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Introduction to The Estheticon by Colin Manlove
Laurent La Gamba says that in 2002 he invented the Camouflage mode of art, which has now seen numerous practitioners, such as the Chinese artist Liu Bolin, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Carolyn Roper, Desiree Palmen and Jean-Paul Bourdier. In La Gamba’s work people are seen half invisible behind (or in front of) shelved produce in a supermarket, or beside refrigerators, cars or swimming pools. La Gamba does not try wholly to conceal his figures in their backgrounds.
Rather, he shows them still partly visible. Faces stick above hedges while the rest of the body merges into a car in a field; a man with a bland expression seems to have opened his body to reveal the contents of a fridge or supermarket shelves. The camouflage is irregular, crumpled; background lines are not quite matched by their painted continuations across the body. The metamorphosis is incomplete, and the head, the mind, is still there.
La Gamba is strongly influenced by Andre Malraux and by Jacques Lacan, on whom he wrote a thesis at the Sorbonne in 1992. His pictures portray a world in which humanity is being taken over by the products of western technology, but is still resistant. His attitude to this is a mixture of mingled horror and fascination. Duality and struggle are at the heart of this work; even struggle itself is compromised, for the human agents are expressionless and apparently indifferent. This duality is completely misunderstood by the correspondents in The Mail who complain that he could have camouflaged his people better.
So far as the art is concerned, La Gamba is playing with interchangeable illusion, whereby a man becomes a car and a car partakes in man at the same time. This art of illusion, well-described in E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1960), is age-old, and stems from the difficulty the human eye and brain have in seeing the world as it is. Recently La Gamba has continued this theme of illusion in a collection of short prose fictions, The Estheticon (2014), which explores the use by people of plastic surgery to enhance their appearance. But here he is also looking at the transactions between man and the material world in terms of altered flesh and prostheses.
This topic relates to the idea of metamorphosis, whereby a man may be changed to a beast, a bird or a tree – as in Ovid or in traditional folktales; but there some outside agency, whether a god or a witch or a magic law is making the transformation happen, whereas in La Gamba’s vision, people are doing it to themselves. While this might seem to give more choice to humanity, it in fact gives less, for their own wishes can lead them into irreversible disaster when an operation goes wrong (‘Tinky Winky, Dipsy …’) or an alteration too many is made (the soldier’s mother in ‘AesthetiCon’), or women who have had breast implants one day encounter a man with both a hatred of such implants and a gun ‘The Woman with the Blue Bra’).
Often each story involves two different narratives, which comment on one another or even collide. In the first story, ‘Nail Angels’ Gisele, who has just had her feet surgically reshaped, is about to open her new nail care salon in the World Trade Centre when she looks up and sees a huge plane flying at full speed towards her window. The narrative of the September 11 bombings here intrudes on and absorbs her story into itself. One sub-story can shares something with the other, as in Camouflage painting where human and inanimate become part of one another. In ‘The Woman with the Blue Bra’ an Arab, Mohamed, who hates Western decadence and is planning to bomb some tourists changes his mind and sets off for a job as a croupier in Las Vegas.
This story continually interrupts another about an American called Bill whose wife has used up the money for their child’s education on breast implants and left him. Bill’s friends take him for a break to Las Vegas, which with its pyramids and Luxor Hotel is partly modelled on Ancient Egypt; but he is sickened by the decadence of the place, and shoots through their breast implants a number of women tourists he sees playing roulette. Bill can be seen as part of Mohamed, who was torn between his urge to murder decadent tourists and a profound desire for the decadent in himself. Far from being the model jihadi, he is excited by the accidental exposure of a woman’s body while she is being arrested, and his mind is full of images of sex and pleasure. At the same time his hatred of tourists for violating his country and the values of his ancestors is in part a front for a simple desire to take out his frustration on others.
For he lost his thumbs in an accident, and cannot be a croupier as he always wished: that is, until he realises the possibilities of reconstructive surgery. The murders he abandoned are instead carried out by Bill, who takes on Mohamed’s loathing for corrupt Western values on the other side of the world. Bill is in a sense the camouflage for Mohamed’s failure. That the two are so intimately entwined is also suggested by the way the story continually switches between one and the other character without notice.
In another view, Bill’s story is the opposite of Mohamed’s. Bill, who at first lives in illusion, ends up detesting and attacking it; Mohamed, who planned mass murder against representatives of Western shallowness ends by joining the very thing he opposed, and flees from the real Egypt to a fake one, an implant of Egypt grafted on to America. Bill, whose wife’s love proved as false as her breast implants, is enraged at a society which prefers illusion to reality, and he chooses to execute some of its supposed representatives. It could seem that Mohamed’s story, in which futile idealism is dropped for comfortable materialism, makes a mockery of Bill’s violent expression of his beliefs. But equally one can read Bill’s story as a satire on the emptiness to which Mohamed has surrendered himself. The two cancel out, and one is left with nowhere to go. That may be the ultimate position of La Gamba’s coldly ironic vision: materialist or idealist, who cares?
Idealists appear in several of the stories, with more or less satire. In ‘Tinky Winky, Dipsy …’ an Irishman called Horacio whose mother died after a failed nasal reconstruction, has taken on a job as a Tellytubby, serenading people on their birthdays. By accepting this occupation he feels he has demeaned his revolutionary Irish ancestors. One day, on the twelfth floor of a tower block where he has been sent, Horacio comes across the doctor who cheated his family of compensation for the clumsy operation on his mother, and defenestrates with him. As he falls Horacio thinks ‘of the thousands of Irish revolutionaries who had been fighting for freedom for hundreds of years, and thought it only fair that it be an emblematic figure of the British Empire who should end this great, British, plastic surgeon’s career’ (48). In thinking this Horacio is, of course, turning an act of revenge for the death of his mother into a political cause. But then we think more widely. Isn’t the plastic surgeon who manipulates and reshapes people, like the British Empire that manipulates the Irish and reshaped their country to produce Ulster? And isn’t he, an Irishman dressed up as an alien, a ludicrous Tellytubby, to amuse English people, a spitting image of the attitude of the English to the Irish? When first Horacio enters the plastic surgeon’s office it is to find him ‘bent over a buxom blonde on his examination table. . . . [holding] both of his patient’s breasts firmly in his hands’ (48), in an image of planned rape.
The surgeon is called Lucian Steel, a pun for ‘steal’. The names Lucian and Horacio suggest a classical source: Horace is the name of a famous Roman author (65-27 BC) of satirical poetry exposing the truth about people, while Lucian of Samosata’s A True History (c.150 AD) was a fantastical and lying account of the universe intended to expose all poetic falsehoods. The names of the characters thus correspond with their classical models – in Lucian’s case, with his famous work. The fantastic Teletubby Horacio wants to destroy a lie, while the surgeon Lucian makes them, in the form of fraudulent implants and in the lie he told to exonerate himself from blame for the death of Horacio’s mother.
All this is rendered in the sparest form, each sentence of the story containing just the detail required and no more, and each fitting with the next until a perfect jigsaw of satire is assembled. The longest story is just 10 pages with about 200 words per page. The language is usually as simple as possible, with sudden irruptions of long words, particularly relating to anatomy and to scientific procedures.
What is the effect of all this? The artist seems at once committed and indifferent; he camouflages himself and he does not; he portrays plastic surgery as corrupt or benign; he seems overall to be beyond any settled view. But what he is doing is presenting a complete picture as forcefully and as fantastically as he can, so that we may see all the possibilities and explore
them for ourselves.
Colin Manlove
Colin Manlove is a literary critic with a particular interest in fantasy. He was a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh.
Postface à l'Edition française de Suspension Consentie de l'Incrédulité par Noël Fuster
Laurent La Gamba est un homme cultivé et éclectique. Il sort de la Sorbonne, ce n’est pas rien mais ce n’est pas tout. Laurent La Gamba est un luthier qui construit des guitares avec du tilleul et d’autres bois qui se double d’un virtuose de la six cordes mais ce n’est pas tout. Laurent La Gamba est un photographe-plasticien célèbre pour ses "camouflages" mais ceci n’est pas tout:
Car tout ceci n’est rien encore: Laurent La Gamba va devenir Laurent La Gamba.
Ecrire des nouvelles…quelle curieuse idée. Mais ça permet de passer d’un pays à un autre, de sautiller d’un personnage à un autre. L’ époque ? Toutes les nouvelles sont ancrées dans leur époque, même quand il s’agit des souvenirs d’une petite fille devenue vieille dame. Quoi qu’il en soit, on est au XX ème siècle.
Les pays, il y en a deux, la France, le pays natal, et les Etats-Unis ou plutôt la Californie. On sent l’homme écartelé entre les deux continents comme un berger landais sur de gigantesques échasses, un pied dans l’ancien monde, l’autre dans le nouveau: il a vécu quelques années à Los Angeles et en est resté marqué à vie. Les personnages sont naturellement français ou américains, ou Anglais vivant en France, des voisins ou une galeriste, un éleveur de porc ou un garde du corps…
Le narrateur - appelons-le ainsi – se sent bien dans le monde moderne: il est en adoration devant les limousines, les Ferrari comme un enfant devant un jouet convoité. Sauf que lui s’achète le joujou. Il y a de nombreuses automobiles sur les routes ou sur les highways, les conducteurs confondant parfois leur voiture avec une navette spatiale. Quand on fait le va-et-vient entre Los Angeles et Roissy, il y a beaucoup d’avions aussi.
Enfin, pas besoin d’être Roland Barthes pour remarquer la séduction qu’opèrent les mythologies modernes sur le narrateur ou ses amis, de l’enfance à l’âge de jeune adulte: cela va de l’inévitable Spiderman à la Princesse Leia, de Darth Vader à Thomas Magnum. Freud et Marx qui ne sont pas de super-héros sont eux-aussi de la partie.
Mais de quoi ça parle ce livre au fond ?
Ça dit que tous les éléments qui ponctuent la vie sont en quelque sorte semblables à un gigantesque trompe-l'œil pictural et l'auteur joue sur différents "signifiants" au sens saussurien qui composent l'univers des êtres humains pour préfigurer (la Ferrari) ou défigurer (l'histoire de l'eczéma) ou encore configurer (l'homme de Disneyland) un destin particulier à partir de destins généraux qui ne sont souvent possibles qu'au prix d'un douloureux travestissement (camouflage ?) Dé-figurer ou pré-figurer au sens de d'ôter ou de donner un vrai visage (figure) ou encore au sens de "figure de style", qui permet de mettre au centre cette question de l'image déformante qu'est le Moi: image déformante de la femme joviale pourtant défigurée par une crise d'eczéma, image déformante de l'enfance heureuse défigurée par les avatars de l'identification infantile, image de l'amour défigurée/travestie par les pièges de l'acting out, l'image fragile de la gloire recherchée, défigurée par les aléas/déboires avec les institutions artistiques françaises, image des héros de l'enfance défigurée par la monstruosité de l'identification au personnage d'Hitler, image du statut social ou/et de la reconnaissance sociale défigurée/travestie par les tentations (la limousine, l'histoire de l'agriculture biologique ou dans La divinité aux yeux d'acier de l'ère automobile), ou encore image déformante des rêves d'enfance défigurée par l'intrusion de la réalité dans le rêve (l'histoire de la Ferrari de Magnum ou du Millenium Condor)
En fait, le livre dit ceci: la vie n'est pas autre chose qu'un subtil et gigantesque trompe-l'œil, une caméologie come dit l'auteur, dans laquelle l'ensemble des visions des êtres humains qui composent leur passé, leur présent et leur avenir, est inféodée à des malentendus souvent tragi-comiques, imposés et orchestrés par des "signifiants" camouflés dans le language de la réalité.
Noël Fuster
Noël Fuster is a professor of French Literature
Laurent La Gamba's Contribution to the history of American Art, by Lyn Cole
Laurent La Gamba’s insertion of himself into American art history is an impudent gesture which could be regarded as immodest were it not for the selflessness he displays in paying homage to the series of iconic works he has selected.
The very specific use of camouflage and self-portraiture, defining characteristics of his own work, are put to good use in this revisiting of the American pantheon. He blends himself into the American tradition via these two techniques which, far from imposing a reading upon these paintings, open up the possibilities of identification for the author. “I am another” takes on a whole new dimension.
The paintings themselves are merely sketched in as background to representations of himself, there is no attempt to do more than make the images identifiable and given their iconic status this is readily achieved.
The focus is upon the artist’s engagement with the works selected, these choices are emblematic and allow the artist to lay claim to a certain allegiance with the various masculine ideals thus portrayed. Jim Dine’s “Black Shovel” for example could exemplify an ironic distance from the American blue-collar worker known for his straight talking and his solidarity with his fellows; Jasper John’s “Three Flags” on the other hand conveys a doubt about the excesses of American patriotism and where it might lead; de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist work along with Jackson Pollock’s famous drip paintings are forever associated with macho self-destructiveness due to the artists’ addiction to alcohol, while the Pop art of Lichtenstein speaks to the abolition of the distinction between high art and mass media and the expansion of the realm of the artist. Basquiat’s graffiti art and its subsequent absorption into the canon as well as the recognition of Mapplethorpe’s photographs as art are a demonstration of this shift. Warhol was of course acknowledged as the game-changer and no account of American art would be complete without him. La Gamba has selected his “Marilyn” to impose his own image upon thus opening up a Pandora’s box of identifications. Not only is gender an issue but Warhol’s use of the image of Marilyn Monroe confronts his own sexuality or lack thereof and confirms him in the role of voyeur. This has reverberations for La Gamba since he chooses to use camouflage as a way into this painting, he takes pleasure in luring the viewer into a contemplation of him as Warhol’s “Marilyn”, throwing into question sexual identity and assuming an identification with an artist who took delight in transvestism. We enter a veritable hall of mirrors with all of the distortions that that entails, this is surely the artist’s intention.
La Gamba’s facility in conjuring up the work of other artists is matched by his simultaneous assertion and annihilation of self through the process of camouflage. He both wants and does not want to be seen. He uses the self-portrait as a way of usurping an artist’s work while laying claim to it whilst camouflage allows him to disappear into a work he is also laying claim to; both practices manifest respect. This is a tradition in art, you have to acknowledge your masters, or mistresses for that matter. It appears that the desire to be seen or not seen is evenly balanced since approximately half of these works involve camouflage and the other half more conscious self-portraiture. The self portraits tend to emphasise the instability of identity while camouflage implies the evaporation of identity altogether. The artist is playing with notions of slippage, of the recognition of an absence of identity and of the need to cling to some fictive support to enable us to engage with the world. We are summoned to witness his multiple selves as they parade before us in the guise of Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol et al and it serves to clarify what we mean by claiming an identity, even a false one, since, at some level, all identities are constructs.
Take La Gamba’s use of the cigarette as a trope, it is deliberately misleading, he does not smoke, yet the viewer makes assumptions about his character from this lone signifier. He is toying with our prejudices. The ludic quality of La Gamba’s involvement with his work draws the viewer in and obliges him/her to reflect on his/her own status in relation to these “masterpieces” of American art.
This is the only vanishing act which draws attention to itself. The artist derives pleasure from disconcerting his audience and, curiously enough, the audience derives pleasure from this deliberate attempt to confuse it. We enjoy being bamboozled by a profusion of selves portrayed in the context of American Modern Art which both mislead and entice the viewer into La Gamba’s self-professed identifications, none of which have any ultimate hold upon us or the artist.
Lyn Cole
Avant Propos à Monlywood par Claire Duane
"Petite poétique des hypocondries populaires", est le sous-titre donné rétrospectivement par son auteur aux différentes éditions de Monlywood.
Le livre commence par une boutade...une boutade "métaphorique" si l'on peut dire, une boutade qui fait réfléchir et qui parle de recherche de la gloire...
En 1995, l'auteur s'exile dans un petit village du sud de la France pour travailler à son œuvre de plasticien, village duquel il mènera une dense carrière internationale, "sans trop avoir à bouger de chez moi" comme il dit...mais après tout on s'aperçoit vite qu'il n'avait pas d'autre choix...d'où les hypocondries.
Voilà pour l'ancrage autobiographique. Il va ensuite se servir de cet "embrayeur" pour tisser son œuvre, non pas comme Proust en se faisant le narrateur d'une fiction linéaire et organisée, mais plutôt à travers un récit à multiples entrées, pourtant cohérente, mais dans laquelle il n'y aucune façon de saisir où se trouve le narrateur et où il porte son jugement. C'est d'ailleurs déjà ce qu'avait parfaitement compris Colin Manlove dans sa préface à l'édition anglaise de The Estheticon, à savoir que l'auteur est partout et nulle part à la fois, qu'il ne se pose jamais en juge et ne fait que mettre en présence une multiplicité de potentialités, elles-mêmes incapables de rendre compte d'une pensée linéaire.
Bien entendu, en ce sens, Monlywood ne peut en aucun cas se retrancher derrière le genre du roman, et Dieu sait si l'auteur rabâche à ce sujet, sur l'anachronisme d'un genre "qui sent le vomi et la charogne", quasiment impossible à transgresser, un genre qui consacrifie l'avènement du narcissisme et de l'ego. Et rompre narrativement avec cet egotisme puéril en commençant à la première personne, voilà bien encore ce sens de la provocation propre à l'auteur... C'est un peu comme si Laurent La Gamba nous disait qu'à chaque ligne il y a toujours cette puanteur, ce corps en putréfaction du narcissisme romanesque qui se dégage dès lors que l'écrivain saisit le bout de son stylo...et que cela n'est pas négociable...que l'on ne sait pas comment faire pour le dépasser...qu'il n'y a pas moyen...
Puis on s'aperçoit que tout auteur est né dans un certain "temps historique" pourrait-on dire...un monde dans lequel prend place sa "formation intellectuelle". Celui de l'auteur pourrait être celui de la guerre froide, du communisme mais aussi celui de Michael Jackson et de ET, celui de Lacan et de Saussure, et pour l'auteur, c'est bien là la question, il n'y a pas de différence. Car comment envisager la culture au sens large comme indivisible et non intellectualisée ? Chez l'auteur il n'y a pas d'intellectualisation de la culture, la culture est là, mais il faut en percer les faux-semblants.
Il y a chez La Gamba cette constante idée que la culture que l'on connaît, à travers les médias ou la télévision, n'est pas celle que l'on croit, qu'il n'y a pas de culture "intellectuelle", que la culture est pleine et entière, et que vous ne pouvez pas plus y échapper que vous ne pouvez échapper aux rayons du soleil...
Cette idée est corrélative de ce qu'il nomme son "épistémophilie", c'est à dire de cette volonté de ne pas se cantonner à la formation éducationnelle que l'on a reçue, mais de la dépasser en permanence, en tentant par exemple d'aller sans répit vers une spécialisation plus poussée à chaque fois. C'est pourquoi on a bien l'impression que se dégage de sa vie une sorte d'organisation par strates. Il y a d'abord la strate du littéraire, la strate du peintre hyperréaliste, la strate du gourou de la photographie plasticienne et ses camouflages dans les supermarchés. Laurent La Gamba ne fait rien à moitié.
Ce qui guide son regard bien évidemment c'est un peu la parabole de son texte sur André Breton: tous les littéraires savent qu'André breton est le fondateur du mouvement surréaliste mais personne ne sait qu'il était l'interne de Joseph Babinski, car justement les littéraires ignorent qui était Joseph Babinski.
Cette démarche est un levier de provocation qui lui permet de jongler avec les idées reçues, idées reçues de la culture américaine comme étant celle d'une culture populaire, idée reçue qui fait de Flaubert un écrivain institutionnel avec une œuvre largement caviardée au nom de la morale ou encore celle qui consacre André Malraux comme un écrivain militant et engagé...il dit: méfiez-vous, il n'en est rien !
Pourquoi ? à cause de la religion. De laquelle ? Mais de toutes les religions, pas d'une seule en particulier, non, de toutes, et de tous les discours qui en relèvent, même lorsque ceux-ci se présentent sous des discours non-religieux. Pour La Gamba, tout discours est un discours religieux. Je pense que c'est là un des grands axes de sa pensée. Voilà l'une des raisons pour laquelle Monlywood n'appartiendra jamais au genre autobiographique, plutôt une fiction autobiographique, une "autofiction", correspondrait mieux à la réalité... Mais comment comprendre de quoi il retourne sans avoir lu Californie, mon amour, The Estheticon ou Bienvenue à Lethargy Land ? Là est tout le problème. Car voilà, tout est lié. Alors au travail...
C. Duane, "Monlywood n'est pas une autobiographie."