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Over five decades, the French artist Jean-Louis Costes has constructed an immense body of work. A prolific songwriter, musician, performance artist, writer and filmmaker, he is perhaps best known, if he is known at all, for his music, especially his synth-driven industrial noise, though his musical output, like his film work, is impressively and deceptively varied. The comparison “the French GG Allin” comes from the bodily confrontation and audience provocation in their respective live performances. It can offer a rough orientation for viewers unfamiliar with Costes, but does nothing to explain his artistic project. Inside of France, his books are respected, while his incendiary satirical lyrics have made him the target of lawsuits and criminal investigations.
Abroad, some will know his collaborations with Lisa Carver (Suckdog, Rollerderby), his former wife. Film viewers may recognize him from Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s BAISE-MOI (2000) and Gaspar Noé's IRREVERSIBLE (2002). Yet his own film work is rarely screened, sitting at the bottom of his public reception, as unhinged as it is underseen. In fact, this program is the first serious retrospective of his films in the United States. The majority of the subtitles in English were created specifically for this program.
"The people who come to my shows are the outsiders of their own groups. It will be punks who are no longer totally satisfied with punk, goths although those won’t admit it. So they're people who break away from their groups. It’s the anti-social people from everywhere." - Jean-Louis Costes
"Costes is the ultimate French absurdist, and he and Lisa Carver wrote operas together and performed them at punk clubs. The mixture of personality and identity was fierce and mind-boggling and far more complex and intelligent than just accidental genius." - Thurston Moore
Costes did not set out to make films, just as he did not set out to make music alone. He tried to play in bands, but nobody would take him. He set up a reel-to-reel in his flat and started alone. Piano on one track, vocals on the other. The one-second delay between the record and playback heads produced a chaotic style. He refused to choose between melody and noise, between pop and weird sounds, between lyric and texture, and he refused to give up making the unlikely thing of all of those at once. He wrote his own songs, recorded them himself, dubbed his own cassettes, and invented his own label. By 1984 the synthesis held. The home studio he built in his Saint-Denis basement gave him the freedom to produce music on his own terms.
The camcorder was bought to archive performances for VHS sales. He turned it on himself in his ruined loft. The first film, ONLY GOD SEES ME (DIEU SEUL ME VOIT), featured in Program 3, was a solo recording with no crew and no editing experience. The films in this retrospective come out of that lineage. The films were made because the camcorder, the basement, and the body were already there, and because he could take the camcorder on the road. No audience was presumed in advance. The result is a body of films that moves from Saint-Denis to Tokyo, New York, and the Amazonian jungle, and remains outside traditional circuits of exhibition, with no label, no distributor, and no institutional support.
This retrospective gathers a representative selection of short- and medium-length films from 1990 to 2006.
This is a retrospective for viewers willing to meet explicit, confrontational underground work directly. The films are formally and emotionally unhinged, and the lower register is fully present, staged through fiction and performance. Scatological content recurs. Often in revolting detail. Sexual content is unembarrassed and frequently violent. Sexual frustration runs through. But none of this exists, Costes claims, without dramaturgical necessity. The films remove the usual aesthetic protections. A romantic and playful streak runs through the work, although usually against all evidence. The slapstick humor, beauty, tenderness, frailty, weakness, and failure are part of the mechanism.
Program 1 is the clearest entry point, built around travel, media panic, and street romance. Program 2 turns inward: DEADLY GAS IN TOKYO is lonely and stylized, and I LOVE STUFF is the joyous, deranged pressure point. Program 3 is the wildcard, built around solitude, private ritual, and mystical collapse.