Georges Perec and the avant-garde in the visual arts

The work of the French writer Georges Perec belongs in the 1960s avant-garde is rooted to a very large extent in the visual arts. Like other avant-garde artists from the 1960s and 1970s, Perec tends to work across genres and art forms. He shares the fascinated interest in mass culture as well as the critique of the traditional concept of the artist, just as he shares the attempt to cross the boundaries between life and art and reach what Perec calls the 'infra-ordinary'. Like many visual artist of this period, Perec is interested in systems and serial production. Several model characteristics of the 1960s avant-garde artist can be seen in Perec's own model of a visual artist, the character Bartlebooth in Life A User's Manual. Bartlebooth's project may seem like a parody of the 1960s avant-garde, but is not far from Perec's own descriptive project Lieux.