I wish I had no nails”) and a frequent topic is boredom (“The highway bores me, there’s no life on the side of the road,” “I never quite hear what people say who bore me.”) yet the onslaught of the sentences-written without chapter or paragraph breaks-are never static enough to generate ennui. Often the statements border on ridiculousness (“I am not looking to seduce a wearer of Birkenstocks. At six I broke my nose getting hit by car.” This dissolving of the temporal experience creates a bizarre emotional palette. In one section, Levé writes, “The girl whom I loved the most left me. Throughout the text of Autoportrait, the emotional pendulum swings back and forth between intimacy and remoteness, hotness and coldness, a seemingly random compositional method which lulls the reader into a whirlpool of sensations. Squeezing a sponge is fun like chewing gum. If I don’t like what I see, I close my eyes, but if what I hear bothers me, I am unable to close my ears. When I am happy I’m afraid of dying, when I’m unhappy I am afraid of not dying. I am not for or against painting, that would be like being for or against the brush. I cross certain streets not breathing through my nose to avoid pollution. When I lie down after drinking water, my stomach makes noises like a water bed. The sentences expose the constant flux of an isolated mind, the pronunciations a type of modern day soliloquy which reflect the dislocated nature of reality, and life in general:
#EDOUARD LEVE SKIN#
Levé transcribes humdrum banalities such as “When I sit with bare legs on vinyl, my skin doesn’t slide, it squeaks” or “I can sleep with my arms around someone who doesn’t move.” What distinguishes Levé’s prose (made up entirely of first-person, declarative statements) from say, a census record, is the reticular nature of the non-narrative, non-chronological text. Translated deftly by Lorin Stein, Autoportrait is amazingly anti-melodramatic. It is not simply portraiture it is self-portraiture.Ĭertain works of literature seem to summon critical discourse, and others, like Levé’s Autoportrait appear to defy it. What differentiates his photography from his writing is the negation of inference. It is unlikely that a reader would not interpret the titles of Levé's books ( Suicide and Autoportrait) in the same manner as they would the title "Pornographie." But Levé’s writing seems to function not as a diffraction of reality, but as the narrator’s reality itself. The same can be said about a piece of literature. At its simplest, the message, decoded, means: I have decided that seeing this is worth recording. The urgency of this message is not entirely dependent on the urgency of the event, but neither can it be entirely independent from it. A photograph is already a message about the event it records. But do works of literature operate on the same level as a photograph? John Berger, in his book The Look of Things wrote:Ī photograph celebrates neither the event itself nor the faculty of sight in itself. A title like “Pornographie” warps the viewer’s perception of the subjects, just as a novel or a poem is tinted by its title. The actions suggest sex, but the contours are misleading. None of the characters involved are naked there is no view of sexual organs, no exchange of bodily fluids. The series, “Pornographie,” is not explicitly pornographic. Two men stand in front of the couch and look down at the action. In a different frame, the woman in coral kneels on the floor, her face between the legs of a man who sits, head thrown back, on a red velvet sofa. A faceless male takes a woman from behind as she bends over a wooden table, his hips pressed against hers. One woman wears a simple black dress and pumps another is in a knee-length coral skirt with matching jacket. Their attire is business-casual and inconspicuous: button-up shirts, no ties, pleated denims or twills.
#EDOUARD LEVE SERIES#
A series of photographs feature an array of fully-clothed characters in a pale grey room.
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