John Holten The Readymades
The Readymades A Broken Dimanche Press publication Oslo, Berlin, Dublin, 2011 www.brokendimanche.eu
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Ragnarök I
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First Edition
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ISBN: 978-3-00-032627-1
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Copyright © John Holten 2011 www.johnholten.com Artwork © Darko Dragičević 2011 www.darkodragicevic.net
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Artworks: Darko Dragičević Literary editor: Nora Mahony Book design and layout: FUK Laboratories www.fuklab.org Assistant editor: Ida Bencke
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Printed on Munken Print Cream Printed by Gallery Print, Kreuzberg, Berlin
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This is a work of fiction. All characters, situations, conversations, scenarios, art and cultural occurrences are the invention of the author with the exception of those belonging to factual history.
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‘Manifesto’ by Hugo Ball which appears on pages 62/63 was accessed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dada_Manifesto_(1916,_Hugo_Ball) ‘Forty Degrees Above Dada’ by Pierre Restany which appears on pages 67/68 was originally published in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: a Sourcebook of Artists' Writings, ed. by Kristine Stiles & Peter Howard Selz (University of California Press 1996) Nicolas Bourriaud’s curator’s statement which appears on pages 78/79 was translated by the author from a text accessed from http://www.fondation-entreprise-ricard.com/expositions/consistance_visible/pres/ Ljubomir Micić’s Zenith text which appears on page 109 was published in Impossible Histories: Historic Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918—1991, eds Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković (The MIT Press 2006)
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Broken Dimanche Press gratefully acknowledges the support of Jugend in Aktion.
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John Holten would like to thank: Create Louth and the Arts Council of Ireland
La Consistance du visible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Invisible Dark Matter, Weighing Heavy . . . . . . . . . 50 ‘To Warmann’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
For reasons unknown, the son of a Hungarian parliamentarian, M. Warmann, asphyxiated himself in a boarding-house on Rue Saint-Guillaume.
— Novels in Three Lines (‘Les Faits-Divers’ in Le matin) by Félix Fénéon, trans. Luc Sante. Edition NYRB
And then one night, as the story goes, the gods tried to make a return. The Serb let the heavy streetdoor close silently behind him, his huge frame dwarfed by the expanse of its opening and went out across the street, his familiar emptiness defined that night by the cold, the lateness of the hour, the empty streets left between still open bars and brothels and sushi restaurants. L’Avenue de l’Opéra had some traffic moving down either side of its length and the streetlights ascending to the Garnier were enough to keep his mood up. He turned right and walked down rue des Petits-Champs, a mote against the detail of storefront and awning, then circled the near-deserted bauble of Place des Victoires. The cold had been so dry in recent days that it reminded him of the cold of the Slavonic winter; more specifically the cheap material of his shirts carried over from boyhood, chafing his pubescent breasts and hysterical nipples. Once they had even burst, bleeding stigmata pressed onto him like some profane favour unwanted. It was the time of year for the gods to make a return. The rills of water were captured from one day to the next in ice, their bulging forms caught as they gushed out in the morning’s gutter founts, caught like spirits photographed while fleeing before some impending armageddon. Crossing onto rue Etienne Marcel he saw that they were still rapt in their escape. The cold was so total the stalls of the Marché Saint-Honoré had been empty lately and washed down by lunchtime, the slosh and brine freezing as dark started to draw out the city’s infinite lights: this Serb, this disbeliever of progress, had to chase an hour or two of daylight, go out and buy some fish at the market from his friend the fishmonger before going back to his bed to continue
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his erasure of the preceding night. His group had seen two black men, huge like sumo wrestlers, punched and pinned to the ground by indifferent Algerian bouncers, their victim’s blood the same dark carmine as almost everything he remembers from the scene. It was like their very first days in the city, hardened war refugees meeting anger and violence on every street corner. He was back out eyeing for violence, for some shimmer of erotic assent. He entered the subdued café on rue Montmartre in which they always started their nights and he placed his hands on the metallic bar, bracing himself. Seita and Saffa joined the men whenever they got tired of the trendier parts of town that they felt it necessary to frequent: Convention, Belleville, Saint Germain and Mabillon even, if fashion dictated so. They liked having kirs with them because it recalled how Russians, homeless from the revolutions, would have been in the long ago and in Paris everyone liked to recall how it was in the long ago. They liked that when fucking there were three men to their two, how as a group they were all equal in their nakedness and could share the broken world the city had destroyed for them alone to pleasure their needs with. They had faith in what it was no longer possible to have faith in. Prenez un kir avec les victimes de la faim was their ironic way of deciding to go across town to the quiet, bland rue Montmartre and have some fun; they were the kind of moped girls, la jeunesse dorée, who read and venerated Catherine Millet and believed her sexual licentiousness was the real thing; they hated Sarkozy but would like to be the girl fucking him; they made animated points in the air with their cigarettes whenever they liked to think about getting what they wanted whenever and wherever they liked. They made the three guys grin indulgently; they made themselves laugh out loud. They appeared on the other side of the window, catching the disbeliever in profile, elbow bearing his weight, shored up at the bar, as if on time for an appointment that had never been made. Through the window it was obvious he was on his own, his friends leaving him in the waiter’s precoccupied company. The girls ran the agenda whenever
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they came along, that much was sure, and the disbeliever, as always, was glad to see them come in from the cold. This night they were both drunk before they even started, the dark cold getting to them, opening up a lewd apathy with routine. They were both excited and talked over each other, slurping at their glasses, Seita’s stockinged, strong leg inserted immediately between his legs the better to feel out the stiffening of his prick, the jostling at the bar allowing for desultory groping. They had news of a gathering in the third or maybe ninth, not far from Republique in any case. – Le Cabaret des filles d’extase, on va y aller j’espère. – On verra. – Viens vite, viens.
She grabbed at his crotch the way she always did when she wanted to rise him up out of his stupor. Drink the coffee, she was saying, ignoring the arrival of the round headed one and the sickly intellectual. It was always the same whenever the girls showed up: noisy remonstrations and physical persuasion along the length of the metallic bar. The two girls held themselves so well they could do whatever they wanted, they could walk up and down the bar, knocking pastis flying and do a little routine for the whole café, forcing them all out on the street, hungry for more. The disbeliever played it cool, pleasing himself with their ebullience, letting the blood flow as slowly as it would without them and so driving the two of them mad with childish frustration. The three men grinned and drank their café-calvados like Breton fishermen bolstering themselves to brave the sea and the mundane prospect of gutting infinite scores of fish. They talked sex dreams and the Belgian parliament’s inability to form a government. – Viens vite, viens. On est chaude lá.
The club was a surprise, a place for tourists not far from the Cirque d’Hiver, a run down slot in the façades of the rue des Filles du Calvaire that stood for all things tarnished and dead to day. From the crowded hallway he made out the abandoned spectacle and the tiredness of
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inert tassles: les filles d’extase were hyperactive with paychecks and their own bodies fused with the proximity of suited people, all turning into beasts before their ribald bodies. One girl was hooded in a loose robe, a shrieking Saint Theresa. Most remained in their outfits, the room so hot from the red lights and smoke that they sweated anyway, their spandex shorts like black paint ready to run under the heat. A cast of the hungry filled out the baking green room, bottles of yellow widow were popped open and drunk. The waiter from La Connetable lay on the floor, recognisable to most from many febrile dawns, the one man among them who could always afford to orgy. He chattered about poppers and the stupidity of glory holes, smoking a pipe, grinning and giggling and hiccupping, waving to the disbeliever when he saw him by the door. Saffa went over and lay beside him, speaking into his ear gravely as if the bombs were dropping and she had to break the news. In the middle of night they started to don theatrical props, to mobilise their bodies, stroke each other, warm up. The Serb started to gulp, swallow champagne indiscriminately. There was a new face for everyone and they all quickly had one, a poor Grand Guignol that left the scene a cut-up deformation of some penurious idea of the gods, a secular cartoon of the sacred. Horny and inebriated: faithless. Soon it was a demented cavalcade, a Procession of the Cross that veered out onto the rue des Filles du Calvaire, the rumour of a four-star hotel suite drawing out the reluctant and prudent. The gods were returning: Venetian boys and girls at carnival, on their way to a holy wedding of god and mortal, defiant and doomed. Anonymity a beautiful shade overtaking the street lights, real life and people who were no longer people: they were something much more, something much less. The gods, they were on the return. There just inside the door were several recidivist sybarites. There across the two huge double beds the disbeliever, the round headed one and several others: les enragÊs left homeless and without love from the peace and unity of fallen borders. There was Pan, braying like a tortured Montenegrin hill goat, legs bent, a proud rump in the air
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ready. There in the cramped bathroom skilled practitioners of a certain acceptable self-sedition, recognisable to everyone from television sets giving out deranged smut in sharp focus, cut up bodies reassembled in throwaway print publications. There were cocks a-wank, laughter and spider-fingers tickling out tears of anguish and release. There was a diapason of pain and beauty; anonymous naked bodies, cheap vin mousseux being poured over cum smeared chests and backs. There was the pervert, as the papers would later call him, the son of a Hungarian parliamentarian, who had managed to asphyxiate himself: he was the first to go. Amongst the Janus faces deep in the clefts of assholes and pussy, the geometry of abandon plotting their arrangement, his belted neck looked in one direction only and that was at his slit-eye opening, holding the air back for the surge of pleasure he never got to register fully. Nobody had seen his selfish withdrawal, his last stand against a unity he wanted no part of, the truer image of the beyond his to have then forever. The son of a Hungarian parliamentarian, not that anyone knew this, was dead in their midst, his hung head a totem to dissolve and leave the conceits of the world behind – the stunned silence brought their own lives, left behind on the deserted boulevards, back to shadow them and immediately, spontaneously, they fed off the waiter’s giggling and continued on with their orgy with renewed rigour. The gods returned as they can only do in nightmares, and there were termagants and viragos, Seita and Saffa amongst them, roaring profanities in four different languages, drawing blood with their claws. Artemis, Persephone, failing artists and unapologetic businessmen, all the soiled hosts of countless strangers turning the grinding mill wheel of intoxication, the crushed white flour alive with the struggle of wheedling maggots. And suddenly they all had heavy revolvers in their free hands, capering and twisting into irrepressible contortions, penetrating each other further, fucking profligate. Suddenly, they were shooting the gods.
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