Authors

The novelist Michal Viewegh penned a note for the jacket of Peep show, an enlarged edition of Blumfeld’s debut Polykači ohně (Fire-eaters) where, with ironic foresight, he recommended the book to ‘all those in need of a break from American movies, design, punks, electronics, perfumes, fast food, Viewegh and pop culture’. The volume is a miscellany of writing in which the radical parodist Blumfeld 2001 ridicules a wide range of the pseudo-modern consumer entertainment and, in particular, its makers. ‘Pop culture must be debased and violated,’ Blumfeld 2001 asserts. His is mainly a critique pillorying the decay of language in the media: he takes Orwellian newspeak ad absurdum to the clipped language of wild gestures, comparable to the vivid idiom of comics, film trailers and TV ads. Inspired by Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’, Blumfeld 2001 creates pungent, distorted Postmodern remixes, in a variety of ways crushing and demeaning the icons of pop culture, from Barbie dolls, Ronnie Reagan the mediocre actor, to McDonald’s nosh-houses. In the words of the literary critic and publisher Martin Machovec, the author thus ‘strips naked the artificiality and trickery of the “pop idols” and all popular quasi-culture’; as ‘the quantity of popular objects and “beings” is indeed optional, they are entirely interchangeable since they merely sponge off the profound, old myths’. What we have beneath the shell of black humour and cynicism – and moreover of a licentious and often sadistically guileful game – is a radical pamphlet that is anti-capitalist or even bluntly anti-civilization: a distinctive philosophical concept confronting the consumerist alibi-making of the twenty-first century (‘When you are at a loss about what to do, do what everybody else is does’) with the purity of thought of the indigenous peoples and Buddhist teaching.

(vn, rk)

The profile was updated in 2005

En français S.M.BLUMFELD, En français.doc