|
|
|
The Scandals of H.G.: Photography, Literature, Activism
Emily Apter, Anne-Cécile Guilbard, Jean-Michel Rabaté
[Multimedia content blocked]
Listen to a 94 minute recording, or download the file
Friday, April 20, 2007
Slought Foundation
Conversations in Theory Series
|
|
|
Slought Foundation, a non-profit organization rethinking contemporary art, is pleased to announce “The Scandals of H.G.: Photography, Literature, Activism," a public conversation with Emily Apter, Anne-Cécile Guilbard, and Jean-Michel Rabaté about the life and work of Hervé Guibert from 6:30-8:00pm. This event will be immediately followed by a public reception from 8:00-9:00pm for "The Truth in Photography," an exhibition featuring sixteen photographs by French artist and novelist Hervé Guibert, on display in the galleries from April 20, 2007-May 23, 2007. (here for more information).
"As a result of the media sensation around the work of Hervé Guibert (1955-1991) in the early 1990s, his work has been frequently pigeonholed: in relation to his age, his beauty, his homosexuality, his betrayals, or, finally, even in relation to his death from AIDS at age 36. Readers may be looking in his work for the Paris of the eighties, for the nights at the 'Palace,' for the leather trousers and the ephemeral beauty of long-haired young men. His work, after all, is fundamentally in the first person, and includes more than twenty novels, photography, photography reviews, diaries, and a video film. Guibert’s work participates in the spirit of an epoch when, in literature as well as in other arts, in life, in photography, but also in video and cinema, the first person was pushed to its limits and the limits of autobiography were explored. His work interrogates and is an experiment in truth, and tests the way that truth can resist and stay still against attempts to approach and invoke it.”
-- From the curatorial essay by Anne-Cécile Guilbard
Hervé Guibert was a French novelist, photographer, photography critic, and video film maker who was born on December 14th, 1955 in Saint-Cloud nearby Paris, and died from AIDS on December 27th, 1991 in Paris. Guibert inaugurated the photography column in Le Monde in 1977, and remained in charge of it until 1985. As a journalist he wrote about and became acquainted with many artists, writers and philosophers, including Patrice Chéreau, Roland Barthes, Isabelle Adjani, Michel Foucault, Miquel Barceló, and Sophie Calle. As a photographer, Guibert exhibited at the Agathe Gaillard Gallery. His collection of texts in the first person about photography, L’Image fantôme (Ghost image, 1981), appeared around the same time as Roland Barthes’s Chambre Claire (Camera lucida, 1980); these two publications were the first in France in which photography was written about in the first person.
After his first book, La Mort propagande, was published in 1977, he went on to write more than twenty-five novels and short narratives in the first person which are notable for their ambiguous relation to autobiography and fiction, many of which were published by Gallimard and Minuit. Many of his novels are inspired by the theories of his close friend Michel Foucault (Des aveugles, or Blindsight), or by Sade’s phantasmagorias (Vous m’avez fait former des fantômes). In 1990, Guibert’s novel A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (To the friend who did not save my life) brought him media acclaim and public notoriety. In the novel, Guibert tells the story of his everyday life as a person suffering from AIDS, and he describes the last months of a close friend’s life, named Muzil, in whom one recognizes Michel Foucault. Because of the philosopher Michel Foucault’s wish to keep his disease untold, the success of the book had partly to do with a series of polemics, often violent, concerning decency and shamelessness and the limits of literature. Guibert continued to write about his life and his AIDS in a series of other texts such as Le Protocole compassionnel (Compassion protocol), and he filmed himself during the last months of his life (La Pudeur ou l’impudeur), which was posthumously broadcast in 1992 on television.
 Download Anne-Cécile Guilbard's essay “The Truth in Photography: 17 Photographs by Hervé Guibert” (4 pg., PDF)
Emily Apter is a Professor of Comparative Literature and French at New York University, and previously taught at UCLA, Cornell University, UC-Davis, the University of Pennsylvania, and Williams College. She is the author of The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2005), Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (1999), Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the Century France (1990), co-editor with William Pietz of Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (1991), and André Gide and the Codes of Homotextuality (1987). Ongoing projects include a book titled Kapital, The Novel: (Madame Bovary), as well as an essay collection, Decadence: Theory of a Century. She has published widely in Critical Inquiry, The Columbia Encyclopedia of French Thought, Grey Room, October, Public Culture, Parallax, Esprit Créateur, and Critique, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the Rockefeller Foundation and the NEH.
Anne-Cécile Guilbard was born in 1973 and received her doctorate in French literature from the University Paris 8. She’s the author of several articles about Hervé Guibert, Roland Barthes, and the relationship between literature and photography. In 1999, she contributed to a publication by Gallimard of Hervé Guibert’s articles about photography at. She teaches literature, aesthetics and visual arts in Poitiers as well as at the University of Marne-la-Vallée. She is the curator of the Slought Foundation exhibition "The Truth in Photography: The Work of Hervé Guibert."
Jean-Michel Rabaté, a Senior Curator at Slought Foundation, is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and has authored or edited twenty books on Modernism, Bernard, Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Lacan, Derrida, psychoanalysis and literary theory.
This program was made possible in part through the generous sponsorship of the Agathe Gaillard Gallery, Paris, Christine Guibert, and the School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania
Organized by
Aaron Levy
Media files on the Slought.org website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
MLA Style:
Emily Apter, et al. "The Scandals of H.G.: Photography, Literature, Activism." Slought Foundation Online Content. [20 April 2007;
Accessed 15 March 2010]. <http://slought.org/content/11347/>.
|
|
