Exhausting the Spectacular in Nicolas Boone

How can one make art after reading Guy Debord? Indeed, his diagnosis of a culture drowned in “spectacular contemplation”1 1  - Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, translated by Black & Red Books (Detroit: Black & Red Books, 1977), 184 (consulted online at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm). and of an art that must, if it is not to lose its soul, set up its own “dissolution” and “supersession” in the political sphere2 2  - Ibid., 190. appears to be an impasse. In 2000, the curators of Au-delà du spectacle3 3  - Presented at several venues, including the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, and Centre Pompidou, in Paris. proposed to get around the problem by summoning the more hedonistic concept, entertained by generations of thinkers, of the world as theatre.4 4  - One thinks of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII: “All the world’s a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players.” They underscored the moralism associated with the sense of guilt regarding the enjoyment of entertainment that Debord’s idea conveyed, thus diminishing its import.5 5  - Au-delà du spectacle, exhibition journal (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2000), 3.  But their argument begs the question of the recuperation of art through the spectacle. More recently, Hou Hanru, curator of the 2009 Biennale de Lyon, titled The Spectacle of the Everyday, broached the question more directly by first positing “that there is no longer any ‘outside’ for the society of the spectacle in the age of globalisation,” although he added that this does not exclude the possibility of taking a critical artistic stance by “negotiating subversively with such a condition of ‘no-outside.’”6 6  - Hou Hanru, “The Spectacle of the Everyday,” introduction, in Xe Biennale de Lyon: The Spectacle of the Everyday, exhibition catalogue(accessed at http://www.mac-lyon.com/static/mac/contenu/fichiers/dossiers_presse/2009/bac2009_en.pdf), 2009, 12. But does not the neat oxymoron in this formulation — can we imagine a subversive person negotiating, or a negotiator being subversive? — suggest the figure of the serpent biting its tail? We are thus back at the heart of the issue: can art escape the society of the spectacle?

In his film Transbup (2010), Nicolas Boone⁷ 7 -  Having obtained a degree from the Paris ENSBA and pursued further studies in Lyon, Nicolas Boone has exhibited at Point Ephémère and the Maison Rouge and often presents films at the FID in Marseille. See nicolasboone.net/. also engages with Debord’s theory, though he adopts a less optimistic perspective. One of his characters — or, more precisely, an avatar of one of his characters, a computer technician and family man who, in a virtual world, is a punk activist fighting a totalitarian system called B⁸ 8 - “B” for “BUP,” an anagram for “PUB,” the subject of a series of films (see below). (The following quotation is our translation.) — says, “We are in a modern dictatorship. There is no separation. Even the protest against B is within B. Both capitalism and presumed anti-capitalism organize life according to the world of spectacle. It is not a matter of developing a show of refusal but of refusing the show . . . . But B always coopts us.” Greatly inspired by Debord and the Situationists,⁹ 9 - See “La Cinquième conférence de l’IS à Göteborg,” IS, No. 7 (April 1962), 27 – 28.  and spoken in this context, these words recall the “no-outside” condition of the society of the spectacle: with the film-within-the-film device, the animation multiplying the cinematic fiction, the Debordian problem seems to be posed from the bottom of an abyss. In other of Boone’s productions, the proliferation of actors, episodes, or references creates bewildering mazes in which one is submerged and lost, until that recurring moment when a slippage occurs and everything goes awry. Can one escape it?