M HKA Ensembles

Book, 19.8 x 14.2 cm, 128 p, language: French, publisher: P.O.L Editeur, ISBN: 2-84682-064-3.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2027/46).

Literary synopsis

In this brilliant and sobering self-portrait, Edouard Levé hides nothing from his readers, setting out his entire life, more or less at random, in a string of declarative sentences. Autoportrait is a physical, psychological, sexual, political, and philosophical triumph. Beyond "sincerity," Levé works toward an objectivity so radical it could pass for crudeness, triviality, even banality: the author has stripped himself bare. With the force of a set of maxims or morals, Levé's prose seems at first to be an autobiography without sentiment, as though written by a machine—until, through the accumulation of detail, and the author's dry, quizzical tone, we find ourselves disarmed, enthralled, and enraptured by nothing less than the perfect fiction . . . made entirely of facts.

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

Levé wrote Autoportrait in 2002, while he was traveling across America, taking the photographs that became Série Amérique. The series looks at towns in the United States bearing the same names as towns in other countries. What makes Amérique more interesting still is Levé's development from a conceptual to an almost classical aesthetic. The organic approach to Amérique comes almost as a shock; compositionally, these photos are as subtle as they are radical. Levé's distinction between landscape and portraiture is willfully ambiguous, almost naïve. Autoportrait, the brief, uncompromising memoir that Levé composed during that same trip, is a variation on this aesthetic in prose. The book is composed entirely of brisk declarative sentences about the author in the first person, often without any discernible narrative coherence. Levé's ambivalence to the memoir as a construct prevails throughout Autoportrait, its own kind of deformation, wherein the act of explaining a life becomes interchangeable with describing an image—whatever details can be discerned, in any order you like. Levé's own portrait, too, is rendered a landscape.

Novel's website