"French Bashing" in Manhattan - Michel Houellebecq, the Photographer (NYC, May 2017)
"French Bashing" is Michel Houellebecq's first American show at VENUS over Manhattan in the Upper East Side, Opening Night on 06/02/2018).
The French writer's photography and photomontages are intimately linked to his writing practice, and he often composes scenes in his books while looking at a photograph he shot. He takes pictures of the things he finds impossible to capture in literature.
“I don’t take pictures of human beings, because I prefer literature for describing a human being,” he said. “And I don’t do much description of the landscape in my books, because I find that a photo is better.”
In Paris in 2016, Houellebecq conceived his first exhibition called Rester Vivant (To Stay Alive), foregrounding his photography against a dense multimedia narrative that unfolded through a sequence of galleries. For French Bashing, Houellebecq has re-conceptualized and tailored two portions of Rester Vivant, completely transforming the gallery’s space with darkened walls, engineered lighting, floor coverings, and immersive soundscapes (composed in collaboration with Raphaël Sohier).
French Bashing provides two visions of Western Europe as expressed by Michel Houellebecq.
On view in the first room is a set of photographs that variously depict train stations, tollbooths, apartment buildings, and movie theaters. Hung on darkly painted walls and individually lit with framing projectors, these images assemble a dystopian vision of France familiar from Houellebecq’s novels. Bleakly desaturated, the photographs capture the atmosphere of what Houellebecq calls “peri-urban” zones: despondent suburban areas surrounding larger cities where homes are valued according to their proximity to arteries of public transportation. Houellebecq superimposes lines from his novels and poetry onto some of these photographs.
The first image visitors encounter in the exhibition bears the sentence, “It’s time to place your bets,” a quotation from Houellebecq’s poem “The Memory of the Sea;” the right panel of a large triptych bears a phrase from Houellebecq’s 2015 novel, Submission: “I had no more reason to kill myself than most of these people did.”
The sense of social decay that pervades his novels is visible in his photographs. The most bitterly amusing of them features a piece of public art—a set of weather-beaten concrete letters spelling “EUROPE”—in front of a bleak supermarket parking lot. Suggesting a vision of a continent on the verge of decomposition.
The sense of social decay that pervades his novels is visible in his photographs.
In the next room, Houellebecq has produced an environment of a distinctly different nature. Here the floor is covered with garish laminated placemats advertising such tourist destinations as St. Tropez and Port-la-Nouvelle. Hung on bright white walls with fluorescent lighting, a group of photographs converge around visions of tourism. Heavily saturated images depict kitschy tour buses, coastal views, and beachside condos in France and Spain. One of these offers an aerial view of a Leader Price discount store that appears wedged into the side of a mountain. Like the images in the first room, the scenes Houellebecq shows here are eerily uninhabited. But in this well-lit space, elements of the natural world seem to encroach upon disused manmade structures. A brighter soundtrack, also composed by Sohier, fills the space with the sounds of vacation towns: children playing, people laughing, and the audio evidence of merriment in the distance.
Houellebecq has visited New York perhaps four times. “I find it rather calm,” he said. He has no friends in the city, and mainly wanted to go on a helicopter tour.
His photographs were for sale in New York. (prices ranged from around 5,000$ to > 20,000$)
Information and extracts from: Venus Over Manhattan Gallery’ s Press Release NY Jun 2017) and The New Yorker Magazine (Lauren Collins, 06/19/2017).
Photos: Yves Lefebvre
