Spiritofboz

The Book of Boz is neither a novel nor a poem nor a tale.  Even less is it a drama or an essay.

It is nothing except the style that inspires it and haunts it, to excess.

No points of reference here.

No beacon.

You sail wherever the wind blows.

Stories are woven, end, are reborn, with the flow, before a storm comes up to carry us further away, to the threshold of a new vision.

For, that is The Book of Boz : a work outside of norms, indefinable, created by a wanderer for other wanderers.

Translated from French by Barabara Harshav

Listen :

> The liminaire read and commented.

(pertinent works will be duly indexed and numbered)

THE SPEECH OF THE ANGELS (SA)

This speech will be conceived as a “fundamental language,” underlying the proliferation of discourse.  Constituted of 20 fundamental signs, it will be embodied in paintings in watered effects, in sculptures in primitive forms, or in monumental installations.  There will thus be a desire to promote a mystique, involving the Subject at the roots.  Confronting the proposed works, the spectator will choose his own progression: which sequence in particular; a strange configuration, discovered by chance; even a new arrangement, reconstructed on the basis of the perceived work.  In any case, the interpretation will be his own invention, determined by his own prerogatives.  At the extremes, our spectator will have a synthetic, contemplative and non-reducible vision, which will reveal his desire to him.

THE FOAM OF THE WORLD (FW)

These works aim at the ephemeral before congealing it into an icon.  To this end, they track down reality to grasp its essence.  A fleeting face during an riot; a “great man” idolized by the press; a painting buried in a museum; a pack of candid photographs; a tattoo on a clean-shaven skin; there will be many chances to determine, sublimate and transfigure reality.  In this respect, a work will be emblematic: an “E=MC3,” made of multicolored neon lights, matched by a treatise signed by a physicist.  A treatise in which the effects (atomic imbalance, climatic catastrophes, new forms of life…) due to a simple change of power (C3 instead of C2) will be described.

THE DEN OF IMAGES (DI)

This series will go through The Book of Boz from one part to another.  Often enchanted, it will translate into plastic form scenes, events, characters, even passions and fantasies coming from the text as such.  The opposite will also hold.  More than once, we witnessed this gripping spectacle: sculptures, paintings and installations suddenly returning to life.  Their protagonists then came out of their silence to plunge headlong into the narrative.  That, to the great despair of the writer, who, pressured on all sides, no longer knew which way to turn.

A fourth dimension will also be planned: “MY LIFE” (ML)

Devoted to the narrator, it will lay out enigmatic works, like anagrams.  Thus that “Self-Portrait with Gag” dated 1998.  In its own way, it will connote a lack, an inaudible word, a secret that shouldn’t be violated.

To this day, Boz remains a mystery.  Yet if we would illustrate him, we would conjure up a brand new religion instigated by artists.  Essentially monotheist, this religion would blend with other spiritualities.  Crossing the Rubicon – the three monotheisms – Boz will be concerned with the Yogis, the Boddhisattvas, the Vedas and the Brahmans.  For Boz contains them all, as well as the rabbis, the priests, the pastors or the mullahs (non-exhaustive list).

From Jerusalem to Benares, Boz will advance like a nebulous fantasy, fertile with legends.  There is something of Alice in Wonderland in Boz.  As for the officiating priests, they will be subdivided into four distinct groups: Men, Characters, Angels, and to lend spice to it all, the poorer classes of the appurtenances (dolls, scissors, frames, stuffed animals, brushes, glue, pencils, varnish, cameras, easels, suitcases, etc.).  Slaves among slaves, those will join with the Implements to fight their enemies.

For the matter is far from serious.  It will even be comical.  So funny that a pumpkin will be transformed straightaway into a carriage, to the great joy of the kiddies who will clap to beat the band.

Our article of faith will be the following: that Present Day Art finishes off and puts an end to Contemporary Art.  The aforementioned phenomenon will be identified by a reference based on Childhood.  This will sweep away artists as diverse as Maurizio Cattelan, Jeff Koons or Takash Murakami.  Or even Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, the Chapman brothers, Annette Messager, Alain Séchas – even a painter as out-of-date as Balthus.

Therefore, Boz will bring about this overthrow: that this appeal to childhood is at one and the same time a return to THE CHILDHOOD OF ART.  Boz will mean a pure eruption in the heart of a decadent aesthetic.  Minimalist colors, baroque sculptures, and mannerist performances are going to disintegrate, shatter and die, before being reborn differently.  For inherent in the artist is a yearning for the void.  This will spur him on, force him to go beyond himself, despite the surrounding negligence.

As such, Boz will contain all the books written in the world.  He will also contain the sum of all works of art produced since late prehistory.  Even better: possessing a prodigious memory, it will include the internal experience of all humanity.  For such is Boz: all human knowledge and experience ever since the start.

Aware of his responsibilities, he will also work on the Other Side.  For there, in the world of Men, the situation was hardly encouraging.  A falling birthrate.  Profligacy.  A weakeed nation-state.  Decline of the family.  Death of the great utopias.  Standardization of psyches.  A rise of radical Islam.  Evil taking over the whole planet.

Yet Boz won’t give up.  He will forge ahead.  He will have his temples, his heroes, his clergy, his rituals, his prayers and even his tablets of the law.  Considering his success, Boz will be sold out.  Immense crowds will follow him, singing hymns to his glory.  Multicolored flowers will mark his path.  For Boz is good!

Endowed with a thousand faces, subject to many metamorphoses, he will work especially on that colossal thing: the redemption of the Artist.

That will be his challenge.

His whim.

His ultimate wager.

That will also be the opportunity for a long narrative full of adventures and twists and turns.  It will be perceived as an initiatory journey or going through the looking glass, fated to play a joke on the horror that dwells in us.

Now, enough talking!

Let the adventure begin!

The Book of Boz was designed as a founder text. Its structure is an hypertext, justiciable to a nonlinear reading. Hence its elusive and vertiginous nature, intended to introduce the reader into an always moving universe. Putting it online won’t thus go smoothly. Indeed how to preserve its richness, while remaining educational ? How to give it to reading without betraying it ? Thinking twice about it, we will be careful, guarantee of an accurate slowness. So we will proceed in the following way : a progressive unveiling of the account per se, in a traditional form finally (the Tree), matched on the margins with the network of associations, resonances, repetitions and references that forge  its true frame (the Roots). Thus "Word-tracks" will be underlined which course will reveal adjacent texts providing in turn other "links", designing little by little the image of an infinite rhizome. A rhizome the internet user besides will be able to dissect, reverse, divert or crush as he like, following its own desires. Doing so, he will rebound "elsewhere", in a different place he will have to redefine, to design, to reshape in order that others can also alter it, refining their own tour of it.

I found my first character in the bottom of a match box.

He was fast sleeping.

His name was Jack Balance and I had known him a long time.

(more…)

The matter is recurring in the Boz and will constitute a chain which strongest link will be  a “star killer” whom project will be quite witted : kill artists to free their works. The lattest, duly demonized and sent off without any directions, will happen, in the end of the track, to confront Future (a character in his whole) in a titanic clash during the Great War. In fact, it’s in the Great Commentary Book that the metaphor finds its whole meaning : setting the enigma of  “a representation of void” meant as the only shape fitting Transcendence.

By Denise Lachaud, psychoanalyst :

- The search for the rightest word, the most accurate, from the quietest to the strongest.
- The air is vibrating with a strange light, between glittering and dark flames.
- Blood, death, Devil, hell, etc. are covered with writing or, more precisely, with the ink of writing.
- This book shows a kind of torrid beauty, striped with scars, a pier to hope, a cemetery of burned dreams.
- The author is working hardt to imagine the litterature to which he offers a reprieve.
- This book can’t lack readers.
- Laughs, fears, tears, angers are always fecund
- The narrator can embody all his characters, real or virtual, human and mineral, vegetal or animal.
- This string of short stories, going from story to story, without being history, would be one of the most beautiful ones, if it was only the fruit of imagination. But the writer knows you can’t escape history’s claws; they eat you away but can also sharpen your pen. More, the writer sculpts space where reality is apparent until the style devices.
- It’s an off-screen account. An account trying to probe wounds.
- The writer can make the difference between a litterary essay and a scathing attack thrown away.
- Powerful writing that doesn’t exclude elegance in service of rage.
- An insoluble puzzle and it’s right. A puzzle composed of this hero’s song key whose behaviour is painted with gentle strokes.
- As an erudite expert, he reworks myths. The work is monumental.
- The spirituality or the death ; anyway, only spirituality could one day deliver men from their sad condition.
- Dramatic action, in the Greek meaning, for better or for worse.
- The writer, sparkling with mischief, knows human soul’s fragility better than anyone.
- The work invits us, like the mermaids’ song, and we enter it with delight.
- The irony is sometimes scathing but never cynical.
- An account ? Better : a string of characters and events. We meet…
- The virtuosic writer creates an hurly-burly from the world, then dares to shove history.
- With this or these phantasmagorias, he presents us History as very close of the people’s life.
- The cut up movement of the accounts subverts the genre of this monumental work, animated with a certain logic, presented in a true litterary whirlpool, with the disconcerting style of weaved legends.
- Here, there is no end to History. The experience is everyday where surprise comes stunningly. Another way of questioning the reader and the interlocutor.
- An intimate book going universal, gliding from a world to another.
- This work’s life comes within the long term; the book is there and we can take it whenever we want. This way, it becomes revolutionary.
- A labyrinth of deep considerations, social, political, religious, mystical, philosophical, flirting with metaphysics. Fine art.
- It’s life, with its joys and blues, hopes, spleens and death.
- The writer is tirelessly probing mankind’s open wounds, which can be, as shown by Stoics, as many open doors on hope.
- He connects Antiquity (story, heroes, time, events, …) to authenticity; a very modern authenticity.
- His strength lies in the research and analysis of the facts and discourses, which he dismantles, searching for truth in avoiding to be lost causes’ lawyer.
- A rendez-vous experts shouldn’t miss, on no account; for these words are to litterature what dreams are to life : some essential narrow escapes and aspirations. With them, we dive in the deepest of existence, where the quiet laught and the stealth tear are born.
- We travel through these words which, unider his pen, get their golden glow back.
- His worlds arise, meet, fight, die in a rythmed topology which provokes images and catch gazes.
- An extraordinary care for details caused by an exaggerated sensibility.
(more…)

If we intend to compare and confront the Book of Boz to monuments of literature, three masterworks can be invoked right away. (Many others could probably be examined, from Goethe to Nietzsche or Kafka, through Nerval and even Proust…, but choices have to be made).

Here are these three elected works, in my opinion, seemingly responding to the complexity of the Book of Boz :

The Divine Comedy (1314-1320) by Dante (1265-1321), Don Quixote (1605-1615) by Cervantes (1547-1616) and finally, more recenty and maybe less known too, Albert Cohen’s (1895-1981) fiction work, which builds up in its whole, like Julien Friedler’s, an one and only always rewritten book, indeed even a cycle, formed by Solal (1930), Mangeclous (1938), Belle du Seigneur (1968) and Les Valeureux (1969). (For the record, Les Valeureux was a part of Belle du Seigneur; the publisher Gallimard arbitrarily choosed to separate them, duplicating the author’s dilemna, quartered between the goy world and his dear tribe’s one, in the intend of reducing the already substantial amount of pages of Belle du Seigneur).

(more…)

In fact, this locution is resonating with many scattered fragments in our book. From associations to associations, it creates a string of which we can point to the main terms : Hell - fire - smoke - a “sultry heat” - even “crematorium furnaces”, correlated with a holocaust. Each term in the series proving besides to be a “track-word”, we will de facto consider “matchbox” as a signifier lending itself to a progressive derivation of the whole Work. Oppositely to the “extinguished candle”, we will then sense the existence of a very blazing  and blinding luminous power. This will draw a kind of demarcation line between Good and Evil, unknown at first.

In this case, in avoiding to make the thesis heavy, only a text will be quoted. Evocative of a “sultry heat”, this text will exemplify , in a litterary way, the idea exposed in “the Boz and the Net”.

(more…)

We’ll think here of our visual work and its referents : Primitivism, in the “return to origin” meaning, initiated as early as 1907 by “les demoiselles d’Avignon”; and Pop Art, meant as its opposite, the un-dealization of art, for the benefit of icons leaning to triviality, of present, jet set successes and money worhiping. A tendency the Boz company will run to its edge, in initiating a company meant from the very beginning as a work of art for the form. For the content, however it’s rather different. Far from ephemera, the Boz company will indeed convey creations questionning Transcendence, in a topical way, derivated from Pop Art in the proven intent to subvert it. A paradoxal move evoking a figuere dear to antique mythology : the Trojan Horse.

Indeed, on the artistic level, our work will operate as a pair of pincers : an arm - Primitivism- questioning divine’s emergence; a second brand - Boz Company - to enter in the world and confront it to non-incidental things. (see Great Commentary Book’s segment about fashion)