Pierre Klossowski
Drawings by Pierre Klossowski. All images copyright Pierre Klossowski All Rights Reserved.Text collage and interruptions by Dennis Brzek; image selection by Julian-Jakob Kneer.Quotes by Pierre Klossowski.
Jean Carrive, 1960pencil on paper105 x 75 cm
Pierre Klossowski died in August 2001, just a month short of witnessing the mediated funeral to the decade he had so intricately been a glowing witness of. Thinking through his texts is a futile epistolary with a counterpart that does not read what I have to offer and does not feel a responsible purveyor of what it is that I bring, in every sense of the word. Encountering Klossowski is therefore a process that expands through much wrecked territory in terms of love, affection, and self-doubt. I read him as a father, a teacher, a pupil, and a hooligan.
Le Commandeur succombant à la pose provocante d'Ogier, 1994pencil on paper109 x 142 cm
Le commandeur de St. Vit séduit par le jeune Ogier, 1992colored pencil on paper126.5 x 148 cm, framed: 131.4 x 152.4 cm
He is pleased to describe me as an infallible mechanism within which my will to resist is a prisoner: my breasts and my three other organs, they and everything else function like so many parts the operator removes one by one from my control to turn them against me like my own weapons and to disintegrate me, next to put me back together again as a kind of automation built of shame and dirt from the ground up. I say machine as I say ‘do’ or ‘things’, but without contempt in tone, I hear him say. But I also say machine as I say simulacrum. Take this example: We are, he said, at the dentist’s, in the waiting room, we wait a good half-hour and leaf through magazines, both sitting in chairs at a certain distance from each other. He then supposes that while I am twiddling my thumbs he comes up to me, the clue to his identity concealed behind his beret at first, then gradually brought far enough into the open to fluster me; I get excited, yes! For me, this picture drawn up here is a means, an effective means. You can say that it is an arbitrary, selfless consumer object, but that is wrong.
*La Révocation de l'edit de Nantes, 1959
*Fragmente einer Auseinandersetzung von Rémy Zaugg und Pierre Klossowski, in: Pierre Klossowski. Simulacra, Kunsthalle Bern, 1981
Diane et Callixte, 1991colored pencil on paper125 x 145 cm
Roberte et Gulliver II, 1980colored pencil on paper129 x 150 cm, framed: 133,6 x 154,6 cm
Le Baphomet au moment voulu II, 1972pencil on paper148 x 198 cm
Klossowski speaks of machines in the sense of the deus ex machina in the theatre: the image, a means that works from within itself, is of course the objectification of something, and this something thus prepared expresses something or has an effect. In the same way, for example, one speaks of a machinery in response to a stratagem.
L'auberge de la comète, 1983colored pencil on paper190 x 150 cm
Decisive moment of my demonstration, ladies and gentlemen! I ask you whether you know whether all that has happened along this lady's contours without her knowledge is a series of gestures actually performed, or whether I, like my audience, am not just the individual moments of a sleeper's dream. I ask you to stay awake, all eyes open, because every prophet is always an impostor. Everything he says in a figurative sense will be interpreted to the letter by ambition; that is why refusing to take his words literally makes a prophet of an impostor.
*Roberte et Gulliver. Divertimento pour Gilles Deleuze, 1972*Le Baphomet, 1965
Suprême vision de frère Damien, 1987colored pencil on paper148 x 140 cm
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