Los Angeles has long been pursuing the economies of pink, but it has been pursuing a phantom. Pink is a non-existent wavelength of light. We cannot perceive it, but literally imagine it. Its features disclose themselves in every BPA-free bottle of pink coconut water, in Lindsay Lohan’s strawberry blonde tresses starring in The Canyons (2013)—Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis’s “acid-etched horror story” complete with a trailer by Kanye West—or ultimately in every smog-induced sunset spectacle off Santa Monica beach. A little bit like Ed Ruscha’s pastel-on-paper work Another Hollywood Dream Bubble Popped (1976), the economies of pink allow the space of representation, not the pictorial space to rule. About that space of representation, Michel Foucault wrote that it transpires “only on the surface, no more than a polished stone, bearing words and shapes: beneath, nothing […] a gravestone.” Unsurprisingly, the asymptote of these economies runs along a vital art market. Ruscha’s slick aesthetic, boasting sharp edges and lurid gradients, shaped the idiom of pop by cutting through it with L.A. archetypes. In contrast, it is the gonzo debonair attitude of living and working in a garage in early sixties Venice—established by the artists gathered around Walter Hopps’s and Edward Kienholz’s …

The traditional form of the novel, as we know it since the nineteenth century, seems oddly impervious to change. In comparison to the extraordinary evolutions undergone by art, very little has changed between today’s mainstream fiction and its Balzac, Austen, and James equivalents. Most of the novel’s purported evolutions have either proven to be barren (as Julio Cortázar’s 1963 Rayuela, a masterpiece which left in its wake a string of choose-your-own-ending fictions) or resorted to the more or less forceful insertions from other disciplines: pictures, traditionally, or sound and video in their most recent tablet incarnations. A text-based fiction, it would seem, has few places to go except where it already is. This state of affairs is both questioned and affirmed by the work of the late Henri Chopin, whose, well, novel, La crevette amoureuse [The loving shrimp], (1967/1975)—is on show in Berlin at Supportico Lopez. Throughout most of the twentieth century Chopin has been a prominent experimental poet and performer (born in Paris in 1922, he remained productive until 2008, the year he died); one of the first and most prolific practitioners of concrete and sound poetry, Chopin was also a publisher of journals such as Cinquième Saison (1959–1963) and …