Michel Houellebecq behind him From the bedroom to the courtroom

On Saturday night, an eclectic art audience gathered outside an industrial garage in East Amsterdam where Michel Houellebecq, the celebrated French author, was scheduled to speak.

Houellebecq had released ‘A few months of my life’ on May 24, a new book that chronicles a tumultuous period from October 2022 to March 2023 when he collaborated with a Dutch art collective called KIRAC. Together they worked on a film, shooting scenes in which the married 67-year-old author was kissing young women.

Although Houellebecq had agreed to do the film, he later changed his mind and tried to back out. In early February, he filed lawsuits in France and the Netherlands to prevent the film from being shown. Last month, an Amsterdam judge upheld Houellebecq’s complaint and granted him the right to see a final cut of each re-edited film four weeks before release, giving him the chance to file another lawsuit if he doesn’t like it what he sees.

In “A Few Months of My Life,” a 94-page autobiographical work, Houellebecq digs deep into his hatred of KIRAC. He only mentions the group’s leader, Stefan Ruitenbeek, once, describing him as a “pseudo-artist” and “a cockroach with a human face”. Female KIRAC members are referred to as “the sow” and “the turkey.”

According to the organizer of Saturday’s event, Tarik Sadouma, Houellebecq had not come to Amsterdam to promote his new book, but to talk about his work in general. As a condition of his participation, Houellebecq asked Sadouma to exclude Ruitenbeek and his cohorts from the event.

But just as the audience took their seats inside, Ruitenbeek stormed through the door, dressed as a giant brown cockroach, with swaying feelers and a hairy cape. He was followed by KIRAC members, one with a fake pig snout, another filmed the whole thing.

“I’m here!” shouted Ruitenbeek, taking the stage, to a mixture of jeers and cheers. “I’m the cockroach!”

A woman taking tickets tried to wring the cameraman’s camera and Sadouma yelled for the intruders to leave. Finally Ruitenbeek — pleading: “No violence!” – left with his entourage.

This was the latest installment in an ongoing, surreal conflict between KIRAC, a fringe art group that posts its films on YouTube, and Houellebecq, one of the world’s most famous authors.

Was it a performance? A marketing stunt? Or part of a real cultural feud? Who could really tell?

KIRAC, an acronym for Keeping It Real Art Critics, is often described as an art collective, but the creative center is Ruitenbeek and Kate Sinha, a writer who is also Ruitenbeek’s life partner. They make films that at first glance seem like documentaries, or possibly mockumentaries, typically set in the art world. In it, the boundaries between reality and fiction are often blurred, stories sometimes conflict, and on-screen characters seem to be playing a game with the truth.

It is also often difficult to discern KIRAC’s political views. In one of his films, Dutch architect and curator Rem Koolhaas is criticized as ‘macho’ and ‘patriarchal’. In another article, KIRAC seems to disapprove of the diversity efforts, arguing that the artist Zanele Muholi got a retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, “just because she’s from South Africa, black and lesbian. ” (Muholi now uses she/them pronouns and identifies as non-binary.)

Seen as provocateurs or pranksters, and sometimes as trolls from the art world, KIRAC members often deliver critical monologues directly to the camera, usually in the form of eloquent academic analysis from Sinha, or mocking insults from Ruitenbeek.

“In the broadest sense, we’re just trying to make great movies, intellectual entertainment,” said Sinha. “I think we’re artists first and foremost, interested in the object we’re making, which is always the film.”

In a joint interview, Ruitenbeek and Sinha said that they developed the concept for the Houellebecq film with the author and shot 600 hours of footage of him, with his contractual permission. Houellebecq only objected when they put together a two-minute trailer for the work in progress, according to Ruitenbeek and Sinha.

In that video, Ruitenbeek explains that a ‘honey trip’ or sex holiday that Houellebecq had planned in Morocco was canceled because the author feared being kidnapped by Muslim extremists. (Houellebecq has a long history of making critical statements about Islam, and some readers have found Islamophobic sentiments in his books.)

“His wife had spent a whole month arranging prostitutes from Paris, and now everything fell apart,” says Ruitenbeek in the trailer, in voice-over. He then suggests that there are plenty of young Dutch women in Amsterdam who would “have sex with a famous writer out of curiosity”, and invites the author to visit.

Houellebecq argued in a French court that the trailer violated his privacy and damaged his image. He asked the court to ensure that KIRAC removes the trailer from all online platforms, removes any mention that his wife arranges prostitutes, and pays her damages. The court dismissed Houellebecq’s case.

Later, in Dutch court, Houellebecq argued that KIRAC had violated contract law and misled him into “ending up in a different film than originally intended”, according to his Dutch lawyer, Jacqueline Schaap. An appeals court ruled in favor of Houellebecq in that case.

The film is still unfinished and continues to develop, Ruitenbeek said. After Houellebecq left the project, KIRAC filmed in and around the court case, as well as other moments, such as the cockroach show on Saturday night.

Ruitenbeek said he was now reconsidering the material, and a final version could not come for months.

“We started this project with an open attitude towards each other; we took each other as artists,” Sinha said of the collaboration with Houellebecq. “It feels like he kicked back and put on a different coat.”

Houellebecq agreed to an interview for this article last week, but backed out after learning his quotes would not be seen for publication. (At the Amsterdam event, he again declined to comment, claiming he didn’t speak English, though he does speak it in the KIRAC movie.)

Ruitenbeek’s over-the-top voiceovers and willingness to play goofball suggest that KIRAC is going for humor. But often the subjects of his films do not find them funny.

“They point the finger at others, but create a safe place for themselves,” said artist Renzo Martens, who was the center of an unflattering film. “From this safe place they are brave enough to cut into other people’s flesh.”

Three Dutch institutions that KIRAC has criticized – the Stedelijk Museum, the Van Abbemuseum and the Kunstmuseum in The Hague – declined to comment on this article.

Thijs Lijster, associate professor of art and cultural philosophy at the University of Groningen, says that there is “something threatening in their way of working. They have a style of filming and approaching people and talking to them, which is kind of hostile in a way.”

It’s not just the fact that KIRAC targets artists and institutions that is controversial. Over time, his films have evolved to enter the realm of social commentary and draw anger from across the political spectrum.

Some viewers saw the 19-minute film “Who’s Afraid of Harvey Weinstein?”, in which Sinha talks about the sexual power dynamic between the American film producer and his rape victims, dismissing the #MeToo movement.

A leading art school in Amsterdam, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, canceled a KIRAC screening after dozens of complaints from students, former students and teachers about statements in the group’s films that they considered sexist and racist. The Weinstein movie was defended a right-wing populist Dutch blog, Geen Stijl. Suddenly KIRAC became a magnet for conservative followers.

Although Ruitenbeek and Sinha said their personal politics are progressive, KIRAC did not deny the attention and instead produced a movie called “Honeypot”. Before that, the group convinced a conservative Dutch philosopher and activist, Sid Lukkassen, to have sex with a left-wing student on camera. The idea was to see if the intimate act would somehow bridge a political divide.

More resistance followed. When an Amsterdam arts center called De Balie “Honeypot,” a feminist collective filed a petition with more than 1,000 signatures calling the film “a glorification of sexual violence.” Signatories to the petition also included right-wing Dutch politician Paul Cliteur and some of his followers.

“It was interesting that these two parties collaborated against the film for opposing reasons,” says Yoeri Albrecht, the director of De Balie, who did not cancel the event. “I have never experienced that in the more than ten years that I have been organizing events here.”

The ambiguity surrounding the group’s motivations only fuels interest in KIRAC’s work. Many who have followed the Houellebecq affair are unsure whether it is real or a postmodern KIRAC fiction.

“Everyone wonders, are they playing a game together?” said Simon Delobel, a curator who teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, where he was introduced to the group’s work by his students. KIRAC and Houellebecq were certainly aware that it could be interpreted as a stunt, he added.

Still, Ruitenbeek and Sinha both said their run-in with the author was no stunt. They don’t want to be in court with Houellebecq, whom they both describe as “a genius.” They just want to talk to him, Sinha said.

Ruitenbeek added that when he appeared on Houellebecq’s talk show on Saturday, he thought there was a small chance that everyone would laugh and give each other hugs. He was “very happy the day he went to get the cockroach suit,” Sinha said. “After all those harassing lawsuits,” she added, “we were back on our own turf: making art.”

Leontine Gallois contributed reporting from Paris.