Kirac: An Immoralistic Art Collective or Just Raunchy Voyeurs?

First he pounded a chicken to death on the keyboard, then the piano had to die, in an orgy of creaking wood and flying splinters. Artist Raphael Montanez Ortiz treated his audience to this performance in Greenwich Village, New York in 1967. Five years earlier, he had Destructivism: A Manifesto appeared one statement of principles for art as “a desperate attempt to ensure the integrity of the unconscious” in the face of the hypocrisy of bourgeois society.

Patting those citizens is part of the avant-garde, ever since the days of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. While that chicken died in New York, made in Vienna the Actionists furore, with animal blood and entrails. In France, normality trembled under the lashes of the Panic Movement’.

And in the Netherlands we have Kirac.

That art collective has been rumored for months because of a pornographic love film they made of (and with) Michel Houellebecq, who portrayed the French writer not want to show afterwards. Completely in style, the confusion is complete about who is using whom here, and in which project.

The collective (Keeping It Real Art Critics) will, wrote de Volkskrant, “making hypocrisy visible”. The company’s first videos are great examples of the spinning camera piercing snobbery and conformist quasi-engagement in the art world. Kirac may be cynical, wrote an American admirerbut at least “not middlebrow”.

In that respect, Kirac and Houellebecq, also an avid provocateur, evenly matched. With this difference: the empathy that Houellebecq has with the sad procession reels that populate his novels, is missing from the stoic Kirac. You also have boss and upper boss impress the bourgeois.

Only, in the life of every iconoclast, on a bad day the realization dawns that his anti-moralism is ultimately also a form of moralism. It’s not always a long walk from a raised middle finger to a raised finger.

And what else do you need? Yea, become an immoralist or pure aesthete, unconcerned with another’s thrashing, as in an earlier Kirac sex movie with a pathetically confused regret. When asked what he himself thought of the mud fight with the French writer, founder Stefan Ruitenbeek said on a talk show bone dry: “I’m looking at that.”

Yes, we too. That is what remains of the iconoclasm: raunchy voyeurism. Marquis de Sade Trash can, or a reprise of the once scabrous Sex for the Buch (1997) that ‘ordinary people’ let their sex fantasies live out on TV.

But at least not middlebrow!

Sjoerd de Jong writes a column here every Thursday.