This is the fourth and final video documenting the events organized in conjunction to the exhibition Archaeology of Longing at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris. I’ll continue making videos for Sideshows, but probably less regularly. Anyway, the video here shows excerpts from a lecture on boredom conducted by Lars Svendsen. The video is less than ten minutes, so it’s really just a fragment of an hours-long program, including a Q&A session with the public, which was interesting if a bit contentious—the lack of a psychoanalytic approach in his presentation was questioned. Lars’ response, “I don’t trust Freud.”

Indeed, in his book, A Philosophy of Boredom, Lars does not approach boredom with a psychoanalytic eye. Yet, while his exploratory investigation is not a psychoanalytic in a materialist sense, it still combines research drawn from the history of ideas to popular culture. It looks at boredom from many different sides, and, in its mix of philosophical references to literature to music, it succeeds in introducing one to the complexity that is, what the author deems, a modern condition of humankind. The book is organized in four sections—the problem, the stories, the phenomenology and the ethics of boredom. The video here combines at least a reference to the first two parts, including a brief mention of the typologies of boredom, and a bit of the importance around boredom and the making, or lack thereof, of meaning.

It was Tom Cruz who pointed me to Lars’ book, which he had reviewed for a journal some years ago. We took it upon ourselves to also analyze some of the works Lars had mentioned there, Crash and American Psycho among them. One piece that made a significant impact on me was Alberto Moravia’s Boredom from 1960. In this novel, Dino, a young, aristocrat painter can own anything except what he thinks is the genuine love from his disaffected model and lover. The search for meaning and impossibility of possessing certain things, which Dino represents, are the very characteristics of boredom.

In Archaeology of Longing, displayed were several copies of Moravia’s novel in different translations: a copy in the Italian, La Noia; in French L’ennui; the first English edition called The Empty Canvas and the most recent simply titled Boredom. The idea was not only to declare object as source in the exhibition. It was also to suggest that each translation offered a new interpretation.

The lecture “A Philosophy on Boredom” by Lars Svendsen took place on the afternoon of November 1, 2008 at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, France. The book, “A Philosophy on Boredom,” was originally published in Norway in 1999; its first English translation was published in 2004 by Reaktion Books.

Originally in French, Gustave Affeulpin’s The so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg (1976) is a fictional report on the construction and operations of an art center underneath the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France. Built in tandem with the museum that is internationally known as the “Pompidou”—native Parisians mostly refer to it simply as “Beaubourg”—the underground center that Affeulpin describes is not a copy but a double. Decidedly, not mimicking. Instead, co-existing. To present culture in its most incisive form, the infrastructure and organizing principles of this, the other center, must be collectively decided upon its public and its program progressively unfold in time, at the vision and inertia, so to say, of its constituents. Affeulpin uses the pseudonym “Albert Meister” to write a piece of fiction as a documentary account. The book is a vivid report on the life of a cultural place, and the inner-workings and mostly failings of an endeavor closer to a utopia blueprint than a concrete place.

The English translation of The so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg, this version subtitled with the tag-line “An Interpretation,” was done by visual artist Luca Frei. Luca’s version includes notes and images, in-between lines and as illustrations, on the construction of the Pompidou and the first publication of Affeulpin’s book. And, as the subtitle he tags on to the original suggests, his is not a straight transliteration of a text from one language to another. The published work claims to be a new work. Intentionality here is crucial. While the book remains a work by Affeulpin, its current manifestation—in English, in print, in distribution and discussion—is made by Luca, highlighting while raising a bit of speculation around appropriation, literary, and citationality, literally.

The so-called utopia of the centre beaubourg – An interpretation was co-published in 2007 by Book Works and CASCO, Office for Art, Theory and Design, Utrecht. The video here documents Luca Frei reading selected passages in the book, a program held on September 18, 2008 in conjunction to the Archaeology of Longing at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris.