The Cocka Hola Company - Skandinavische Misanthropie I
2005
Book, 18.6 x 11.7 cm, 461 p, language: German, publisher: München: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, ISBN: 978-3453400528.
Materials: ink, paper
Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2024/680).
Literary synopsis
The debut novel of Norwegian writer Matias Faldbakken is a contemporary satire to end all satires. The Cocka Hola Company (first novel of the series Scandinavian Misanthropy Trilogy) is the ferociously funny chronicle of a war against the welfare society and its underlying values. Relying on most people’s inherent hypocrisy and double standards, Simpel and his band of social misfits to stage a series of equally amusing and revealing assaults on middle-class norms. Not since the early sixties has the clown-mask been used to spit out such bitter truths about the human condition in modern-day Western civilisation.
Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice
Scandinavian Misanthropy Trilogy’s protagonists struggle with postmillennial phenomena such as the ‘coffee-tableization of everything’ or the idea of the ‘survival of the hippest,’ and an unhealthy amount of hatred for everything around them. This vicious circle of the subversive – each critique in the cultural field being not only immediately absorbed but also turned into a cultural good, and therefore soon tuning into the mainstream – is also part of his topoi as a visual artist. His non-literary works also deal with the chasm between mainstream and underground, independence and commerciality, and the possibilities of an intervention of the artist and his utopias in the real world.
Authorship: Artist Author.
Creative Strategy: No Link to Artworks.
Genre: Erotic/Pornographic, Satire.
Publishing: Publishing House.
Theme: Nihilism, Socio-Political Critic.
