Katya Bonnenfant, who works under the artistic moniker the old boys’ club, approaches various subjects—including ideas around desire and judgement—with humor, whimsy, and a lightness of mood, even if the subjects themselves reject this levity. La Destitution de la jeune fille, which continues in this playful vein, is a direct response to the book Premiers materiaux pour une theorie de la jeune fille (Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl), written in 1999 by Tiqqun, a largely anonymous French writers collective. The philosophical theory put forward by the group takes form within the work as an epic battle, inspired by the history painting of such canonical artists as Paolo Ucello and Antoine-Jean Gros. Rather than an historical narrative, however, the subject is made contemporary. Advancing the notion of the Young Girl as a nongendered concept symbolizing the capitalist machine and the meaninglessness of modern life, the collective calls for a new social order in which the Young Girl is overthrown. Echoing the anonymity of their literary brethren, creatures with myriad masks—Native American, Hello Kitty, burqas, clowns, football helmets—wage war against commodity culture and empty existence. Far from being a simple notion of good versus bad, however, it is amidst a landscape of chaos and confusion that these creatures fight the battle of the contemporary world.