Martin Bladh

The Cult of the Young Men - 8 Ghost Stories

2011-12-22T23:19:00.000-08:00

Georg Trakl (1887 – 1914)

Francis Michael Sharp – The Poet’s Madness; a reading of Georg Trakl: On one occasion, Trakl allegedly threw himself in front of a frightened horse. At another point early in his life, apparently prompted once more by an abhorrence of rapid motion. He stepped into the path of a moving train. The circumstances and aftermath of these two events are not recorded. The third event has been interfered both as absent-mindedness an as an “expression of a psychotic situation.” Sometime between the ages of five and eight, Trakl walked directly into a pond until he disappeared under water. His hat floating on the surface provided his rescuers the only indication where he could be found, and he was pulled to safety.

Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918)

Wolfgang Georg Fischer – Egon Schiele, Desire and Decay: In 1910 a gynaecologist friend, Erwin von Graff, secured Schiele access to the university gynaecological clinic, and there he found his material for a realistic unmasking of the traditional iconography of children. Newborn Baby (1910) was one of the drawings Schiele did at this time. The baby’s head is outsize, the body rickety, the movements of the hands and legs as yet uncoordinated. Schiele drew the baby’s hair standing on end, its facial features distorted and its half-closed eyes fixed in an expression that seems one of horror and suffering. Its belly is like a limp, leathery bag, and its navel is like a wound, a hole in the body. The red scrotum looks ulcerous between the spread, bluish legs, and the thin, purpled arms reaching out to the shoulders look cramped. This is the human child as homunculus. Schiele saw newborn infants as shrivelled ancients with grief in their eyes, as if they were afraid of beginning their journey through the worldly vale of tears.

Kimitake Hiraoka (1925 – 1970)

John Nathan – Mishima; a biography: The body did not come home until four the following afternoon, and since the crematorium closed at five, there was scarcely time for the final “leave-taking.” As he had requested in his will, Mishima was dressed in his Shield Society uniform, a military sword laid across his chest. At the last moment Yoko placed some manuscript paper and his fountain pen in the coffin with him. Only Azusa and Yoko’s father, Nei Sugiyama, accompanied the body to the crematorium.
The following day the house was open to friends who came to light incense to Mishima’s memory. Yoko greeted and looked after the guests whose acquaintance with the house had begun after Mishima’s marriage; Shizue took care of older friends. One had come with a bouquet of white roses. As he stood in front of the Buddhist altar looking up at Mishima’s photograph, Shizue said from behind, “You should have brought red roses for a celebration. This was the first time in his life Kimitake did something he always wanted to do. Be happy for him”.

David Wojnarowicz (1954 – 1992)

David Wojnarowicz – From the Diaries of a Wolf Boy: Sometimes I wish I could blow myself up. Wrap a belt of dynamite around my fucking waist and walk into a cathedral or the Oval Office or the home of my mother and father. I’m in the last row of the bus, the seven other passengers are clustered like flies around the driver in the front. I can see his cute fuckable face in the rearview mirror. I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I’m looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don’t know where I’m going; I decided I’m not crazy or alien. It’s just that I’m more like one of those kids they find in remote jungles or forests of India. A wolf child. And they’ve dragged me into this fucking schizo-culture, snarling and spitting and walking around on curled knuckles. They’re trying to give me a damp mattress to sleep on in a dark corner when all I really want is the rude perfume of some guy’s furry underarms and crotch to lean into. I’ll make guttural sounds and stop eating and drinking and I’ll be dead within the year. My eyes have always been advertisements for an early death.

Ian Kevin Curtis (1956 – 1980)

Paul Morley – Nothing: I’m sure that the he that once livened up this body would have been pleased with the pose and the shadow of death that grazed it. Film stars and pop stars and models work hard to create such a cold and splendid pose. Working too hard to achieve such poses can often lead, what with one thing and another, to an early, controversial death. The earlier the death, the better, the more tragic, this final pose. The neat black marks crossing the neck of the body of the man who died early and was truly in front of me only succeeded in increasing the depressed glory of the final pose. The black marks that danced on the body’s neck like some gothically extravagant beauty spot drew attention to the damned flawlessness of everything else, emphasising with sick, magnificent force that this was indeed – as he would have wanted, if he had chosen – a good-looking corpse.

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (1960 – 1994)

Brian Masters – The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer: After a while, Jeff felt he knew David well enough to bring him into part of his private little world. In his solitary moments, which were frequent, he had dreamt up a game involving stick men and spirals. The stick men were spindly figures who would be annihilated if they came too close to one another, as each boy manipulated his little army. The spirals were tightly drawn, intensely imagined symbols of descent, whose ultimate destination was a black hole. He called the game Infinity Land.

Per Yngve Ohlin (1969 - 1991)

Dead quoted in Michael Moynihan’s and Didrik Söderlind’s Lords of Chaos: I had a weird experience once. I had inner bleeding and it couldn’t be found at X-rays so when it continued to bleed and bleed I finally fainted and dropped down to the floor cos I run out of blood. The heart had no blood left to beat and my veins/arteries almost emptied of blood. “Technically” I was dead. At that moment when I fell down (into a door, I heard later), I saw a strange blue color everywhere - it was transparent so I could for a short moment see everything in blue, till something shining white and "hot" surrounded me
... it’s someone I know who’s had many out-of-body experiences and knows much more than I do about "supernatural" experience, that I asked this cos it was so strange about those colors. She told me that the first “plane” in the astral world has the color blue. The earthly plane has the color of black. Then comes a gray that is very near the earthly one and is easy to come to. The next one further is blue, then it gets brighter and brighter till it “stops” at a white shining one that can’t be entered by mortals. If any mortal succeeds in entering it, that one is no longer mortal and can not come back to the earthly planes nor back to this earth. After the white plane… it goes further with other colors that I don’t know of – there only spirits and great sorcerers can travel. I was told that the white plane I then entered, without knowing it, was the deadworld, and I had died.

Eric David Harris (1981 – 1999)

REB quoted in Jefferson County, Columbine Documents: It will be like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam, duke, and doom all mixed together. maybe we will even start a little rebellion or revolution to fuck things up as much as we can. i want to leave a lasting impression on the world, and god damnit do not blame anyone else besides me and V for this. don't blame my family, they had no clue and there is nothing they could have done, they brought me up just fucking fine. don't blame toy stores or any other stores for selling us ammo, bomb materials, or anything like that because it's not their fault. i don't want no fucking laws on buying fucking PVC pipes. we are kind of a select case here so don't think this will happen again. don't blame the school, don't fucking put cops all over the place, just because we went on a killing spree doesn't mean everyone else will, and hardly ever do people bring bombs or guns to school anyway. the admin is doing a fine job as it is. i don't know who will be left after we kill but damnit don't change any policies just because of us. it would be stupid, and if there is any way in this fucked up universe we can come back as ghosts or what the fuck ever we will haunt the life out of anyone who blames anyone besides me and V…

mjbladh@hotmail.com

Oedip, Rothko and Anthology

2011-12-06T02:15:00.000-08:00

December 7 - December 17, 2011

http://galeria-arta49.tumblr.com/

Galeria Arta49 is excited to present a very special body of work featuring Martin Bladh.

Martin Bladh (1976) 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.

Martin Bladh’s name is also recognized from his involvement in the experimental, post-industrial outfits IRM and Skin Area. This exhibition explores the relationship between his music and visual art. The three collage series on display show Bladh’s obsession to mingle and crossbreed different type of media – music, literature and visuals - into a total work of art.

Oedipus Dethroned:
Eight collages made as a complement to the reissue of IRM’s second album Oedipus Dethroned from 2000.

Rothko Field:
Eight collages made as a complement to Skin Area’s third album Rothko Field from 2011.

Anthology:
Six collage drawings made as a complement to the upcoming IRM Anthology album 2012.

contact:
http://martinbladh-vf.blogspot.com/
mjbladh@hotmail.com

N-SPHERE - THE VERTEX

2011-12-04T02:28:00.000-08:00

The Spheres Virtual Platform presents: In December 2011, The Spheres present N-Sphere The Vertex, the gallery's #1 printed issue. At the junction of art paths, The Vertex pulls the N-Sphere's axes into a convergence point. The first printed edition of the magazine, The Vertex emerged out of the DIY stubborness that ...has brought us to this instant in space and time, with the hopes of blending ideas, concepts and people. A token from the N-Sphere to all knowledge dwellers out there, may you never succomb into oblivion. N-Sphere The Vertex includes: Christopher Conn Askew [United States], :Of the Wand & the Moon: [Denmark], Martin Bladh [Sweden], Suka Off [Poland], Alexander Sterzel [Germany], KiEw [Germany], Michaela Knížová [Slovak Republic], Enfant Terrible [Holland]. Preview and details about purchase here: http://sfere.ro/

Dennis Cooper's Martin Bladh Day

2011-11-14T05:15:00.001-08:00

http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2011/11/martin-bladh-day.html

DES: Exhibition at Babylon Projects

2011-10-21T04:52:00.000-07:00

http://www.babylonprojects.com/wordpress/?page_id=1137

mjbladh@hotmail.com

DES: Liebestod (2011)

2011-09-20T14:28:00.000-07:00

related post: http://martinbladh-vf.blogspot.com/2009/10/des-sad-sketches_6821.html

mjbladh@hotmail.com

Interview: Bad Alchemy#59 2008

2011-09-09T07:03:00.000-07:00

BA: Your work is a unity of sound, lyrics, vision & body (Vienna Actionism, Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries). Are You seeking for a synthesis of art & life, or how are Your talents and passions related?

MB: To me it is absolutely necessary that art and life frequently overlap each other. If you’re passionate about something you carry it with you 24 hours a day. I think it’s very important for artists to dare to be pretentious; you can’t make art as a hobby or a nine to five work. Then I wouldn’t go that far as to state, like several silly Fluxus-artists have done, that drinking a cup of coffee or blow air into a balloon is art and thereby important. It’s always a hard and exhaustive struggle for an artist to look for and settle on his chosen medium. Only because you’re a good draughtsman doesn’t necessary make you a good artist. Music was my first artistic outlet, but after a couple of years it seemed futile for several of the ideas I nurtured. I then turned to painting, writing, performance etc. and still I haven’t been able to restrict myself to one media. So, yes I’m interested in a work that spans over several different mediums and thereby works as a synthesis on different levels and senses. I guess Wagner and Nitsch have helped me to legitimise this whole idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. This way of working is very important to me, and has helped me enormously when I’ve tried to pin down my obsessions and special interests.

BA: If You had to go back in time for a ‘Self-portrait of M. B. as a young monkey’ (to steal from another M. B., Michel Butor), when and how did it dawn on You that You are… different, maudit, an - artist?

MB: When I passed on from being a mere listener and observer to being creative. At a certain point (probably by the beginning of the millennium) I decided that I didn’t want to dedicate my life to someone else’s work. Certainly, after IRM had recorded Oedipus Dethroned [2000], I thought that I had something going that I wanted to dig deeper into and would take years to exhaust. A couple of years later when I first saw my own vision materialised in the flesh, I got quite exited cause this was an image I’ve been thinking of for years. The action work Sensation is Everything was of great importance to me (although I don’t fashion it as one of my better pieces today).

BA: The emphasis on excess and enjoyment at any cost, what You call ‘sexual absolutism’, and the motto: Agere contra (to act against) seem to contradict the ‘desinvoltura’ of Ernst Jünger’s ‘Anark’, another heroic model of Yours, whose attitude is to resist power by ignoring it?

MB: My work is full of contradictions. But I cannot really see the contradiction between the Jüngerian Anark and the supreme libertine. Although I respect Jünger’s work I can’t really say he’s been that influential on my part, the manifesto was written in collaboration with Bo Cavefors. I myself have nurtured a project which I used to call The New Theatre of Cruelty and Bo got his own project called Theatre Decadence. Bo is a huge admirer of Jünger and he was one of the first to introduce his work to the Swedish audience in the sixties. The main reason for quoting him was to illustrate how we don’t care about the political movements of today, and thus through our theatre feel ourselves liberated from them. As stated our agere contra is a very personal one and has nothing to do with a collective utopian following, it has to do with being aware of the world, but ignoring it and thereby act against it; to live inside a society but at the same time be able to live outside of it. I don’t see this as a heroic act but a necessary one. Communication is what it is, and foremost directly related to our own carnal desire, exhibitionism and narcissism, masochism and sadism.

BA: Many of Your motifs (like Isaac, Oedipus, Jesus, Sebastian, de Rais, Jack the Ripper…) are about violence in a sado-masochistic vexation of offender and victim, of the sacred & the infame. How does this recurrence of the body as battleground of pain & lust relate to our more and more virtual and abstract times?

MB: Discourses such as sex and violence are of great importance to me. And all the names you mentioned are more or less archetypical examples of these discourses combined. They are icons, some of them considered holy, some infamous, but I also think that all of them have a pornographic quality which I find very seductive. And this is very obvious, when looking at how they’re depicted in today’s media and arts. These "characters" and there tragic or heroic destinies are also important as mirror images which I can superimpose onto myself, as both the victim and aggressor. I’m not making a political statement on art or media, my work is all about me, my taste and obsessions.

BA: Am I wrong, or is there also an oxymoronic mixture, or undissolved tension of ‘hot’/organic/red (flesh, blood, cry) vs. ‘cold’/anorganic/black (machine noise, skull, razorblade) in Your work?

MB: You’re absolutely right. The paradoxical marriage between life and death fascinates me enormously. I wouldn’t take it as far as to say that I try to illustrate the Freudian death drive versus the pleasure principle struggle, but this kind of contradiction is very dear to me; the aggressive sex drive and the programmed inner yearning for an inorganic state. The relation between love and hate, masochism and sadism, the cold razor and the warm flesh. A piece is only successful if it got the power to unnerve me and seduce me at the same time.

BA: An IRM album is called Indications of Nigredo, and there seem to be alchemical motifs in the Heliogabalus cycle too. Or rather motifs of the Apocalypse, when even kings and bishops will be fodder for swine and wolves?

MB: First of all, I’m not a religious man. I’ve used esoterica in a metaphorical way, somewhat in the same way as Jung, and to point out contradictions; the marriage of the opposites etc. Although, religious and mythical themes tend to fascinate me, and especially the alchemical state of Nigredo has been influential. The "apocalyptic" illustrations from the Heliogabalus cycle are referring to the bodyguards‘ dismembering of the queer emperor.

BA: The ‘part maudit’, the ‘accursed share’ in Your work seems to be the (male) body, often as a split cadavre, more often headless (acephalos), or mutilated / castrated. Is the body and especially the Male Sex part of the problem, or part of a solution?

MB: I don’t see it neither as a problem or a solution. It’s matter of personal taste and obsession, in the end everything comes down to the human flesh, it’s all that matters. A work of art has to be centred round the body to hold any real interest to me at all, and often so, the mutilated male body (my own or a stranger‘s). What I seek and what I’m trying to manifest (on paper or in the flesh) is a personal depiction of sensation, a strong sensual and aesthetic form of exaltation. The headless body is foremost a way to get rid of the obvious connection to my own person, to make the work more vague and suggestive: an anonymous flesh. The wounded genitals are the most obvious and symbolical way to impersonate the crippled and futile body, and what a wonderful seductive picture it is.

BA: There is always the human weakness to identify with the aggressor or the aggressive, which makes Industrial, Harsh Noise or Black Metal etc. so attractive as camouflage for sissies. What is Your artistic angle in this dilemma?

MB: I’ve never been interested in provocation, or breaking taboos just for the sake of it. The people you’re referring to use these "extreme" subject matters as a legal and safe outlet for inner urges and fantasies which they don’t dare to step further into. They never go beyond a certain point, and that in the end makes their work futile and uninteresting. I don’t think I ever ventured into this small minded "sadistic" area myself; I’m equally interested in the victim’s role as the executioner’s.

BA: As poet & voice of IRM You are delivering Your heart on Your tongue. Articulating phobias, spitting words about martyrium & katharsis, suffering & self-mutilation, about an unnamed desease or wound. On Four Studies for Crucification (2002) You called the desease ‘time infection’. Is it mortality itself?

MB: Yes in this case I think your remark is accurate. The disease might be seen as life itself, the human body; this great exhilarating and obnoxious disease. At the moment I’m involved in a collaborative project with Swedish artist Stefan Danielsson, in which I rework old IRM lyrics and present them along side his beautiful collages. It will be very interesting to see someone else animate these words. And the lyrics for the piece you mentioned were actually used as a starting point for this project.

BA: Your paintings are like illustrations to A. Artaud’s >Heliogabalus: Or, the Crowned Anarchist<, or to Georges Bataille. But if asked to illustrate something unexpected, what would You choose to visualize?

MB: The series of collage paintings, or work studies as I call them myself, all deal with specific subject matters and illustrate the three dramas Three Studies for a Crucifixion; Heliogabalus and Gilles de Rais which I’ve written as a collaboration with Cavefors. I recently did some single illustrations for Huysmans En Rade [1887, dt. Auf Reede] and Hermann Ungar’s The Maimed [Die Verstümmelten, 1923] on demand for a Swedish publication. But I would never illustrate a work that doesn’t hold any interest to me.

mjbladh@hotmail.com

Kebad Kenya; for Florian Ayala Fauna (2011)

2011-08-31T10:17:00.000-07:00

mjbladh@hotmail.com

Anthology: 2 (2011)

2011-08-18T09:29:00.001-07:00

mjbladh@hotmail.com

Rothko Field (2011)

2011-07-11T12:57:00.001-07:00

Threshold

Threshold ll

In The Skin

In The Skin ll

Rothko Field

Rothko Field ll

Hypnagoga

Hypnagoga ll

mjbladh@hotmail.com

Bodies of Bladh – Reflections on Two Images

2011-06-07T16:12:00.000-07:00

X

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

DES: ICON (2011)

2011-05-18T14:29:00.000-07:00

The prison-biographer holds my portrait towards heaven. Behind iron-bars his face is a field of death...

mjbladh@hotmail.com

IRM - Order4 review, Uncut Magazine, Take 160, September 2010

2011-05-16T11:29:00.001-07:00

IRM
Order4
Cold Meat Industry

Sinister drones from Swedish industrial veterans.

Active for over a decade, Martin Bladh and Erik Jarl’s IRM have long avoided many of the more obvious clichés of the noise/industrial genre, instead pursuing a singular, personal vision taking in the provocative vocal eruptions of Whitehouse and the ritualistic art performances of the Vienna Aktionists. Split into four 15-minute movements, Order4 is their most varied work yet. Dense noise gives way to creepy orchestral passages, graceful drones and chilling found sounds; Bladh’s barked and spoken lyrics, meanwhile, remain harrowing studies of the body, delivered with a clinical remove.

Louis Pattison

Cue 3

2011-05-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

Cavefors: Today, to what extent do you think children war games might be the origin of your later fascination with violence... if you see connections between victim and perpetrator, and victim turning perpetrator? Today even though it is about abused children the subject matter is still basically the same.

Bladh: The nature of the war game was obviously very single minded… it was all about the perpetrator, who was always the winner. Somewhere along the way this wasn’t good enough… But it wasn’t until I reached my early teens that I got obsessed with the ambivalent roll of the executioner… what makes him tick? But the war game might very well have been an early, childish way of expression for the same kind of feelings and energies which occupy my daily life even now. I often dream about war games. But in the dream the line between play and reality has been erased… Sometimes it’s a struggle of life and death, but even then my gun is always loaded with blanks, I have to approach my opponent and scream into his ear that he is dead and must lie still.

My later interest in sexually abused children is not based upon some authentic, traumatic experiences. What interests me is how the child changes shape through the years and develops from the role of victim into that of the executioner… the unwilling masochist who slowly “matures” into a willing sadist.

Cavefors: Isn’t there ANY kind of personal experience… why else would you spend so much effort to prove that the victim (the raped boy) becomes perpetrator (paedophile). It is true that I myself wasn’t raped, possibly treated roughly, but that only increased my pleasure, if you could call it a pleasure to be the one “in charge”, that is to give more than the other who wanted my body could take. There might very well be raped or sexually abused boys turning into paedophiles. But I don’t believe it is very common. My own experiences were of a positive nature.

Bladh: I don’t try to prove anything. I’m referring to the heap of source material I’ve read. I’m interested in the cases where young boys have been exposed to very harsh sadistic abuse; experiences that’ll manifest as deep pathological scars. And these special cases can’t be compared to your own personal childhood experiences. Of course there’s something which attracts me to this kind of material in the first place… but it has not to do with personal childhood experiences, although I’ve felt a strong urge to personify that kind of “victim-role” through my work. So, when I speak about this subject matter, I’m not referring to some ten-year-old boy who got jerked-off by an uncle. I agree that it sounds ridiculous that such individuals would develop into sexual predators when reaching a mature age; there’s no real victim or abuser in these cases. Then I’m not interested in discussing the damage or benefit caused by the ancient Greeks; if a society which indulges in legal paedophilia would be based upon mass neurosis. I’ve to my own knowledge no sexual feelings towards children, and I’m not fighting for the child’s or paedophile’s right to a functioning sex life.

Cavefors: I think the majority of paedophiles are sexually inhibited men, that are basically afraid of sexuality, their own and others – then to approach and violate children becomes the only way out when the urge becomes too demanding and masturbation to pictures of children won’t give enough stimuli. The question remains – is it not the struggle of good and evil, THE WAR between the boy and the perpetrator that is the REAL subject that you’re looking for.

Bladh: Not the war between two separate individuals. It is the war that’s fought within the skull of the individual. When the victim suddenly becomes aware of the executioner within himself, and vice versa, and loses himself in the grey area between good and evil. The paedophile is one of those figures that best embodies the victim/executioner-role in one single individual, whether he was a victim of sexual abuse or not. He’s something of the ultimate outsider who doesn’t fit in anywhere and is despised by everybody, even though he has been sexually inactive during his whole life, because his inner urges – his creativity – is basically considered criminal. He is forced to pass through life as a pariah forced to conceal his identity, and to hide away his pornography. Not to expose him and the other to life threatening risks. He’s forced to a life in exile, to a life of fantasy in front of computer screens, photographs, reproductions of artworks and short clips. And we all know the aesthetic triumphs of the inhibited mind. Art history is filled with beautiful examples of more or less smothered paedophilia. But… then I can’t deny that a topic such as this may fascinate me more because the majority describes it as evil...

mjbladh@hotmail.com

Pig and Tomboy (2005)

2011-04-28T14:25:00.000-07:00

IRM: Oedipus Dethroned / An Act Of Self Mutilation Is An Act Of Freedom

2011-04-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

IRM - "Oedipus Dethroned / An Act Of Self Mutilation Is An Act Of Freedom." 2 cd BOX

Autarkeia

Price: 75 Lt / 22 EUR

This release calls for a very laconic word, actually, it speaks for itself. One sentence say it all: IRM Oedipus Dethroned / An Act of Self Mutilation Is an Act of Freedom box containing two golden discs is the pearl of the global post industrial; re-released after being fully sold-out, basking in glory, enjoying the same relevance after so many years and still vehemently desired and sought-after. After the first edition of the cult album Oedipus Dethroned, the audience of heavy music realised that Sweden had once again defended its heavyweight champion's name on the industrial scene. Disturbingly massive, crushing and oppressive Erik Jarl’s analogous loops and rhythms combined with uncompromising vocals and poetry of Martin Bladh create shockingly ruthless and naked idea of deliverance through unbearable suffering. The tortured body in all its most hideous conditions turns into an instrument for revealing the true nature of being and surpassing its limitations. In destruction and devastation it opens the true road to the genuine unconditional beauty in its decay. Very elegant, valuable package and a new booklet with Martin Bladh's collages raise the release to the new aesthetic heights in the pantheon of gods of industrial culture.

Album's "Oedipus Dethroned" tracks:

1. the celebration of the untouched skin
2. oedipus dethroned
3. the disease
4. the stage-surgeon
5. inside the skull of a mannequin
6. the wound
7. the stage
8. the crucifixion [the final stage]

Album's "An Act Of Self Mutilation Is An Act Of Freedom" tracks:
1. introduction
2. the disease
3. untouched skin
4. crucifixion
5. the stage surgeon
6. aktion: nrk

The box contains of 2 golden metalisation discs on digipack, 2 special protectors including box itself for discs and digi and 20 pages booklet. Lim. E 300.

http://www.autarkeia.org/main.php?lang=en&menu=label&ac=releases&id=1638

mjbladh@hotmail.com

Heliogabalus (2007)

2011-04-15T04:20:00.000-07:00

Georges Bataille – Tears of Eros: In the beginning, in Greece, as far as we can tell, the practice of the Bacchanalia had on the contrary the sense of a surpassing of sensualist eroticism. Dionysiac practices were at first violently religious; it was en enflamed movement, on the whole, is so poorly known that the links between the Greek theatre and the cult of Dionysos are difficult to locate. But it would not be surprising if the origin of tragedy is in some way linked to this violent cult. The cult of Dionysos was in essence tragic. At the same time it was erotic, it was so in its frenzied disorder, but we know that to the extent that the cult of Dionysos was erotic, it was tragic. Tragic, moreover, above all, and eroticism ended up bringing it into a domain of tragic horror.

Lampridius – Heliogabalus: For who could tolerate an emperor who indulged in unnatural lusts of every kind, when not even a beast of this sort would be tolerated? And even at Rome he did nothing but send out agents to search for those who had particularly large organs and bring them to the palace in order that he might enjoy their vigour. Moreover, he used to have the story of Paris played in his house, and he himself would take the role of Venus, and suddenly drop his clothing to the ground and fall naked on his knees, one hand on his breast, the other before his private parts, his buttocks projecting meanwhile and thrust back in front of his partner in depravity. He would likewise model the expression of his face on that with which Venus is usually painted, and he had his whole body depilated, deeming it to be the chief enjoyment of life to appear fit and worthy to arouse the lusts of the greatest number.

Charles Baudelaire – A Heroic Death: The Prince was no better and no worse than anyone else, but an excessive sensibility made him, in many cases, more cruel and more despotic than any of his peers. A passionate lover of the fine arts, and indeed a real connoisseur, he had a truly insatiable appetite for sensual enjoyments. Uninterested in men and morals, a true artist himself, the only enemy he recognized as dangerous was Boredom, and the bizarre efforts he made to flee or conquer this world's tyrant would certainly have drawn down upon him, on the part of a severe historian, the epithet "monster," if he had allowed anyone in his domain to write anything that was not intended to produce either pleasure or astonishment, which is one of the most delicate forms of pleasure. The great misfortune of this Prince was that he never found a theater vast enough for his genius. There are young Neros who suffocate in too narrow limits, and whose names and good intentions will always remain unknown to the centuries to come. Improvident Providence gave them abilities greater than their States.

Karl Menninger – Man Against Himself: There are numerous legends about the cult of Cybele and Attis which originated in Phrygia after the sixth century B.C. (…) The gist of several of them is that the Mother-Goddess Cybele (or in some legends, Agdistis) was originally hermaphroditic and that the gods performed a surgical operation, cutting off the creature’s external, i.e., male, genitals and leaving the female genitals. She is represented as being related to Attis, either directly or indirectly representing his mother. Attis grows to manhood and is beloved by Cybele, but is persuaded by his friends to marry a king’s daughter. At the wedding the mother-lover appears and drives Attis mad with frenzy. He castrates himself and his bride kills herself. Cybele mourns the deed and obtains from Jupiter the promise that Attis’s body shall not decompose but that his hair shall continue to grow and his little finger to move.

Antonin Artaud – Heliogabalus or, the crowned Anarchist:Heliogabalus was a born anarchist, and one who ill bore with kingship, and all his acts as king were acts of the born anarchist, the public enemy of order, who is an enemy to public order; but he practised his anarchy on himself and against himself, and as for the anarchy he brought to the government of Rome, he might be said to have practised what preached and to have paid the required rate for it.
When Gallus cut off his member and was tossed a woman’s garment, I perceive in this ritual the desire to have done with a certain contradiction, reuniting man and woman at a stroke, combining and merging them into one, in and through the male. The male being Initiator. According to the historians, Heliogabalus also came within an inch of having his member cut off.
If that were so, it would have been a grave error on Heliogabalus´s part; and I think the historians of the day, who understood nothing of poetry and still less of metaphysics, must have mistaken the false for the true, ritual simulation of this act for the actual deed.

Robert Hughes – The Fall and Decline of the Avant-garde (Times Magazine, Dec 18 1972): Those interested in the fate of the avant-garde should reflect on a Viennese artist named Rudolf Schwarzkogler. His achievement (and limited though it may be, it cannot be taken from him; he died, a martyr to his art, in 1969 at the age of 29) was to become the Vincent Van Gogh of body art. As every moviegoer knows, Van Gogh once cut off his ear and presented it to a whore. Schwarzkogler seem to have deduced that what really counts is not the application of paint, but the removal of surplus flesh. So, he proceeded, inch by inch, to amputate his own penis, while a photographer recorded the act as an art event. In 1972, the resulting prints were reverently exhibited in that biennial motor show of Western art, Documenta V at Kassel. Successive acts of self-amputation finally did Schwarzkogler in. That the man was clearly mad as a hatter, sick beyond rebuke, is not though important: wasn’t Van Gogh crazy to? But Schwarzkogler’s gesture has a certain emblematic value. Having nothing to say and nowhere to go but further out, he lopped himself and called it art. The politics of experience give way to the poetics of impotence. Farwell Jasper, hullo Rudolf!

Antonin Artaud – Heliogabalus or, the crowned Anarchist:To restore poetry and order to a world whose very existence is a threat to order, is to bring back war and the permanence of war; it is to bring in a state of enforced cruelty, to arouse a nameless anarchy, anarchy of things and appearances which awaken before sinking anew and melting into unity. But he who arouses this dangerous anarchy is always its first victim. And Heliogabalus is a diligent anarchist who begins be devouring himself, and ends by devouring his excrement.

Lampridius – Heliogabalus: The soldiers, however, and particularly the members of the guard, either because they knew what evils were in store for Elagabalus, or because they foresaw his hatred for themselves, formed a conspiracy to set the state free. First they attacked the accomplices in his plan of murdering Alexander, killing some by tearing out their vital organs and others by piercing the anus, so that their deaths were as evil as their lives. Next they fell upon Elagabalus himself and slew him in a latrine in which he had taken refuge. Then his body was dragged through the streets, and the soldiers further insulted it by thrusting it into a sewer. But since the sewer chanced to be too small to admit the corpse, they attached a weight to it to keep it from floating, and hurled it from the Aemilian Bridge into the Tiber, in order that it might never be buried. The body was also dragged around the Circus before it was thrown into the Tiber. His name, that is to say the name Antoninus, was erased from the public records by order of the senate, -- though the name Varius Elagabalus was left --, for he had used the name Antoninus without valid claim, wishing to be thought the son of Antoninus. After his death he was dubbed the "Tiberine," the "Dragged," the "Filthy," and many other such names, all of which were to signify what seemed to have been done during his rule. And he was the only one of all the emperors whose body was dragged through the streets, thrust into a sewer, and hurled into the Tiber. This befell him as the result of the general hatred of all, against which particularly emperors must be on their guard, since those who do not win the love of the senate, the people, and the soldiers do not win the right of burial.

Sigmund Freud - Civilisation and its Discontents: And now, I think, the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure tous. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of…

mjbladh@hotmail.com

Cue 2

2011-04-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

The beauty of the semiotic wound will never be revealed if the artist doesn’t go to extremes such as the cases of Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic and David Nebreda. In spite of the fantastic myths: Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Bruce Louden and John Fare, only Yukio Mishima and possibly also Bas Jan Ader, died as a direct result of their own private theatre. The danger often lies in the psychical realm; often as it’s represented through the written word. Literature has left the deepest wounds and the most beautiful scars. In the profound analysis of one’s own sublime desire, the author is destined to descend the bottomless pits without safety-strings, without the knowledge if he’ll ever make it back to the surface again. To authors such as Sade, Lautreamont, Céline and Artaud, the creative process became almost unbearable, and at times almost annihilating. The great descending; to never look back; those beautiful depths penetrated and revealed in the words of Baudelaire, Strindberg, Genet and Mishima.

When Sarah Kane writes “There isn’t anything you can’t represent on stage”, she’s got my admission. Sadly enough, it seems like this ambitious craving can never be fully satisfied. In a British production of Kane’s Cleansed, the “blood” was substituted with serpentines, as a way to “desensitise” the experience. So, what’s left when the violence has been desensitised? I would not say that I’m all too familiar with Kane’s intentions, but what demands to be represented on stage, hasn’t been represented yet. This leaves us with the written instructions of the actual drama - fantasy - with pure, concentrated, uncorrupted words and the images they conjure up. Only words can liberate the artist from morals, conventions and human rights – all that must be cast aside; that he can lose himself in the impossible experience.When Hermann Nitsch writes about using the corpses of dead boys, I take him literally. When I witness the animal carcasses and the blood in his actions, I always imagine the picture of the disemboweled “six-year-old”. But the actual action is a limitation, a maimed version that never will be realised. Still, the vision lives on and keeps its artistic authenticity on paper. Although, the text must be written as if the author had the intention to realise it in the flesh, on stage, or in front of the camera; it should neither be impossible to realise in a strictly practical way, but still comes short because it involves the “freedom” of other people. Once in my life, I want to experience a drama, performance-piece, or film which has been directed by a full-fledged sadist. A work in which the cast either consist of willingly masochists, but more preferably of involuntarily victims; a production in which the sadist is locked within his own pathological trap: his own private implosion which evolves into explosive expression; the balance between instant sexual gratification and the sublime aesthetic immortality; the carnal itch caught somewhere in middle of what’s sacred and profane, now concentrated in the eye of the camera, which reflects the terror through the eyes of the crew.

mjbladh@hotmail.com

Insult (2007)

2011-03-29T02:46:00.000-07:00

With arms outstretched but not taut, the wrists were nailed to the patibulum. It has been shown that the ligaments and bones of the wrist can support the weight of a body hanging from them, but the palms cannot.

1:1
It was awful. I arrived from college one evening and my mother was crying on the sofa. Concerned, I approached her, but she pushed me away with her arm. She said, “I do not want to talk to you”. I went to my room and immediately saw that my diary was open on my desk…

1:2
I wanted to be between the paint and the wall because I wanted to be invisible. I wanted to be invisible in hallways, in shopping malls – to be invisible everywhere because I was triggering this violence.

1:3
I was immediately degraded and no one wanted to hear any of this. For them, it was final: I was the bad one, the one on the wrong path. They were the righteous ones…

1:4
I had seen my mother on her deathbed and she said she forgave me and that she was hoping for my cure – as if it was me who had to be forgiven for something and not her. When she died, I wrote a letter and placed a copy in her grave. I wrote that I forgave her and that I had missed her a lot. That, instead of holding me in her arms when I needed it, she had rejected me.

The weight of the body, pulling down on the outstretched arms and shoulders, would tend to fix the intercostal muscles in an inhalation state and thereby hinder passive exhalation. Accordingly, exhalation was primarily diaphragmatic, and breathing was shallow.

2:1
At home, image was of great importance. In front of people, nothing was to show. I was to pretend… I was no longer able to do this, and I revolted against my father. I had to get out of there. I even invented the lie that he had raped me, to make sure that someone else would take care of me.

2:2
I was experiencing one depression on top of other depressions, one suicide attempt on top of others. I could not stay there anymore. Communication was non-existent; it was like living on two different planets. In the end, living there was like living in hell.

2:3
I was a big monster, social garbage. If religion had not been there, I would have maybe not tried to kill myself. It was super oppressing, that idea of sin, abnormality, and blame, with everyone around me believing it.

2:4
I was a monster, someone who should not exist: human garbage.

Most commonly, the feet were fixed to the front of the stipes by means of an iron spike driven through the first or second intermetatarsal space, just distal to the tarsometatarsal joint. It is likely that the deep peroneal nerve and branches of the medial and lateral plantar nerves would have been injured by nails.

3:1
When I was nine years old, he showed me a Playboy magazine. The girls were naked, inviting. My father was showing them to me saying:” A girl is that. They are to be caressed and penetrated with your penis.

3:2
The first time a masturbated on a child was when I was babysitting the daughter of one of my brothers. She must have been about two or three. I took off her diaper and rubbed my penis against her private parts. I didn’t want to penetrate her, just to feel her next to me. I did it again a few more times before I began to be afraid of what I might do. I stopped. I realised I wasn’t normal. To put it out of my mind I used to drink. I was taking pills, taking drugs. Perhaps it was the softness of the baby that attracted me to her. Still today, with women, I never feel completely satisfied sexually. Its children who excite me the most, although I don’t want to touch them, anymore.

3:3
Children are very mean. I don’t remember their words anymore, but most of it was non-verbal. When I would approach others, they would move away. In winter when I would try to climb on a large pile of snow, they would push me down in a way that also told me that I was not wanted there. It was all very cruel. When it was time to be on a team, I was the last one picked. In fact, I was never chosen.

3:4
As time went on, I began to find it degrading, dirty, kind of. But if I had to do it over, I would.

Adequate exhalation required lifting the body by pushing up on the feet and by flexing the elbows and adducting the shoulders. However, this maneuver would place the entire weight of the body on the tarsals and would produce searing pain. Furthermore, flexion of the elbows would cause rotation of the wrists about the iron nails and cause fiery pain along the damaged median nerves.

4:1
I couldn’t take feeling so awful about myself, being thought of as a garbage can, human trash, a nothing, a nobody.

4:2
I had given everything I had, and I was tired of living. I abused alcohol, and it was the same with sex. I was feeling alone, even if people were around me. I could not see a light at the end of the tunnel and I therefore put everything in order for my great departure.

4:3
I experienced something like a nightmare. I saw my parents dealing with my death and decided that I could not do this to them. From that point on, I would not be choosing death as a solution to my problems.

4:4
To all who love me and to the ones who did not love me. I am sick of this shit of a life. Sick to the point of wanting to puke!!!

mjbladh@hotmail.com

Gilles de Rais (2004-2007)

2011-03-18T05:41:00.000-07:00

Guido Ceronetti – The Silence of the Body: Maybe Gilles de Rais should have been put in an asylum and asked to make collages at the first sign of the cravings for orgies and massacres seething within him. He would have found and outlet for his madness and been cured. His extraordinary collages would have sparked endless discussions. He would have been reborn as an artist who carried the seed of great crimes. But we would never have known that he carried them, just as we do not know how much crime is contained and submerged in the expiating ergon of certain great artists who never cease to amaze.

A. L. Vincent and Clare Binns – Gilles de Rais - The Original Bluebeard: The recrudescence of Gilles de Rais’ stage mania, which had first shown itself in his boyhood, was, as we have already hinted, closely allied to his sexual abnormality and a component element of the whole morbid diathesis. It was not the result of any genuine histrionic ability or legitimate love of the drama, but a symptom consistent with his diseased egotism and perverted instincts. René de la Suze declared that the theatre was one of the principal causes of his brother’s ruin, a statement that is amply confirmed by the facts. To the playgoing public who are accustomed to the wonderful productions of the modern theatre it will come as a surprise to learn that Gilles de Rais was a forerunner of this movement. Indeed it is debatable whether the stage of today could give us anything approaching in cost or display the “shows” mounted by Gilles in the years 1433-1434.

Fritz Lang quoted in Lotte Eisner’s Fritz Lang: Because of the loathsome nature of the crime M dealt with, there was a problem of how to present such a crime so that it would not sicken the audience, yet would have full emotional impact. That is why I only gave hints – the rolling ball, the balloon caught in the wires, after being released from a little hand. Thus I make the audience an integral part in the creation of this special scene by forcing each individual member of the audience to create the gruesome details of the murder according to his personal imagination.

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Gilles de Rais’ Hearing October 22, 1440, Georges Bataille - The Trials of Gilles de Rais: By which secret confession that in the said Gilles´ presence was read in trial and published, and approved by him, the said Gilles de Rais, the accused, voluntarily and publicly, before everyone, confessed that, because of his passion and sensual delight, he took and had others take so many children that he could not determine with certitude the number whom he’d killed and caused to be killed, with whom he committed the vice and sin of sodomy; and he said and confessed that he had ejaculated spermatic seed in the most culpable fashion on the bellies of the said children, as much after their deaths as during it; on which children sometimes he and sometimes some of his accomplices, notably the aforesaid Gilles’ de Sillé, Milord Roger de Briqueville, knight, Henriet and Poitou, Rossignol and Petit Robin, inflicted various types and manners of torment; sometimes they severed the head from the body with dirks, daggers, and knives, sometimes they struck them violently on the head with a cudgel or other blunt instruments, sometimes they suspended them with cords from a peg or small hook in his room and strangled them; and when they were languishing, he committed the sodomitic vice on them in the aforesaid manner. Which children dead, he embraced them, and he gave way to contemplating those who had had the most beautiful heads and members, and he had their bodies cruelly opened up and delighted at the sight of their internal organs; and very often, when the said children were dying, he sat on their bellies and delighted in watching them die thus, and with aforesaid Corrillaut and Henriet he laughed at them, after which he had the children burned and their cadavers turned to ashes by the said Corrillaut and Henriet.

Report - City of West Memphis Police Department: The victims were removed from the scene at approximately 4:30 p.m. 5/6/93 and taken to the Arkansas state crime laboratory, Little Rock, Arkansas, for analyses. To date analysis has determined that a knife with a serrate edge was used to castrate Moore. A hammer or a round object was used to create trauma to the head of all three victims. Beyers and Branch were alive when placed in the water and as a result of drowning. Branch appears to have marks on his penis which would indicate that oral sex had been performed on him. There is a possibility that Beyers may have been injected by a hypodermic needle. A dark colored hair, host likely Caucasian, was located on the buttock of one victim and the neck area of another. Forensic analysis is still being conducted and any additional information will be forwarded to the behavioural sciences unit. The medical examiner also advised that evidence would tend to indicate that the victims’ had been struck with a belt containing studs or a raised surface.

Lyndy Abraham - A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery: The decapitation or dismemberment of the bird, lion, serpent, dragon, tree, man or king signifies the dissolution, putrefaction and division of the body, the matter in the alembic, at the black nigredo, the first step in the opus. This stage, which is a time of sacrifice and lament, is sometimes referred to as the caput mortuum or caput corvi. The Six Keyes of Eudoxus clearly equated the dissolution of the matter with the beheading and death of the bird: “the wise Artist ought to dissolve the body with the spirit: he must cut off the Raven´s head” (in Regardie, Philosopher’s Stone, 105). The crow or raven’s head is a well known name for the black stage or nigredo. The Hermetis Trismegisti tractatus aureus advised the alchemist to “Take this Volatile Bird” and “cut off its Head with a fiery sword” (Salmon, Medicina Practica, 279). This means that the volatile (flying) matter in the alembic has to be fixed (made non-volatile) and that the heating and digestion of the matter are to be continued until the black colour is transformed into the white of the albedo.

Gilles de Rais’ execution October 26, 1440, Georges Bataille - The Trials of Gilles de Rais: Recommending himself to holy Monsignor Jacques, whom he had always held in singular affection, and also to holy Monsignor Michel, begging them in his hour of great need to be willing to help him, aid him, and pray to God for him, despite the fact that he had not obeyed them as he should have. He further requested that the instant his soul left his body, it might please holy Monsignor Michel to receive it and present it unto God, whom he begged to take it into His grace, without punishing it according to its offenses. And the said Gilles then made beautiful speeches and prayers to God, recommending his soul to Him. And then, so as to set his aforesaid servants a good example, he wished to die first. Just before his death, his said servants told him and implored him to be a strong and valiant knight in the love of God, asking him to remember His suffering, which had been for our Redemption. Which Gilles de Rais died repentant. And before the flames could open his body and entrails, it was drawn away and his body placed in a coffin and carried inside the Carmelite church of Nantes, where it was buried.

Gilles de Rais quoted in A. L. Vincents and Clare Binns Gilles de Rais - The Original Bluebeard: There is not so great a sin that man can commit that God in His paternal goodness and benignity will not pardon, if only the sinner has great repentance and contrition in his heart, and he asks forgiveness with good hope. God is readier to pardon than the sinner is to ask. Thank God for showing us a manifest sign of his mercy in allowing us to die in our force and good memory, instead of punishing us suddenly for our evil deeds. Have such a regret for your crimes that you do not fear death, which is such a little thing, and without which we can not see God and His glory. How much ought we to wish to be out of this world where there is only misery… Together we have sinned, and immediately our souls are separated from our bodies we shall meet with God in Paradise.

mjbladh@hotmail.com

Cue

2011-02-27T11:43:00.000-08:00

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.

I see through me... (2011)

2011-01-28T07:37:00.000-08:00

To...

earn...

violence...

I...

hurl...

myself...

into...

this...

surplus...

gash.

Photo: Mikael Oretoft

Martin Bladh and the Truths

2011-01-21T04:19:00.000-08:00

Truths are seldom unitary. When Martin Bladh confronts violence, pain and blood with naked bodies, the first impression might be that he seeks attention by using controversial methods. That he walks in the same footsteps as Hermann Nitsch; between the cruelty of beauty and disgust. But to look through such a narrow angle would be deceitful, although Bladh confesses his kinship with Nitsch when he in an article in the publication Heterogénesis (No. 50-51, 2005) with the title 010804, 14.00 – Castle Prinzendorf´s Chapel (First floor) writes: “It’s the cameras duty to immortalise the beauty of the passion, just like the great painter’s of old time”. However Bladh is considerably more radical in his attitudes and becomes more straightforward than Nitsch when it comes to confront violence with the beautiful, to see the beauty in the body of the beast; I understand Bladh as more related to Francis Bacon than to Nitsch, and most obvious to Bacon’s religious inspired queer art. What Bacon in a photographic manner perceives as the truth and tries to capture with paint and brushes, Bladh transforms into action, on stage and video.

In an action work (Deadringer 2) Martin Bladh is inspired by the mid panel in Francis Bacon’s triptych Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962). Bacon has painted a naked, homosexual man lying on a bed. The figure differs remarkably from the classic catholic iconography, but the painting is still obviously traditional in the traditional sense of the word. Although the man on the picture is historically abstracted Bacon shows a figure, a man that visualizes how even an existentially modern human is incarnated in the eternal process of love, violence and suffering. Incarnation through pain and death, through sexual action and rest. Is the man on Bacon’s painting crucified, taken down and laid on lit de parade or is he resting after being whipped and fucked? The baconian red nuance reoccurs in Bladh’s Deadringer 2. The blood red paint on Bacon’s walls have transformed into “actual” blood which runs through a tube to the actor in Bladh’s action work, from a blood container, into the actor’s/man’s mouth, that fills up fast, the blood runs from the mouth and nose, drenches the bed that he lies on. It is a subtle way of Bladh to transform the Bacon painting to his own work. And besides, Bladh has something which Bacon lacks, accompanying, subtle, slow masturbating music as well, for example Sebastian (IRM. Virgin Mind, 2002). The spectators have to confront the philosophic and religious challenge to walk away with their own private vision. And follow up questions? Why isn’t Bladh’s man that receives the blood transfusion naked? Why is there no direct sexual connection between the queer Bacon’s naked man and Bladh’s sexually neutral man, with pants drawn up to his navel? Bladh won’t give any concrete answers to diffuse questions; which of course is impossible. But he gives us clues of violence and sexuality. In these video- and action works there’s reminiscences of Greek mythology and Christian resurrection drama, dionysic exhibitionism and Jesus Christ’s suffering and crucifixion. It’s about the ability, the art of enduring. Through this art of indurations, in the ability of enjoying pain, there is attraction and grandeur. After the excess the beautiful rest. Bladh reconstructs a renaissance aestheticism, a sadomasochistic ritual teaching which follows the instincts and insight instead of the intellect. When Bladh in the video work Exhibit A lets a real young and true-hearted boy transform into a boy soldier, is it a brutal image of many boys reality, a reality that not have to be the soldiers, but which shows how the vulnerable- and blossoming sexuality can be lead into the bourgeoisie societies norm of non-acceptable ways, but functioning through the boys own reality, as sadomasochism, exhibitionism etc. Towards the end of Bladh’s video the boy spreads his legs and offers his cock as a logo for his personality. The same thing happens in Exhibit B, but with the anus as the main subject. There are no valid intellectual arguments which can approve of this transformation, but with the transformation from being the used into being the abuser comes the cruel recipe of instinct and insight. And who would claim that the boy who’s being fucked by a man or the boy whom in the role of the soldier rapes other boys, wouldn’t enjoy being the one who “takes it” or the one that “gets back”. In Talk Show Bladh shows a young boy, with bandages wrapped around war injuries, almost naked, with a vaguely erect cock. The boy picks up a pair of scissors, and the spectator’s first impression is that he’s going to hurt himself, maybe castrate himself, but instead with trembling hands the boy starts to cut away the pubic hair which is visible above the edge of the bandage, to tidy up his appearance, to make the smooth body even more sexually attractive. In Talk Show 3; Off Stage the boyish body returns, now with clearly explicit signs of the cracks from the sadomasochistic whip. Bladh’s at the same time painfully and sexually pleasurably inciting triptych can be seen as a illustration to the quotation (5:29:30) where the evangelist Matthew speaks that it’s better to lose an eye or a hand then to have the whole body thrown into Gehenna. With other words, forsake that which is not essential, protect you solitude, your inaccessibility, because it is only through that naked position that you might access your freedom. Forsake conveniences and fortune which is reached through social terms; forsake the sexual variations imposed by the public opinion, because the real reality gives so much more, beauty and pain, tranquillity and ecstasy. “For some pain and blood are associated with death, but for others they are associated with birth” (Armando R. Favazza).

Martin Bladh knows a great deal about all these possibilities to reach the essence of the core; the truths.

Bo I. Cavefors

Talk Show 2 - It shouldn’t happen to a dream (2006)

2011-01-18T14:39:00.000-08:00

A: Last time we spoke you mentioned something about a peculiar smell… do you remember?

B: Yes… Rotten… like boiled ham, very tangible, the first time…

A: Obnoxious?

B: You get used to it…a kind of personal growth, I guess.

A: How many boys were there when you started out?

B: 13 I think...

A: And now?

B: We’re four, in fact we’re five… but the last one doesn’t count.

A: Could you picture yourself in about ten years from now?

A: It might be difficult to visualise such a distant scenario… but if we reduce it into… let’s say, five years?

B: (sigh)

A: A career, maybe?

B: A career…

A: Lets break it here.

A: Before we stop… is there something you would like to say… just in general?

B: Everything has already been said.

A: Nothing you want to entrust me with… only for me?

B: Nothing…no…

A: You’re really sure?

A: Ok, we’ll stop.

B: (moaning)

A: Hello, hello. Can you hear me?

A: How does it feel? Ok.

A: Could you try to look over there... No, to the right… a little more. Thanks.

The Devil in Love

2011-01-07T03:22:00.000-08:00

Martin Bladh has contributed a track to “The Devil in Love”, a soundtrack to the 1772 occult novel “Le Diable amoureux” by Jacques Cazotte.

Cazotte’s story follows the young nobleman Alvare as he summons Satan, who appears to him first in the shape of a dreadful camel, then as a spaniel dog and finally as a beautiful androgynous girl. Alvare wrestles with the temptation presented by this mysterious creature. Is the Evil One really as black as he is painted, and can Satan himself fall in love?

The contributing artists were handed “Le Diable amoureux” to read and then given free reign.

The double CD is released alongside the novel by Swedish publishers Malört Förlag and can be ordered through their website for €26 (including international postage).

http://www.malortforlag.se/english.php

Tracklisting:
TIGER LILLIES: I’m in Love With the Devil
JARBOE: Mistress of Deceit
GAVIN FRIDAY: The Devil in Love
JOHN ZORN: Yeqon
KEIJI HAINO: まぶしくない
THE COFFINSHAKERS: A Devil in Love
SHINJUKU THIEF: Che Vuoi?
PAUL ROLAND: I Dared the Devil
SHARRON KRAUS: If the Devil
ART ZOYD: J’étais à vingt-cinq ans capitaine aux gardes du roi de Naples
MOLLY NILSSON: Le Diable amoureux
THE SCARRING PARTY: Biondetta
SHINKIRO: Biondetta Reveals Herself
SHAPESHIFTER: Adore You
KALKI LODGE: The Evocation of Biondetta
BRACE/CHOIR: Biond
DIFFERNET: Hideous Creature
PIERS BLEWETT: Beyond Everything, That Terrible Ache
RIKKE LUNDGREEN & ANE LAN: The Waking
DÖDENS LAMMUNGAR: Du måste veta (mitt namn)
STONE BREATH: Love in the Devil’s Tongue
MARTIN BLADH: Of Flies…

Martin Bladh: A Body of Work

2010-12-28T11:50:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-12-09T08:30:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-03T12:12:00.000-08:00

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

Talk Show (2005)

2010-11-03T16:17:00.000-07:00

A: Is this the first time?

B: No, but I don’t know if the first time counts.

A: What do you mean?

B: Well, first time was like, different, it’s hard to remember. Others I’ve talked to say first time doesn’t count if you can’t remember. I remember some of it…not everything.

A: What do you remember?

B: A funny smell.

A: You like it like that?

B: Yeah.

A: Do you like being called by your forename?

B: Sometimes, yes.

A: What’d they call you then? What’d they call you at home?

B: They call me (---).

A: Why is that?

B: I used to do that when I was a kid. Then one of my school buddies started to call me (---). Then my brother heard that (---) called me (---).

A: How important were the arts for you?

B: I used to believe that I was an artist because I felt different.

A: But was art a natural way of expression? Or is it possible…at all?

B: I was no good… I didn’t know what to express… I think I was more into specific individuals… the artist…I didn’t know what you were supposed to do.

A: When did you finally decide that this was what you wanted to do?

A: When did you realise that this was what you wanted to do?

B: After I had spoken to (---) and he explained that this was what I had done best…so far… and really did well.

A: How long will this go on?

B: Don’t know… some time.

A: How many times do you think you’ll endure?

B: Don’t know…another couple of rounds, maybe.

A: This isn’t something you’d do for a living… to make it your own thing?

B: No… I don’t think so.

A: What would you like to do then… more than anything else?

B: Maybe to sing… I got a beautiful voice.

Oh, my love
my darling
I've hungered for your touch
a long lonely time
and time goes by so slowly
and time can do so much
are you still mine?
I need your love
I need your love
Godspeed your love to me

Lonely rivers flow to the sea,
to the sea
to the open arms of the sea
lonely rivers sigh 'wait for me, wait for me'
I'll be coming home wait for me

Oh, my love
my darling
I've hungered for your touch
a long lonely time
and time goes by so slowly
and time can do so much
are you still mine?
I need your love
I need your love
Godspeed your love to me

Anthology (2010)

2010-10-24T15:08:00.000-07:00

Qualis Artifex Pereo - Finis (with Bo I. Cavefors) (2009)

2010-09-26T14:03:00.000-07:00

Michel Surya – Georges Bataille, An Intellectual Biography: Death is linked to the earth, only to the earth (and not to the heavens), to rotting, decomposition, to the buried body turning into a cadaver. The body is root, teeming beneath the skin of the forest, or a volcano swarming with entrails. Acéphale was this recognition: a community of seers, eyes wide open on the stupefying work of death. We are reminded of The Solar Anus. The sun as a corpse at the bottom of a well, with the sky upturned. We are reminded of everything most violently anti-idealist in Bataille’s writings, as a way of gaining an approximate idea of the disruptive meaning Acéphale’s orgies were meant to have.

Georges Bataille – The Sacred Conspiracy: Man has escaped from his head just as the condemned man has escaped from his prison. He has found beyond himself not God, who is the prohibition against crime, but a being who is unaware of prohibition. Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless; this fills me with dread because he is made of innocence and of crime; he holds a steel weapon in his left hand, flames like those of a Sacred Heart in his right. He reunites in the same eruption Birth and Death. He is not a man. He is not a god either. He is not me but he is more than me: his stomach is the labyrinth in which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.

André Masson quoted in Critique, 1956: I saw him immediately as headless, as becomes him, but what to do with this cumbersome and doubting head? – Irresistibly it finds itself displaced to the sex, which it masks with a “death’s head.” Now, the arms? Automatically one hand (the left!) flourishes a dagger; while the other kneads a blazing heart (a heart that does not belong to the Crucified, but to our master Dionysus). (…) The pectorals starred according to whim. Well, fine so far, but what to make of the stomach? That empty container will be receptacle for the Labyrinth that elsewhere had become our rallying sign. This drawing, made on the spot, under the eyes of Georges Bataille, had the good luck to please him. Absolutely.

Patrick Waldberg – Acéphalogramme: The war had burst upon us, Acéphale vacillated, undermined by internal dissensions, its conscience shattered perhaps by its obvious incongruity in the face of world-wide disaster. At the last meeting in the heart of the forest, there were only four of us and Bataille solemnly requested whether one of the three others would assent to being put to death, since this sacrifice would be the foundation of a myth, and ensure the survival of the community. This favour was refused him. Some months later the war was unleashed in earnest, sweeping away what hope remained.

Gideon Bachmann – Pasolini and the Marquis de Sade: It is the classic scene of every pornographic novel, with or without literary pretensions, the first moment of the manifestation of supremacy of one being over another. Since the film is to be made without emotion, I find it hard to understand the willingness, even complicity, with which these boys, even as film actors, expose themselves to the camera’s anatomical panning and tilting. There is joggling for position, pride of the chosen, sly jockeying and competition. For a moment, the film scene and the reality of its filming seem one. These boys are proud of their bodies in front of Pasolini as they might have been, in their innocence, in de Sade’s castle in Switzerland two hundred years ago. When they were picked for the film, they were not told about the script. There might be some nudity, they knew, seeing that it was a Pasolini film. But none were aware of the portent of what they were involved with. And yet, so strong is the career strife, so important the parts in a Pasolini film for their financial future, that none rebels.

Suetonius – The Life of Nero: He so prostituted his own chastity that after defiling almost every part of his body, he at last devised a kind of game, in which, covered with the skin of some wild animal, he was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women, who were bound to stakes, and when he had sated his mad lust, was dispatched by his freedman Doryphorus; for he was even married to this man in the same way that he himself had married Sporus, going so far as to imitate the cries and lamentations of a maiden being deflowered. I have heard from some men that it was his unshaken conviction that no man was chaste or pure in any part of his body, but that most of them concealed their vices and cleverly drew a veil over them; and that therefore he pardoned all other faults in those who confessed to him their lewdness.

Gerard de Nerval – To Alexander Dumas: Was this young Nero, the idol of Rome, the handsome athlete, the dancer, the poet whose only wish was to please the populace? Is this what history and the conceptions of our poets have left of him? Ah, give me his fury to interpret; his power I would fear to accept. Nero! I have comprehended thee, not alas! according to Racine, but according to my own heart, torn with agony whenever I have ventured to impersonate thee! Yes, thou wast a god, thou who wouldst have burned Rome. Thou wast right, perhaps, since Rome had insulted thee!

Diana Milia – Self-Mutilation and Art Therapy; Violent Creation: Despite the degree of morbidity involved in self-mutilation, there does appear to be present an active urge towards separation and change that is not apparent in the use of the fetish. Like the sado-masochistic behaviour that is confined to sexual practices, fetishistic behaviour is not usually ego-dystonic. That is, the behaviour is incorporated and accepted into the personality, and does not interfere with functioning in other areas of life. It is in fact a compromise, a compromise that fulfils its function smoothly and continuously. However, as has been discussed, the self-mutilating person is often concerned with personality change, and with taking control over his or her body. While the self may be split between victim and aggressor identities, there is an attempt to move from a passive to an active position, such as in the “identification with the aggressor”. Taking control by the self, even in rudimenentary and impulsive forms, is a manifestation of an attempt at separation and individuation

Joel Black – The Aesthetics of Murder: Going back to antiquity, we can find the modern artist-criminal’s ancestors in the early Roman emperors, particularly Caligula and Nero, whom Leo Braudy has depicted as performance artists:”Both emphasized the element of performance in the role of the emperor and presented themselves as great artists, even entertainers, for whom approval had to be immediate.” Lacking their predecessor Augustus’s achievements and abilities, these emperors could only demonstrate their sovereignty by taking crime to a theatrical extreme. “When one’s inheritance was absolute power, only the striking colours of art or crime could make one truly distinctive

Jim Fielder – Slow Death: Standing right next to the Satan’s Den sign was a tall tripod with a very expensive RCA Victor camcorder pointing toward a large black leather table/chair rigged up with metal stirrups, electrodes and dozens of red plastic straps. Hanging from the ceiling next to what looked like the gynaecology table was a RCA Victor television set, positioned so the female victims could see what Ray was doing to them.

Oedipus Dethroned (2010)

2010-09-16T13:32:00.000-07:00

The Celebration of the Untouched Skin

Oedipus Dethroned

The Disease

The Stage-Surgeon

Inside the Skull of a Mannequin

The Wound

The Stage

The Crucifixion (The Final Stage)

2010-08-26T15:52:00.000-07:00

BO I. CAVEFORS OCH MARTIN BLADH
utställning, film och performance,
11-25 september 2010

KONSTATELJé E
Amiralsgatan 31, Malmö
+

Konstateljé E presenterar
vad som tveklöst
kommer att bli en konsthändelserik höjdare i Malmö
i september.

Utställning, film och performance av
Bo I. Cavefors
och
Martin Bladh.

Ett helt program bestående av Cavefors' och Bladhs
separata och gemensamma verk
inkluderar bildkonst, film, musik och performance.

Mellan den 11-25 september 2010.

Bla visas följande filmer:
Den Spetälske i staden Aosta;
Francis Bacon: Tre studier för en korsfästelse, ett passionsdrama i tre akter;
Qualis 1;
Qualis 2;
Insult;
Performance: Bo Cavefors & Leif Holmstrand.
Martin Bladh kommer under vernisagen framföra en musik-performance
baserad på Bladh/Cavefors kommande
samarbetsprojekt The Island of Death.

Bo Cavefors läser hela librettot
Dödens Ö.

vernissage lör 11 sep 16:00

DES: Video (2009)

2010-08-04T12:49:00.001-07:00

1

The loner has to achieve fulfilment alone within himself. All he has are his own extreme acts. People are merely supplementary to the achievement of these acts. He is abnormal and he knows it.
I had always wished to kill but the opportunity never really presented itself in safe conditions … therefore substituted by fantasies which had me killed in the mirrored images. I had been killing this way for years, killing my own image.

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.

2

Jag står i ett kalt rum, golvet är vitt, bakgrunden mörk. Nu är det en teaterlokal, förmodligen byggd under 1800-talets andra hälft; balkonger med arabesker, röda ridåer, sammetsklädda säten, tre parketter, tre olika ingångar till respektive parkett, gröna exitlampor över varje utgång, någon form av intetsägande freskmålning täcker det kupolformade taket. En spotlight: vitt ljus lyser upp mig. Jag står på scenen. Ridån måste ha gått upp utan att jag märkt någonting. Jag är förmodligen naken; kanske bär jag ljusa underbyxor eller ett höftskynke. Jag kan se strålkastaren och rampbelysningen vid scenkanten, kan höra men inte se publiken. Någonting säger mig att det är pappfigurer – inte riktiga människor - som sitter i sätena, och bruset som ligger över sorlet kommer från ett förinspelat ljudband. Rummet blir helt tyst. Rampbelysningen och spotlighten slocknar.
Allting sker i ultrarapid. Ljuset från spotlighten kommer sakta tillbaka, men nu inte lika intensivt. Jag sträcker ut en arm, mot det öppna rummet, mot publiken. Trots att jag inte rört på mig så har scenkanten kommit närmare, jag står nu precis framför den släckta rampbelysningen. En flamma blixtrar till från andra parkettens mitt. Några sekunder förflyter. Den första kulan träffar bröstkorgens övre del, vänster sida, slår upp ett stort hål, blod väller fram. Rummet är helt tyst, ingen knall. Den andra kulan träffar ljumsken, höger sida; jag böjer mig framåt. Jag kastas tillbaka när den tredje kulan träffar i halsen och går rakt igenom. Den fjärde kulan träffar ansiktet, kinden, vänstra sidan; hela käkpartiet blir synligt, tre kindtänder i överkäken splittras. Den sista kulan träffar i tinningen, jag slungas bakåt, faller ned på scengolvet, blod och grå hjärnsubstans rinner ut i en stor pöl: en gloria runt mitt trasiga huvud. Spotlighten slocknar, de röda ridåerna går sakta ned, rampbelysningen tänds, publiksorlet börjar på nytt, det låter som om de lämnar teatern. Jag känner mig lugn och helt avslappnad. Jag faller ned genom golvet, försvinner i en djup avgrund, faller under flera minuter i ultrarapid. Jag är helt avslappnad.

3

I put talc on my face to erase the living colour. I smear charcoal under my eyes to accentuate a hollow dark look. I put pale blue on my lips. I rub my eyes to make them bloodshot. I have put three holes in my old tee-shirt. I make a mixture of cochineal and saffron to synthesise blood. I soak the “blood” into the holes and the liquid stains my shirt and runs down my body. I lie, staring-eyed, on the bed in front of the mirror and let my saliva foam and drip from my mouth. I stare in fascination at the shot body of me in the mirror. I step outside myself in detached imagination. There is another imaginary person in the room who finds my body out in the woods. I have been executed and left there by the S.S. I am a French dissident student. The other person, an old hermit who lives in the woods, drags my dead body back to his old shack. He is wearing rags and he decides that I have no further use of clothes and begins to strip my limp body. He is speaking to me as though I were still alive. He pulls my now naked body off the bed on to the floor. He washes me. He ties my penis and puts some wadding in my anus. He sits me on the chair then he puts me over his shoulder and carries me back into the woods and buries me. Later he returns and digs me up takes me back to the shack. He masturbates me and my penis comes to life and I ejaculate. It is over. I tidy up the room, replace the mirror and have a bath. I turn on the T.V. and call the dog over to me. She wags her tail unsure of her reception. I reassure her and she jumps on to the bed and makes herself comfortable.

4

Jag sitter på en höjd och blickar ned mot en vit kvadrat - som lyses upp av en spotlight - ca 20 meter nedanför mig. Omgivningen runt mig och fyrkanten döljs i mörker, den är det enda jag kan se. Plötsligt vecklar kvadraten ut sig och blir en teaterscen med röd ridå och rampbelysningen vid scenkanten. Nu sitter jag i en teaterlokal, förmodligen byggd under 1800-talets andra hälft; balkonger med arabesker, röda ridåer, sammetsklädda säten, tre våningar, tre olika ingångar till respektive våning, gröna exitlampor över varje ingång, någon form av intetsägande freskmålning täcker det kupolformade taket. Min plats är belägen i mitten av den andra parketten. Jag kan höra men inte se publiken, som om jag helt saknade periferiseende, trots detta får jag en känsla av att rummet är fyllt med pappfigurer – inte riktiga människor – som sitter i sätena, och bruset som ligger över sorlet kommer från ett förinspelat ljudband. Rummet blir helt tyst. Rampbelysningen och spotlighten slocknar. Spotlighten tänds på nytt, det matta ljuset lyser upp en ensam figur som står framför rampbelysningen vid scenkanten. Han ser ut att vara naken; kanske bär han ljusa underbyxor eller möjligen ett kort höftskynke. Nu ser jag tydligt som om jag bara stod en meter framför honom; hans anletsdrag är identiska med mina egna. Samma överkropp med samma ärr, armar, ben. Han/jag sträcker ut en arm mot publiken i salongen. Allt sker i ultrarapid. Jag reser mig från min plats, i handen håller jag en 38 kalibers revolver i svart stål. Den första kulan träffar bröstkorgens övre del, vänster sida, slår upp ett stort hål, blod väller fram. Rummet är helt tyst, ingen knall. Den andra kulan träffar ljumsken, höger sida; han/jag böjer sig/mig framåt. Han/jag kastas tillbaks när den tredje kulan träffar i halsen och går rakt igenom. Den fjärde kulan träffar ansiktet, kinden, vänstra sidan; hela käkpartiet blir synligt, tre kindtänder i överkäken splittras. Den sista kulan träffar i tinningen, han/jag slungas bakåt, faller ned på scengolvet, blod och grå hjärnsubstans rinner ut i en stor pöl, likt en gloria runt hans/mitt trasiga huvud. Spotlighten slocknar, de röda ridåerna går sakta ned, rampbelysningen tänds, publiksorlet börjar på nytt, det låter som om de lämnar teatern. Jag känner mig lugn och helt avslappnad. Jag faller tillbaka ned på sätet, försvinner i en djup avgrund. Jag faller under flera minuter i ultrarapid. Jag är helt avslappnad.

5

The boy stood steady and cold against the wind in awe of his doomed universe and the devil and all that he could imagine a creator and destructor to be. He was cut off and engulfed by the sea, carried away into the numbing pressures of a silent peace without fear, without panic… He floated down into the womb of death, the painless seat of freedom. His glazed eyes stared, his body suspended, hair streaming, and limp hanging arms conducting a dreamless world. Natural living forces animated the pale white boy dancing, drunk in a timeless sea… The man spoke as he washed the boy’s lifeless body in soothing quizzical tones. “There is something so temporarily attractive in the bodies of dead young men. The limpness of the moveable parts, the ineffectiveness of a non-personality. The texture of dead cold skin to the touch. The uses which fantasy can make on an unresisting model of life… The hands and fingers are not rigid, not limp, nut lie as though undecided between the two. It is an unlovable thing but traumatic in its presence.

I was fascinated by the mystery of death. I whispered to him because I believed he was still really in there. I ran my fingers all over his body and marvelled at its smooth beauty. If he were in there alive it was obvious that his penis was irrevocably dead. It looked small and insignificant. I would hold him towards me standing up and view in the full length mirror (my arms around him). I would hold him close often, and think that he had never been so appreciated in his life before … after a week I stuck him under the floor. Three days later I removed him (only once). I wanted him to lie there underneath in a bed of white roses.

6

Jag hade, särskilt under mina tidiga tonår, tankar om en värld som helt existerade utifrån och via mig själv. En värld där jag var den absoluta, enda existerande entiteten, en medelpunkt, där allt omkring mig – människor, natur, byggnadsverk – var mina egena uppdiktade privata chimärer. Som en blottlagd hjärna nedsänkt i en kuvös, eller som en kropp som flöt ensam i universum, drömde jag rörelser, tiden och historiens skeenden (som aldrig var mer än en nödvändig bakgrund till min världsbild, och fyllde aldrig någon funktion i sig). Men världen var ingen utopi, här fanns ständiga hot, gnagande problem och tärande ångest, som då självfallet sprang ur mig själv, men som inte gick att råda bot på. Denna fantastiska världsåskådning fungerade dock aldrig i praktiken. Jag tog den aldrig så långt som att göra verkliga försök att ändra dess naturlagar, radera ut vissa opassande pappfigurer eller dylikt. Jag vill skilja mellan fantasi och psykos. En stark fantasi som fascinerade och återkom. Ingenting skulle få finnas kvar när jag slutligen lämnade världen. Allt blev en förlängning av den egna kroppen, tanken, fantasin.

Jag kan inte med säkerhet säga att jag verkligen har älskat någon annan människa än mig själv. Det fanns en tid då jag var övertygad om att jag sökte en annan människas närhet, idag är jag inte alls lika säker. Jag förstår det egoistiska och fundamentala i att fortplanta sig, men det går inte att jämställa med ett konstverk. Ett verk måste vara slutgiltigt, inte förbli i ständig utveckling, en utveckling som jag själv inte kan rå över och som kan utvecklas till något som jag i grunden föraktar.

2010-06-07T14:11:00.000-07:00

The Spheres :: a world behind curtains presents:

In June 2010, The Spheres present N-Sphere, the gallery's monthly magazine. Gradually expanding to form its own galaxy, the N-Sphere includes an interconnected section with the music world. Main features for this month are: Hadewych, The Centre for Transgressive Behaviours, Overlapping realities: on the artistic practice of Ion Grigorescu, Bob Schatte, Agent Side Grinder.

The June guest exhibit features Martin Bladh, a musician and visual artist currently residing in Sweden. In his world, fantasy and obsession are reciprocal, cumulative, clawing each other's eyes out, making up and making out, shoving themselves in a crowd of assertion. Visit the guest gallery here. An interview with the artist is included in the current issue of N-Sphere.

The Spheres

http://sfere.ro/art/guest/index.php
http://sfere.ro/nsphere

The Island of Death

2010-06-07T13:41:00.001-07:00

1

Je me voyais devant une foule exaspérée, en face du peloton d'exécution, pleurant du malheur qu'ils n'aient pu comprendre, et pardonnant ! - Comme Jeanne d'Arc ! - "Prêtres, professeurs, maîtres, vous trompez en me livrant à la justice. Je n'ai jamais été de ce peuple-ci ; je n'ai jamais été chrétien ; je suis de la race qui chantait dans le supplice ; je ne comprends pas les lois ; je n'ai pas le sens moral, je suis une brute : vous trompez..."
Arthur Rimbaud

Peter Brooks – on The Lord of the Flies:
My experience showed me that the only falsification in Golding’s fable is the length of time the descent to savagery takes. His action takes about three months. I believe that if the cork of continued adult presence were removed from the bottle, complete catastrophe could occur within one long weekend.

Gitta Sereny – The Murder of James Bulger:
The two boys, as has been described often elsewhere, sat on a specially built platform, with two social workers between them. Although in all reports they were described as being of different size and build, Jonathan slim and tall, Robert smaller and roundish, they appeared to have caught up with each other in the intervening months: they were both rather heavy and flabby - both were said to have gained weight since their arrest, Jonathan over two stone. Under close restraint, neither had had any opportunity for exercise. But his new weight notwithstanding, Jonathan was a nice-looking boy with silky brown hair and a small childlike face: it was extremely difficult to associate that face with the acts we heard described. He behaved extraordinarily well during the long days of the sessions: except for occasionally turning around to glance at his parents, he moved little. We would hear in the course of the trial that a school psychologist had diagnosed him as hyperactive: he was certainly the stillest hyperactive child I have ever seen. A few times he, as well as Robert, played with some of the tissues their social workers held at the ready for them, creating patterns by folding them up and tearing little holes of different sizes and shapes. A couple of times I saw Jonathan open up his completed artwork and show it with a smile to the tall man beside him, who smiled back. The solid 6ft 2in man and the boy appeared close, conferred often, and the man's eyes were almost always on his charge. Repeatedly, when Jonathan seemed particularly tense, or cried, his social worker briefly held or touched him.

Yukio Mishima – Confessions of a Mask:
Although as a child I read every fairy story I could lay my hands on, I never liked the princesses. I was fond only of the princes fated for death. I was completely in love with any youth who was killed. But I did not yet understand why, from among Andersen’s many fairy tales, only his Rose-Elf threw deep shadows over my heart, only that beautiful youth who, while kissing the rose given him as a token by his sweetheart, was stabbed to death and decapitated by a villain with a big knife. I did not yet understand why, out of Wilde’s numerous fairy tales, it was only the corpse of the young fisherman The Fisherman and His Soul, washed up on the shore clasping a mermaid to his breast, that captivated me. Naturally I was fond enough of other childlike things. There was Andersen’s The Nightingale, which I liked well, and I delighted in many childish comic books. But my leaning toward Death and Night and Blood would not be denied.

2

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme
einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem
stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Augustin Vilaronga on Tras el Cristal:
…working with the kids was extremely challenging, because you can’t ask a child to do or say certain things; they understand many things, but not all things. And even more so when you talk about sensitive topics, such as sex, you can’t be very explicit. And I remember we found ways to interact with the kids, like in the needle scene, we stick a gas gauge in the child’s heart, which is a brutal scene, and I remember that the child turned it into a game. You can’t just tell a child to play dead, because if you do they don’t respond effectively. So we had to find little tricks to get the children to perform. If their stomach hurt, or if they couldn’t breathe, which is a distressed feeling, we pretended as if they were pulling a balloon out of their mouths. Always trying to find ways for them, many times they had no clue what they were doing, and at times they were aware of what they were doing. Children aren’t just puppets, they too understand what’s going on, and they are able to project their feelings from within.

Gitta Sereny – The Murder of James Bulger:
Robert, though too heavy and his face too wide, looked nice enough the first week. But after the weekend, his already short dark hair had been almost shaved off, giving him suddenly a disturbingly neutered look - and that of a convict. I asked whether perhaps his secure unit had been beset by headlice - it seemed the only explanation for this grotesque crop. But I was told, no, he had asked for this cut. Robert's hands were much more restless than Jonathan's. They were never still. The two boys appeared at times to compete in the Kleenex cut-outs both produced - they leaned forward repeatedly to look at each other's paper-lace and once or twice appeared to smile. They also looked at each other, quick darting looks at high points of the evidence, but, with two or three exceptions, without visible emotion. While Jonathan's feelings about things he heard were clearly expressed in his face, Robert's was blank for most of those three weeks. His emotions were in his fingers - and in the movements of his mouth. His fingers were constantly moving, wadding-up the tissues, forming them as if with purpose into round or oblong shapes, or tearing them into bits. We were told he was in the habit of sucking his thumb and pushing his finger in his ear, but in court he did something different, stranger with his hands, with great intensity. Several times in almost every session, he licked the tip of each finger, then wiped them on his trousers and licked them again; then he put two or three fingers in his mouth, filling it, closed his lips around them, held them still for a moment, and then pushed the fingers to and fro or turned them around in a circle. Or yet again, he licked a finger and then drew it slowly around his mouth. His social worker, a slim, tense-looking man, rarely looked at Robert; their communication appeared limited to the five or ten times during each session when Robert, for an instant looking childlike, asked him the time. Although next to each other, there seemed always to be a small space between them which neither did anything to close. I was told the social worker was a nice man; but he didn't touch the boy, even at the very end of the trial when Robert, hearing the sentence, his usually pink face chalk-white, cried.

Pierre Molinier quoted in an interview with Pierre Chaveau:
I had photographed her. I had said to my parents: “Whatever happens, don’t disturb me.” Then I locked the door. They had put her in her communion dress and she was wearing black stockings. I caressed her legs a little. What a sensation it produced in me! I climbed on top of her and ejaculated on her belly, with her lying there dead. But she was pretty for all that; even when she was dead she was pretty. And so the best part of me went with her. (LAUGHTER) Yes … What a smasher my sister was. She had fantastic legs.

3

Morremo. Il velo indegno a terra sparto,
Rifuggirà l'ignudo animo a Dite,
E il crudo fallo emenderà del cieco
Dispensator de' casi. E tu cui lungo
Amore indarno, e lunga fede, e vano
D'implacato desio furor mi strinse,
Vivi felice, se felice in terra
Visse nato mortal. Me non asperse
Del soave licor del doglio avaro
Giove, poi che perìr gl'inganni e il sogno
Della mia fanciullezza. Ogni più lieto
Giorno di nostra età primo s'invola.
Sottentra il morbo, e la vecchiezza, e l'ombra
Della gelida morte. Ecco di tante
Sperate palme e dilettosi errori,
Il Tartaro m'avanza; e il prode ingegno
Han la tenaria Diva
E l'atra notte, e la silente riva.
Giacomo Leopardi

Maurice Sendak interviewed on Now with Bill Moyers:
Moyers: What I hear you describing is not a story that you just made up. It's a story you experienced.
Sendak: Yeah. Well, that's what art is. I mean, you don't make up stories. You live your life. And I was not Max. I did not have the courage that Max had. And I didn't have the mother that Max had. Who would give you, love you and you know this little scene which is so trivial. It happens at everybody's house, happens every Tuesday and Thursday.
He has a fit. She has a fit. It'll go on till he's about 35, goes into therapy, wonders why he can't get married, okay? Cause people often say, "What happens to Max?" And it's such a coy question that I always say, "Well, he's in therapy forever. He has to wear a straitjacket when he's with his therapist."
Moyers: This is probably apocryphal. But, I have to ask you this. I did hear... You were born in '28?
Sendak: Yeah.
Moyers: I did hear that you were seriously affected by the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby?
Sendak: Oh, yeah.
Moyers: Is that true?
Sendak: Oh, yeah. Oh, it was the... that was me. That was me entirely in the sense of I was... He was kidnapped in '32.
Moyers: That's right, 1932.
Sendak: On March 2nd, 1932. So, I was 29, 30... well, I was about three and 1/2 years old, something like that. I remember everything. I remember I couldn't read but the radio was always on. I remember Mrs. Lindbergh's tearful voice, where she was allowed to speak on radio to say that the baby had a cold. And would the man or men or women who took him rub camphor on his chest. It was a slight cold. But she didn't want it to get any worse. I remember that vividly, her voice.
Moyers: When you say it was you, was it the child's appropriation of fear? Did you fear being kidnapped?
Sendak: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Fear of dying because I was a very sickly child. My parents were immigrants. They were not decorous. They were not discreet. They always thought I was gonna die. And my mother crying and yelling 'cause I was a very sickly baby. So I heard all this. I knew I was mortal from a very early age, okay? My grandmother, I have told—I don't remember—sewed me a suit of white with white stockings and white shoes. And I would sit on the stoop in front of the house with her so that the angel of death would pass over because I was already an angel. I was all in white. So, I would not be taken as long as I dressed in white.
Moyers: You were dressed to fool the fates?
Sendak: Yes. The Lindbergh thing was I'd just come off a very serious illness. And all the news was the Lindbergh baby. I made the queer association that since I was not meant to live long and I'd been told that—and if the Lindbergh baby is kidnapped, it can't die because it's a rich, gentile baby. It has blue eyes and blonde hair. Father is Captain Marvel. And the mother is the princess of the universe. And they live in a house in a place called Hopewell, New Jersey where there are German Shepherds and where there are nannies and where there are police. Who could climb up the wall, climb in the room and take the baby out and nobody know? How defenseless could babies be even among the rich? Now, I could not bear the thought that that baby was dead. My life hung on that baby being recovered. Because if that baby died, I had no chance. I was only a poor kid, okay? I mean, it doesn't make much sense to say it. But, that's the equation. And when the baby was found dead, I think something really fundamental died in me, some... I don't know what to call it.

Dylan Klebold quoted in Jonathan Fast’s Ceremonial Violence - a psychological explanation of school shootings:
Walk in, set bombs at 11:09, for 11:17
Leave
Drive to Clemente Park. Gear up.
Get back by 11:15.
Park cars, set car bombs for 11:18
get out, go to outside hill, wait.
When first bombs go off, attack.
have fun!

Thomas Quick – Kvarblivelse:
The one in the light, in the last house, who is dead, may ride the carriage. Pretty horses with black bands wrapped around their legs, harnessed to the carriage and then, slowly, the carriage starts to move behind the horse or the horses. The horse or the horses can sense how seriously delicate this is - the thing that they are moving - they don’t want to move to fast and would never runaway. I go to the back of the carriage where there is a strange wooden handle. The door opens when I press it down. The floor is empty; I thought there was going to be a coffin. I climb into the carriage. I try to close the door as good as I can. It smells like Miss Bergström’s living room – I can sense that no one has been here for quite so time.
I pull the curtains, they’re quite dusty. The windows get dark and then everything goes dark. I lie down on my back. My shorts are dirty but their colour is still bright. I take them off along with my underpants. I place the underpants over my face and put the shorts on my belly. Now the light reaches me and the journey may begin. I close my eyes and when I do, I can hear how the people whisper silently and, indeed, somebody is crying.

4

Förruttnelse, hasta, o älskade brud,
att bädda vårt ensliga läger!
Förskjuten av världen, förskjuten av Gud,
blott dig till förhoppning jag äger.
Fort, smycka vår kammar -- på svartklädda båren
den suckande älskarn din boning skall nå.
Fort, tillred vår brudsäng -- med nejlikor våren
skall henne beså.
Slut ömt i ditt sköte min smäktande kropp,
förkväv i ditt famntag min smärta!
I maskar lös tanken och känslorna opp,
i aska mitt brinnande hjärta.
Rik är du, o flicka! -- i hemgift du giver
den stora, den grönskande jorden åt mig.
Jag plågas häruppe, men lycklig jag bliver
därnere hos dig.
Till vällustens ljuva, förtrollande kvalm
oss svartklädda brudsvenner följa.
Vår bröllopssång ringes av klockornas malm,
och gröna gardiner oss dölja.
När stormarna ute på världshavet råda,
när fasor den blodade jorden bebo,
när fejderna rasa, vi slumra dock båda
i gyllene ro.
Erik Johan Stagnelius

Maurice Sendak interviewed on Now with Bill Moyers:
Moyers: Are you obsessed with death?
Sendak: A little bit. A little bit. Yeah, it's such a curious thing.
Moyers: How so?
Sendak: It's a whole adventure.
Moyers: We have no firsthand reports, do we?
Sendak: No, we don't. I wouldn't believe them even if they did. They all talk about lights in the distance and people flying on the ceiling. No. But, it is an adventure. You know who said that? Peter Pan of all people. I don't like him.
Moyers: Why?
Sendak: No, it's not him I don't like. It's Barrie I don't like. The sentimentalizing of children, the cutesifying of the children. If you look into the heart of Peter Pan, it is a boy obsessed with death, afraid to live. And you strip away all the silly music and the silly nonsense and the crocodile and the hook and all those things, it's a very strange, very strange story. But, Barrie was a very strange man.

Eric Harris quoted in Jonathan Fast’s Ceremonial Violence - a psychological explanation of school shootings:
5:00 up
6:00 meet at KS
7:00 go to Reb’s house
7:15 he leaves to fill propane
I leave to fill gas
8:30 meet back at his house
9:00 made d. bag set up car
9:30 practice gearups
Chill
10:30 set up 4 things
11: 00 go to school
11:10 set up duffel bags
11:12 wait near cars, gear up
11:16 HAHAHA

Dennis Nilsen quoted in Brian Masters´ Killing for Company:
On one my treks along the beach to Inverallochy I was feeling pretty miserable. I stooped and took of my shoes and socks and waded up to my knees in the sounding sea. I was hypnotised by its power and enormity. I disregarded that my short trousers were getting wet, I moved steadily forward up to my waist. I could see a much older boy sitting further up the shore. Poking the sand with a stick. I must have stepped into a hollow because I suddenly disappeared under water. The retreat of the wave carried me out further. I panicked, and waving my arms and shouting I submerged. I could hear a loud buzzing in my head and I kept gasping for air which wasn’t there. I thought that Granddad was bound to arrive and pull me out. I felt at ease, drugged and dreamlike under the silent green weight of water. I felt myself suspended in a void. I could hear a droning slowed-down voice in the distance (a mixture of every voice I had ever known, nothing recognisable). I felt a heavy weight upon me. I felt very cold at first, but this changed to a neutral feeling, then I could feel the warmth of the sun. I was vomiting and gasping. I became aware of blue and air and a breeze in a sandy hollow in the dunes. My clothes were spread out on the long sand grass and the sky was bright blue with wisps of white cloud. I felt a pressure on me and sank into a deep sleep. Later I could feel the dry sand’s comforting support beneath me. I coughed a bit and felt my raw throat. I sat up and covered my nakedness with my hands noticing a white sticky mess on my stomach and thighs. I remember thinking that I had been fouled on by a seagull. I wiped it off with sand. I peered from behind the grass high on the dunes but there was no one about. My clothes were damp but not all that wet. It was quite hot so I put them on and wandered over the dunes and took the golf link road slowly home hoping that my things would soon dry out.

IRM: Order4

2010-04-28T06:46:00.000-07:00

IRM has already existed for over 10 years and are recognized as one of the most interesting Industrial bands around. It is now evident on this album that they are a three piece band, as the new member Mikael O. displays the full spectrum of his bass-guitar strummings.

"This new work by IRM is a deeper delving into the psyche of the self inflictor – the core of inner regions violently exposed. Comprised by four tracks, each exactly 15 minutes in length we are thrown into a vortex of feedback, cymbaldrones, heavy bass-strumming, nightmarish pianotinkles and irreproachable synthwork. Demanding your attention all the way through – certainly not an easy listening experience – describing the course of events is impossible. It is again a mature and intricate work of incisive delicacies and theatrical ambiences. The sense of detail throughout is immense and the editing perfect. The clinical heaviness of earlier works are now transformed into a pure harsh, static soundwave which are most often cut off by another, slower, softer but in ways a more painful and dynamic one. The lyrics here are deeper cuts into personal matters. A man altering between life and death - a calculating and disillusive thinker and recluse who has lost the grip of reality, or perhaps found another? The strife for self-control turned into sick dedication, waging war on himself to receive recognition – the end comes nearer. Seldom have we heard a strange work like this which turns both lyrics and music into a full whole – stay away if deeper encounters with the human mind offends."

The creative artwork has been made by the renowned Swedish artist Stefan Danielsson, who also made the frontcover artwork for Whitehouse album "Racket"

Tracklist:
1.Order 1
2.Order 2
3.Order 3
4.Order 4

Total playing time 60.00 min
Released on Cold Meat Industry

För samples:http://www.myspace.com/thesoulcleaner
Mer samples http://www.myspace.com/coldmeatindustry

Stefan Danielsson:
http://bitedead.blogspot.com/
http://www.inediaprodigiosa1.blogspot.com/

Mark. 9: 43-49 (2010)

2010-03-04T09:01:00.000-08:00

⁴³If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out.⁴⁵And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell.⁴⁷And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell,⁴⁸where "their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.'⁴⁹Everyone will be salted with fire.

talcum powder: torso - throat – face - arms

He was missing out on something

sertralin (25mg) - water

He thought himself not worthy

plastic glove (right hand)

He thought himself being chiefly responsible

cleansing - torso (right side)

He had always wanted to be an actor

razor – vinegar

He believed himself being a fraud

incision - skin side - horizontal (right side)

He was an empty vessel

cleansing – skin side – horizontal (right side)

He lay open to desire

razor – vinegar

He insisted he was asexual

wine – water - albumin

He claimed that touch defiled

ashes: torso - throat – face - arms

He owned it to his mother

aspirin (25mg) – water

He owned it to his father

cleansing – vinegar – right hand

He was the mirrored image of mother

cleansing – skin side – horizontal (right side)

He was the mirrored image of father

salt – skin side – horizontal (right side)

He often simulated injuries

milk – urine – yolk

He was afraid being looked upon as a cheap thrill

hair – fire

He made clumsy attempts

ultraviolet light

He attempted to expiate the burning itch

talcum powder: torso – throat – face - arms

He was the sole persecutor

sertralin (25mg) – water

He was the sole jury

cleansing – vinegar – right hand

He sought out a victim

cleansing – torso (right side)

He sought out an executioner

razor – vinegar

He would enact the role of victim

incision – skin side – vertical (right side)

He would enact the role of executioner

cleansing – skin side – vertical (right side)

He lost his voice among other voices

razor – vinegar

He invented a voice of his own

wine – water – albumin

He drilled himself into an instrument

ashes: torso – throat – face – arms

He maintained that he lived his words

aspirin (25mg) – water

He invented a language of his own

cleansing – vinegar - right hand

He invented a mythology of his own

cleansing – skin side – vertical (right side)

He invented heroes of his own

salt – skin side – horizontal (right side)

He made a heroic attempt

milk – urine – yolk

He brought about the amputation

ultraviolet light

He expressed no regrets

Photo: Mikael Oretoft

Martin Bladh interviewed by Peter Sotos

2010-02-14T08:19:00.001-08:00

This interview with Martin Bladh was conducted by Peter Sotos during the autumn of 2007.

PS: I’m intrigued by the idea that the many references you use in the text may conjoin only through your work. The references aren’t so disparate, seeing as an example that the confluence between Artaud, Nitsch, Bataille and Freud has been heavily and routinely discussed, but I’m wondering if the ideas you mine may make more sense for you as a writer rather than a performer, musician or a filmmaker. That maybe you personalize the effect these references have? That they chart a history? That you’ve eroticized… the possibilities?

MB: All these fragments are raw-material, a starting point; the actual artwork starts with a vague idea, a picture or a text, and then suddenly a scenario grows from that. In many cases they make more sense to me personally than to the observer or casual reader, but in works such as Matt 5:29-30 the text reference is very obvious and gives the work a new dimension which I think is possible to grasp. As you’ve mentioned these “raw-material” often follows a context and are not as disparate as, let say…Bacon’s visual raw-material which can link together a car crash victim with an umbrella, a Velasquez painting and an Eliot poem. Take a performance work such as The Death of Narcissus where I started out by making a connection between Dennis Nilsen’s notorious autoerotic obsession in front of a mirror and John Nathan’s speculations about Yukio Mishima’s narcissistic and deeply erotic suicide. There is definitely a kind of semi-storytelling here, and I’m very precise when it comes to putting these references together.

I wouldn’t go that far, and it would be ridiculous to state that I “live” these texts references, but I try to find connections between them, my own words and body. The idea of taking them upon me; using myself as a sort of canvas or a crash test dummy for other people which I feel related to or a topic that fascinates me. There’s a strong bound here that makes perfect sense to me. Then, take a guy like David Nebreda, which is the most amazing thing I’ve seen; this guy is obviously very sick and it would be ridiculous to even try to come near or replicate his extremely insightful personal work, but his pain, compulsive aesthetics and the obvious danger he puts himself in excites me enormously… So what is left in the end…my own narcissistic urge, personal

fetish?

PS: Fetishism is a reductive idea, I would think especially here. Certainly, your aim is to expand these ideas? I’d never ask if experience is central to the work. You can look at what Sade created versus Bataille. Or Artaud versus Nitsch. And easily understand that what’s missing in both Bataille and Nitsch has to do with an extremely personal monologue that has nothing to do with immediate flesh or grandiose provocation. A friend of mine was recently selling some used books on porn theory to a bookstore and the guy behind the counter didn’t want them. He said they’d buy porn but not porn theory because it was too much like buying a book on beer. The guy’s an idiot, obviously, but what does make sense to me is that very few artists actually make something that is better, or more actual, than the theory. Sade and Artaud being two examples who do.

The point I was trying to make is related to Bacon, actually. In Bacon’s work, I think, you’ll find that these various, seemingly unrelated, instances come together to make a very personal reality. Bacon’s work is then something that exists far above the simple references, removes, practicalities. It doesn’t make sense to pull apart his work into analogies or backwards gossip. The work exists as a convergence, perhaps, but not an assembly. It’s not defined by its surreality or improvisation. You couldn’t say it’s a statement on sex, or umbrellas, or even a proxy, but you could view it as a sexual experience that couldn’t be captured in any way other than creating that specific painting. What I was trying to get at was if you thought all the information you collect and then itemize come together through the work you release in a form that is greater than the parts. I think it is. And since you ask if it might be a narcissistic urge or fetish, I have to ask first: What do these trawls suggest back to you?

Nebreda, to use your example, is more than a document of madness or physical suffering. Just like Artaud. Though it’s very common to see his work treated as such – by academics who’re looking for word-play extremes or lazy voyeurs who think the material is part of a sadistic giggle. How does narcissism play back? Or do you just indulge it…?

MB: To me the final product is the most important thing; a work isn’t good if it doesn’t amount to anything. I’m not really that interested in theory. In art, theory is useless if it can’t give any form of delivery. These kinds of quasi scientific theories often tell more about the artist’s own pathological state then he would like to acknowledge. It’s like – “why do I have this urges, I can’t be alone, so it most have an explanation that comes to everybody’s (mankind’s) benefit, and I was meant to be a ring leader for this new insightful philosophy.” This kind of thinking approaches a universal almost utopian vision; a claim for greater human values which doesn’t speak for the artist alone but the whole world. And it’s here I think Nitsch goes wrong; his great visions are still after all these years only partly realised, and lately he’s even reduced them further by not having animals slaughtered during the actual actions due to fear of death threats and reprisals from animal-right groups. He is bigger then ever and still he is farther from his bombastic theoretical texts then ever before. Artaud literary lived his own words, which probably annihilated him in the end, but he had no other choice and stayed very true to his work. My anthology collections are much more suggestive than theoretically explaining, and when put together as a whole (with the actual performance and the later reproductions) I think they expand and give the work a new dimension, which I find very inspiring and even seductive.

I feel very close to Bacon and I totally agree with what you said about him; that his work couldn’t come out in any other way. Just as with Bacon, sensation is the central key to what I’m doing, but compared to him I’m far too eclectic and there’s a long way to go before I reach such a genuine and personal way of expression. As you know, one of my action pieces is called Sensation is Everything. Everything comes down to sensation: sadism-masochism-exhibitionism-narcissism-fetishism-egocentrism… To depict myself in a particular violent fantasy, gives me a rush which comes very close to sensation and of course gratification. I’m always looking for an adequate picture of myself, or of myself as the staged wound. To have this distorted, damaged reflection of my own body thrown back at me is a very sensual experience. I can relate to Mishima’s rigorously staged and perfectly aesthetic photographs of his own death. This might be looked upon as a futile process, both romantic and pathetic, but to me it’s of great importance. And satisfaction is what hopefully comes back, as private sensual experience. After all I’m only concerned with my own private universe and the people I choose to impersonate and thereby drag into it.

PS: Is there a requirement for an audience in what you do? I’m trying to understand the difference between a ritual and a personal exploration, perhaps, but also your reasons for writing scripts as something that is in essence a fantasy. Or is it essentially something else entirely?

MB: A present audience isn’t always that necessary, but communication is. It’s a limitation to always relay on an audience. The most important thing is to make something which exalts and inspires me. I see artistic creation as an urge, and sometimes the urge is an exhibitionistic one and an audience is needed. But there’re also pieces that require more perfection which I rather perform alone in my apartment. I always use some kind of reproduction media such as photography, especially polaroid, video and accompanying texts. Some of my favourite works that involve the artist’s own body were performed alone with the camera as the single witness. When it comes to drama I often prefer the text before the actual realised work. I’ve actually written some drama pieces that are meant never to be performed neither for an audience nor a camera (not only because of the delicate subject matter), they couldn’t possibly be realised in the flesh…the suggestive power of words becomes everything.

I like monotony very much which has been reflected in my work again and again. I guess this fascination gets very close to what is referred to as ritual, but to me repeating a pattern is more about form than some kind of spiritual experience or magic reality.

I’m careful about using terms such as catharsis and therapy through art (although I find Schwarzkogler’s and Artaud’s concepts very inspiring). I prefer terms like fantasy, fetish or sensation. I’m no modern day shaman or priest.

PS: Why is the writing so cold and detached? Is the process of carefully itemizing the things that inspire you vastly different than the life that might erupt through the performance pieces? How does a personal fantasy find locus in the “suggestive power of words”? I’m thinking, especially with your films, that you want to see… more?

I started making some films recently. And the idea I wanted to deal with was based in taking the words away from the people who would agree to sit in front of a camera for me. I only asked people that release different forms of pornography. Because, to start with, I was interested in dissemination rather than the hackneyed impulses behind their sexual tastes. I wouldn’t mention this otherwise as I hate work that begins with an experiment so that the final work is seen as “experimental” –essentially a subjective marketing or craft strategy. The genesis of the work doesn’t complete the idea. But I found the interviews to be truly excruciating. I had to try and find what I was interested in locating in another way. This isn’t to say that I was only interested in what I thought I wanted to hear. Every person I listened to would yap about their exhibitionism and then slide that thin confession into an even thinner understanding of what they might expect back from an audience. Personally, I don’t believe art requires an audience and I don’t believe that you are trying to do anything like a shaman or priest. Obviously, you couldn’t perform many of the texts you’ve written. And I don’t think you’d have to. But there’s a calculation to them as scripts in that they resemble instructions and practical requirements rather than disgust driven or sexually desperate screeds or even a pornography that might have a more recognizable or inhabitable style…?

Of course, Dennis Nilsen thought he needed bodies to experience what he thought he wanted. But he also – like Dodd, Dahmer and so many others- wrote elaborate plans in diaries. Whether he found the experience as frustrating as the fantasy is interesting but hardly relevant when art is concerned. I don’t think you do what you do for an audience. So can you explain what you mean when you say communication is necessary?

MB: Yes I would want to see and to show more…but there are things that couldn’t be done in front of the camera because it involves other people. It feels a bit awkward to talk about these text- or drama pieces because they haven’t been translated into English. Matt. 5:29-30 and Off Stage: Slide Show are both masochistic fantasies which involves extreme violence. Matt 5:29-30 is a video installation piece which also involves damaged polaroids and drawings. Off-Stage is a photo piece that consists of 16 polaroids. I’m the only protagonist in these pieces and the violence depicted on the video and the pictures are obviously faked, which I think works in these two cases. But the other texts that I referred to, that isn’t represented in this book, deals with grandiose scenarios that involve other people, corpses and animals. And I would never allow this material to be performed and thereby be reduced and simulated into nothing. It would totally destroy it. Still they are written as drama pieces which would be possible to perform on a stage or in front of the camera, and that’s the way I like it; that it is possible to follow the instructions and realize the text…but still you know it would be absolutely impossible…in the end only words could do them justice. Do you remember that we had a brief discussion some years ago about artistic implosion versus explosion? When in an implosion you wear your own work and it becomes a most personal thing and with an explosion you involve outsiders into the creative process which might be a problem to your artistic integrity. I would like to see these texts as implosions involving other people.

My texts are cold and instructional, and again this has to do with my fascination with form. Many of my ideas tend to materialise as rigorously structured scenarios, simple, clinical in an almost theatrical setting. And I can understand if it looks like I’m trying to erase myself from the text, but really I’m not, it’s just the way it comes to me, naturally.

With communication I don’t mean that I’ve an urge to explain or share myself, but what I do need is a kind of feedback, directly or indirectly from a spectator, reader or listener. I know and understand that what I read into and feel through the work is more than an audience can possible grasp, but there is still a need of some kind of feedback or dialog. I don’t really know if this is a simple kind of ego-trip, child disease or a basic human need, and frankly I don’t care. What about you? Your work is extremely personal. Do you still feel a strong urge to get your work published and read? I think I would have to carry on my artistic creation even if no one would see it or care about it. It’s a necessity; I do this because I have to and can’t stop doing it. What about you Peter?

PS: To me, the subjects I’m dealing with are too complex to write an essay or opinion piece. And there’s a problem that comes from an audience wanting the writing to be separate from life and so-called life experience. It isn’t. I’ve written books about why I write and why I publish -not just descriptions of sucking off men through glory holes or children being raped by explicit phrasing. To me, there’s not a question of why the work is personal. There’s no other way in. Also, to pretend that the books haven’t created me or that I could’ve remained somehow pure to an idea or stance or settled in comfortable public opinions seems completely opposed to why I would want to write and publish in the first place. So much of my work is about recognizing myself in certain others and the sickening, exciting elasticity of empathy –It’s never a question of brutal honesty or lies or trying to fingerpoint a universal truth and teaching an audience something about themselves. I’m not trying to prove anything, I don’t stick to a script and I’m not writing a confessional –the ones that read this material, looking for that, usually stop at gossip. That has nothing to do with why I write.

Look at blog writing or the new genre-version of memoir. People send me their work or direct me to their op-ed pieces and weekly blogs and I’m sure these dolts think they’re contributing something to the world as well as thinking that this is something they must do for themselves, first and foremost. I don’t see it. The experience of my tastes and interests have very little to do with the simplicity of numbers or flesh or art theory, in fact. What’s in my head would never make any sort of sense other than by writing. Another example could be found in the countless internet clubs where men masturbate onto photos and then post the cum covered shots. If all I did was photograph the spill and state my favourite character, the weight and personal significance of the experience wouldn’t exist. All the facts and choices and options that make something like that important to me would never mean a fucking thing otherwise. I’m not looking to stop, you know? And ignoring the act -and the interest in what the act is, or should be- would be an essay. This is far too important to me. But I can’t control the context that the audience reads in. Shame, embarrassment, bragging, performing: all the same lazy rigors of what creates a quiet pervert, marketing artist or a silly political voice. I think I know where the experience becomes real and it isn’t in fumbling or shouting or recalling anecdotes.

I’m trying to understand what makes you pick your medium. A photograph as opposed to a painting. Or a film rather than just a single stopped image. I suppose I’m wondering –as well- if there is a centrality to all your work? An aesthetic predisposition or rabid impulse...? I’d have to say that I think there is a single, wide personality and I’m trying my best to drag everything backwards. It may sound reductive but I don’t see it that way at all. Am I way-off?

MB: What I’m doing is trying to create a personal “legal” outlet for fantasies and obsessions; a private cell where you’re your own master and executioner, who’s got control and the freedom to lose control. It’s not a matter of what is safe or risky as long as it is urgent and needs to be done and feels real to you. During the last ten years I’ve tried almost every artistic medium as an outlet for my ideas and obsessions; painting, drawing, photography, writing, music, film, installation, performance…you name it. In comparison to your writing, one chosen medium couldn’t do it for me…and trust me; this is a source of envy. I had a period in the beginning of the millennium when I was painting constantly, but the medium didn’t work out the way I wanted; the immediate marriage between content and form to come together in a satisfying way. Music and live shows couldn’t quite do it either. With IRM we tried to incorporate performance pieces into the shows, but mixing a musical concert with theatrical elements often tends to get a bit awkward, and in the end I was uneasy about doing these shows. It cost us not only a lot of money but a hell of problem with stage managers and producers who literally wanted to beat us up. Also the ideas that I wanted to manifest with these shows couldn’t really speak for both me and Erik in a satisfying way, it became too personal but also disappointing… I found film and performance to be a great relief; the images that I have been living with and wanted to show now materialised properly for the first time. Lately, I’ve found the single snapshot/Polaroid to be an even more satisfying way of expression, although I wouldn’t say that I’ve “exhausted” the film medium, I know that I’ll come back to it, the same thing will probably happen with painting too…

To answer your question, and it’s very obvious, yes, there’s definitely a centrality to my work. Almost everything I’ve done in music, painting, photography, film, performance and texts show the same thing. If you look at one of my (earlier) paintings and compare it to a (later) film or photography work you see that there are great similarities, they’re actually very much the same picture/scenario.

PS: Can you tell me what your work has told you about what you wanted to see…? Thinking, specifically, of creating carefully itemized tableaus that may have then moved you to want to change things about yourself? Seeing proof of what you –perhaps only- thought? Or see more, of course…?

Is one piece defined by the next piece?

MB: I’ve been thinking about that myself lately… and I don’t have a good answer to the question. The actual act of self-dissection is always a stimulating experience, which has an almost heroic feel to it. This exploration has diffidently shaped the way I look upon the world and myself. If you ask me if it has made a difference to me then the answer is absolutely, yes. It diffidently helped me excavate what is important and what is not. But it’s very hard to describe it. A friend asked me the same thing not so long ago. I can’t say that what I’m doing has made me a better person, disgusted me or opened fantastic new ways of seeing etc. People tend to think that everything I do is about catharsis, due to the violent and monotonous nature of the work; my answer is always that even if it is, I’ve not seen it yet, and it’s not likely that it’ll show up in the nearby future either; it’s like a barrier moving further and further away, and I don’t know if that is neither good nor bad, but then I have no thoughts or plans about reaching a special goal and then stopping either. It is not a religious quest. It is not a breaking test in the vein of Burden or Abramovic and I’m not interested in breaking social limits and taboos just for the sake of it. I never ask myself, have I done this before? Will I repeat myself? What I do still excites me and that’s the only thing that matters. When I’ve finished one piece there’s always an embryo for the next one. It’s like I get an idea from one piece and it mutates further into something else which often makes me understand its precursor better. That’s the only natural way of working for me.

PS: I’m very interested in your definition of sensation. Do you think sex has more to do with sight than touch, for example? And does that mean that everything sensual pales behind the triggers that fire when looking for something…?

MB: To me sensation is mostly triggered by violence. I think sensation in essence is a violent act, an overload, an attack on the nervous system. It’s a very physical experience, which has to do with brute force, not intelligence. It might seem as I’m talking about some universal human instinct, and maybe I am, but the actual trigger is a personal fetish. It could be an explicit pornographic picture, an abstract recognition of lacerated flesh or a renaissance depiction of the crucifixion, but when you come across it you recognise it immediately. It doesn’t really matter if this “violence” is projected upon me in the actual flesh or an outside object through a staged scenario. Sight is of great importance to me, and sexually probably more important than touch: the voyeuristic tension between observer and object, between nausea and masturbatory fantasy. For me a piece is successful when it excites me and at the same time gives me an uneasy feeling.

PS: Would you like to discuss your masochism? Is it a desire to see the sadistic act above all? Do you have to take this on; inculcate both sides?

MB: The role of both victim and abuser is a very central theme. It’s definitely some kind of narcissistic urge, which I sometimes mistook for self disgust when I was younger. Nowadays these sides blend together as a symbiosis, and I think I found a balance. I love the idea of being the anonymous flesh in front of the camera while at the same time being the invisible interrogator behind it. When I’m putting myself in a situation that to me is humiliating and repugnant, I’m openly indulging in a masochistic act. Then, by using voices of real life victims and turn them into fictional peep-show characters, would most certainly by proxy be seen as a sadistic act (one example being Injury where I used a collage of different case studies of sexually abused boys who later turned perpetrators, to make up this “fictional” character that I’m impersonating).

Showing the actual act of violence isn’t necessary. In several of my pieces the violent act has been cut out and happens off-stage, and you’re left with its actual outcome. Although, the whole piece still revolves around this particular incident.

The tension between sadism and masochism is present in almost everything I’ve done. I’ve especially tried to manifest these opposites in my short films. In performance work it has much more to do with being passive or active; where a certain contract is agreed upon by the passive- and active actors. Pieces such as Porn Pigs – a Love Story and Dead Ringer has very articulated characters that makes it much easier to point out which one is impersonating the sadist and the masochist. I think the inculcation between the factors is all too present in the performance work Sensation is Everything where I switched the role from sacrificial victim to victimiser, but maybe not in a very satisfying way…

PS: What is lacking? I'd doubt that you think an orgasm is the final say in satisfaction.

MB: I think it was a dire mistake to use symbolical action when trying to stage a personal outlet for sensation the way I did in Sensation is Everything. Looking back at it now, it seems to have more to do with a layman’s interpretation of Freudian thinking, and maybe even allegory instead of direct personal experience. The actual orgasm isn’t really related to sensation; it always leaves you feeling empty. I think there is a need for suspense, and this suspense have been portrayed more successfully in my video works then in the performance pieces.

PS: I suppose you need to define success. Forgive me if I’m sounding base. But are you trying to sustain something or trying to craft a sense of suspense in the way that genre writers or movie directors try to engage an audience for shock or surprise –or whatever?

MB: Success is diffidently defined by sensation, a fulfilled and adequate depiction of the body and the staged scenario. At least, that’s what’s worth striving for. I’ve absolutely no interest in the classical “Hitchcock” way of staging suspense, or genre scare and shock tactics. Again, here monotony plays a central part. Warhol occupies this territory in films like Blow Job and Vinyl, Pierre Guyotat does it, and you do in your books. I’m not looking for the usual dramatic or cinematic shock outbursts, but a slow steady process that holds me in sustain.

PS: I'm not sure what you mean by being anonymous -an audience comes to your work looking for you, right? You're not performing so that an audience finds themselves or a unique way of looking at sex or sensation.

MB: What I’m referring to is the (my) headless body in the short films and video works. This work was made by me, alone in front of the camera without any audience present. I use the headless body and the distorted voices to reduce obvious or false references to my own person, it makes the viewer, and even myself more uncertain who is behind and in front of the camera, who’s talking and who’s answering the questions etc. Then of course it enables me to cast these “fictional” characters in a more satisfying way. By excluding my face the observer will not be able to read too much of my own biography into this fictional stories. So, to some degree I’m a projection screen, a canvas of flesh that has to be filled with a fictional meaning. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m cutting myself out of the work, my own pathological interest for the subjects I choose to impersonate is present in every single piece I’ve done.

PS: I’d argue that you may like to think you’re anonymous but that you’re really anything but. Thinking that you’re anonymous may make the work easier for you to do, though. Does it? I think a certain consistency in all of your work –or obsessions, if you like- provokes me to see it as a whole.

MB: I’m not saying that I’m being objective, but thinking in terms of role play and fiction, enables me to exclude different aspects of myself and exaggerate others. As I stated before, all these scenarios and characters that I’ve created revolves around the same topics, obsessions etc. and might very well be seen as lesser components of a greater oeuvre which includes my musical projects and earlier paintings as well.

PS: I suppose, on another level, you can explain if you're looking for some form of personal negation.

MB: I’m quite convinced that a successful work of art lies somewhere between what is deeply personal and traditional, a kind of concentration where your own pathological and aesthetic obsessions blends together in a perfect unity. My own body is always the origin of the work, it is my own private invention, but I’m still able to communicate with an audience due to its recognisable expressive power.

PS: This may be my problem. But I know your audience. Aren’t you disappointed with most of the reactions from the idiots who post on forums and gossip on blogs? Why see your work as some form of communication that includes LCDs? How do you reconcile the private with the public? Why worry about letting morons in?

MB: Sure, most comments I’ve read are made by morons (posted on PE or industrial music forums) and have nothing to do with what I’m actually doing. Still, there are some opinions which I do cherish. Some feedback has been nourishing. Although, this isn’t the kind of feedback I’m looking for in the first place. I do this for myself and if some people tend to like it that’s fine with me. I can’t help to think of some kind of receiver. It all comes down to pure ego, can’t you relate to that? You must have found Jean-Jacques Pauvert comments flattering, even if it doesn’t affect your actual writing?

PS: No, I can’t relate to that. I’m trying hard to figure out what sort-of agency you think is involved in your work. Ego is a word that others, including you, might use in a cavalier manner and I don’t think it has any place in my work. In the gratification way I’m pretty sure you’re using the word. My writing deals –to a disturbing degree- with how I’m perceived in this world and that, of course, is an applicable definition of Ego. But our worlds are a bit different. The answer I was trying to elicit from you dealt –primarily- with how you may or may not see your compulsions ghettoized. It’s you that contends you’re interested in a form of communication. If nothing else, I’m asking you who you think you’re talking to –the ones that recognize the “expressible power” of the body. Who are they?

MB: This is foremost an exhibitionistic need, and the outcome is personal gratification. Even if the turnout might be futile, there’s still an urge. I don’t claim that my work contains a hidden dialog that speaks to the spectators in some kind of telepathic way. I don’t believe in what several silly body-artist calls spiritual contact with the audience. Neither do I care for simple art-house provocation or people that want tacky gore-feasts. There are no special types of groups or scenes that I’m referring to or trying to get in touch with. My work has started to attract a new, pretentious art audience here in Sweden which I can’t relate to at all. If someone approaches me after a performance or a screening and says that he found it to be erotically charged, that to me is communication. When someone contacts me and explains why my work has inspired him, is also communication. If I would hear that someone had actually masturbated to one of my flicks, that would also be communication and thereby gratification. At some rare occasions people have pointed at things which I myself have overlooked, and which afterwards make perfect sense to me. But what is more important is to know that my body is being looked upon during the performance or the knowledge that someone will be watching it later on a TV-screen.

PS: Do you think a contempt for what you do and want is important to, or evident in, how you conceive your "characters"? Are the different voices and mediums you choose an attempt to write a bigger monologue? In the sense that the method used forces you to talk back, essentially, to yourself?

MB: I’m sure that these creations, at least in some way are different reflections of myself, but I wouldn’t use a word such as contempt. All of these characters have a specific relation to violence which I find seductive and inspiring; being it the religiously deranged self-mutilator of Matt 5:29-30 or the masochistic rent-boy-artist of the Talk Show trilogy. Still, there is no love or compassion, and some aspects of these personalities do disgust and unnerve me. I would like to think that I’m writing a bigger monologue, that I’m talking with or back to myself through these fictional dialogs and monologues. I would like to still be able to use “characters”, but to make them speak for me and not just through me. This is what I’m working on at the moment; to find the inner monologue and the best artistic outlet for it. This is a problem which is hard to get around in a satisfying way… I’ve always had a problem with manifesting my own acute desire and to avoid the risk of sinking to deep into the world of fiction and become a mere storyteller. Your own work derives much of its strength through actual real life experiences, which I’m lacking. I’m bound to a paradoxical fantasy world that revolves around my own body.

PS: I think that is very important, frankly. You do away with this objectivity and see yourself superimposed on these”characters” that most usually come wrapped in sympathy. So, it’s not really just fantasy, is it?

MB: You might be right… It’s a paradoxical way of looking back on reality.

PS: Come to any conclusions then? I’d like to see you explain your exhibitionism, for example.

MB: The performance in front of an audience or a camera is to me very erotically charged. And as I have a strong tendency towards narcissism, my own reflection in the mirror is of great importance. Watching me in the mirror or being watched on the stage, together with the fictional, often violated character upholds as you pointed out a discourse, which I’m leading with myself. It’s an erotic image that foremost speaks back to me. There are a lot of references to theatre and stage props throughout my work: the makeup-mirror, the rows of light, talcum powder etc. And in some pathetic kind of way I’ve managed to turn these props into some kind of fetish objects which boost the experience of the performance. I think the actual idea of performing is very charged; the body on the stage is a turn on. What I do wouldn’t make sense without the reference to the stage, or the theatrical setting. And this might also be the answer to the use of role-play, I don’t think a performance act could be casual, it always involve some heightening of the ego and the senses. It is like entering a new state of mind, and this kind of artistic outlet is quite different (at least to me) from writing, painting or editing, although these components becomes very important as preparations, but also as fetish value when looking back at the reproduction of the piece. The body becomes elevated when being put in this specific context; erotically or even heroically charged; a body that is my own, but at the same time put together by a variety of other people. It’s almost like I’m building my own personal mythology, with a hall of fame which assembles different voices and heroes. To see my own body reflection covered with fake or real wounds could be compared to a masturbatory fantasy. As an example, I found Nilsen’s fantasy that includes his own dead body to be very powerful, I can relate to it, and will dedicate a whole piece to this scenario.

dirge: the peter sotos files (2008)

2010-02-14T07:51:00.000-08:00

1. buyer's theme 1

2. dirge

3. playground sex

4. dirge: marc

5. insult

6. buyer's theme 2

7. dirge: mary

8. predicate

9. injury

10. buyer's theme 3

while I was working on the swedish translation of peter's excellent book selfish, little: the annotated lesley ann downey, i found that i couldn't get enough of this unsafe, highly personal world, and got the ugly idea to make my own piece based upon it. since i love the buyer's marked material i asked peter for the permission to do a recording centered on his private universe. he agreed and sent me a load of sound- and video clips, which he'd collected and put into context. i guess it's fair to call this album a conceptual piece, but i want to point out that it is foremost my own personal take on peter's work and he should not be held responsible for anything i've done. big thanks to peter who made this recording possible.

martin bladh, norrköping, june 2008.