Shit happens

>> Is there any hope for French performance artist/musician Jean-Louis Costes?

POOPER TROOPER: Costes in action

by JOHNSON CUMMINS

Sitting in a popular eatery on the Main with France’s Jean-Louis Costes, one can’t help but feel that maybe a restaurant was not the ideal spot to interview this performance artist/musician, given that most of his work is enough to kill anybody’s appetite. With over 40 CD releases under his belt, and numerous plays as well, including his most recent opera Les Petits Oiseaux Chient (“the little birds shit”), Costes does have a recurring theme to his work—his obsession with scatology.

“I guess I’m the king of shit,” Costes states rather matter-of-factly, with a thick Parisian accent. “Shit is something I know about because it’s something I do every day, it’s a real part of life. At first it was a joke and I was just trying to be as stupid as possible. Then I realized that the stupider you are, the more intelligent you are, because you are getting closest to what real life is. I hate conceptual art, for instance, where people think about something and then create it. I like to just create as soon as it hits my head. There are so many good love songs in the world that I wouldn’t want to do that, but when it comes to body fluids, I will put that in every show.

“It’s what I do,” Costes says with deadly seriousness.

It’s true that controversy follows Costes around like toilet paper stuck to his shoe, but he insists that to shock merely for shock value’s sake is only a small part of his art. His current opera, which he and his partner and fellow performance artist Lisou Prout present tonight at Zoobizarre, may feature him covered in fake shit (chocolate pudding, in fact), with a heaping amount of nudity and simulated sex, but he insists that he’s just trying to entertain and stir emotions with a story of the human condition.

His long flirtation with controversy has left Costes no stranger to censorship. In his native country, leftists have accused him of Nazism after a record of his was banned for purported racist themes. Protesters added pressure and briefly got his Web site yanked, and more recently, his show in North Dakota get the plug pulled prematurely when the promoter got his gander up about the nudity and potty play.

This last event quickly leaked to the Internet and news wires, on which Costes was demonized and held up as an example of art going too far. “It was funny to read all of these people’s comments about how much they hated the show, because almost all of the people who commented weren’t even there. I actually found a lot of articles coming from conservative Christian viewpoints that spoke out against me to be really interesting, and made some good points. It’s funny because I actually practise Catholicism, but I don’t really believe in it. I wish I did, though, because I find it really interesting that people can go to church and hope for a miracle. What Christianity is to me is a sense of hope, and I respect that, but unfortunately, I just don’t have much hope.”

With Feu Thérèse and DJ Christof
Migone at Zoobizarre tonight, Thursday,
April 12, 9 p.m., $12