He let me meditate a little on these words before continuing: “Would you be interested in seeing what I do?”
Obviously, I accepted. I arrived at his place the following Sunday, in the early afternoon. He lived in a house in Chevilly-Larue, right in the middle of a zone that was undergoing a phase of “creative destruction,” as Schumpeter would have said: muddy wastelands, as far as the eye could see, sprouting with cranes and fences; a few carcasses of buildings, in varying states of completion. His buhrstone house, which must have dated from the thirties, was the only survivor from that era. He came to the doorstep to greet me. “It was my grandparents’ house…” he told me. “My grandmother died five years ago; my grandfather followed her three months later. He died of a broken heart, I think—I was surprised he even held on for three months.”
On entering the dining room, I had a sort of shock. I wasn’t really working class, despite what I liked to bang on about in all my interviews; my father had already climbed up the first, and most difficult, half of the social ladder—he had become an executive. Nevertheless I knew the working class, I had had the occasion throughout my childhood, at my uncles’ and aunts’ houses, to be immersed in it: I knew their sense of family, their naive sentimentality, their taste for alpine chromolithographs and collections of great authors bound in imitation leather. All this was there, in Vincent’s house, right down to the photos in their frames, to the green velvet phone cover: he had visibly changed nothing since the death of his grandparents.
Somewhat ill at ease, I allowed myself to be led to an armchair before I noticed, hanging on the wall, perhaps the only decorative element that did not date from the previous century: a photo of Vincent sitting next to a big television set. In front of him, on a low table, had been placed two quite crude, almost childish, sculptures representing a loaf of bread and a fish. On the television screen, in giant letters, was displayed the message: FEED THE PEOPLE. ORGANIZE THEM.
“It was the first piece of mine that really had any success…,” he commented. “In my early years I was strongly influenced by Joseph Beuys, and especially by the happening ‘Dürer, ich führe Baader-Meinhof durch Dokumenta.’ It was the middle of the seventies, at the time when the terrorists of the Rote Armee Fraktion were being hunted throughout Germany. The Dokumenta de Kassel was then the most important exhibition of contemporary art in the world; Beuys had displayed this message at the entrance to indicate his intention of showing Baader or Meinhof around the exhibition, on a day that suited them, in order to transmute their revolutionary energy into a positive force, utilizable by the whole of society. He was completely sincere, that was the beauty of the thing. Of course, neither Baader nor Meinhof turned up: on the one hand, they considered contemporary art to be one of the manifestations of bourgeois decomposition, on the other they feared a trap by the police—which was, by the way, perfectly possible, the Dokumenta not enjoying any special status; but Beuys, in the megalomaniac delirium he was in at the time, had probably not even given the slightest thought to the police.”
“I remember something about Duchamp…A group, a banner with a phrase like: ‘The Silence of Marcel Duchamp Is Overestimated.’”
“Exactly; except that the original phrase was in German. But that illustrates the very principle of the intervention art: create an effective parable that is taken up and narrated in a more or less distorted way by third parties, in order to indirectly modify the whole of society.”
I was naturally a man who knew about life, society, and things; I knew an everyday version of them, limited to the most common motivations that set the human machine in motion; my vision was that of a cutting observer of social issues, a Balzacian-lite; it was a worldview in which Vincent had no assignable place, and for the first time in years, in reality for the first time since my initial encounter with Isabelle, I began to feel slightly destabilized. His words had made me think of the promotional material for Two Flies Later, in particular the T-shirts. Printed on each of them was a quotation from the Manual of Civility for Young Girls for Use by Educational Establishments, by Pierre Louÿs, the bedside reading of the hero of the film. There were a dozen different quotations; the T-shirts were made of a new kind of fiber that sparkled and was a little transparent, very light, which could be fitted into a plastic envelope to be slipped into the pages of the issue of Lolita that preceded the release of the film. I had by then met Isabelle’s successor, an incompetent groovy chick, who could scarcely remember the password for her computer; but that didn’t stop the magazine from selling. The quotation I had chosen for Lolita was: “To give ten cents to a poor man because he hasn’t any bread is perfect; but to suck his dick because he hasn’t any bread, that would be too much: you’re not obliged.”
When you think of it, I said to Vincent, I had done intervention art without knowing it. “Yes, yes…,” he replied uneasily. I noticed then, a little uncomfortably, that he was blushing; it was touching, and a bit unhealthy. I became conscious at the same time that probably no woman had ever set foot in this house; the first act of a woman would have been to change the decoration, to tidy away at least a few of these objects, which contributed to the not only old-fashioned, but frankly quite funereal atmosphere.
“It’s no longer that easy to have relationships, after a certain age, I find…,” he said, as if he had read my thoughts. “We no longer really have the opportunity to go out, nor the taste for it. And then there are lots of things to do, formalities, steps to take…the shopping, the laundry. We need more and more time to look after our health, as well, simply to maintain the body in more or less working order. After a certain age, life becomes administrative—more than anything.”
Since Isabelle had left I was not that used to speaking to people more intelligent than I, capable of divining my train of thought; what he had just said, especially, was crushingly true, and there was a moment of unease—sexual subjects are always a bit heavy, and I thought it right to talk politics to add a bit of banter, and, staying on the theme of intervention art, I recounted how Workers’ Struggle, a few days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, had plastered Paris with dozens of posters proclaiming: “Communism Remains the Future of the World.” He listened to me with that attentiveness, that childlike seriousness that was beginning to wring my heart before he concluded that although the act had real power, it had, however, no poetic dimension, when you bear in mind that Workers’ Struggle was, above all, a party, an ideological machine, and that art was always cosa individuale; even when it was a protest, it only had value if it was a solitary protest. He apologized for his dogmatism, smiled sadly, and suggested: “Shall we go and see what I do? It’s downstairs…I think that things will be more concrete afterward.” I got up from the armchair, and followed him to the stairway that opened onto the hall. “By knocking down the partitions, that’s given me a cellar of twenty meters on each side; four hundred square meters is good for what I’m doing at the moment…,” he continued in an uncertain voice. I felt more and more ill at ease: people had often spoken to me about show business, media projects, and micro-sociology; but art, never, and I was filled with the presentiment of something novel, dangerous, and probably fatal, from a domain where there was—a bit like in love—almost nothing to win and almost everything to lose.
I placed a foot on the level ground beneath the last step, and let go of the banister. It was totally dark. Behind me, Vincent flicked a switch.
Forms appeared at first, blinking, vague, like a procession of mini-ghosts; then a zone lit up, a few meters to my left. I didn’t understand the direction of the lighting at all; the light seemed to come from the space itself. “Lighting Is a Metaphysics…”; the phrase turned over in my head for a few seconds, then disappeared. I approached the objects. A train was entering a spa in central Europe. The snowclad mountains, in the distance, were bathed in sunshine; lakes sparkled, there were high mountain pastures. The girls were ravishing, they wore long dresses and veils. The gentlemen smiled as they greeted them, d
offing their top hats. Everyone seemed happy. “The Best in the World…”: the phrase sparkled for a few instants, then disappeared. The locomotive was gently steaming, like a big, gentle animal. Everything seemed balanced, in its place. The lights dimmed slowly. The windows of the casino reflected the setting sun, and every pleasure bore the imprint of Germanic honesty. Then it became completely dark, and a sinuous line appeared in the space, formed of translucent, red, plastic hearts, half-filled with a liquid that beat against their sides. I followed the line of hearts, and a new scene appeared: this time it consisted of an Asian wedding, celebrated perhaps in Taiwan, or Korea, in a country anyway that had only recently known wealth. Pale pink Mercedes dropped the guests off in the square in front of a neo-Gothic cathedral; the husband, dressed in a white smoking jacket, advanced through the air, a meter above the ground, his little finger entwined with that of his betrothed. Some potbellied Chinese Buddhas, surrounded by multicolored electric bulbs, quivered with joy. A flowing, bizarre music became slowly louder, while the married couple were lifted into the air before hanging over the assembled guests—they were now as high as the rose window of the cathedral. They exchanged a long kiss, both virginal and labial, to the applause of the guests—I saw little hands moving. In the background, caterers lifted the lids off steaming plates; on the surface of the rice the vegetables produced little spots of color. Fireworks exploded, and there was a fanfare of trumpets.
Again it went dark, and I followed a more indistinct path, as if trekking through woods, I was surrounded by green-and-gold rustlings. Dogs were frolicking in the clearing of the angels, they were rolling around in the sun. Later, the dogs were with their masters, protecting them with loving looks, and later still they were dead, and little stelae sprouted up in the clearing to commemorate love, walks in the sunshine, and shared joy. No dog was forgotten: their embossed photos decorated the stelae at the foot of which the masters had left their favorite toys. It was a joyful monument, from which all tears were absent.
In the distance, as if suspended from trembling curtains, some words in gilded letters took shape. There was the word “Love,” the word “Goodness,” the word “Tenderness,” the word “Fidelity,” the word “Happiness.” Coming out of the total darkness, they evolved, from nuances of matte gold through to blinding luminosity; then they fell back alternately into the night, but at the same time following one another in their rise toward the light, in such a way that they seemed, somehow, to create one another. I continued my path across the cellar, guided by the light that shone sequentially on all the corners of the room. There were other scenes, other visions, so many that I gradually lost any notion of time, and only recovered full consciousness once I had gone back upstairs, and was seated on a wicker garden bench in what could once have been a terrace or a winter garden. Night was falling on the waste-ground landscape; Vincent had lit a big lamp. I was visibly shaken, and he served me a glass of cognac without my needing to ask.
“The problem…,” he said, “is that I can no longer really exhibit, there are too many regulations, and it’s almost impossible to transport. Someone came from the Delegation for Plastic Arts; they plan to buy the house, and maybe make videos and sell them.”
I understood that he was touching on the practical and financial side of things purely through politeness, in order to allow the conversation to return to a normal footing—it was very obvious that in his situation, at the extreme emotional limit of survival, material questions could no longer carry more than a limited weight. I failed to reply to him, nodded, and served myself another glass of cognac; his self-control at that moment seemed terrifying to me. He spoke again:
“There is a famous phrase that divides artists into two categories: revolutionaries and decorators. Well, I didn’t have much of a choice, the world decided for me. I remember my first exhibition in New York, at the Saatchi gallery, for the happening ‘Feed the People. Organize Them.’ I was quite impressed, it was the first time in a long time that a French artist was exhibiting in an important New York gallery. I was also a revolutionary then, and convinced of the revolutionary value of my work. It was a very cold winter in New York, and every morning you found tramps in the streets who had frozen to death; I was convinced that people were going to change their attitude as soon as they saw my work: that they were going to go out into the street and follow exactly the instruction on the television screen. Of course, none of that happened: people came, nodded, exchanged intelligent words, then left.
“I suppose that the revolutionaries are those who are capable of coming to terms with the brutality of the world, and of responding to it with increased brutality. I simply did not have that kind of courage. I was ambitious, however, and it is possible that the decorators are fundamentally more ambitious than the revolutionaries. Before Duchamp, the artist had as his ultimate goal a worldview that was at once personal and accurate, that is to say moving; it was already a huge ambition. Since Duchamp, the artist no longer contents himself with putting forward a worldview, he seeks to create his own world; he is very precisely the rival of God. I am God in my basement. I have chosen to create a small, easy world where you only encounter happiness. I am perfectly conscious of the regressive nature of my work; I know that it can be compared to the attitude of adolescents who, instead of confronting the problems of adolescence, dive headfirst into their stamp collection, their herbarium, or whatever other glittering, limited, multicolored little world they choose. No one will dare say it to my face, I get good reviews in Art Press, as in the majority of the European media; but I could read the contempt in the eyes of the girl who came from the Delegation for Plastic Arts. She was thin, dressed in white leather, with an almost swarthy complexion, very sexual; I understood at once that she considered me to be a little invalid child, and very sick. She was right: I am a tiny little invalid child, very sick, who cannot live. I can’t come to terms with the brutality of this world; I just can’t do it.”
Back at the Lutétia, I had some difficulty getting to sleep. Obviously, Vincent had left someone out of his categories. Like the revolutionary, the comedian came to terms with the brutality of the world, and responded to it with increased brutality. The result of his action, however, was not to transform the world, but to make it acceptable by transmuting the violence, necessary for any revolutionary action, into laughter—in addition, also, to making a lot of dough. To sum up, like all clowns since the dawn of time, I was a sort of collaborator. I spared the world from painful and useless revolutions—since the root of all evil was biological, and independent of any imaginable social transformation; I established clarity, I forbade action, I eradicated hope; my balance sheet was mixed.
In a few minutes I reviewed the whole of my career, especially the movie one. Racism, pedophilia, cannibalism, parricide, acts of torture, and barbarism: in less than a decade, I had creamed off all the lucrative niches. It was, however, curious, I told myself again, that the alliance between nastiness and laughter had been considered so innovative in movie circles; they can’t have read Baudelaire in their profession.
There remained pornography, on which everyone had broken their teeth. The thing seemed up till now to resist all attempts at sophistication. Neither the virtuosity of the camera movements nor the refinement of the lighting brought about the slightest improvement: they seemed instead to constitute handicaps. A more “Dogma”-style attempt, with DV cameras and CCTV images, hadn’t proved any more successful: people wanted clear images. Ugly, but clear. Not only had attempts at “quality pornography” collapsed into farce, but they had also been unalloyed commercial fiascos. All in all, the old adage of the marketing directors, “It’s not because people prefer the basic products that they will not buy our luxury products,” seemed in this case to be demolished, and the sector, one of the most lucrative in the profession, remained in the hands of shady Hungarian, or even Latvian, jobbers. At the time when I was making Munch on My Gaza Strip I had, one afternoon, for research purposes, visited the set of
one of the last French producers who was still active, a Ferdinand Cabarel. That hadn’t been a waste of an afternoon—on the human level, I mean. Despite his very southwest surname, Ferdinand Cabarel looked like a former roadie for AC/DC: whitish skin, greasy, dirty hair, a “Fuck your cunts” T-shirt, death’s-head rings. Right away I told myself I had rarely seen such a twat. He only managed to survive thanks to the ridiculous work rate he imposed on his crew—he canned about forty usable minutes per day, while also doing promotional photos for Hot Video, and even passed for an intellectual in the profession, asserting that he “worked with a sense of urgency.” I’ll spare you the dialogue (“I excite you, eh, my little slut”—“Yes, you excite me, my little bastard”) and the puny stage directions (“now, a double” obviously indicated, to everyone, that the actress was going to be the object of a double penetration), what struck me above all was the incredible contempt with which he treated his actors, particularly the male ones. Without the slightest irony, or the slightest humor, Cabarel would scream into his megaphone things like: “If you don’t get a hard-on, guys, you won’t be paid!” or “If the other guy ejaculates, he’s out the door…” At least the actress had a fake fur coat to cover her nakedness between shots; if the actors wanted to keep warm, they had to bring their own blankets. After all, it was the actress whom the male viewers would go to see, she was the one who would perhaps be on the cover of Hot Video; as for the actors, they were just treated like cocks on legs. I also learned (with a bit of difficulty—the French, as we know, don’t like to talk about their salaries) that the actress was paid five hundred euros per day of shooting, while they had to be content with one hundred and fifty. They weren’t even in it for the money: incredible and pathetic as it may seem, they did this job in order to fuck girls. I remembered in particular the scene in the underground parking lot: they were shivering, and, as I looked at those two guys, Fred and Benjamin (one was a lieutenant in the fire brigade, the other an administrator), who wanked melancholically to keep themselves ready for “the double,” I had said to myself that, sometimes, men could truly be courageous beasts, so long as it was regarding pussy.
The Possibility of an Island Page 11
