Art shows us that what humanity isn’t getting right is sex: that is the motif common to three videotapes made by Philippe Sollers collaborating with the video artist Jean-Paul Fargier: Le Phallus mis à nu par ses non-célibataires même, Picasso by Night by Sollers, and Le Trou de la vierge. Speaking to the camera, Sollers dialogues with the sculptor Alain Kirili and puts before us works by Picasso and Courbet to show the viewer that artists are the only ones to use the real language of sex. Humanity’s mistakes and misunderstandings about the relations between the sexes are an insistent and controversial topic of Sollers’s fictional writing and essays, a topic itself badly misunderstood. Sollers turned to video art during the 1980s to exploit the capabilities of visual manipulations and deliver his message visually as well as verbally: video effects, Fargier’s specialty, enhance Sollers’s surprising discourses.

The provocatively named Le Trou de la vierge (1985), a visual essay on Courbet’s “L’origine du monde” and several Picasso paintings, shows how “les grands événements en peinture sont lies à la représentation du corps féminin” (video carton). While displaying works by Picasso, Sollers turns non-representative cubism into ironic representation of the woman’s body, brought out by the contrast with the realistic and explicit Courbet. In Le Phallus mis à nu par ses non-célibataires même (1985), a vertical mass of fired clay about four feet tall stands on a pedestal between Sollers and Kirili and influences their dialogue; it is an abstract sculpture called “Maternité.” The camera moves insistently around this statue, while the conversation discusses rounded bulges and hollows, hammer blows and knife thrusts, acts of its creation. In Picasso by night by Sollers (1987), a conservatively-dressed Sollers lectures at the Pompidou Center to an unseen audience while the camera intercuts images of Picasso works, scenes from the galleries, and flying, video-manipulated images of Sollers speaking. In all three videos, a fascinating text interacts with images that draw the eye and provoke. Just as Sollers in his writing undermines the comfortable relation of words to realities, irony of representation dominates in these videos.

The fact that these videotapes were made in the 1980s does not make them any less pertinent today; rather, what Sollers was talking about then continues to require our attention, and perhaps even more so. Art, for all its postmodern sophistication and self-awareness, has still not been allowed to instruct humanity about its needs, as Sollers wants to show Picasso and other artists of the woman’s body doing; if anything, censorship has widened and deepened.

I will show clips of the videos and analyze their visual effects in conjunction with the words spoken, demonstrating the pervasive irony in Sollers’s message. The verbal-visual combination becomes a new genre unlike anything ever seen on television.