Houellebecq is the most important contemporary writers, the France has to offer. Man is ashamed now almost that to formulate that. That was not always so. He was once controversial. He is now mainstream. There are still a few old champion of morality that can not help, “Harry Potter for adults”, a once said. Others take what he writes, literally, and then put him on trial. . Because of Islamophobia, for example
We now know anyone who reads that Houellebecq is a literary man with see-driven administration: In 1998, he writes in “The Elementary Particles” eugenics, stem cells and preimplantation genetic diagnosis. 2001, his book “platform” in which Islamist fanatics in a nightclub in Thailand appear to blow up a bomb. The novel was published in early September. A week later plunged in New York, the Twin Towers and with the assurances of the past century.
And even though “The Possibility of an Island” (2005) literary was a big disappointment, as Houellebecq describes it years before the first ultrasound images of unborn on the wailing wall of Facebook were published how our cloned descendants operate only together electronically.
A seer, a prophet
In his latest novel, “submission” it is all about the takeover of Islam in France. When he appeared last year, the editors of “Charlie Hebdo” was shot on the same day in Paris, and heralded a new era. Twelve people died. Among them, the economist Bernard Maris, a close friend of Houellebecq. He has since been living under police protection.
Houellebecq is a seer, earlier you would have said Prophet. It was well known that he not only writes that he takes photos, shoots movies, appearing in films, has indeed sung his own poems on stage. A perfomance artist he is, even if he is alone with yellowed by nicotine fingers and winter parka before cameras to almost nothing to say.
But is it therefore, a visual artist? An artist like his alter ego Jed Martin, the protagonist of “The Map and the Territory”, which documented the decline of things at the end of his work? What is an artist, the question should be counter? One who rubs against the world around him? The in this friction produces something like sparks?
” Michel Houellebecq. Rester Vivant “is the exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo. Stay alive. That sounds like a nice slogan that fits into our mortal time. It is not an exhibition about Houellebecq, it’s a he. He had just exhibited at the Manifesta in Zurich his medical records, which suggest that it is not so bad ordered physically around him.
In Paris Houellebecq recorded 21 rooms, 2000 square meters. Showing photos, landscapes, scantily clad women, film clips (two women during orgasm), the toys of his deceased dog Clément, the MRI scan of his own skull. Also a skull sculpture that you have sent to him, with a brass plaque which commemorates his birth and death, 2037th
Oh, a Fumoir there are here, with bar, bar stools, chairs (seating is very important for Houellebecq). There are huge ashtray in it, and if not would his sung by Carla Bruni and other artists poems from the jukebox, then you could keep the bar for a cheap Swinger. One must really most smoke.
Believe the hype
Of course, there is a certain hype about this exhibition. But we did it and the whole company “Happy Sapiens”, on the other contemporary artists are involved with interesting exhibitions, wrong, one would reduce it to a media spectacle. “Rester Vivant” is a walk-in installation, a multi-dimensional work that access to the obsessions Houellebecq granted.
It is a very particular way a witness of his time, because with him always durchblinzelt the longing to overcome the banality or ugliness of the present. “Rester Vivant” is touching, rewarding, funny and sad at the same time.
Tristes Tropiques in Thailand
Because Houellebecq’s romantics. He loves the irony. That’s why he plays with the exhibition visitors. He gives him, in the first room, what he expects: Houellebecqsche suburban drabness, sad tropics in Thailand, orphaned stations in France. The room is pitch dark, its walls are black, occasionally flashing a neon light, as if to show that seeing is a process that is not self-evident.
In Calais he photographed in the 90s, the cast in concrete words “Europe”. The letters are torn, already empty promise. Not change the sweeping streetlights nothing about the intended drum exude something like optimism.
Photos Houellebecq are deserted. Apart from a few scantily clad women in the department “desire” holding the photographic portrait is not the drug of choice to see people in the soul. Houellebecq, agronomy studied, because he wanted to be a landscape gardener, shows his obsession with rocks, for mineral, for the non-lived nature.
It is a disturbing view of the world that surrounds us. Because he can see beauty where nobody wants to notice. His pictures do not have the power nor the will to form the work of Andreas Gursky.
photos that help write
They are made to document the environment of his novels. They should help when writing. You are strong only by the words that they wear as wounds, by contrast collages, which he glued over it.
The Hall “tourism” he with colorful Placemats paved. In old-fashioned living room he lets us share in his glory. he invited as a guest of his friend Robert Combas, who reflects his poems as a painting, from paint tubes and brushes make crucifixes and his studiolo issues: a devastated office, in which no man can to not clean up. It illustrates for Houellebecq the principle of art: want to create out of disorder order. And fail it
The heart of this Look, the room, the dedicated to his deceased dog Clément and a disturbing declaration of love to a creature on four short legs is: Pembroke Welsh Corgi is, the mark on which the Queen is. The floor is checkered Scottish It is the aesthetics of the dog basket. But we must not make the mistake of trying to read this hall ironically. There is a lesson in mortality.
The many photos of Clément, born in 2000, died in 2011, the dog watercolors his ex-wife Marie-Pierre, the dirty toys, the slide show, to Iggy Pop husky voice an excerpt from reading “the possibility of an island”: It’s the most intimate thing has Houellebecq to offer a cheesy extrinsic relationship with a dog, the idea of absolute love, which he as a human and poet chases, comes closest.
Because the dog is known to be less complicated than the human being. In “The Possibility of an Island” he beschreit him as “love machine”: “Man makes him a human being before and gives him the order to love it – and this being matter how crude, perverted, deformed or be stupid, the dog loves it “.
Inhabited absence
Sex, which Houellebecq has always said clearly, does not lead in this paradise unconditional love, he has only briefly the feeling of weightlessness. The broad field of love relationships he has always described as one, determined on the only body to market value – and its own shares never stood particularly high
. “Nous habitons l’absence” is across the last black and white landscapes, we inhabit the absence. to fill the transcendental homelessness with words or pictures, is the cause of art.
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