Unfun - Skandinavische Misanthropie III
2012
Book, 18.6 x 11.8 cm, 270 p, language: German, publisher: München: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, ISBN: 9783453675698.
Materials: ink, paper
Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2024/678).
Literary synopsis
Five years after Macht und Rebel, Matias Faldbakken returns with Unfun - Scandinavian Misanthropy III, drawing his trilogy to an explosive close through a discussion of violence and its ultimate consequence – death. Using the dramaturgy of the rape/revenge flicks of the '70s as a framework for his narrative, Faldbakken cooks up a grotesquely hilarious and challenging story about the crew around the online slasher game "Deathbox", at the center of which are the 'violence intellectual' Slaktus and his former girlfriend and victim Lucy, an anarchist who embodies the horror film’s Final Girl trope. Problematizing concepts of oppression, freedom, and power in different contexts, Faldbakken lets Lucy mete out revenge on her oppressors in a narrative littered with references to popular culture, which bears Faldbakken’s trademark of being at once seriously disturbing and highly entertaining.
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: Anarchism, Death, Drugs, Nihilism, Socio-Political Critic, Violence.
