La monnaie vivante: Barcelona

La Monnaie Vivante is the title of an essay and a series of performative and photographic works initiated by Pierre Klossowski in 1970. Soon, 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 having read its lines.

 

Enclosed in that contradiction, Pierre Molinier had anticipated it with a series of photographs in which he equated the transvestite, fictionalised, 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 place exchange value before use value? Or is the problem value itself — valuation, evaluation, examination?

 

Thus, this catalogue of organs aspires to be a body and becomes a singularity, a subject, a citizen.

What is, then, a body?

 

Pedro G. Romero