Deník

In his second book, French conceptualist Édouard Levé (1965-2007) takes on one of the world's most banal textual mirrors: the newspaper. The publication of an unnamed daily newspaper of an unspecified date around the turn of the millennium becomes a book through a radical appropriation (with mystifying elements): news is torn from the everyday and saved from transience. At the same time, however, Levé deprives them of the very thing that characterizes them: he removes all proper names, and what makes a newspaper a newspaper is also lost in book form: the layout of pages, the size of headlines, the eye-catching peroxides... News of violent attacks, genocides, epidemics, trials or tax frauds are juxtaposed with birth and death announcements, statements by athletes, advertisements for the sale of both luxury and luxury real estate. The hierarchy of the near and the distant, the collective and the individual, disappears, leaving only a swarm of simultaneity and an alienating fog of phrases.

Czech edition