![]() ![]() ![]() This was a re-creation of a 1931 performance at the Vincennes Colonial Exhibition (witnessed by the theorist Antonin Artaud), at a theatre in Paris. In 1999 - at 'the close of one of the last afternoons of the last century of the millennium', as Guyotat writes - he and a companion attend a performance of Balinese dance. The timeframe of the book begins almost twenty years in the future from the moment of Guyotat's self-inflicted comatose state, so that we know immediately that the book projects itself as an act of survival as well as one of disintegration. ![]() Pierre Guyotat's Coma is a book of fragments that, in their amassing and accumulation, recount a narrative of simultaneous corporeal and linguistic disintegration and emaciation, in the form of a journey of hallucinations and travels undertaken through France, that leads towards a dead end: a near-fatal physical coma, and a terminal breakdown of language - which, through a further aberration (one of many to be experienced in Guyotat's work), eventually transmutates into the form of a book of resuscitation, and into a new language: Coma. Stephen Barber sifts through Guyotat's extraordinary history and prises apart the pages of his most recent work ![]() Pierre Guyotat's books break down language, bodies and the self to stage an estranged eternal present. ![]()
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