The Discreet Charm of Bruno Latour

Abstract

Michel Houellebecq’s 2010 novel La Carte et le territoire (The Map and the Territory) concerns an artist, Jed Martin, French despite his American-sounding name, whose work is in various ways concerned with work and labour. Martin begins, as a student, taking photographs of industrial objects in his aim to give an objective description of the world. His next project, which will make him famous as an artist, is a series of photographic close-ups of Michelin maps of provincial France in an exhibition titled ‘The Map Is More Interesting Than the Territory’. Then he turns to painting with a 60-work series in oil titled the ‘Series of Simple Professions’ and made over seven years, which explores the division of labour in contemporary society. The paintings include Ferdinand Desroches, Horse Butcher and his masterpiece Bill Gates and Steve fobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology. Defeated by attempts to paint Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market, particularly by his difficulty in painting Koons’s face, Jed Martin turns to Michel Houellebecq, a fictional character in his own novel, as a subject (for the painting Michel Houellebecq, Writer). The writer then composes an essay for the exhibition catalogue in which he reflects that Martin’s view of capitalism is ‘that of an ethnologist much more than that of a political commentator’ (Houellebecq, 2011, p. 122).