Desecrated Medieval Norwegian Architecture On Display At New York Museum [Life in Black - 05.06.08 13:38:01]
New York Press (www.nypress.com) has issued the following report from Elisabeth Kley:
Like a room-size Parthenon floating on a midnight pond, Banks Violette's untitled salt replica of a ruined church skeleton is poised atop a shiny black epoxy stage that almost fills the Whitney Museum's small lobby gallery.
In a way, it's a sculpture of a sin, or many sins, acts of desecration performed by black-metal musicians and their followers in Norway. This destructive series of events began on June 6, 1992, with the torching of a 12th-century wooden church, an irreplaceable artifact of medieval architecture.
By September of the same year, Varg Vikernes (aka Count Grisnackh), the only member of a black-metal band called BURZUM, had participated in two more church burnings. Since then, over 100 places of worship have been burned in Norway, a country whose state religion is Protestantism.
Grisnackh's personal crime spree turned deadly on August 10, 1993, when he stabbed his colleague Oystein Aarseth (aka Euronymous), the guitarist for the band MAYHEM, 23 times: twice in the head, five times in the neck, and 16 more in the back.
Unrepentant, he is now in jail answering fan mail, espousing his personal brand of heathen neo-Nazism.
Snorre Ruch, the leader of BLACKTHORN, another Black Metal band, drove with Count Grisnackh for six hours from Bergen to Euronymous' Oslo apartment, waited on the stairs while Euronymous was murdered, and watched Count Grisnackh wash Euronymous' blood from his hair, hands and face. Now released from jail, he and two musical collaborators, Jon Wesseltoft and Finn Olav Holthe, have provided Violette with a 98-minute synthesized score to accompany the sculpture. A quasi-science-fictional hum is emitted from several speakers, evoking muffled church bells, wind fanning flames, the buzz of a chain saw and the hissing of a grenade's fuse.
Fitting perfectly into its rectangular black-walled gallery, Violette's sculpture is a modern indoor folly, a faux ruin just a few steps away from the Whitney entrance, coat check, bookstore and elevators. It began with one wooden beam, chipped and burned with a blowtorch. A polyurethane mold was made from the beam and then a series of replicas, cast with over 200 pounds of table salt, was assembled into the framework of a church. The result is a vulnerable piece of architecture with the tactile material presence of a sturdy minimal sculpture by Donald Judd. Salty beams sparkle under harsh spotlights, their crystalline whiteness disturbed here and there by soot. They rest on a black epoxy foundation divided into 24 squares, outlined by light reflected in the grooves between them. The punctum of the piece is the grating contrast that appears where the bottoms of the salt-cast beams meet their gloomy reflections, uneasily resting on their frighteningly slippery base.
With just enough space for the actual skeleton to be seen from every side, the gallery is rather claustrophobic. But reflected in the gloom of its polished stage, the building seems to go on forever, recalling Yukio Mishima's Golden Pavilion, floating on a pond, destined to be torched by a disaffected monk. Violette's small pavilion rests on a surface hard as a mirror, rather than water. Undisturbed and perfect, it begs to be touched, stepped on, even marred.
In previous work, Violette has mined similar narratives of seepage between musical violence and real-life tragedyspecifically a series of teenage heavy-metal-fan suicides in Bergen, New Jersey, and the 1995 murder of a 15-year-old girl by three male classmates in the California woods. The boys, members of a band called HATRED and fanatic followers of another band called SLAYER, visited the body periodically for eight months, until one of them finally confessed. Violette's allegorical sculptures of these events features more forbidding black epoxy stages and backdrops that no one will ever use. Their networks of fang-like solid black drum shapes connected by shining steel stands and hardware speak silently of heavy metal's toxic influence. The compound reflections produced by their mirrored surfaces seem to pull our images into collaboration with unseen musicians, acting out our ambivalent attraction to gothic horror and fascination with the lurid details of "true crime."
Under spotlights and on stage, the Whitney's skeletal church becomes a stand-in for the performers who instigated and performed the burningsViolette's first active protagonist, perhaps. Echoing the banality of Robert Smithson's simple vitrines of materials brought into galleries from spectacular outdoor landscapes, Violette's sculpture may seem surprisingly tame at first, in spite of its theatrical presentation. A certain disappointment ensues, akin to the experience of reaching a long-sought monument surrounded by buses, souvenir shops and cranky tourists. Upon reflection, however, the 14 mesmerizing pillars of salt stand like Lot's women, punished for unnatural sinsrelics of sweat and tears.
The exhibit is on display through October 2nd at the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Gallery in the Whitney Museum of American Art, located at 945 Madison Ave. (E. 75th St.). Call 212-570-3676 for times. Admission is $12.
New York Press (www.nypress.com) has issued the following report from Elisabeth Kley:
Like a room-size Parthenon floating on a midnight pond, Banks Violette's untitled salt replica of a ruined church skeleton is poised atop a shiny black epoxy stage that almost fills the Whitney Museum's small lobby gallery.
In a way, it's a sculpture of a sin, or many sins, acts of desecration performed by black-metal musicians and their followers in Norway. This destructive series of events began on June 6, 1992, with the torching of a 12th-century wooden church, an irreplaceable artifact of medieval architecture.
By September of the same year, Varg Vikernes (aka Count Grisnackh), the only member of a black-metal band called BURZUM, had participated in two more church burnings. Since then, over 100 places of worship have been burned in Norway, a country whose state religion is Protestantism.
Grisnackh's personal crime spree turned deadly on August 10, 1993, when he stabbed his colleague Oystein Aarseth (aka Euronymous), the guitarist for the band MAYHEM, 23 times: twice in the head, five times in the neck, and 16 more in the back.
Unrepentant, he is now in jail answering fan mail, espousing his personal brand of heathen neo-Nazism.
Snorre Ruch, the leader of BLACKTHORN, another Black Metal band, drove with Count Grisnackh for six hours from Bergen to Euronymous' Oslo apartment, waited on the stairs while Euronymous was murdered, and watched Count Grisnackh wash Euronymous' blood from his hair, hands and face. Now released from jail, he and two musical collaborators, Jon Wesseltoft and Finn Olav Holthe, have provided Violette with a 98-minute synthesized score to accompany the sculpture. A quasi-science-fictional hum is emitted from several speakers, evoking muffled church bells, wind fanning flames, the buzz of a chain saw and the hissing of a grenade's fuse.
Fitting perfectly into its rectangular black-walled gallery, Violette's sculpture is a modern indoor folly, a faux ruin just a few steps away from the Whitney entrance, coat check, bookstore and elevators. It began with one wooden beam, chipped and burned with a blowtorch. A polyurethane mold was made from the beam and then a series of replicas, cast with over 200 pounds of table salt, was assembled into the framework of a church. The result is a vulnerable piece of architecture with the tactile material presence of a sturdy minimal sculpture by Donald Judd. Salty beams sparkle under harsh spotlights, their crystalline whiteness disturbed here and there by soot. They rest on a black epoxy foundation divided into 24 squares, outlined by light reflected in the grooves between them. The punctum of the piece is the grating contrast that appears where the bottoms of the salt-cast beams meet their gloomy reflections, uneasily resting on their frighteningly slippery base.
With just enough space for the actual skeleton to be seen from every side, the gallery is rather claustrophobic. But reflected in the gloom of its polished stage, the building seems to go on forever, recalling Yukio Mishima's Golden Pavilion, floating on a pond, destined to be torched by a disaffected monk. Violette's small pavilion rests on a surface hard as a mirror, rather than water. Undisturbed and perfect, it begs to be touched, stepped on, even marred.
In previous work, Violette has mined similar narratives of seepage between musical violence and real-life tragedyspecifically a series of teenage heavy-metal-fan suicides in Bergen, New Jersey, and the 1995 murder of a 15-year-old girl by three male classmates in the California woods. The boys, members of a band called HATRED and fanatic followers of another band called SLAYER, visited the body periodically for eight months, until one of them finally confessed. Violette's allegorical sculptures of these events features more forbidding black epoxy stages and backdrops that no one will ever use. Their networks of fang-like solid black drum shapes connected by shining steel stands and hardware speak silently of heavy metal's toxic influence. The compound reflections produced by their mirrored surfaces seem to pull our images into collaboration with unseen musicians, acting out our ambivalent attraction to gothic horror and fascination with the lurid details of "true crime."
Under spotlights and on stage, the Whitney's skeletal church becomes a stand-in for the performers who instigated and performed the burningsViolette's first active protagonist, perhaps. Echoing the banality of Robert Smithson's simple vitrines of materials brought into galleries from spectacular outdoor landscapes, Violette's sculpture may seem surprisingly tame at first, in spite of its theatrical presentation. A certain disappointment ensues, akin to the experience of reaching a long-sought monument surrounded by buses, souvenir shops and cranky tourists. Upon reflection, however, the 14 mesmerizing pillars of salt stand like Lot's women, punished for unnatural sinsrelics of sweat and tears.
The exhibit is on display through October 2nd at the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Gallery in the Whitney Museum of American Art, located at 945 Madison Ave. (E. 75th St.). Call 212-570-3676 for times. Admission is $12.
