KIRAC: The End of the Boomers’ Reign

Late January 2023: a thousand outraged voices set the sinister “Twittersphere” buzzing. The cause is a film trailer circulating online in which writer Michel Houellebecq, naked as the day he was born, can be seen hungrily kissing a Dutch student. People are already calling it “arty porn”, in which the writer is said to engage in unsimulated acts. Public opinion grates and sneers; Libération fumes. Houellebecq, the verdict goes, is descending into something unhealthy after taking a “turn to the far right”. Porn, morality and politics: viral bingo, served with a salty, typically Dutch seasoning. As for the trailer, it intrigues: the atmosphere suggests an unsettling docufiction, somewhere between Lars von Trier's Dogme and an art student's amateur film.

The origin of evil

And with good reason. Announced for 11 March, this medium-length film is the work of a young Amsterdam-based couple, Stefan Ruitenbeek and Kate Sinha, operating behind a transmedia collective, KIRAC, an acronym for Keeping It Real Art Critics. A whole programme in itself. Their website consists mainly of talkative medium-length films in which the two activists interview luminaries of contemporary art, push them into corners and draw out a few falsehoods to feed a very nebulous “critique of criticism”. Nothing terribly subversive at first sight, unless you live exclusively for Art Press or have invested in NFTs.

Except that, over the past few episodes, the temperature has suddenly risen a notch, particularly with the video devoted to the erotic stirrings of Sid Lukkassen, a conservative philosopher well known in the Netherlands and also a consultant at the European Parliament. Ironising about a rapprochement between right and left, the film places a leftist student in the philosopher's hands, and she manages to seduce him. It is released against his wishes, already causing a small scandal in the relevant circles.

With Houellebecq, KIRAC shifts into a higher gear. As the trailer explodes across the web, Stefan Ruitenbeek grants interview after interview and recounts the circumstances, sordid or pathetic according to taste, in which the star novelist came to join his project. In contact with the writer, the couple are said to have promised Houellebecq and his wife a few uninhibited groupies, mostly art or philosophy students, we are told. There was only one condition: the encounters had to be filmed and would be incorporated into their new film. At least, that is what the Dutch collective claims. The encounters were filmed in a Paris hotel, and the neurasthenic writer apparently gave quite a performance — still according to Ruitenbeek.

The organ of fiction

Yet a few weeks later, the affair takes another turn: Michel Houellebecq believes he has been deceived and begins legal proceedings to have the film banned. A strange twist. The champion of French letters is himself a master of communication and a skilful director of his own image. He has even made his living from it: after all, the heroes of his novels are never anything but alter egos, victims of the sexual misery of which the writer has been the herald since the 1990s.

But now, through the collective's camera, the paper character is suddenly reoccupied by flesh. It is a kind of backlash: Houellebecq is no longer a literary silhouette, a sickly, sardonic Droopy around whom an endless series of farcical plots can be woven. He is also a body that gets hard, a body that kisses. We must assume the author himself was unsettled by it. How else are we to understand this sudden reversal?

The age of indifference

For Stefan Ruitenbeek, the question is barely worth asking: “I make no claim to journalistic or documentary truth in my films. Whether it is true or false does not matter, because it is a work of art,” he tells us. Ultimately, KIRAC plays with a reality that has become illegible, in the wake of Debord or Baudrillard. There is certainly a situationist temptation in KIRAC, which intends to oppose the predation of reality by “elites and academic institutions” with a genuine playground capable of putting things back into perspective. An art of critical interference that would, paradoxically, restore things to order.

At a time when contemporary art is nothing more than another cryptocurrency, when Nobel Prizes in Literature are handed to female hacks for services rendered to sisterhood, and above all when pornography is no longer produced by old, perverse directors but by young women themselves, in the privacy of their bedrooms and under the gaze of their webcams — see OnlyFans — reality is no longer a given, to paraphrase Duchamp, but something soluble in the great collective, digital fiction. In this world of the undifferentiated, authors such as Houellebecq look like survivors, remnants of a forgotten age. Those are the remnants KIRAC wants to bait and brutalise.

A trap in murky waters

That, at least, is the impression given by Ruitenbeek, always quick to deliver lengthy ideological refrains: “It is a real battle to free myself, to break away from this old world that is dying, dying with the boomers and everything built after the Second World War. And that quest is the very subject of my art. It is the spectacle you can see in my films. And every stage of my quest, such as this encounter with the ‘old world’, Michel Houellebecq — some people online call him ‘the last real human being’ — is part of that quest. And this character, Michel Houellebecq, is entangled in the supposed separation between himself and his literature. He thinks art is no longer as relevant. He is fading away. He does not get the Nobel Prize. So he goes out and says, as himself, the same things that the characters in his books have already said. Because the characters have lost their power,” Ruitenbeek explains, before adding: “And now he sees what happens when he says it himself. And the whole desire to become an erotic artist, to use his real body instead of words on paper, is part of his own artistic battle.”

Sophisms and nonsense

KIRAC knows how to wield a concept and shamelessly practises an art of abrasive sophistry. Kate Sinha presents herself as the collective's great theorist and produces commissioned texts and reflections published on their website. There we encounter Ayn Rand, apostle of American-style libertarianism. A role model? Not even that. “I think only an idiot can take Ayn Rand seriously,” Kate Sinha tells us. “But it was still fascinating to discover exactly what makes her intellectual and ideological construction stupid.” In another article, she compares Jeff Koons with Robespierre. Both are supposedly apostles of a “secularising moralism with no way out other than endless opportunism”. “Robespierre,” Kate insists, “is the symbol of the terrifying moment when something apparently endless, limitless, reaches its end.”

As so often, KIRAC kicks the question into touch, with the mildly irritating air of overgifted brats, top-of-the-class pupils reinvented as paragons of agitprop. Stefan adds: “KIRAC is a pure product of the art world and postmodern thought. I started as an artist making contemporary art for galleries, art collectors and museums. Then I decided to make films from that position. By pointing my camera at my girlfriend, who is an archaeologist: she began discussing modern art as though it consisted of archaeological discoveries. It was very effective. That is the first episode of KIRAC. Hopefully our films will transcend our own postmodernism and stand the test of time. Mozart was also a product of his time. Michel Houellebecq is a pure French boomer. But that is not all there is to it. We also present various semi-anachronistic or atavistic ideas. In episodes 19 and 20, we propose the idea of the hardcore portrait to make art interesting again, as opposed to all the boring abstract and political shit you see at international art fairs such as Art Basel.”

The media stunt of the month

So what, exactly, is KIRAC? Even after several days of exchanges, we are not much closer to knowing. A cancerous tumour of postmodernity, situationist pornography, or simply a joke by clever little fellows desperate for recognition? One ends up believing poor Michel Houellebecq, who undoubtedly sinned through pride and vice: he was duped, deceived through the very thing in which he sinned. Ultimately, KIRAC's methods of approach do indeed resemble pimping and sexual blackmail. A technique that has flourished in contemporary art — Benjamin Griveaux knows something about it. In any event, KIRAC has pulled off its stunt: creating a buzz at any price, that contemporary obsession.

Marc Obregon