Appareillages livresques et diffractions fictionnelles dans le projet multimodal Character de Paul Heintz

Abstract

French artist Paul Heintz’s multi-media project Character began with a reading of George Orwell’s novel 1984 and a desire to meet the namesakes of the novel’s main character, Winston Smith. Exploring the links between books, films and exhibitions, the artist has produced a protean proposal that challenges the traditional concept of the work as a unitary, homogeneous creation, and in which the book, materialised as a “heterogeneous editorial object”, is given a cardinal function. This multimodal ecosystem, marked by a principle of repetition and a logic of duplication, is as much a questioning of reality through fiction as it is a political gesture: Heintz places the relational schema at the heart of the enterprise, with a view to giving substance to the possibility of a readjusted ‘being together’ capable of responding to contemporary political issues echoed in a novel like 1984.

Keywords

• artist’s book
• Winston Smith
• George Orwell
• 1984
• multimodality
• transmediality