Martin Bladh interviewd by Michael Barnett
Martin Bladh is a multi-faceted artist. Over his years in the public eye, Martin has worked on numerous visual, musical, and performance art projects. He entered the public realm through his power-electronics project, IRM, with Erik Jarl, and later joined by Mikael Oretoft. He would soon join forces with Magnus Lindh creating the musical force know as Skin Area. Martin has also done musical projects with Sektor 304, entitled Ruby, and with Bo I. Cavefors, entitled The Island Of Death, as well as a number of his own personal musical projects. Delving into the medium of film, Martin has created a handful of videos, many of which can be seen on the DVD accompanying Epicurean Escapism I. He also played a large part in the production of the feature film, Gasper. In the visual art world, Martin has joined forces with Karolina Urbaniak, starting Infinity Land Press. Through Infinity Land Press he has already participated in the production of a number of books, including The Rorschach Text, To Putrefaction, and No Breath Of Sound – The History Of Drowning. With all these projects in the works along with more that I haven’t even mentioned, and others which haven’t yet found their way to the public eye, Martin Bladh is a very busy man. I am honored to have the multi-media artist take a little time out of his dizzying schedule to answer some questions about his art and some others which lead in a more personal direction.
Michael: I have to admit from the start, I was a bit nervous to conduct this interview. So often these days in entertainment, artists follow their own path, without much attention to overarching themes or the history of art. I get the feeling when observing your various forms of art, that there is a serious depth, hidden meanings, allegories, which all need to be taken into account to fully appreciate your body of work. Do you have a formal education in the arts, or has this always been a natural passion for you?
Martin: I’m interested in the history of art, and yes, I’ve studied it at the university as well. Even though you don’t need the faculties I really believe this is something people need to know and understand, before they can call themselves “artist,” or using words such as “important,” “urgent,” “brave” or “original.” I also went to so-called art school for some years, which was, and is nothing but utter BULLSHIT that should be shunned like the plague. I’m sure that at least 95% of all this silly playground nonsense does more damage to the so-called artist to be and the art-world in whole.
Michael: Considering my previous question, do you find that fans often notice the underlying meanings?
Martin: Well, I’ve different kinds of fans. Some of my “music fans” are mainly interested in noise and the pitch of my voice. I mean if you haven’t bought the latest IRM and Skin Area CD’s, read the lyrics and looked at the artworks you have a very vague idea about the content. You can’t listen to an MP3 and experience it, that’s just impossible. Then of course you wouldn’t count as a FAN if you didn’t buy the actual record, right? Saying that, my work has a vagueness, and ambivalence to it, it points you into specific territories but it doesn’t have one specific meaning.
Michael: Are you equally happy to see fans enjoying your art, regardless of their understanding of the underlying meanings?
Martin: I don’t like laziness, which is a huge problem these days. There’s too much information out there and it’s too easy to get it; that instead of really analyse a subject people are just scratching the surface and move on to the next download. I mean, the day people will start to buy kindle art-books everything is fucked! But of course, it’s always nice to be appreciated, even if it’s only for having composed a curious tune, or a framed decorative piece of tapestry.
Michael: You have recently started a company, Infinite Land Press, with Karolina Urbaniak. Would you like to tell readers a little bit about the goals of the press and some of the recent publications?
Martin: Me and Karolina Urbaniakstarted Infinity Land Press back in 2013 as a means to publish our own material without having to deal with any middleman. I still lived in Sweden back then and Karolina was based in London. Our first book To Putrefaction (2013), a romantic ode to death and decay, was strictly limited to 50 copies. We then got the idea to publish books with other artists that we admired, such as Dennis Cooper, Michael Salerno and most recently Philip Best, and collaborations between ourselves and other artists – Karolina did Altared Balance with Jeremy Reed and The Void Ratio with Shane Levene, and in the beginning of 2017 me and Jeremy Reed’s book Darkleaks – The Ripper Genome will be released. We usually deal in strictly limited editions because that’s what we can afford and stock in our office (which is our living room), and we’ll continue to publish as long as we find material that’s interesting enough. Our credo: Infinity Land is a realm deeply steeped in pathological obsessions, extreme desires, and private aesthetic visions. Having disappeared over the horizon from the nurseries stocked with frivolous babblings of apologetic pleasures, Infinity Land is foundationally a geography configured by the compulsive, annihilating search for impossible beauty. In the words of Yukio Mishima, “True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”
Michael: As I’ve already alluded to, your artistic vision is truly multi-faceted. You have released everything from books, to DVDs, to albums. You have also done some stage shows which combine aspects of all these projects. Can we look at your entire body of work as part of a whole? Is there an over-arching vision which anchors all these ideas into one central theme?
Martin: I like the Wagnerian idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, where different artistic media bleed together into one synthesis. It might be a weakness, but I’ve never felt satisfied by expressing myself through a single media, and I’ve vivid memories of the suffocating frustration that I went through from the period 1998 – 2003, when sounds and lyrics was my only outlet. The multimedia expression has become an absolute necessity for me, if you read my books DESand The Hurtin’ Club you know what I mean. And yes, every new project I do has a specific content which I try to filter through these various medias.
Michael: Out of all your musical output over the years, I was the most intrigued by your work on Ruby with Sektor 304. The vocal style was totally different than I had experienced on IRM or Skin Area albums. I wonder if you could give us some insight into that album? How it came about as a collaboration between you and Sektor 304. Also, I wonder what your connection is to the character named Ruby, the main focus of the album.
Martin: I’m glad to hear you saying that as I believe it to be highly underrated. The Sektor 304 guys contacted me back in 2012, and wanted me to send them a guest recording for a live broadcast they were doing for the Portuguese radio. When I heard the result I was very pleased and asked them if they wanted to collaborate with me on an album. I remember making clear from the start that this would be something different from what I’ve been doing with IRM and Skin Area, and the guys were very sympathetic and excited about that. The whole narrative and background story of Ruby (the name’s got an alchemical inclination) came out of a clinical study from the late 50ties, about art therapy and schizophrenia which I’ve read. It was based on dialogs between a psychiatrist and patient, how the patient’s explained his painting for the psychiatrist and the interpretation process involved. I kind of re-wrote this material for my own purpose, which (obviously) took it into even darker territories, and that was the birth of the androgynous Ruby.
Michael: I had the pleasure of witnessing an IRM performance last year, on the APEX Fest Tour. The performance was magnificent. You had an extremely theatrical stage presence, which seemed almost choreographed, everything from your facial expressions to body positioning, and the handling of the two microphones. Do you put a lot of preparation into your live sets for all your projects or was this a natural presence which just seemed to be calculated?
Martin: Nothing I do on stage has been prepared or choreographed beforehand, but I’ve done these performances for quite some time now, so I might rely on my body memory. The only so called “preparation” I do is to drink, and let the alcohol sensation peak when I go on stage, I guess it’s somewhat similar to an Dionysian frenzy, and I really work myself up when I’m up there; so I’m not really aware of my body postures or facial expression until watching the reproduction of the show afterwards (which I do very seldom).
Michael: Continuing on the topic of the APEX Fest, I was delighted to read in the “Through My Eyes” article on Santa Sangre Magazine: “Any moment of 2015 you’ll remember on your death bed? The city of Baltimore. I never seen anything like it in the western world. A hellhole. Amazing.” Obviously, coming from Baltimore, I found this remark quite interesting. Baltimore, as with much of the United States and Europe, is currently undergoing a lot of social changes and realizations. I would be interested if you could take that previous statement into a bit more detail, and describe to the readers exactly what you found so different about Baltimore.
Martin: Ha, ha, well I guess that statement was a bit unfair, cause I only saw some of the roughest parts of the city, which actually reminded me of photographs of Berlin 1945, with whole building blocks caving in on themselves. I know there’s another side to the city as well, but I never seen anything like it neither in Western nor Eastern Europe. I remember asking the organiser for a pharmacy and she told me there was one just a couple of hundred meters away, but to get there I should take cab because otherwise it might be too dangerous.
Michael: In 2014, your most enduring musical project, IRM released Closure… through Malignant Records. You also released the track, “Triptych”, which is a sort of crash course of the whole trilogy which included: Indications of Nigredo, Order4, and Closure… Since finalizing this chapter of IRM, have you begun to work on something new, or is IRM currently on hold as you guys focus on other projects like Skin Area, Jarl, and Infinity Land Press?
Martin: IRM haven’t worked on any new material since finalising Closure… , and I’m not sure when we’ll start again. Everything is a bit more complicated since I moved to London and the other two guys are still in Sweden (living in different cities). Our records are recorded and put together very carefully, and the process of making the last two full length albums was very time consuming. Me and Magnus are actually in the process of putting together a new Skin Area record though, and we work on it every time I visit Sweden.
Michael: I recently reviewed the Pale Thorns debut album, Somberland. Pale Thorns is a solo-project by Magnus Lindh, the other half of Skin Area. When I spoke with Magnus, he mentioned that you had looked over his lyrical content on the album. We both agreed that your lyrics are totally unique and deliver extremely powerful imagery. I wonder if you can think back to when you first started writing lyrics. Were you a child when you first put the pen to paper, or did this come later in life as you started IRM with Erik?
Martin: As a kid I had a very vivid imagination, but I was more keen on drawing than writing. It was back in 1992 that I made my first attempts to write – coloured by the second wave of Black Metal – and from what I remember, they were hideously bad. It was later when I started to nurture a genuine interest in literature that something happened. Oedipus Dethroned (2000) would probably be the first serious example of some kind of craft.
Michael: Which writers or filmmakers have been the most influential on you throughout your life? Has this list changed much over the years as you have become an adult?
Martin: As a child I was obsessed with comic book- and James Bond villains, the only “books” I ever read were things like Flash Gordon. When I was a bit older I discovered H.P. Lovecraft and horror films. Then writers like Sade, Burroughs, Lautreamont and Mishima together with filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch and Pasolini turned everything topsy turvy. And then as an adult, “mature” man, I might settle for writer such as Antonin Artaud, Georg Trakl and Jean Genet, and as for film Ingmar Bergman, Fassbinder and Michael Haneke.
Michael: Sweden seems to be a place where so much unique talent enters the public realm, especially when it comes to the darker side of media. What do you think it is about Sweden which produces such dark and introspective artists?
Martin: That’s what an outsider sees when he scratches the surface, dig a little deeper and you’ll find that most of it is rather harmless and PC, filled with individuals who have a morality quite similar to your own mother’s. But yes, there are a lot of acts that originate from Sweden, and some of them are really good. A lot of it might have to do with luxury angst; to live in a safe and pampered society might give you a desire for controlled danger as spice to the boredom of everyday life. Then when it comes to medias such as literature, film or conceptual and visual art the country is a desert – total shite that is.
Michael: You have since relocated to London, is the U.K. a more fitting home-base for your operations?
Martin: I’m closer to Karolina, and it’s of course much easier to run Infinity Land Press from here. I have two-day jobs and I’ve never worked as much as I do now, but because of that I’m pricing the time I spend on my “real” work much higher.
Michael: Do you think the apocalypse is coming, if so how do you think it will happen?
Martin: Some kind of apocalypse is coming our way, but even the apocalypse isn’t the end…
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“THE HURTIN’ CLUB”
INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN BLADH
BY THOMAS MOORE - MAY 2016
THOMAS MOORE: “The Hurtin’ Club” feels like something that has come from a certain amount of research. Can you talk about where the book and your interest in the subject matter came from, if in fact there are two different starting points?
MARTIN BLADH: It all started with me researching the darker aspects of fairy tales. I was interested in the amount of violence and camouflaged sexual themes in the Grimm Brothers’ and Charles Perrault’s work; the amount of cannibalism, mutilation and incest within tales such as “Bluebeard”, “The Juniper Tree”, “The Three Army Surgeons”, “The Girl Without Hands”, “Hansel and Gretel” and “Hop-o’-My-Thumb”. I also went through modern children’s books with darker themes, some of them written to comfort kids who came from broken homes and dysfunctional families, and was amazed when I came across a book called “Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy” written for survivors of satanic ritual abuse. I remember stories circulating in the media during the early 90s, I was a black metal kid at that time. Fundamental Christian groups, militant feminists and opportunistic journalists claimed that hidden satanic networks were operating everywhere and paying tribute to the devil by raping, sacrificing and eating babies. It was a repetition of the “Malleus Maleficarum”, the renaissance witch hunts, giving rise to new myths of horror. Several child psychiatrists stepped forward and claimed that the ‘survivor’ children experiences within the satanic cults were so traumatic, that their egos split into different personalities, and the repressed memories could only be revisited through therapy. I read everything I could find on the subject and a couple of years ago I came up with the idea of making my own fairy tale based upon the material.
TM: I’m interested in your approach to the subject matter. Do you see yourself coming from a personal investigation into the effects of Satanic Child Abuse or more from a scientific approach to the various forms of therapy that are used to look into the field? Not that it has to be that kind of binary approach, but I am curious about your mindset when looking into this stuff.
MB: I wanted to mix a psychological, scientific method with the occult and phantastic. What I found most interesting was the actual stories, the case studies themselves, but I also needed the fairy tale context to make it work. My book is not a criticism of psychiatry or an attack on right wing Christians or moral panic. It doesn’t matter whether these stories are ‘true’ (which they are obviously not), they still make great reading. I collected and compared many case studies from around the Western World and the similarities between them were stunning. The ‘victims’ repeat the same stories again and again – how they’re being drugged before taking part in rituals, how they are forced to witness babies, children and grownups being sacrificially slaughtered, how they’re being forced to take part in these killings and to consume the flesh of the victims, how they’re submitted or being the perpetrators of sexual torture, how they’ve been watching or took part in summoning the devil, how they had demons or foreign objects magically operated into their bodies, how dead sacrificial victims are being resurrected and killed again, and how they witnessed or took part in the mass cremation of corpses. The list goes on and on… It’s just too good (or too horrible, you decide) to be true.
TM: Do you have any personal opinions regarding different forms of therapy that are used in relation to kids?
MB: What is certain is that several of the play therapists which helped to create the satanic panic, provided their subjects with a certain selection of toys to play with – often related to death, fear and disgust – like skeletons, creepy crawlies, monsters and slime, to suggest specific scenarios. Then of course we have the whole issue with anatomically correct dolls. I mean if you give a child a doll with anatomically correct genitals he will of course pay more attention to that curious detail. Leading questions and simpleminded Freudian symbolism runs through most of these sessions. Like the great man once said: “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Child’s play is often violent and even transgressive in nature. I have fond memories of mutilating action figures, setting them on fire to watch them melt, as well as blowing off their body parts with fire crackers.
TM: The book makes me think about memory, and how different memories are reconstructed, and how it is painfully impossible to really remember something. Part of someone remembering something is an attempt to piece together mental interpretations or versions of physical experiences. I’d be interested to hear how you think memory is represented in “The Hurtin’ Club” and any whether you approached the work with memory as a theme.
MB: After spending hours and hours being interrogated I’m sure that many kids believed these things actually happened to them. But there’s sometimes a confusion whether the ‘experience’ was traumatic or not. In these cases the children’s memories are often experienced as pictures from a scary book. I believe that innocent games like playing doctor, or dissecting dolls are taken too literally as evidence, and that the children get confused by how seriously the grownups react to their stories. The trauma seems to be a bigger issue for the adult victims who recollects their ‘repressed’ childhood memories because they have a better understanding of the stigma involved. Then of course we must remember that two of the most notorious cases of ritualistic satanic abuse – as represented in the books “Michelle Remembers” and “Satan’s Underground” – are based on deliberate lies. “The Hurtin’ Club” is constructed as a polyphony of memory recollections from a variety of child personas.
TM: How do you see the four distinct sections of the book operating in relationship to each other?
MB: I wanted each section to be exceedingly different from the other. I won’t give away too much, but each of them deals with a specific therapy method, which of course is obvious when you look at the visuals. These sections are components in a bigger sadomasochistic construction where several interests are at play.
TM: Looking back now at the finished piece, have you drawn any new conclusions from writing the book?
MB: Well, I understood that I really enjoy to work with fiction. It felt like a relief. I used to believe that I was cutting myself out of the work if I didn’t stick to my usual autobiographical wanderings. Instead, “The Hurtin’ Club” helped me to dig deeper into new territories and bring up images I hadn’t come across before.
Martin Bladh interviewed by Peter Sotos
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.
Interview: Bad Alchemy 2008
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
Martin Bladh is a multi-faceted artist. Over his years in the public eye, Martin has worked on numerous visual, musical, and performance art projects. He entered the public realm through his power-electronics project, IRM, with Erik Jarl, and later joined by Mikael Oretoft. He would soon join forces with Magnus Lindh creating the musical force know as Skin Area. Martin has also done musical projects with Sektor 304, entitled Ruby, and with Bo I. Cavefors, entitled The Island Of Death, as well as a number of his own personal musical projects. Delving into the medium of film, Martin has created a handful of videos, many of which can be seen on the DVD accompanying Epicurean Escapism I. He also played a large part in the production of the feature film, Gasper. In the visual art world, Martin has joined forces with Karolina Urbaniak, starting Infinity Land Press. Through Infinity Land Press he has already participated in the production of a number of books, including The Rorschach Text, To Putrefaction, and No Breath Of Sound – The History Of Drowning. With all these projects in the works along with more that I haven’t even mentioned, and others which haven’t yet found their way to the public eye, Martin Bladh is a very busy man. I am honored to have the multi-media artist take a little time out of his dizzying schedule to answer some questions about his art and some others which lead in a more personal direction.
Michael: I have to admit from the start, I was a bit nervous to conduct this interview. So often these days in entertainment, artists follow their own path, without much attention to overarching themes or the history of art. I get the feeling when observing your various forms of art, that there is a serious depth, hidden meanings, allegories, which all need to be taken into account to fully appreciate your body of work. Do you have a formal education in the arts, or has this always been a natural passion for you?
Martin: I’m interested in the history of art, and yes, I’ve studied it at the university as well. Even though you don’t need the faculties I really believe this is something people need to know and understand, before they can call themselves “artist,” or using words such as “important,” “urgent,” “brave” or “original.” I also went to so-called art school for some years, which was, and is nothing but utter BULLSHIT that should be shunned like the plague. I’m sure that at least 95% of all this silly playground nonsense does more damage to the so-called artist to be and the art-world in whole.
Michael: Considering my previous question, do you find that fans often notice the underlying meanings?
Martin: Well, I’ve different kinds of fans. Some of my “music fans” are mainly interested in noise and the pitch of my voice. I mean if you haven’t bought the latest IRM and Skin Area CD’s, read the lyrics and looked at the artworks you have a very vague idea about the content. You can’t listen to an MP3 and experience it, that’s just impossible. Then of course you wouldn’t count as a FAN if you didn’t buy the actual record, right? Saying that, my work has a vagueness, and ambivalence to it, it points you into specific territories but it doesn’t have one specific meaning.
Michael: Are you equally happy to see fans enjoying your art, regardless of their understanding of the underlying meanings?
Martin: I don’t like laziness, which is a huge problem these days. There’s too much information out there and it’s too easy to get it; that instead of really analyse a subject people are just scratching the surface and move on to the next download. I mean, the day people will start to buy kindle art-books everything is fucked! But of course, it’s always nice to be appreciated, even if it’s only for having composed a curious tune, or a framed decorative piece of tapestry.
Michael: You have recently started a company, Infinite Land Press, with Karolina Urbaniak. Would you like to tell readers a little bit about the goals of the press and some of the recent publications?
Martin: Me and Karolina Urbaniakstarted Infinity Land Press back in 2013 as a means to publish our own material without having to deal with any middleman. I still lived in Sweden back then and Karolina was based in London. Our first book To Putrefaction (2013), a romantic ode to death and decay, was strictly limited to 50 copies. We then got the idea to publish books with other artists that we admired, such as Dennis Cooper, Michael Salerno and most recently Philip Best, and collaborations between ourselves and other artists – Karolina did Altared Balance with Jeremy Reed and The Void Ratio with Shane Levene, and in the beginning of 2017 me and Jeremy Reed’s book Darkleaks – The Ripper Genome will be released. We usually deal in strictly limited editions because that’s what we can afford and stock in our office (which is our living room), and we’ll continue to publish as long as we find material that’s interesting enough. Our credo: Infinity Land is a realm deeply steeped in pathological obsessions, extreme desires, and private aesthetic visions. Having disappeared over the horizon from the nurseries stocked with frivolous babblings of apologetic pleasures, Infinity Land is foundationally a geography configured by the compulsive, annihilating search for impossible beauty. In the words of Yukio Mishima, “True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”
Michael: As I’ve already alluded to, your artistic vision is truly multi-faceted. You have released everything from books, to DVDs, to albums. You have also done some stage shows which combine aspects of all these projects. Can we look at your entire body of work as part of a whole? Is there an over-arching vision which anchors all these ideas into one central theme?
Martin: I like the Wagnerian idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, where different artistic media bleed together into one synthesis. It might be a weakness, but I’ve never felt satisfied by expressing myself through a single media, and I’ve vivid memories of the suffocating frustration that I went through from the period 1998 – 2003, when sounds and lyrics was my only outlet. The multimedia expression has become an absolute necessity for me, if you read my books DESand The Hurtin’ Club you know what I mean. And yes, every new project I do has a specific content which I try to filter through these various medias.
Michael: Out of all your musical output over the years, I was the most intrigued by your work on Ruby with Sektor 304. The vocal style was totally different than I had experienced on IRM or Skin Area albums. I wonder if you could give us some insight into that album? How it came about as a collaboration between you and Sektor 304. Also, I wonder what your connection is to the character named Ruby, the main focus of the album.
Martin: I’m glad to hear you saying that as I believe it to be highly underrated. The Sektor 304 guys contacted me back in 2012, and wanted me to send them a guest recording for a live broadcast they were doing for the Portuguese radio. When I heard the result I was very pleased and asked them if they wanted to collaborate with me on an album. I remember making clear from the start that this would be something different from what I’ve been doing with IRM and Skin Area, and the guys were very sympathetic and excited about that. The whole narrative and background story of Ruby (the name’s got an alchemical inclination) came out of a clinical study from the late 50ties, about art therapy and schizophrenia which I’ve read. It was based on dialogs between a psychiatrist and patient, how the patient’s explained his painting for the psychiatrist and the interpretation process involved. I kind of re-wrote this material for my own purpose, which (obviously) took it into even darker territories, and that was the birth of the androgynous Ruby.
Michael: I had the pleasure of witnessing an IRM performance last year, on the APEX Fest Tour. The performance was magnificent. You had an extremely theatrical stage presence, which seemed almost choreographed, everything from your facial expressions to body positioning, and the handling of the two microphones. Do you put a lot of preparation into your live sets for all your projects or was this a natural presence which just seemed to be calculated?
Martin: Nothing I do on stage has been prepared or choreographed beforehand, but I’ve done these performances for quite some time now, so I might rely on my body memory. The only so called “preparation” I do is to drink, and let the alcohol sensation peak when I go on stage, I guess it’s somewhat similar to an Dionysian frenzy, and I really work myself up when I’m up there; so I’m not really aware of my body postures or facial expression until watching the reproduction of the show afterwards (which I do very seldom).
Michael: Continuing on the topic of the APEX Fest, I was delighted to read in the “Through My Eyes” article on Santa Sangre Magazine: “Any moment of 2015 you’ll remember on your death bed? The city of Baltimore. I never seen anything like it in the western world. A hellhole. Amazing.” Obviously, coming from Baltimore, I found this remark quite interesting. Baltimore, as with much of the United States and Europe, is currently undergoing a lot of social changes and realizations. I would be interested if you could take that previous statement into a bit more detail, and describe to the readers exactly what you found so different about Baltimore.
Martin: Ha, ha, well I guess that statement was a bit unfair, cause I only saw some of the roughest parts of the city, which actually reminded me of photographs of Berlin 1945, with whole building blocks caving in on themselves. I know there’s another side to the city as well, but I never seen anything like it neither in Western nor Eastern Europe. I remember asking the organiser for a pharmacy and she told me there was one just a couple of hundred meters away, but to get there I should take cab because otherwise it might be too dangerous.
Michael: In 2014, your most enduring musical project, IRM released Closure… through Malignant Records. You also released the track, “Triptych”, which is a sort of crash course of the whole trilogy which included: Indications of Nigredo, Order4, and Closure… Since finalizing this chapter of IRM, have you begun to work on something new, or is IRM currently on hold as you guys focus on other projects like Skin Area, Jarl, and Infinity Land Press?
Martin: IRM haven’t worked on any new material since finalising Closure… , and I’m not sure when we’ll start again. Everything is a bit more complicated since I moved to London and the other two guys are still in Sweden (living in different cities). Our records are recorded and put together very carefully, and the process of making the last two full length albums was very time consuming. Me and Magnus are actually in the process of putting together a new Skin Area record though, and we work on it every time I visit Sweden.
Michael: I recently reviewed the Pale Thorns debut album, Somberland. Pale Thorns is a solo-project by Magnus Lindh, the other half of Skin Area. When I spoke with Magnus, he mentioned that you had looked over his lyrical content on the album. We both agreed that your lyrics are totally unique and deliver extremely powerful imagery. I wonder if you can think back to when you first started writing lyrics. Were you a child when you first put the pen to paper, or did this come later in life as you started IRM with Erik?
Martin: As a kid I had a very vivid imagination, but I was more keen on drawing than writing. It was back in 1992 that I made my first attempts to write – coloured by the second wave of Black Metal – and from what I remember, they were hideously bad. It was later when I started to nurture a genuine interest in literature that something happened. Oedipus Dethroned (2000) would probably be the first serious example of some kind of craft.
Michael: Which writers or filmmakers have been the most influential on you throughout your life? Has this list changed much over the years as you have become an adult?
Martin: As a child I was obsessed with comic book- and James Bond villains, the only “books” I ever read were things like Flash Gordon. When I was a bit older I discovered H.P. Lovecraft and horror films. Then writers like Sade, Burroughs, Lautreamont and Mishima together with filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch and Pasolini turned everything topsy turvy. And then as an adult, “mature” man, I might settle for writer such as Antonin Artaud, Georg Trakl and Jean Genet, and as for film Ingmar Bergman, Fassbinder and Michael Haneke.
Michael: Sweden seems to be a place where so much unique talent enters the public realm, especially when it comes to the darker side of media. What do you think it is about Sweden which produces such dark and introspective artists?
Martin: That’s what an outsider sees when he scratches the surface, dig a little deeper and you’ll find that most of it is rather harmless and PC, filled with individuals who have a morality quite similar to your own mother’s. But yes, there are a lot of acts that originate from Sweden, and some of them are really good. A lot of it might have to do with luxury angst; to live in a safe and pampered society might give you a desire for controlled danger as spice to the boredom of everyday life. Then when it comes to medias such as literature, film or conceptual and visual art the country is a desert – total shite that is.
Michael: You have since relocated to London, is the U.K. a more fitting home-base for your operations?
Martin: I’m closer to Karolina, and it’s of course much easier to run Infinity Land Press from here. I have two-day jobs and I’ve never worked as much as I do now, but because of that I’m pricing the time I spend on my “real” work much higher.
Michael: Do you think the apocalypse is coming, if so how do you think it will happen?
Martin: Some kind of apocalypse is coming our way, but even the apocalypse isn’t the end…
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“THE HURTIN’ CLUB”
INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN BLADH
BY THOMAS MOORE - MAY 2016
THOMAS MOORE: “The Hurtin’ Club” feels like something that has come from a certain amount of research. Can you talk about where the book and your interest in the subject matter came from, if in fact there are two different starting points?
MARTIN BLADH: It all started with me researching the darker aspects of fairy tales. I was interested in the amount of violence and camouflaged sexual themes in the Grimm Brothers’ and Charles Perrault’s work; the amount of cannibalism, mutilation and incest within tales such as “Bluebeard”, “The Juniper Tree”, “The Three Army Surgeons”, “The Girl Without Hands”, “Hansel and Gretel” and “Hop-o’-My-Thumb”. I also went through modern children’s books with darker themes, some of them written to comfort kids who came from broken homes and dysfunctional families, and was amazed when I came across a book called “Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy” written for survivors of satanic ritual abuse. I remember stories circulating in the media during the early 90s, I was a black metal kid at that time. Fundamental Christian groups, militant feminists and opportunistic journalists claimed that hidden satanic networks were operating everywhere and paying tribute to the devil by raping, sacrificing and eating babies. It was a repetition of the “Malleus Maleficarum”, the renaissance witch hunts, giving rise to new myths of horror. Several child psychiatrists stepped forward and claimed that the ‘survivor’ children experiences within the satanic cults were so traumatic, that their egos split into different personalities, and the repressed memories could only be revisited through therapy. I read everything I could find on the subject and a couple of years ago I came up with the idea of making my own fairy tale based upon the material.
TM: I’m interested in your approach to the subject matter. Do you see yourself coming from a personal investigation into the effects of Satanic Child Abuse or more from a scientific approach to the various forms of therapy that are used to look into the field? Not that it has to be that kind of binary approach, but I am curious about your mindset when looking into this stuff.
MB: I wanted to mix a psychological, scientific method with the occult and phantastic. What I found most interesting was the actual stories, the case studies themselves, but I also needed the fairy tale context to make it work. My book is not a criticism of psychiatry or an attack on right wing Christians or moral panic. It doesn’t matter whether these stories are ‘true’ (which they are obviously not), they still make great reading. I collected and compared many case studies from around the Western World and the similarities between them were stunning. The ‘victims’ repeat the same stories again and again – how they’re being drugged before taking part in rituals, how they are forced to witness babies, children and grownups being sacrificially slaughtered, how they’re being forced to take part in these killings and to consume the flesh of the victims, how they’re submitted or being the perpetrators of sexual torture, how they’ve been watching or took part in summoning the devil, how they had demons or foreign objects magically operated into their bodies, how dead sacrificial victims are being resurrected and killed again, and how they witnessed or took part in the mass cremation of corpses. The list goes on and on… It’s just too good (or too horrible, you decide) to be true.
TM: Do you have any personal opinions regarding different forms of therapy that are used in relation to kids?
MB: What is certain is that several of the play therapists which helped to create the satanic panic, provided their subjects with a certain selection of toys to play with – often related to death, fear and disgust – like skeletons, creepy crawlies, monsters and slime, to suggest specific scenarios. Then of course we have the whole issue with anatomically correct dolls. I mean if you give a child a doll with anatomically correct genitals he will of course pay more attention to that curious detail. Leading questions and simpleminded Freudian symbolism runs through most of these sessions. Like the great man once said: “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Child’s play is often violent and even transgressive in nature. I have fond memories of mutilating action figures, setting them on fire to watch them melt, as well as blowing off their body parts with fire crackers.
TM: The book makes me think about memory, and how different memories are reconstructed, and how it is painfully impossible to really remember something. Part of someone remembering something is an attempt to piece together mental interpretations or versions of physical experiences. I’d be interested to hear how you think memory is represented in “The Hurtin’ Club” and any whether you approached the work with memory as a theme.
MB: After spending hours and hours being interrogated I’m sure that many kids believed these things actually happened to them. But there’s sometimes a confusion whether the ‘experience’ was traumatic or not. In these cases the children’s memories are often experienced as pictures from a scary book. I believe that innocent games like playing doctor, or dissecting dolls are taken too literally as evidence, and that the children get confused by how seriously the grownups react to their stories. The trauma seems to be a bigger issue for the adult victims who recollects their ‘repressed’ childhood memories because they have a better understanding of the stigma involved. Then of course we must remember that two of the most notorious cases of ritualistic satanic abuse – as represented in the books “Michelle Remembers” and “Satan’s Underground” – are based on deliberate lies. “The Hurtin’ Club” is constructed as a polyphony of memory recollections from a variety of child personas.
TM: How do you see the four distinct sections of the book operating in relationship to each other?
MB: I wanted each section to be exceedingly different from the other. I won’t give away too much, but each of them deals with a specific therapy method, which of course is obvious when you look at the visuals. These sections are components in a bigger sadomasochistic construction where several interests are at play.
TM: Looking back now at the finished piece, have you drawn any new conclusions from writing the book?
MB: Well, I understood that I really enjoy to work with fiction. It felt like a relief. I used to believe that I was cutting myself out of the work if I didn’t stick to my usual autobiographical wanderings. Instead, “The Hurtin’ Club” helped me to dig deeper into new territories and bring up images I hadn’t come across before.
Martin Bladh interviewed by Peter Sotos
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.
Interview: Bad Alchemy 2008
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