27 May 2016
6:00 pm | Studio | ICA
Pierre Guyotat has been a unique figure in art and writing over the past 50 years, inspiring innumerable artists, film-makers, writers and choreographers. Foucault, Pasolini, Genet, Barthes, Derrida and many others lauded his work in the 1960s and 70s, and protested against its governmental censorship in France. Foucault wrote of Guyotat’s book Eden, Eden, Eden that he had created “a language of startling innovation. I have never read anything like it in any stream of literature. No-one has ever spoken as he speaks here.” Guyotat’s recent and contemporary work, such as Coma, remains as seminal as ever.
In this launch event for Stephen Barber’s book on Guyotat’s work, Revolutions and Aberrations — based on dialogues with Guyotat over a period of twenty years, and the first book in English on his work — he and Paul Buck discuss Guyotat’s work in its depth of experimentation and its capacity to provoke extreme outrage. The event includes screenings of film documents such as that of Guyotat’s appearance at the ICA in 1995, along with readings of translations from his work.
Stephen Barber is a professor at Kingston University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture; his recent books include England’s Darkness (2014) and Performance Projections (2015).
Paul Buck—poet, novelist and performance artis — is the co-editor of Cabinet Gallery’s Vauxhall & Company publications.
