Built in 1783, the Hameau de la Reine was a faux rustic retreat within the grounds of Versailles in which Marie Antoinette and her consorts could pretend to be peasants; she enjoyed dressing up as a shepherdess, and milking cows, and performing these tableaux vivants as if she were a character in a painting. Now upon seeing Kanye West, Juergen Teller and Kim Kardashian’s preposterous shoot in the grounds of the Château d’Ambleville for System magazine, which has also been published as a coffee-table book, one might wonder: what the hell is this? Well surely it is another strange, unwieldy pastoral fantasy for the wealthy and restless. Juergen, the photographer, is pictured hiking through a stream in his trademark tiny shorts, and actually he has always been an outdoorsy sort; his recent book The Keys to the House (2012) documented his traipses through the Suffolk countryside, whilst his series Irene im Wald (2012) recorded some walks with his mother through the woods near Nuremburg, Germany, where he grew up. Now he’s taking the world’s most famous couple on a stroll through the wilderness.

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“Last year, when I wrote about Kim and Kanye,” Jerry Saltz recently recounted, “I said I was ‘struck dumb’ by the ‘collective cultural fracturing’ that they actually seemed to be engineering, and doing it with the blatant biraciality of their combined meme, and with grandiosity, sincerity, kitsch, irony, theatre, and ideas of spectacle, privacy, fact, and fiction. All that had compressed into some new essence, an essence that they seemed to be shaping as surely and strangely as Andy Warhol once formed his.” But what exactly is this new essence? It’s worth looking for it in these latest photographs of a pair who think of themselves as king and queen; and indeed had their wedding party at Versailles, and are the closest thing we have to a Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette today. Theatricality is the key to their power. Once I attended the launch of her lingerie collection in London and there was a man employed to walk backwards in front of her at all times whilst brandishing a gargantuan, battery-powered lighting rig that reached towards the ceiling, illuminating her softly.

It was like watching a tiny football stadium taking a walk through an overpriced nightclub.

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Now in Juergen’s photographs Kim wears her hair messy and her make-up less than usual, in order to conjure up the illusion of the natural. Here is another tableau vivant in the French countryside, an act of absurd theatre. More to the point (and like Steven Klein’s photographs of her for the spring/summer 15 issue of Love magazine) it is intentional in its ugliness, weighty in its fleshliness. In shoots such as these Kim appears to be promoting a new 21st-century grotesque, and celebrating the gross corporeality of the body as opposed to the skinny teenage limbs, androgynous torsos, and air-brushed surfaces that the fashion industry tends to favour. In one image she is laying facedown on a pile of rubble as if she has just been quarried out of the ground, like an ancient fertility goddess. With her giant breasts and her impossibly large bottom, which appears completely out proportion to the rest of her body, she rather resembles the Venus of Willendorf.

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Writing in the New Yorker last week, Nathan Heller described the condition of “a modern figure who is neither purely good nor wholly evil, who’s both arresting and unsettlingly weird. In Dickens’s time, such a person might be described as eel-like or clammy. Today, he’s best known as a creep.” He suggests that, just as anxiety was the condition of the post-war age, so creepiness might be the condition of our times. Well it seems to me that Kanye fits this bill, of being “both arresting and unsettlingly weird,” as snugly as the flesh-coloured bodysuit that he has dressed his wife in outside the Château d’Ambleville. Such trompe l’oeil bodysuits also provided the central motif of his autumn/winter 15 fashion presentation for Adidas – which he staged in collaboration with Vanessa Beecroft, that artist-choreographer of naked performances – resulting in a rather dumpy, appendage-less look. Perhaps Kanye is creepily reimagining Kim as a sort of Hans Bellmer sculpture, an abstract collection of disembodied orbs.

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In fashion photographs she is usually pictured almost naked, thus shifting our focus from the clothing to the body, and it is not so much a classically harmonious body as a provocatively, unusually deformed one. Kim Kardashian is a grotesque – in that her form is comically exaggerated, as an outlandish and pantomime representation of our carnal desires. There is something unnatural, ungodly about her posterior. Once she had a doctor x-ray it on her reality show in order to prove to the world that it was real, without any implants, but then came the rumours that she had had fat clandestinely taken from elsewhere in her body and then injected into her bottom, without leaving a trace. Imagine that. What a decadent thing to do with one’s flesh, and what a confusing scenario in which the boundaries of the real and the pretend are absolutely blurred. At a dinner held in her honour at Art Basel Miami Beach last year, she was heard to joke that her arse is a work of art.

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Often in photographs Kim is turned mostly away from us, and instead we are confronted with her arse. So preposterously large is it, so extraordinary in its form, that it has more personality than most faces. She presents her bottom to us in a proud manner, and it is creepy, and grotesque; but quite captivating nonetheless.

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Dean Kissick is a writer based in Los Angeles.