As Galerie Azzedine Alaïa presents an exhibition of his life's work, we look at the who, what and why of the prolific French author
Who? Pierre Guyotat is a writer who epitomises the literary avant-garde; a pioneer of linguistic creativity who celebrated his right to protest and freedom of speech during mid-20th century Paris. With collaborators including the likes of fellow luminaries Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (each of whom wrote a preface to his 1970s novel Eden, Eden, Eden), Guyotat epitomised the progressive liberalism of the French creative vanguard, challenging enforced militarism, literary censorship and championing revolution – both politically and poetically.
Born in Bourg-Argental in 1940, Guyotat wrote his first novel shortly before being drafted into the Franco-Algerian War in 1960. Following two years of service, he was arrested for “inciting desertion” and subsequently imprisoned – firstly, in a hole in the ground for three months, later in a detention center – an experience which informed much of his early writing. Throughout his life, Guyotat has engaged with his transgressive contemporaries; to name but a few examples, he briefly joined the French Communist Party, travelled the Sierra Maestra with Fidel Castro, protested on behalf of soldiers, immigrants and sex workers, and was part of the re-establishing of the Pompidou Centre. His extensive output has become a lynchpin of French philosophy, politics and literature, and continues to be revered by activists and authors alike.
What? While Guyotat's early work often explicitly focused on his own, personal experience of war, much of his later work was slightly more abstract and predominantly preoccupied with obscenity, the erasure of taboo and practical illegibility, often employing grammatical and syntactical confusion and vastly extended sentences, making his work comparable to the likes of James Joyce. His writing regularly employs a rhythmic but ceaseless and visceral brutality to communicate the inhumanity of war and sexual degradation; in fact, he told Bomb Magazine "I've always been revolted by existence, by the very fact of being human."
His 1970 masterpiece Eden, Eden, Eden was so highly regarded by his contemporaries that, when was banned by the French authorities as pornographic, a petition was created including the signatures of Italo Calvino, Georges Pompidou, Jean Genet and Simone de Beauvoir to protest – and when the book wasn't awarded the Prix Médicis, Claude Simon resigned from the jury. More recently, his work has taken a more narrative (or, in his words, "normative") approach; since 2006, he has published fictional autobiographies which explore his adult life, childhood and pre-childhood in the light of his constant pursuit for creative expression.
Why? On Thursday, April 21st, Galerie Azzedine Alaïa presents an exhibition celebrating Guyotat's oeuvre, placing his works in a physical dialogue with that of authors including Paul McCarthy, Juliette Blightman and Klaus Rinke. Additionally, Guyotat has created drawings for the exhibition, which hang alongside his frenetically amended original manuscripts. It is an immersion into the world of Guyotat and those who revere him; an introduction for the uninitiated and a comprehensive celebration for his admirers.
Pierre Guyotat, La matière de nos oeuvres is at Galerie Azzedine Alaïa, 18, rue de la Verrerie, from April 22 to June 12 2016.
