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Like residues two images are remnants in my mind after watching the videos of Martin Bladh. They both seem to be crucial, pinning down some central aspects, some key issues of Martin’s work. The first body is a submissive headless body and the second is an active and self humiliating body.
1st body
We find the first body of Bladh as the central and lonely unity in works like Injury, and Talk Show. A torso covered with bruises displayed against a flat monochrome background. Like a piece of dead meat on a chopping board, waiting for the knife, or maybe hanging down nailed to a wall, a plucked chicken or rabbit ready for the dismemberment. We are unable to see the head, most of the arms and legs. We have seen the Headless before, for instance in the famous picture by the surrealist painter Andre Masson on the cover of the first issue of Acéphale 1936, a magazine that was connected to a secret and esoteric society founded by the French philosopher and mystic Georges Bataille and friends. In a letter of intent Bataille declared that the aim with the society was “to become altogether other, or cease to be”. As many of the intellectuals and artists during the 20th century the society turned their backs to the logic and science of western civilization. They took inspiration from so called primitive societies that, they assumed, had knowledge of a more genuine state of being and with a magical knowledge that was since long forgotten in the more developed civilizations. According to Bataille: “Human life is exceeded of serving as head and reason of universe. Insofar as it becomes this head and this reason, insofar as it becomes necessary to the universe, it accepts serfdom.” There is rumours that the society was planning a human sacrifice, that all of the members agreed to be the victim but nobody was prepared to be the executioner. The image of a headless body is also frequent in the Japanese post war dance Butoh. Unable to see the dancer, with head covered in a cloth, is able to reach a richer awareness of the body. Tatsumi Hijikata one of the founders of Butoh was very inspired by the writings of Bataille. They shared the urge to let the body free of the restrictions of the intellect, the superego and the restrictions of the society. A body fettered to cliffs, walls or framed inside the field of a picture, struggling to get free of all the obstructions created by upbringing, socialization and restrictions from all the taboos of moral and religion. In Injury and Exhibit A this defenseless body often is thematized and this interpretation is strengthened by the many references to children and childhood throughout Martin’s realm. In this world the images of sweet little roe dear Bambi is covered with blood, a bleeding wound opens in the children room’s wallpaper (Injury). The innocent/ce is sacrificed. Word is spoken that, without reveal its source (who actually is speaking is not clarified – is it the individual laying in front of us or somebody else, the abuser?), is addressing sexual frustration and uncertainty, of abuse and self-loathing and discomfort with the body. Martin’s video work also bear on inspiration from the Austrian actionist Hermann Nitsch’s early actions, his penis rinsings and his work with a bodily grammar. A new kind of language is emerging in which the body in pain gives shape to signs or letters and the systematics of torture creates the syntax. These works often displayed young boyish bodies like in the pictures from 20 action (1966) where the body of the young often man seems to lack most of the arms and legs. Their bodies are covered with entrails, visualizing emasculations and opening of a side wound (resembling the sore of Christ). According to the English feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, a way of feminizing the body is to show it in fragments, visually cut up immobilized and displayed in room without any depths. This objectified feminized body brings a halt to all action. Lack of perspective means lack of room to maneuver. In the medieval visual culture we find this flat space in which the gestalts seem to float somewhere between the image surface and the spectator. A celestial world is a world beyond the time-space. That way it’s so easy to understand the mishandled body in Talk Show as a holy corpse, a scapegoat that are suffering for our sake – lying in front of us, penetrated by our gaze, examined by the spoken words.
2nd body
In Matt. 5:29-30 the second body of Bladh is observed from above and from behind. As a viewer you have the position of a surveillance camera. We understand, without actually seeing it, that the person in the scene is performing an act of self-mutilation, he is castrating himself. Systematically he performs the act, according to a predetermined plan, and between each part of the emasculation time passes. It’s not an act of rage or uncontrolled rage or desperation; which makes the video sequence more frightening. He “proceeded, inch by inch, to amputate his own penis, while a photographer recorded the act as an art event”, writes the American critique Robert Hughes 1972 in an article that created the grandiose legend about the death of the Austrian actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Although the writer of the article misinterpreted Schwarzkogler’s photos, he formulated a fantastic image of the modernist artist that trespasses into every territory to fulfill his vision – not even coming to a halt when reaching the final threshold. This myth with its roots in a romantic concept of the divinely inspired artist, that never compromises when it comes to realizing their ideas. Art history is full of canonized artists that match this avant-garde myth; Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock etcetera. In this reading the second body of Bladh like the first one establishes the similarity between artistic act and a sacrificial. If we instead apply another viewpoint a totally different meaning evolves. The key point is the kind of perspective that’s present in this setting. We are viewing the scene from a steep angle above the actor, our focal point is headed to the corner where the wall meets the floor. What puzzles our perception of the room is that a [set of] mirror is arranged in a way that dissolves the corner and is supposedly mirroring the gruesome act for the actor. Our position as a viewer gives us the role of the supervisor witch refers to the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s notion of the Panopticon, in witch the unseen guard can watch over the members of the society. Foucault claims that this control system, in witch the overviewed never knows if they are being watched or not, creates self-disciplinary actions by the supervised. And, as the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich claimed, the most disciplinary act is to repress the sexuality. Like Oedipus the actor/Bladh in Matt. 5:29-30 is blending himself, reading the gaze as an instance for power, the domination of the phallus. But instead of seeing the act of self-mutilation as a self-corrective operation we could also understand it as an act of resistance. As an alternative to a subordinance over the law of the father, that according to the Jacques Lacan re-reading of Freud is initiated when the child discovers itself in a mirror and begins to see itself through the gaze of another. The law of the father means the dominance of language and the split in the mind, as a knife separating the id from the superego. Reading the image of the second body of Bladh in this manner you could interpret it as radical resistance to the law of father, the dominance of language and as a sentimental longing for the speechless unity between mind and matter. Bladh is participating in the search for the holy body. Castration is well known from the religious cults like the ancient self-castrating corybantes who devoted themselves to Cybele. Blood from the penis is dripping on the mirror, as in Talk Show 1, the reflection is covered in blood and the room collapses. An act to put an end to all further actions, the perspective of the renaissance, which is so crucial for actions is overpainted with blood. We return to the sacred space beyond the time space categories, beyond good and evil.
AA
Reading Bladh’s videos in a multi perspective way, with the help of Bataille, Mulvey, Foucault and Reich, give us an image of a very romantic artist that’s very critical against civilization. This could be understood as an anomaly in the contemporary art scene. One aspect contradicts this notion – the frequent references to the stage. As the row of light in Matt. 5:29-30 and Talk Show 2, which is taken from a make-up mirror, and the theatre curtain in Talk Show 3. Bladh is aware of the collapse of the Grand Narratives but persists to return to the subject of the holy reunion with eternity through sacrifice. But this is a staged sacrifice, the body and the activities of the body as a constructed reality – a body without organs. The castration is then maybe a step towards the theatre of cruelty, towards Antonin Artaud’s vision of a free man: “When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.”
Haparanda, February 1, 2007,
Hans T Sternudd
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