BGW. La monnaine vivante

‘La monnaie vivante’ is the title of an essay and a series of performative and photographic works promoted by Pierre Klossowski in 1970. Soon after, Michel Foucault hailed it as the most important book of its time. Excess, energy, dissolution: this is how Maurice Blanchot defines the body of our time after reading its lines. Caught in that contradiction, Pierre Molinier had anticipated it with a series of photographs in which he equated the transvestite, fictionalized, artificial body with the work of art: “L’Oeuvre, le peintre et son fétiche.” But then, what can a body do? If everything is reduced to mere merchandise, how can we be a body that does not put exchange value before use value? Or is the problem value, evaluation, examination? Thus, this catalog of organs aspires to be a body and becomes a singularity, a subject, a citizen. What, then, is a body?

Pedro G. Romero, curator of the exhibition