At Fanzine, Laura Carter reviews Johannes Göransson’s Haute Surveillance.
“Imagine that you are on a secret journey through the life of Jean Genet, through the shifting framework of a character made by Johannes Göransson,” writes Carter, who imagines no small number of scenarios for readers of Haute, in a review that’s worth reading as a thing unto itself. “You are a teenage virgin,” Carter continues, a few sentences later, “the marriage of pornography and Art, which will, in the long run (as many Woody Allen movies suggest) turn you into a Dictator.”
There are allusions, throughout the book, to a theory of media. It’s spectacular, it’s pyrotechnics, it’s naked bodies and sex and orgies of the Virgin Father and the Black Man, carefully arranged around Hegelian hate.
It’s a museum, where “I’ve become evil because language gets in the way.”
It’s a B-movie where “the human body becomes more beautiful and less a subject.”
You will discover that “Perhaps it’s an aesthetics, not an ethics.”
And there is trauma there. It’s an emergency, a state of emergency. “The trauma saturates the mansion, it’s a trauma-rama.”