The King is Dead (Le Roi Est Mort)

Muse National des Chteaux de Versailles et de Trianon Chteau de Versailles

Published at Hyperallergic on February 2nd 2016 as

At Versailles a Darkly Comic Celebration of Louis XIVs Death

http://hyperallergic.com/272382/at-versailles-a-darkly-comic-celebration-of-louis-xivs-death/

entrance (left) partial installation view by the author

partial installation view by the author

partial installation view by the author with top half of Effigie funraire bauche de Catherine de Mdicis,

Girolamo della Robbia, 1565-1566. Marbre. Paris, muse du Louvre, dpartement des Sculptures Muse

du Louvre, Dist. RMN GP

Ren-Antoine Houasse,Louis XIV cheval, roi de France et de Navarre (XVIIe sicle)

Perhaps unintentionally, this show is about the awareness of the impertinent finery of decomposition. With

Batrix Saules extensive exhibition The King is Dead (Le Roi Est Mort), Chteau de Versailles is

presenting a black-humor-provoking, shaggy-dog narrative about the death of Louis XIV. Known as Louis

the Great (Louis le Grand) or the Sun King (le Roi-Soleil), this Louis was the king who converted a hunting

lodge built by Louis XIII into the spectacular Palace of Versailles that we know today. He also well

patronized the visual arts by funding and commissioning artists Charles Le Brun, Pierre Mignard, Antoine

Coysevox and Hyacinthe Rigaud.

With works coming from the Frick Collection in New York, the English royal collections, the Rstkammer

in Dresden and the Prado Museum in Madrid; the show includes stogy ceremonial portraits, coffin plaques,

gilded crowns, scepters, swords, effigies, gravestones, surgical instruments, and (the best part) an account

of Louis autopsy. It included cutting and separating his body into three sections (body, heart, and entrails)

before embalming him and putting him in a coffin made of lead and oak. Itself cut into nine sections, the

show is a broad historical overview that celebrates the 300th year anniversary of the death of the king do to

gangrene.

During Louiss long reign of 72 years, France was the leading European power, and this is what gives the

macabre exhibition a cumulative tone. One that is, ultimately, comedic (agreed, comedy is rather

subjective). Seeing the all-powerful, amoral (he produced numerous illegitimate children), superman at the

mercy of unsophisticated (hack) doctors and the fleeting cosmic forces of disease and death far beyond his

comprehension, is darkly funny.

In accordance with a tradition dating from the death of Philippe le Bel (1314), the bodies of French kings

were separated into three parts (body, entrails and heart), each with its own grave, thereby increasing the

number of places where homage could be paid to the dead king. Louis XIV's coffin was placed at Saint-

Denis in the Bourbon tomb, without a monument. A recent discovery has allowed the identification of the

exact location of the barrels containing the entrails of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, at the foot of the steps to

the sanctuary at Notre-Dame de Paris. The heart is buried the Eglise des Jsuites on Rue Saint-Antoine in

Paris, a church that contained the monuments for the hearts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV that were

destroyed during the Revolution. The King is Dead display includes the copper plaque placed on Louis

XIVs coffin, borrowed from Saint-Denis Basilica-cathedral and the Muse de Cluny storage archive,

which was desecrated during the Revolution, as well as funky surgical instruments and apothecary drugs

that came from the Muse de la Mdecine.

The humor here swerves between royal pomp and farcical absurdity, with this emphasis slightly more

geared to the latter, in my eyes. Ultimately though, the enjoyment to be had depends on whether you inject

satirical intent where it is not supposed to exist. You have to allow yourself to enjoy the cheap thrill of

mocking the gauche excess of chopping up Louis. But there is little doubt that the rather kinky surgical

tools do occasionally capsize the glorious kingly narrative spun here into one about invisible dirty forces

just below the surface of things. Everything else funny follows from this ignobility. Everything.

Pierre Dionis, Cours doprations de chirurgie dmontres au Jardin Royal par Mr Dionis, chirurgien de

feue madame la dauphine, prsent de Madame la duchesse de Bourgogne (1707) Livre imprim, Paris,

chez Laurent dHoury, BIU SantBIUM DR

From the Constantine Room to the Morocco Room, the exhibition covers nine sections as laid out by

scenographer Pier Luigi Pizzi, the same man who recently presented The Baroque Underworld: Vice and

Destitution in Rome at the Petit Palais. With much visual drama, by using darkness and pin spot lighting, he

knits together works of art and historical documents from French and foreign collections (including

furniture of funeral liturgy) into a great Baroque show of supposedly huge significance to courtly

sensibility - and those that still yearn for it. Certain aspects of this visual drama could, I imagine, appeal to

the fantasist tastes of blood-and-soil reactionaries and far right neo-royalists; those few with a pretentiously

fervent imagination of a mystical/glorious destiny of France - those dedicated to the destruction of

secularism and liberalism - those few that yearn to re-establish an atavistic hierarchy constructed along

ultra-traditionalist Catholic lines that ultimately aim to reinstall a great monarch. Thinking about those

views while looking at the stumpy legs and saccharine facial expression in Pierre Firenss Portrait d'Henri

IV sur son lit de mort (Portrait of Henri IV on his death bed) (1610) is where the black humor starts to

kick in.

Pierre Firens, Le Portraict du defunct Roy Henry le Grand IV [] en son lict de deuil (1610) Burin H.

23,2 ; L. 13,7 cm Chteau de Versailles Chteau de Versailles

Antoine Benoist, Portrait de Louis 68 ans, sept ans avant sa mort (1706) Relief, cire, verre, cheveux,

dentelle, soie, velours H. 85,3; L. 71 ; P. 12 cm Chteau de Versailles Chateau de Versailles (dist-RMN-

GrandPalais), Christophe Fouin

Also, for some reason, the wax portrait of the king at age 68, that used mounds of real hair, is a ridiculous

gas. Made by Antoine Benoist, it made me think not only of Donald Trumps hairocalypse, but also of

Alfred Jarrys play Ubu Roi, a play that created a famous scandal when it was first performed at the Theatre

de lOeuvre in Paris in 1896 (an important precursor of Dada). Through a language of hilarity, Ubu Roi tells

the farcical story of Pre Ubu, an officer of the King of Poland and a grotesque figure who epitomizes the

idiocy of officialdom. And for that grotesque suggestion, Benoists simulation hyperreality of the kings

hair can be snickeringly appreciated. The obviously too much hair throws into relief the previously

mentioned kingly chop. Here one sees beneath the jaded stucco surface of power.

At The King is Dead, one might first be tempted to be impressed by the traditionalist signifiers being

played with here. Signs of what some have identified as Frances rather thinly veiled conservative longing

for power in face of digital globalization. This longing, an impulse which verges on the nauseatingly

nostalgic, is politically dangerous, as it fuels foolish fantasies of the far right. But for me, the rewards of the

exhibition (the first on the subject) is not so much about celebrating the courtly life and death of Louis

XIV, as it is about an antagonistic, mocking, blatantly satirical humor that crucially was at least partially

responsible for the coming French Revolution. For me, that is the merit of looking back on the details of

Louiss death, autopsy and funeral. So as to situate him in the context of the Revolution. By doing so, I

came to realize that this show was not talking to me about the king and his objects, but rather describing a

hidden cynical, satirical humor, just out of sight. Louiss grand pomp allows component humor to swallow

various aspects of his nobility into a satirical network lying silently beneath it, at turns flamboyant and

morally outrageous - an invisible mockingness at work silently below the realm of the power of grand

appearance.

It should be noted, however, that that invisible realm of snide forces - so common to our political world

today is one that does not concern itself too much with the victims of power, but prefers to mock the

transcendental aspect of power, now mediatized and turned into what Jean Baudrillard once called the great

procession of simulacra.

Surely in chopped up death, the king becomes a funny abstraction, an object of drle enunciation. Yet the

show makes no effort to dispel Louis XIVs transcendental appearance. Thus I even more enjoyed it at a

level of Ubu Roi absurdity - and only wished it would have described much more closely the appearances

of rot and pain in the operation of the gangrenous death event. So as to stop repeating what the politics of

capital globalized imagery constantly does, which is to rarely embellish with art the moral consideration of

the pain of victims of power (excluding Howard Zinn, of course). My mental/moral position as visitor to

The King is Dead was, then, to abstain from arriving at an a priori preemptive decision about privilege and

nobility. So that entertaining black humor could be discovered veining its way through any de regieur

royalist interpretations. With The King is Dead I could see both powers sinister intoxication, its appeal, but

also its farcical mendacity (which it tries to conceal behind pomp). The black forensic fairy-tale I

constructed out of the royal mlange, allowed me to escape the official royal narration. It kept turning it

back into something profoundly idiosyncratic: the royal stink of royal death. That deeply strange, incurable,

irrational smell we all must share one day. So I interpret The King is Dead as a meditation on humiliating

royal death then, in all its nasty comedy. It made Louiss kingly power seem faintly funny in face of deaths

inexorability - and weak, because death is beyond the power of narration and nobel words and images.

Joseph Nechvatal

partial installation view by the author

Inscription tumulaire arrache en 1793 au cercueil du roi Louis XIV, Cuivre martel et lamin, grav au

burin, 1715, H. 23,5 ; L. 17 ; p. 0,3 cm, muse de Cluny, muse national du Moyen ge, en dpt la

basilique Saint-Denis. DR

Pompe funbre du duc de Berry, en lglise royale de Saint-Denis, le 14 mars 1820, Jean-Dmosthne

Dugourc (1749-1825), 1821. Plume, lavis dencre de Chine, rehauts de blanc. H. 36 ; L. 52 cm. Chteau de

Versailles DR

Les Funrailles de Sadi Carnot (1837-1894) au Panthon en 1894, Georges Bertrand, 1903. Huile sur toile,

Chteau de Versailles Chteau de Versailles (dist. RMN GP) / Christophe Fouin