Rester vivant

It is rare for the film adaptation of a book to surpasses the tension of the original. All that’s left for the audience is to discuss why the film failed in the aim of being absolutely faithful to the subject.

Michel Houellebecq’s carte blanche at the Palais de Tokyo effectively follows this fate. As with the film adaptation of his The Possibility of an Island, Houellebecq the “artist” drags and scatters fragments of life and creation, consciously posing as the umpteenth guru of an increasingly insipid grammar of visual arts, embodying its most recent patterns and tics.

Contemporary art offers a perfect context for the author’s suicidal game. Once he has donned the juggler’s mask, he is even able to levitate the tools of his creation: pen, notebook and camera. Immersed in claustrophobic darkness, this magic gravitates and passes from one image to the next. The climax occurs in a Buddhist temple, which is reached after passing the Swiss chalet, the actual studio of Robert Combas, a lounge, a bar and also a small projection room for soft porn. The Parisian labyrinth makes us look back with nostalgia on the minimalist version of this same show seen at the recent edition of Manifesta in Zurich. This is an uncut and less naïf version, and it is in need of more concrete ideas especially to be diluted over the greater number of square metres.

One effect is in Sainte Chapelle, where the audience has to flock to worship the relics of a tormented author and share his existential thorns (Islamic terrorism, terror of sectarianism and despair for an art system overly controlled by the market). All this is clumsily choreographed through the interpretation of human mediocrity. However, it certainly isn’t a simple maze cum pilgrimage site for the disciples of that poor post-Taloryist adventure which represents our world and the time in which we live. This, at least, is revealed by an abundance of dull photos. These go from post-apocalyptic black-and-white shots of bland landscapes, to colour images featured in triptychs with tawdry symbolism, to the nihilism of the picture-postcard room, a small pavilion with a prevailing post-Instagram aesthetic.

Nonetheless, something real is needed. And so we come to the author’s corpse, here in the form of a hyper-contemporary sculpture that Renaud Marchand drew from the homonymous passage in Houellebecq’s book. It scarcely matters that the tanks contain Daniel, Michel or even Jed, the main characters in Houellebecq’s best-sellers, since here we won’t pose the problem of the relics’ authenticity. Intelligently, here the author is solipsistically everywhere and is exhumed in extremely egocentric traces of his present and past: from the projection of extracts to the recovery of sentimental memorabilia  dedicated to his dead dog Clément. This ritual was assisted by a rigorous artist like Rosemarie Trockel, a local ’80s celebrity like Robert Combas, a unisex fashion designer like Renoma and even Iggy Pop. The punk idol devoted his talent to small fetishistic exercises for thoughts of greater importance. The metaphor of love for the pet animal, re-proposed in captions, seems to be extended and contradicts the words recently uttered by the most Franciscan of popes.

Now Houellebecq has gone even further, certifying – with an operation verging on personality cult – all the different hyper-intellectual exhibition attempts surrounding his work. Among the various major and minor episodes, one should mention the memorable and seminal tribute that Stephanie Moisdon offered him in Digione, and that with the title “The World as Will and Wallpaper” seems to have stirred the design of this latest curation frenzy. What drove the Palais de Tokyo’s director Jean de Loisy to risk a new exercise that flirts with the “by Michel Houellebecq” and with the artist himself is a mystery which I don’t think even the results of habitual attendance will clarify.

Now, we are confronted with a Houellebecq-style sequel that, in re-presenting him as a total artist – and who could deny that he isn’t – functions as a successful Web or TV series. The important thing is to fuel oneself with stimuli that emphasise the indelible and total incomprehension of the contemporary art world, to underline its total extraneousness. It is strange that the show by the same author in the novel The Map and the Territory – and now we can say so unashamedly – went to tormented lengths to explain the functioning of the contemporary art “system”. Time wasted if he really was so scarcely interested in it. So, it may be better to wait for the new book on the super rich. Faced with this jolt of bovarism made by proxy – at least Warhol dreamt of being a housewife – all we can do is insert a coin in the outmoded jukebox that Houellebecq has placed in the exhibition and listen to a song by Carla Bruni, hoping that the bling-bling aesthetic has really had its day. But perhaps it is more fitting to ask the gallery representing him how much one of his works costs: ils est temps de faires vos jeux

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until 11 September 2016
Rester vivant
Palais de Tokyo
13, avenue du Président Wilson, Paris