former relating the tale of Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, a character in thrall to depression on what proves to be her disasterous wedding day. The latter part focusses on Claire, her sister, (Charlotte Gainsbourg), set against the background of Armageddon. A family-oriented drama collodes with an apocalyptic sci-fi tale in this second part of the film, Justine, Claire, her scientist (and space geek) husband John played by Kiefer Sutherland are watching, with dread and excitement, the approach of the planet Melancholia, itself on a collision course with the planet Earth.

Whilst the film can be viewed in terms of these two contrasting halves, the two very different narratives might best be examined considered concurrently. The planet Melancholia also symobilises Justine’s depression, as unavoidable and as damaging, and experienced in a similar way, by the depressive to the end of the world. Von Trier’s depiction of Justine’s melancholia (and thus an implicit reflection of his own battles with depresson) is of a different order to how depression is often examined. Sigmund Freud, for example in his seminal essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia‘ (1917) presents depression/melancholia as having a distinct, rational, explainable basis in that it is built around a profound sense of loss, in a similar structural way to mourning. For Von Trier’s Justine, however, there is no easy identification that can be made in this way (aside, arguably a hinted at breakdown of her parents relationship, and a difficult relationship with her mother). Melancholia is a force, one that resists explanation or cure and as a condition is treated both with sensitivity and respect. When viewed in context with Antichrist it again seems to be a resolutely female force, irrationality contrasted with the male hyper-relationality of Sutherland’s scientist, or Willem Defoe’s psychiatrist.

It is tempting to ‘read’ the motifs presented in von Trier’s film and attempt to unlock hidden meanings in the film. The allusions to pre-Raphaellite painting, such as Millais’ Ophelia, suggest such a route of critical inquiry might be rewarding, but the possibility always remains in a Von Trier film that they might be red herrings. For all the intellectual clues hinting to a deeper meaning, however, Von Trier, is as much concerned, as ever with the instant cinematic experience – the genuinely hilarious wedding planner played by Udo Kier, seemingly parachuted in from Father of The Bride seems designed to undermine such a reading and to puncture any such intellectual pomposity.

Millais - Ophelia, 1851-1852

That said, I’m fascinated by the choice of Justine for the name of Dunst’s character, which she shares with one of the Marquis de Sade’s notorious heroines. In Sade’s Justine (1791), the eponymous heroine is on a quest for virtue, which descends into an inescapable world of vice. At the end of the novel, she is finally saved from vice and is able to devote herself, finally to virtue. This redemption, however, swiftly sees her sink into depression, and she is killed, bizarrely, after being struck by lightning. For Von Trier, Dunst’s Justine seems similarly cursed, her own compulsion towards vice is destined to ruin her wedding way. For Sade, Justine’s death is a form of punishment from God, this seems to resonate in Melancholia by the inevitable natural disaster which closes the film. Is Von Trier making a broader statement about how contemporary society deserves a similar punishment? What does Justine’s day job in advertising tell us about contemporary virtue and vice?

It doesn’t seem right to compare Melancholia with Hollywood blockbusters, but the cinematic release and the casting of an all-star cast (particulaly Sutherland star, of the all-action TV series 24), this is what Von Trier seems to be asking us to do. As with Antichrist, it is aesthetically of a similar order to much good video art (Bill Viola, for example), particularly the film’s opening segment. It is an aesthetically striking, and ultimately, hugely emotionally moving film (I sat in the cinema for a good few minutes in silence after the final scene). Von Trier’s approach seems very similar to that of Antichrist, although in a much less visceral and shocking way. Whilst Antichrist is a deconstruction of a horror movie, with all of the standard tropes reassembled, Von Trier seems to be taking a similar approach in Melancholia. Rather than a horror movie, he takes the tropes of the disaster movie, the impending disaster, the scientists getting it hoplessley wrong, then way a disaster forces characters to reconsider their relationships with each other – and subverts them. Sutherland, for example, rather than being a Jack Bauer-style hero wimps out as soon as the going gets tough. We are a long way from Independence Day.

Reportedly, von Trier is not particularly find of Melancholia, primarily because it is his one of his most mainstream films to date, Whilst eminently still not a mainstream movie, it is a considerably more approachable film than Antichrist or Dogville, but this doesn’t negate von Trier’s avant-garde nartistic triumph. Melancholia deserves to be a huge success. Go see it before the moon crashes into Earth.

Tags: Charlotte Gainsbourg, kiefer sutherland, kirsten dunst, Lars von Trier

Park in Progress, Domaine National de Saint-Cloud, Friday July 1st, 2011

It feels naughty, creepy and, frankly, slightly scary to be in a park after nightfall. It feels even more so when that that park is as imposing as the the Domaine National de Saint-Cloud, a short Metro ride from Paris, on a hill in the south-west and far enough away for you to feel like you’ve left the metropolis. It’s a long way from home, dark and not a little unsettling. The striking views it offers over the Paris as twilight descends and shadows lengthen only reinforce the feeling that you’ve left the city behind. It’s beautiful, certainly, but also eerie and you get the feeling you shouldn’t really be there.

Park In Progress from Pépinièreseuropéennes on Vimeo.

In the sunshine, the Parc de Saint-Cloud is a glorious place to escape, unwind and enjoy the patterns created by the rays of light falling through the trees. Last Friday night, however, was an opportunity to see the park from a different perspective. As darkness fell over Saint-Cloud, Park in Progress 4 lurched into life.

Park in Progress is an annual initiative organised by Les Pépinières européennes pour jeunes artistes, an organisation which, since 1992, has aimed to promote young creatives and their work on a European and international level. The event allowed around 40 young artists to showcase their work, but it is much more than an art fair. I was expecting a marquee filled with watercolours, plastic cups filled with warm wine and half-hearted, cringe-worthy performance pieces. What I got was a engaging experience that made creative use of one of the world’s most beautiful parks as well as clearly inspiring the artists whose works formed the collection to come up with something site-specific and special. Hell, we even got welcomed to the show by a man with a megaphone and no trousers.

Whilst there were some installations and video-art, Park in Progress was, due to the unique nature of the setting, really about live performance. A dance piece by Alban Richard saw the crowd of thirthy-something wannabe art bohemians clutching picnics, bottles of red and cans of lager smuggled in from the local superette draw together. The piece was performed against the backdrop of both an operatic aria and the crepuscular Paris skyline in the park’s Nymphée d’apollon. At this point, people-watching the crowd was at least as interesting as the performance. This morphed into a second piece by Carmen Cruz and François Martig which lured the two-hundred attendees towards the more upper levels of the park and deeper into the darkness towards the Jardin de Trocadéro. It’s been a long while since I’ve  followed a woman dressed like the ghost of PJ Harvey into the depths of a remote French forest on a Friday evening.

The Jardin de Trocadéro is a ‘jardin à l’anglaise’, taking its inspiration from nineteenth-century English parks and is a delicately-constructed space, its topiaried trees bordering a small lake housing a family of confused ducks. Heading into the rapidly-descending darkness, attendees were confronted by a noise installation, which included a cooped chicken, from the Belgian collective Livescope, at odds with the elegance of the surroundings. The standout performances included Julia Hadi‘s solo dance piece, performed on the shore of the lake, illuminated against the pitch-darkness by a video projection, giving her work a VHS, Videodrome aesthetic. This was followed by the night’s most memorable piece, dancer and choreographer Armelle Devignon held the attendees spellbound whilst she, lit by floating candles, mirrored by the surface of the lake and accompanied only by a black silence, descended into the water, before disappearing into the darkness and confusing the ducks some more.

Whilst many of the works were interesting, and I have a few names I’ll be looking out for in the future, tonight was about the collection as a whole; the individual works working together in the park. At times it felt almost like immersive theatre, something Punchdrunk would create. I’d encourage you to go next year, but I want to keep it to myself.

Tags: Paris, Pépinières Européennes, performance art, saint-cloud

Keith Reader, The Place de la Bastille, The Story of a Quartier, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011).

 

When you’re writing about a place where people live, work and play, the biggest challenge is to stop the everyday from coming across as, well, everyday. To put it another way, it is no mean feat to convincingly make the familiar strange, to force your reader to look at the things that surround them in a new, engaged way of seeing. Wherever you live, when you bustle through it bleary-eyed, on your way to work or way back home, then it becomes background, mundane.

 

 

 

 

 

The Bastille district of Paris, as Keith Reader points out on the first page of his new book is an perfect example of the everyday. It might be filled with bars, cafés, noise, traffic, people of a wide variety of backgrounds, it might steeped in history – the 1789 French revolution started here, fuelled by the disenfranchised artisans of the Faubourg Saint Antoine – but it isn’t immediately interesting to look at. It is a functional place, first and foremost. It isn’t on too many tourists’ must-see list. Equally, there are far more immediately obvious parts of Paris to write about; Montparnasse, Montmartre, the Marais (and lots of other places that don’t begin with the letter ‘m’). For those with a passing knowledge of Paris, the Bastille is a square where there used to be a prison, where there is an ugly opera house and not much else.

 

Reader’s two main achievements in The Place de la Bastille are both making the those who know the place well (I’ve lived in the area for the last two years) stop, take stock and renew their interest in it and effectively arguing why it is worthy of investigation by non-residents . For Reader the Bastille is an important site in the collective Parisian memory, but not just for the role it played in stoking revolutionary furore. Reader goes beyond the much-told nineteenth-century history and, in an approach he describes as ‘flânerie at a computer’, inspired by Walter Benjamin‘s wanderings, explores the history of the less-known corners of the locale. We learn, then, about the pimps and prostitutes of the once seedy, now just disheveled rue de la Roquette, about the gay cruising of the perennially debauched rue de Lappe, and the marginally less exciting fashion wholesalers of the rue Sedain.

 

Refreshingly, Reader’s desktop flânerie takes in an impressively broad range of sources topping his hat to the well-known Paris history books, such as Éric Hazan’s L’Invention de Paris (2002) and Andrew Hussey’s Paris, The Secret History (2006) but also an unconventional mix of pulp detective fiction and films as well as his own anecdotes, himself a former resident of the area. Reader has also impressively demonstrated how the Bastille continues to be relevant to the contemporary collective memory, citing the 1981 celebrations by the left to mark it’s return to power in the guise of François Mitterand’s presidency, mirrored recently to mark the 30 year anniversary, and the much-reported debates around the designed for the world’s biggest and most expensive opera house.

 

The book’s final chapter comprises a walking tour, a nice touch for those whose appetites to discover more about the area have been whetted by the previous pages. Whilst a well-argued, thoroughly-researched and scholarly work, it is vibrant and readable enough to interest a readership from outside the academic community from which Reader comes (he holds a professorship at the University of Glasgow). Only the works essential, yet densely theoretical, introduction risks deterring the broader readership this book deserves.

Tags: bastille, keith reader, opera, Paris

‘This Is How You Will Disappear’, Gisèle Vienne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, April 21, 2011

French channel Arte has just started rebroadcasting Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s 1990s murder mystery TV series. At the very heart of Lynch’s landmark show is the ongoing battle between everyday small town North American life and the darker forces of death and the irrational that menace, yet concurrently complete it. Even after over twenty years it still has the capacity to disturb and entertain in equal measure.

The shadowy, dark forces explored by the show eminate from the Black Lodge, steeped in local legend as the place from where the ‘evil’ in the local woods emerges. Deep in those woods lies the portal to this place shrouded in death and mystery that appears to lie outside our ability to understand the world. It is this space outside time that ‘This Is How You Will Disappear‘, Gisèle Vienne‘s perfomance piece, part short play, part contemporary dance, part art ‘happening’ immediately evokes and appears to reside within.

The similarities with Lynch’s TV, show, however, stop there. Whilst Twin Peaks explored the tension between the logic and understanding of everyday experience and the the darker forces of incomprehension, ‘This is How You Will Disappear’, which premiered at the 2010 Avignon Festival and is currently touring the contemporary art festival circuit, plunges straight into the latter.

The performance takes place in a painstakingly recreated forest clearing, shrouded in fog, completely withdrawn from the security of the familiar and everyday. Indeed a recognisable world outside the forest is only hinted at. The performance’s text, provided by US writer Denis Cooper centres around three characters, a gymnast, her coach and a lost rock star, all of them who appear to have conventional existences outside the forest, but are all trapped by or hiding in the forest’s darkness. Their fortunes will tragically collide.

French cultural output has never shied away from embracing the dark side of human thought and experience; the writings of the Marquis de Sade, Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille are a clear testament to that. Indeed Blanchot and Bataille have been explicitly cited by Vienne and Cooper as direct influences on their work. The interesting aspect of ‘This is How You Will Disappear’ is how it takes the experience of incomprehension and attempts to bring it to life in front of an audience, an experience that directly implicates the viewer as participant. In the performance, what we don’t think, the thoughts we don’t dare to have are given centre stage.

Perhaps most immediately striking aspect of the performance is the work of Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya who has created intensely dramatic living fog sculptures for the show. These combine with the lighting and video projections to overwhelm the forest on occasion, spilling over the stage, filling the auditorium and blurring the distinction between spectacle and audience. The viewers are thus directly transported into the forest beyond thought in an experience that is concurrently both exhilarating and claustrophobic.

This effect is reinforced by the show’s music, provided by the black pope of heavy drone Stephen O’Malley, perhaps best known for his Sunn O))) work, here collaborating with Peter Rehberg. Fog, light, video and music/low frequency noise all combine to strikingly physical affect In this way, the title ‘This Is How You Will Disappear’ frames the show both as a consideration of the characters and their metaphysical states and a declaration of visceral intent from Vienne/Copper/O’Malley to their audience.

Whilst undoubtedly a hugely affecting work, the shows sheer audacity and excess resonate strangely with the audience in the days and weeks following the experience. In a post credit-crunch age of supposed belt-tightening and financial austerity, how can artists justify the sheer ridiculousness of such a scale? Bringing together big names from around the world to collaborate with video, live sound, live action (even live falconry – seriously), doesn’t come cheap. Maybe the answer is to be found in Georges Bataille’s La Part maudite– his general economic treaty celebrating pure, excess as an end in itself. Maybe we shouldn’t try and justify it.

Tags: 'this is how you will disappear', denis cooper, drone, gisèle vienne, performance art, stephen o'malley, sunn O)))