Martin Bladh: A Body of Work

Martin Bladh is a Swedish artist of multiple mediums. His work is dark, visceral, hypnotic and disturbing, laying bare themes of violence, obsession, fantasy, auto-eroticism, self-mutilation, domination, submission, narcissism. Further beyond that, there is also a tribal, base, essential quality to his work, a kind of saving grace which grounds his art and makes it extremely rare and extremely valid.

I first discovered Martin Bladh when I came across images of him online reenacting the murder and dismemberment of my father at the hands of the infamous serial killer Dennis Nilsen. It didn't shock but intrigued me. I wanted to know more about this man, who he was and what, if anything, he had to offer up artistically. For almost a year I sat back in reflection of his work, personal fears along the lines of the repetition of history preventing me from contacting him. When I finally did, by email, it was not some two-bob-serial-killer-fanboy-internet artist I felt I was making contact with but rather a man who had really broken through, someone living and breathing his art – an art that subsisted outside of galleries and theatres and resided in a bedsit with a polaroid camera often as the sole spectator.

Looking at Bladh's work one can discern influences from Yukio Mishima, Francis Bacon, Hermann Nitsch, Peter Sotos, Georges Bataille, Dennis Cooper, Dennis Nilsen, David Nebrada, even St Sebastian. They're all there, all openly on display, yet remarkably Bladh's work progresses past these influences and finds its very own standing alongside them. There are not many who can transform a Bacon painting into their own, who can litter their work with the quotes of writers and philosophers and have those words seem more their own than their owners’. Martin Bladh can, and
does. His arrangement of collages, his cut ups and pasting, his personal markings, all lend a uniqueness to what he does that is unmistakable: everything he produces signed with a signature that cannot be scrawled.

Indeed, the work of Martin Bladh is just that, 'a work', an entire body, a Gesamtkunstwerk. His pieces can only be viewed separately, but they never make more sense than when seen within the context of his overall oeuvre. Through a bombardment of the senses, which comes from full exposure to Bladh's art, one acquires a kind of cognitive idea of his expression and no one part represents that better than the whole – the body.

That kinda brings us to the chaos of Martin's art and the multiple mediums he uses – not so much through choice but more through necessity and desperation. Text, paint, performance, music, film, no medium inferior to the other, but all holding equal strain of what he seeks to get out. This all builds into his Gesamtkunstwerk and somehow each medium retains the unique artistic print of the man behind them. They all have the same unique feel and all pull us towards the same unique place.
But pull as they might, at whatever they can bring out of us, there is nothing to learn from Bladh's work but the man. Anything else you walk away with is grace to yourself, extrapolating your own obsessions and fears and disgusts from what he cuts, slices and serves up. And it makes sense. Bladh's art/performances are not put on show for us but for him, they are fantasies that follow the man into his most intimate personal spaces. He would create and play these things out if he was floating lost through space alone. His main audience is himself and that leads back to the narcissistic qualities that were mentioned before.

Of course, that summing up has about as many holes in it as a colander. It is the truth of a lie and sits rather unsteadily with the exhibitionism (even the narcissism) that Martin freely admits to being present within his work. And I can offer no marriage or resolution to that. All I can say is that as with the best, his work is full of contradictions and it's those contradictions that make it impossible to define his art, but possible to define the artist.

Martin Bladh's work will not be to everyone's taste. He is definitely much more Yuk than Yum. But it's important one knows of him, if only to disregard, rubbish or become nauseous over what he does. Still, for all the shock in Bladh's work, he is anything but a shock artist. Bladh's motivation for creating is too self-directed to care for such things. And finally, it is in that self-obsession/worship, Bladh's unabashed display of auto-eroticism, that one finds an honesty and an integrity in his work that is desperately lacking in the arts today. Martin Bladh has deserted the middle ground and is off somewhere all on his own.

Shane Levene

http://www.memoiresofaheroinhead.blogspot.com/

Death of Narcissus 2 (2007)

Wolfgang Georg Fischer – Egon Schiele, The Theater of the Self: In the oil The Self-Seers (Death and Man, 1911) there is a pale, hazy phantom image – as at a séance – behind the darker portrait in the foreground, and it is as if this phantom had been called up by the hand that rises from depths. The portrait sitter’s eyes are wide in alarm, his eyebrows raised, as he sees his second image as Death behind him. The doppelgänger as mask and death mask; the opposition of the present and a menacing, fateful future. The recurring death motif in his work prompted Schiele to offer a written comment. For him, life and death were co-present, as the doppelgänger images imply. In a poem of 1910 or 1911 he wrote: “I am a man, I love death and love life.”(…) For an artist to give such preferential treatment to his own body and face, to use his available person so insistently, to look so addictively into the studio mirror, is inconceivable if the artist is not also narcissistic beyond the usual.



John Nathan – Mishima, a Biography: In mid-September Mishima posed for the young photographer Kishin Shinoyama for the first of a series of photographs called “Death of a Man.” The series was Mishima’s inspiration and Mishima designed the scenes. They included Mishima drowning in mud, Mishima with a hatchet in his brain, Mishima beneath the wheels of a cement truck, and of course Mishima as Saint Sebastian, arms roped above his head to a tree branch and arrows burning deliciously into his armpit and flank. The photographs were intended for publication in a magazine called Blood and Roses, but when Mishima died, Shinoyama could not bring himself to release them. The photograph that most unnerved him was one he had taken in jest; Mishima sits naked on the floor with a short sword buried in his abdomen, and standing behind him, with a long sword raised waiting to behead him on his signal, is Shinoyama. What can Mishima have been thinking? Were these moments when stage blood and the real thing came confused in his mind and he looked forward to his actual death as simple another more sensational pose? In all the hours of talk about each scene while it was being planed and photographed, Shinoyama’s only impression was that Mishima was intensely serious about the project, “the most demanding and the most cooperative” model he had ever had



Jean-Luc Mercié – Pierre Molinier, a retrospective: On the fixed date - 3 March - at the appointed time of 7:30 p.m., Molinier lie down across his bed in front of the mirror and shot himself in the mouth. This was the last encounter of Eros flouting Thanatos, eye to eye, until the final spasm of detonation. Baudelaire would have surely hailed the courage of this dandy, who lived and died in front of his mirror. An artist’s scruples, a last concern for his appearance prevented Molinier from photographing the fatal moment. It would have been easy for him to use string to attach the trigger - although he would have surely preferred the term “finger piece” – to attach the finger piece of the revolver to the cable release. He didn’t do it, undoubtedly so as not to leave the subtle operations of development and printing in the hands of strangers. What does exist, however – worlds apart from the Molinier method, for here, nothing is touched – are the photos for the Criminal Records Office. Only a handful of us have viewed them. A drizzle of blood runs from his nostril, another from the top of his skull. The gun’s kick sent the barrel back out of his mouth, and the Colt lies on his chest. One bullet and sputters of a flash were enough to wipe out any misunderstanding.



Dennis Nilsen quoted in Brian Master – Killing for Company: When I had the privacy of my own room as an N.C.O. sexual expression became more complex. The novelty of one’s own body soon wore off and I needed something positive to relate to. My imagination hit on the idea of using a mirror. By placing a large, long mirror on its side strategically beside the bed, I would view my own reclining reflection. At first always careful not to show my head, because the situation needed that I believe it was someone else. I would give the reflection some animation, but that play could not be drawn out long enough. The fantasy could dwell much longer on a mirror image which was asleep.

IRM - Red Album

IRM - "Red Album" goldenCD

Autarkeia

Price: 40 Lt / 12 EUR
To celebrate that a decade has passed since the release of the IRM "Red Album" LP, a CD reissue is now presented by Autarkeia. Martin Bladh and Erik Jarl had already known eachother for a few years when they began their mission as IRM in 1997. Fuelled by the rage of sonic power-houses like Whitehouse and Brighter Death Now, they recorded a demo tape that landed them a deal with Cold Meat Industry. Immediately upon its arrival, "The Red Album" was met by great enthusiasm as it breathed new life in a genre gone quite stagnant at the time. The sound displayed a unique amalgamation of Jarl's analogue bass-heavy eruptions, and Bladh's revelatory lyrics/vocals which were thematically more aligned with the apocalyptic preachings of Michael Gira and Nick Cave than the confrontationalism of William Bennett. Also the monochrome cover designs that IRM chose to work with stood in stark contrast to the cheap shock tactics that had infested the power electronics scene for so long. On subsequent landmark albums such as "Oedipus Dethroned" and "Virgin Mind" IRM honed their sound and dug deeper into the maze of the human psyche, while in parallell both Bladh and Jarl have explored new aestetic avenues with diverse solo projects.
Now when looking back, it is perfectly clear that IRM have fulfilled and surpassed all the expectations that the release of "The Red Album" promised. More than ten years down the road, the adolescent debutants have become the revered minstrels of industrial gospel.

Album's tracks listing:



1. some inner domain

2. powerdrill

3. unconcious

4. soulcleaner

5. martyr 2000

6. katharsis

7. r.s.

8. the essence of young death



Album “Red” lasts for 41 min 45 s. Lim. E 500.

http://www.autarkeia.org/main.php?lang=en&menu=label&ac=releases&id=1577