07/19/2026
BENJI’S WORLD PRESENTS: COSTES, THE MAD MASTER OF SAINT-DENIS
Over five decades, the French artist Jean-Louis Costes has constructed an immense body of work. A prolific songwriter, musician, performance artist, writer and filmmaker, he is perhaps best known, if he is known at all, for his music, especially his synth-driven industrial noise, though his musical output, like his film work, is impressively and deceptively varied.
A camcorder was bought into his practice to archive performances for VHS sales. He turned it on himself in his ruined loft. The first film, ONLY GOD SEES ME, was a solo recording with no crew and no editing experience. The films in this retrospective come out of that lineage. The films were made because the camcorder, the basement, and the body were already there, and because he could take the camcorder on the road. No audience was presumed in advance. The result is a body of films that moves from Saint-Denis to Tokyo, New York, and the Amazonian jungle, and remains outside traditional circuits of exhibition, with no label, no distributor, and no institutional support.
This is a retrospective for viewers willing to meet explicit, confrontational underground work directly. The films are formally and emotionally unhinged, and the lower register is fully present, staged through fiction and performance. Scatological content recurs. Sexual content is unembarrassed and frequently violent. But none of this exists, Costes claims, without dramaturgical necessity. The films remove the usual aesthetic protections. A romantic and playful streak runs through the work, although usually against all evidence. The slapstick humor, beauty, tenderness, frailty, weakness, and failure are part of the mechanism.
PROGRAM 1: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
THURS, 7/16 – 7:30 PM
MON, 7/20 – 7:30 PM
FRI, 7/24 – 10:00 PM
TUES, 7/28 – 7:30 PM
PROGRAM 2: THE MAD MASTER OF SAINT-DENIS
THURS, 7/16 – 10:00 PM
TUES, 7/21 – 7:30 PM
SAT, 7/25 – 10:00 PM
WED, 7/29 – 7:30 PM
PROGRAM 3: I LIVE ALONE
FRI, 7/17 – 11:55 PM
SAT, 7/25 – 11:55 PM
