I am pleased to present a video and a movie on behalf of my friend Lucas Zeebergs’ show at Turquoise. First, we will play a video by Lucas, followed by the movie, Boudu Saved from Drowning, by director Jean Renior. The former was made earlier this year, the latter is from 1932. In an attempt to bridge the two, I would like to lay out the following. Without revealing too much, as you will see.. in the ensuing battle between Boudu and his new benefactors, the crux of their strife is an issue of value. The bookkeeper, a rosy, voltaire loving romantic, immediately sees Boudou as almost a platonic ideal of some philosophical concept– He says, here is this man who has totally cast aside societal norms– and the bookkeeper takes immense sympathy with this character, this miscreant. The bookkeeper immediately sees Boudou and himself as on the same team- as those with a kind of special distinction, an awareness of society. But from the very jump there is a singular misunderstanding. The host families' need for propriety eats at them as Boudou is unable to act to standard. It is almost as if a debt is created for him- but it should have been clear, from the very inception of their relationship, that there was a fundamental misalignment. The benefactors insist on the value of a life Boudou had already reasoned was worth nothing. The bookkeeper and his home of books, his wife and her room of perfumed silks, their servant and her many roles, all try to find use for Boudou, who has no interest in negotiating, and who may in fact be useless.

In Renoir’s own autobiography, My Life and Films, published 1974, Renoir reflects on Bodou, considering it a great success, and delights in the fulfillment of his work- quote: The success surpassed all hopes.The public reacted with a blend of laughter and fury. Boudu, many years ahead of his time, presaged the hippie movement. Boudu was even the perfect hippie

Quite ahead in time, both after the primary age of the film and the rise of this ‘hippie’ character, Renoir makes the same observation of his film as critic Pauline Kael, who wrote on Bodou: not only a lovely fable about a bourgeois attempt to reform an early hippie... but a photographic record of an earlier France.

The writer of the BFI monograph on Boudu, Richard Boston, takes issue with the Kael recognition of hippie-dom. Being a hippie was the act of social posturing and fashioning. Thus, he holds Kael to the Oxford definition of the word as being synonymous with being a beatnik, and wearing exotic clothes. He points back to Boudu, and says there could be no greater distance: None of this sounds remotely like Boudu. Boudu doesn't reject conventional values: he never had them in the first place: you wouldn't catch him doing anything as pussy-footing as 'rejecting conventional values.’

While Kael’s own criticism is easy enough to wave aside, either as a plagiarism of the autobiography of the films’ director, or an advantageous step towards becoming a cultural critic, Renoir’s assertion is more difficult to reject. Looking at the enduring cultural legacy of the hippie today, we see an endless spawning of alternative consumer groups- the lifestyle market. Lifestyle is the true progeny of the hippie. Perhaps it is this word, lifestyle, that can be our bridge- In Renoir's own french translating to ‘the art of living’. It is Bodou’s uselessness, perhaps, that Kael and Renior see as transgressive, and understand as a cultural characteristic with mileage. The association of art, in a simplistic philosophical form, as something non-utilitarian, would bud from an artist who is similarly totally useless.

Published 1984, the midyear between Renior’s autobiography and Kael’s criticism, is Distinction: A Social Critique on the Judgement of Taste, by fellow Frenchman Pierre Bourdieu. Unsatisfied with sociologists' prior attempts at studying taste, Bourdieu arranges a series of studies and surveys, revealing correlations between tastes and class. Art (musical, visual, etc.,) is often used as a cultural point of reference in these surveys. After a collection of surveys where people were asked to comment on a series of photographs, in which respondents who belonged to higher classes were more confident in accepting them as works of art and discussing them as such, Bourdieu pivots to address the reality of the artist, for who he was relying on as the dependent variable of his research. He takes interest in the relationship between the artist and transgression, and how the act of transgression specifically interacts with bourgeois aesthetics through shock. Bourdieu calls the symbolic transgression in combination with common artist politics of revolutionary-ism or political neutrality unserious. He says the indifference which transgression implies when it becomes the center idea of lifestyle (art-of-living) is what leads to the public's aversion of artists- he says, especially by independent shopkeepers and craftmakers, but also among the rising newly wealthy, who in striving for virtue are deeply insecure and all the more receptive to ‘pornocracy’. He quotes Proudhon in length, a 19th century anarchist. I would like to read this section in full-