Читать книгу Interventions 2020 - Мишель Уэльбек - Страница 19

Monday, the art school in Caen. I’ve been asked to explain why kindness seemed to me more important than intelligence, or talent. I did my best, I struggled; but I know it was true. Then I visited Rachel Poignant’s studio, which uses casts of different parts of her body. I came to a halt in front of long thongs covered with the cast of one of her tits (the right one? the left one? I can’t remember). In their rubbery consistency, and general appearance, they definitely looked like octopus tentacles. Still, I slept pretty well.

Wednesday, the art school in Avignon, for a ‘day of failure’ organized by Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux. I was supposed to be talking about sexual failure. Things got off to an almost cheerful start, with a screening of short films brought together under the title of Films Without Qualities: some hilarious, others strange, sometimes both (I think the tape is currently running in different art centres; it would be shame to miss it). Then I saw a video by Jacques Lizène. It’s haunted by sexual misery. His penis protruded from a hole made in a plywood sheet; it was encircled in a noose by a string used to activate it. He moved it slowly about, jerkily, like a soft puppet. I was very uncomfortable. This atmosphere of decomposition, the sad fuck-up of contemporary art, ends up by suffocating you; sometimes you miss Joseph Beuys and his generous-minded propositions. Nonetheless, this witness to our age has a relentless precision about it. All evening I thought about it, and was forced to accept this observation: contemporary art depresses me; but I realize that it’s by far the best recent commentary on the state of affairs. I dreamed of a rubbish bin overflowing with coffee filters, peelings, meat smothered in gravy. I thought of art as a kind of peeling, of the bits of flesh that stick to the peels.

Saturday, a literary gathering in the north of the Vendée. A few ‘right-wing regionalist’ writers (it’s easy to see they’re right-wingers: when they talk about their origins, they like to point out a Jewish ancestor four generations back, so that everyone can see how broadminded they are). Otherwise, as everywhere, a very diverse audience: the only thing they have in common is that they like reading. These people live in an area where the number of shades of green is endless; but, under a perfectly grey sky, all the shades of green fade away. So what we have here is a faded infinity. I thought of the orbits of the planets after the end of all life, in an increasingly colder universe, marked by the gradual fading of the stars; and the words ‘human warmth’ almost made me cry.

On Sunday, I took the TGV back to Paris; my holidays were over.