Cue

Dennis Nilsen quoted in Brian Master´s Killing for Company: He looked really beautiful like one of those Michelangelo sculptures. It seemed that for the first time in his life he was really feeling and looking the best he ever did in his whole life. I wanted to touch and stroke him, but did not. I placed two mirrors around the bed, one at the end and one at the side. I lay naked beside him but only looked at the two bodies in the mirror.

Narcissistic sensation could be compared to a pendulum rocking between opposite poles. To my opinion a piece is no good if it doesn’t have the ability to seduce and at the same time put me in a state of discomfort. It’s about resistance - a resistance that spurs me on. There is no obvious connection to direct sexual ecstasy or orgasm. The aim is a painful, sustained process, a ritualistic monotonous tension without definite ejaculation; the moment before and after the performance might be as rewarding as the actual act (It’s not unusual that the act hits me more violently when I watch the reproduction afterwards and the piece is revealed to me in all its complexity). The sensation is happening on a childish, abstract fantasy level where it’s treated for a quite a long time. It’s a sadomasochistic sensation, an idea, a scenario which I find quite repugnant, but holds a great attraction to me and thereby has to be carried out. It’s very important that this act has a spectator. If no psychical audience is present I would like to have the knowledge that it can be observed later through reproduction apparatuses.

Even when I’m alone, in front of the mirror, the hidden audience is there by proxy, within me the actor’s and the spectator’s imagination - through your own gaze you perceive the other. I recognise this as a kind of communication, feedback or mute dialogue, where I reflect myself in the spectator. I’m very attracted to the tension between the victim and the perpetrator. Both parts are of equal importance to me. When I put myself in a situation which I find degrading or even repugnant, I’ve become the wound. When I make use of “authentic” voices from real life victims, putting them in a different context where they are forced to act as characters in a peepshow staged and directed by me, have I not become the executioner by proxy? I fantasies about further depths, go even deeper, to force my work into a sadomasochistic cul-de-sac where the actual work itself represent the sadistic part and I’ve become a mere masochist trying to endure it.

Yukio Mishima – Kyoko’s House: All we know or ever know is that death must always have been his desire. Death confronted him wearing a variety of masks. One by one he took them of and put them on his own face. When he removed the final mask, death’s real face must have been revealed, but we cannot know whether even that was terrifying to him. Until then his desire for death had made him fervently desire the masks too. With the masks he gradually made himself beautiful. You must realize that a man’s determination to become a beautiful person is very different from the same desire in a woman; in a man it is always the desire for death.

The mask has always been a way of controlling and perhaps even to shield myself off from certain aspects of the work. I’ve always inhibited the ability to adopt a certain persona, to reflect myself in other human beings that I hail or whose life stories fascinate me, to find mutual references. I’m quite eclectic in the post-modern sense, above all when it comes to form, how something “should” be represented. I like to take samples from other artist’s works and put them together into new pieces, into a new personality: my own. By acting out that certain role, you’ll finally be able to incarnate the persona you always wanted to. A certain exaggeration, masquerade, even dandyism could be quite useful to help you there. The masks coincide in this pathological search for perfection, the elevation of the being, the creation of the ideal-self image - perfect ego puzzle.

The very idea of the body, isolated on the stage in front of the audience certainly brings an erotic tension quite similar to the arranged, theatrical gestures in front of the mirror (which craves an audience by proxy). What I do wouldn’t make sense without the obvious references to the stage, the props and the mirror. I don’t believe a performance-piece could be everyday, relaxed or “natural”, it demands a dramatically heightening of the senses, of the ego; a state of mind which is different than other sorts of artistic expressions. The body becomes elevated when it’s placed within this particular, exposed context, both erotically and heroically; a body that brings together an amount of different fragments; my own mythology of voices, heroes and monsters. As the principal actor I’m the master of this self invented universe. The body is the arena and the projection screen where the obsession and fantasies blend together. In this new, dualistic reality I’m the sole judge, jury, and executioner, the prosecuted and the convict. This balance could sometimes be quite terrifying, but it is this “stage fright” that makes me want to search out the terribly beauty of the reflection, the violence of the mirror. What I want is a kind of condensation, a concentration of all the impressions I’ve stolen. Voices, reproductions and bodies assume the shape of a collage – the body and arena of the spectacle, the sustained process of violence, which becomes immortalised and refined through the reproduction.