Jean-Philippe Toussaint — Livre/Louvre — Le Louvre — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 8 → June 11, 2012

As part of the series of events dedicated to the arts of the book, the Louvre has extended an invitation to the Belgian writer and filmmaker Jean-Philippe Toussaint, who has devised an exhibition entitled “Livre/Louvre” bringing together photographs, videos, installations and performance pieces to “explore the theme of the book without focusing on writing.”

Through this exhibition, Jean-Philippe Toussaint contemplates reading, the passage of time, and literature. Among other subjects, he deals with the notions of libraries and collections, with a particular focus on the Edmond de Rothschild Collection in the Louvre’s Department of Prints and Drawings. Toussaint also trains his gaze on intellectual activity through an installation combining drawings by Le Brun with a performance piece involving a glass stall that is the scene of an experiment.

In addition, the artist has produced two large photographic compositions specifically for the exhibition. The first, entitled Tuesday at the Louvre, sheds fresh light on the life of the museum on the day of the week when it is closed to the public, while the second is a group portrait of contemporary writers freely inspired by Fantin-Latour’s Homage to Delacroix. Similarly, the eternity of the written word and the ephemeral nature of reading are brought into dialogue through the exceptional juxtaposition of the original manuscript of Beckett’s En attendant Godot, together with the eighth edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, both presented alongside nine electronic tablets displaying translations of Dante’s opus in different languages.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint is a writer and filmmaker who graduated from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris in 1978 and holds a DEA (diploma of advanced studies) in contemporary history. He is the author of nine novels written in a minimalist style, all published by Editions de Minuit. Artist-in-residence at the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, Japan in 1996, Toussaint was awarded the Prix Médicis for Fuir in 2005. His novels have been translated into some twenty languages. The “joyful reduction to essentials” deployed in Toussaint’s written works is carried to the extreme in his cinematographic productions.

Jean Philippe Toussaint, Mains, Détails, 0 Photographies © J.P. Toussaint, 2012

The Love of Reading (2005–2012)

The first section of the exhibition presents a wall of images made up of a series of 84 photographs by J.-P. Toussaint. Luminous and boldly detailed, they show the effects of the passage of time, where the books are almost always the same, while clothing and faces change.

In this same section, two exceptional manuscripts from the Edmond de Rothschild Collection are also presented: Dante’s Divine Comedy and the original manuscript of Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot. These two manuscripts are shown alongside the computer on which the novel Fuir was written.

The Universe (which some call the Library)

In this vast, luminous installation calling to mind the heavenly firmament, Jean-Philippe Toussaint draws an analogy between the library and the universe, where the learnedly ordered library is the world. The word “book” is a focal point of the exhibition, as evidenced by neon signs spelling out the translations of this word in many different languages.

Jean Philippe Toussaint, Mardi au Louvre, Détails, 0 © J.P. Toussaint, 2012

Tuesday at the Louvre

Tuesday at the Louvre is a original photographic composition by the artist, which aims to depict life at the Louvre on Tuesday, the day when the museum is closed to the public, evoking works of other artists depicting studio paintings. Ladders, scaffolding and installers are the main protagonists in Toussaint’s composition, which is dominated by Delacroix’s masterpiece The Death of Sardanapalus.

Group portrait of writers

This section features a photographic portrait of several writers (Pierre Bayard, Emmanuel Carrère, Philippe Djian, Jean Echenoz, Oliver Rolin and Jean-Philippe Toussaint) assembled around a Delacroix engraving, freely inspired by Henri Fantin-Latour’s celebrated painting, Homage to Delacroix, encouraging dialogue between the past and the present.

Jean Philippe Toussaint, Autoportrait en lecteur, 0 © J.P. Toussaint, 2012

LIRE/LIVE, an original installation

This last section of the exhibition is a performance installation, involving a live model sitting on a chair in a glass stall reading a book, wearing a helmet fitted with electrodes, which is connected to a control panel recording everything happening in the model’s mind while reading. Despite the medical environment, this apparent scientific reality is nothing other than a ruse, since the data shown on screen are actually part of an original video work by Jean-Philippe Toussaint derived from medical image recordings. Three Self-portraits as reader are presented opposite this installation, together with anatomical drawings by Charles Le Brun from the Louvre’s collections.