Libération — Stefan Ruitenbeek: art is a dirty business

Profile. The provocative Dutch video artist has filmed several pornographic scenes with Michel Houellebecq, who wants to prevent them from being shown.

By Quentin Girard. Published 21 March 2023 at 17:52.

An erect penis doubles in a mirror. A naked pregnant woman cradles an orchid between her legs. A man’s head protrudes from the vagina of a mannequin with its legs spread. And amid this jumble of photographs, statues, paintings and other objects of an artistic-sexual nature, Stefan Ruitenbeek, 40, his curly hair a mess, wearing glasses on a grandmotherly chain and a T-shirt riding up over his belly, films his favourite actress, Jini Jane, 23. Or rather, he films Jini Jane’s cameraman-boyfriend filming Jini Jane as she opens the fridge lasciviously in a short purple dress, arching her backside. Stefan Ruitenbeek loves nothing more than the meta: art looking at art looking at art, which, and so on. If, in addition, a journalist who has come to interview him about the Houellebecq affair observes the moment and appears in the shot, a fine day is in store.

The three accomplices have met at a friend’s enormous apartment in Rotterdam to record their response to the French writer, who wants to ban the object entitled Kirac 27. In theory, anyway, because at this moment the student and OnlyFans performer is caressing a bottle with her bare feet, and the connection is not entirely clear. ‘I’ve been following her for years, and I have a big-brother relationship with her,’ Stefan Ruitenbeek explains in fluent English. ‘It’s good that her boyfriend brings desire back into it.’

At the end of last year, Michel Houellebecq filmed pornographic scenes with several actresses, including Jini Jane, in his wife’s presence, for a Stefan Ruitenbeek project. Since the trailer appeared, the author of Submission has been going from French tribunals to a Dutch court to ensure that no one ever sees this experience. While the Amsterdam judges have not yet delivered their ruling, expected on 28 March, the writer has denounced the video artist’s lack of ‘loyalty, courtesy and respect for others’ on his website.

In recent years, Stefan Ruitenbeek has acquired a modest reputation as a troublemaker in the Netherlands with his project Kirac, ‘keeping in real art critics’. In highly niche videos, often more than an hour long, where reality and fiction dance together, he debates the contemporary creative world with those close to him, particularly Kate Sinha, the mother of his child. To tear it to pieces, naturally: he considers it sanitised and fearful, under the thumb of ‘billionaires who make it boring and predictable’, when its primary goal should be ‘to emancipate people’. He says: ‘The boomers had their sexual revolution in the sixties and have since decided that sex and provocation are no longer necessary in art. That is bullshit, obviously.’

In gonzo mode, Stefan Ruitenbeek and his friends go to museums and fairs to provoke artists and gallerists. Rather aggressively. Some burst into tears; everyone knows who he is, yet his opponents and victims strangely continue to answer him. ‘Even the most cynical people, with the guiltiest consciences, need to confess, a little like the Grand Inquisitor to Jesus in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov,’ he attempts to explain, messianically. Ruitenbeek sees himself as ‘a man of the left; in any case, I have all its traumas, inherited from my family’. As early as the first Kirac films, in 2016, specialist Roos van der Lint instead identified a ‘populist rhetoric’, close to the far right, resulting in being ‘always against, never for’.

The anxious, compulsive provocateur grew up in Eindhoven in a cultured family: a mother who was a teacher, a father who worked as a researcher in a psychiatric institute, an aunt who ran a hospital and an uncle who was a curator at a Berlin museum. He offers all these details to show that he did not come from nowhere. As a child, he was seized by a terror: the possibility of death. Raised in an atheist family, he realised that his only way out was to become like ‘Mozart, Beethoven or Bach, immortal through their music’. ‘So I took lessons at the conservatory, and at fourteen I realised I had no talent,’ he says. ‘But I didn’t despair. I’m pragmatic; I told myself I had to find my own path.’

As a young adult, after studying art, he took up photography and disliked what he made. After obtaining a grant from a museum, he gave all the money to a porn production company: ‘Make an art film with it.’ The work was produced, never shown, and Stefan Ruitenbeek found himself ostracised. ‘I know what it means to be cancelled. I’m not afraid of it happening again with Houellebecq.’ He went into exile in Berlin for several years, slipping into a ‘very dark, obsessive haze’. ‘I was stuck, depressed, and I met Kate Sinha. I started recording us, and I felt liberated. I could use the narrative structure of videos to explain what was weighing on me, instead of creating inert objects like my photographs.’ Kirac was born: a desire to be loved, and also to take revenge on a milieu he loathes as much as he wants its validation.

And Michel Houellebecq in all this? Ruitenbeek has read all his books, his poems and his interviews, and loves Atomised above all. The writer’s excesses do not trouble him in the slightest. ‘An artist can be as psychotic, mad, delusional, antisemitic and racist as he wants; what matters is what he creates,’ he judges. ‘I read Céline’s Bagatelles for a Massacre, and it was fascinating.’

Although he appreciates Bergman and Kubrick, he argues that his productions are above all interpretations of Houellebecq’s novels, ways of unmasking the world. It is only logical that the writer should appear in the 27th episode. At last, validation, a blessing. If Stefan Ruitenbeek is to be believed, the project’s sexual dimension came about almost by chance, as the discussions unfolded. Over recent months, he has spent a great deal of time following Jini Jane in a kind of intimate diary of her work as a sex worker. She says: ‘He is a bit like my mentor. He pushes me to take part in big projects I wouldn’t dare launch myself, because I’m too introverted.’ Their relationship, ambiguous to say the least, takes them to Paris and from there to the apartment of the author of Serotonin, where the porn actress has a threesome with the Goncourt winner and his wife. That day, the writer kisses her and complains of living in a mediocre world. He talks, but does not really listen to the video artist who has come to show him his work and admiration.

Since then, the fourth wall has collapsed. They have slipped into a parallel world, a real novel. As yet without an ending. Kirac 27, which one would not bet on ever being released, hisses like a snake above everyone’s heads. A pity: beyond the question of the sex scenes, the five previously unseen minutes we were able to watch suggest a fascinating fiction of the real. The showman has burned his idol.

1 August 1982: Born.

2016: Kirac begins.

November 2022: Meets Houellebecq.

January 2023: Release of Kirac 27 announced.

March 2023: Various court cases between Ruitenbeek and the writer.