DAYWALKER, LET GO
(for pictures from the show, scroll down and click on "ældre indlæg")
I felt nothing less than a twinge of bad conscience when I got off my Raleigh in front of Ibi Grill in Spodsbjerg, a sort of hot-dog cart which besides the sausages and the beers took care of renting out motor boats for Germans in particular, going out fishing on Storebælt. And scooters. I crawled over the counter, which wasn’t so easy, it being almost at the height of my head, and buried my teeth in the loose flesh on the neck of the hot-dog man in command, biting hard. I gorged in the blood, glancing apologetic at the small group of holiday guests who was watching. I knew it wouldn’t be of any use to dwell too long on the situation, wondering about the injustice of it. So when I had finished eating, I washed in the scolding hot sausage water and mounted my bike to drive away.
I’m old enough not to spend all my time brooding over imaginary offences. But I’m not humble enough to bear with real offences and self-humiliations. The problem is that I don’t know exactly how to categorize the twinge of bad conscience, I felt just before eating the hot-dog man. And which I feel every time I’m going to eat, even when I’m really drunk and supposed to be beyond civilization, past the cerebellum, the backbone, the kidneys, the hair follicles and the tips of my fingernails. Sensing this twinge of bad conscience makes me feel a not insignificant level of contempt for myself.
This time the result was that I, in stead of driving into the camping ground where we were staying, continued down the road to Rudkøbing and stopped at the first newly renovated cottage with hollyhocks, thatched roof and timber frame, to kill a whole family without eating anything because I had the feeling that it provided a sort of aesthetic balance, held up against the killing of the hot-dog man.
The stupid thing about it was evidently that I had to wheel my bike in stead of cycling back to the camping ground, since the little twinge of the heart from before had exchanged itself into a distinct contempt for myself, along with an impulse to become really nasty.
Luckily the rest of the day took a quite different turn when I succeeded in completing a whole game of midget golf without getting angry – which had never happened before. I felt sufficiently self-assured to see the remaining events of the day in a somewhat more positive light, without being downright hypocritical. Probably it’s just a balance that you need to maintain as you get along. And even though it sometimes may seem pretty hopeless for me to realize what needs to be done, things usually end up being resolved. And that’s kind of nice.
As a pattern of life though, it’s not a durable situation constantly having to negotiate the whole of my living conditions, and not just worry about details like most people do. For instance, to me it’s a necessity to tear people’s carotid artery apart in a very aggressive manner and drink their blood. I was raised to recognize the concept of ‘other people’, like myself. To accept their integrity and rights. And I think it comes naturally to me but on the other hand it comes naturally to me, too, to snatch an infant from a baby carriage and eat large portions of it in front of the parents. This is where the question of bad conscience, and in the end aesthetics, gets into the picture. I balance my meals against each other in an aesthetic way. That’s the only solution I can think of. The problem isn’t like eating burgers and French fries for a couple of days, and then solving it by grinding low fat dhal for another couple of days. In this context everything is junk food, everything gives me a bad conscience. In return though, it makes sense to balance a boozer against a younger woman, riding a classical lady’s cycle with plastic flowers attached to her wicker handlebar basket. Or an employee from the call centre of a phone company.
For a long time it had topped my list to find a group of well-balanced victims. Preferably a large well-defined group with a reasonable level of geographic distribution, so it wouldn’t be too easy to hunt me down. But I don’t really think it’s a genuine problem. It appears to be the case that vampires from the creative potential are something which in general is being welcomed. Maybe because we’re so ... how to put it? So aesthetically solid?
Recently I met a colleague at The Town’s Inn late in the evening. He was not in a good mood, to put it nicely, because I’d been telling stories about him to my second son. I had used him as a definite bad example of how you shouldn’t do, how you don’t balance the aesthetic foundation of the various choices you make. That evening was as good an occasion as any to prove his lack of judgement: bad cocaine, the face smeared with blood, an extra hand jutting up from the left breast pocket of his cheap blazer, and a pair of panties, jauntily aslant. And him snuffling his complaints. He downright demanded of me to deny having said what I had said to my son. I did that readily while contemplating whether to kill him or not. After all it was our wedding anniversary and Sonja was there too. When she went to the toilet I tore out his throat and hurried to the toilet and washed. I managed to make Sonja leave the bar with me under the pretence that I couldn’t stand listening to him any longer. Even though I don’t think she quite believed me, she let it be and said nothing. I don’t know why, but for once a lot of trouble came up. Maybe because it wasn’t a completely peripheral colleague I had killed. Anyhow, we hadn’t made it longer than a few steps down the street on our way to Bobi Bar before a surge of drunk aggressive painters poured itself out the door of The Town’s Inn. They all seized the opportunity, being out in open air, to light their cigarettes, and a reefer as well, while they took up the chase with a cough. Sonja glanced disapprovingly at me, instantly knowing what was going on, and posed herself in the same combat position as I held. I don’t know what they had imagined but of course they didn’t stand a chance. That night a clear-out among the younger artists of Gallery Egelund took place, and a group of other third-league galleries likewise lost their wasted golden eggs.
It has never bothered me to open my mouth and let out a lot of half-digested bullshit. I’m a poseur if I’m anything at all. An annoying fool who’s not the least bit ashamed of being it. Hopefully it’s just a tiny wee bit charming since I can’t help it anyway. Authenticity has always appeared phoney to me. I’m able to respect it as an equal manifestation of life but I don’t believe in it. So when the ghost of Otto Olsen staggered out of The Town’s Inn and said “Fein, fein” in a rather snuffling voice, I smiled benevolently but false, as usual in that kind of situations. Truth is, I wasn’t prepared for this, but as I was smiling to the drivelling ghost who tried to mumble something, a few things became clear to me. The heap of human garbage that lay scattered on the ground before us, had of course been possessed by an alcoholic third-rate ghost, one who had characterized himself as a mediocre painter and a coward while he still was alive. Actually the dance leader from Restaurant Phoenix roused a certain goodwill in me. Damn, it hit a soft spot, like always when I hear the genuine language of Copenhagen spoken. As said before I don’t really believe in stories about authenticity. It’s a load of serious crap. But when some old blighter on an accordingly old wreck of a bicycle shouts at another equally rotten, sour boozer, expressing his wish that the other will fall off his bike and die, while they both laugh cheerfully to each other, then I really don’t care if it’s role playing or not. It’s bloody well put together (isn’t it this sort of crap a painter is supposed to say?). I looked at the spiritual remains of Otto Olsen, wondering about the possibilities of getting him a job in return, since I’d just wiped out the conditions of his existence. My line of thoughts was interrupted when Sonja brought to my attention that we were going to meet Nis, and that sort of settled what I was going to suggest to Otto. Not that Otto was capable of anything else but saying “Fein, fein”, but I didn’t feel obliged to have discussions with a ghost. That’s a principle of mine.
Nis was at Bobi Bar together with most of Publik, a group of artists who’s into contemporary art in public spaces. Otto had cheered up and was now looking a bit confused about the company. This wasn’t exactly the kind of people he was used to deal with. But hey! He was a curious guy ...
I don’t know if it’s justifiable at all to generalize about the situation that artists find themselves in, but I think I’m not completely wrong if I assume that it’s mixed in with a certain level of opportunistic thinking. Of course Publik could be possessed by Otto Olsen’s ghost. Without any problem this alcoholic, swaggering monster of a mediocre painter is able to possess the direct opposite to Gallery Egelund: The social non-object producing conscience of the well read middle-class. As Knud Pedersen describes the matter in his memoirs, Otto wasn’t unintelligent, not without social cunning, not without a certain opportunism. Then you may ask yourself: What happens next? Will the rest of us discover this possession? Will Publik sit at The Town’s Inn together with Elmer, shouting PUSSY LSD, PUSSY LSD, or is Otto smarter than that?
When I was in the 5th grade I was selected to participate in a skiing trip with my school. We were a handful of pupils coming along, leaving with the ferry to Oslo. It was a hectic night without any sleep. We were simply overwrought and darted around the ship like a gang of lunatics. I didn’t sleep in the bus either. When we arrived at the hotel I was pretty exhausted, and I went to lie down in the five-person room with a nice vampire comic book, dozing off at some point. The next thing I remember is sitting at a table in the dining hall, eating blood from a soup plate. Which is a quite natural situation to me, being a vampire. But I woke up to discover that I have consumed a whole portion of tomato soup. Until then I had always refused to eat soup, and I’m fairly sure that I never had tasted soup before. But it changed. Since then I have eaten soup with great pleasure, and my attitude towards vampires has remained unchanged positive. To me they’ve always seemed to be a little more on top of things than many. Even when they’re being impaled through the heart and transform to dust with a sharp snarl. Usually it adds up to some hundred years of fun for the bugger, and in my eyes that makes up for a lot.
Which leads me on to Lestat from “Interview with the Vampire” by Anne Rice. The reason why I borrowed the book in the first place was a recommendation on the cover by Sting, stating that this was the most erotic novel he’d ever read or something like that. Given that I detest Sting and his raunchy, ecological charm, I simply had to bring the book back home with me. Terrible book. It has nothing to do with a proper vampire novel. Some old vampire running about, getting aroused by a girl vampire who hasn’t even grown hair on it yet. But the old pig can’t produce a boner, because apparently vampires can’t do that in this book. Very convenient, Anne Rice. I don’t know how Sting, the pregnant man, likes to be linked to an impotent vampire, but to me the picture seemed reasonable. And in that way I had a great time with the book.
After three or four beers Otto Olsen had scanned the ways of Publik and was preparing to possess Nis. I think he sensed the distant connection between the swaggering third-rate painters and the good conscience. At a point we went out pissing together, and he confided to me that he very well could see himself as a common evil spirit of all artists. He’d been drinking too heavy and was getting a bit dissipated. As mentioned he was going to force himself into Nis through the prolongation of the spinal cord, when Sting came in the door and sat down at our table. It kind of put an end to Otto Olsen who never before had seen anybody like that. Damn, he got angry when he realized that Sting was somebody. He began with, sort of accidental, turning over a beer that poured itself out into Sting’s lap. Sting was either being stupid or wildly arrogant. He only smiled. Or maybe it was an act of light triumph, because he happened to wear smart leather pants, that just needed to be wiped with a cloth. When Otto saw Sting’s leather pants I think he almost puked.
Nis and Katarina were engaged in a discussion about something modern so they hadn’t noticed the bad atmosphere, to put it mildly, that was spreading at our end of the table. And they hadn’t at all noticed that a dirty war about their souls were being fought. But when Otto got up and began to shout a curse in the age-old vampire language and a violent smell of sulphur was spreading itself, Nis made a reserved face towards us, meaning something like “Wassup?”. Sting tried to ease the tension by ignoring Otto and asking Nis what kind of paintings he did. Of course Nis was aggravated, answering that he definitely wasn’t a painter, that he did social interventions and what the hell did Sting think he was doing, sitting there dissing people, and that it would be a pretty good idea to apologize to Otto since he obviously had become upset because of something stupid Sting had done. While he was talking Sting transformed in front of us. Now he was Bono in company with an Indian, showing a war painted face. And now he changed back again, back and forth, again and again, until this whole StingBonoStingBono-thing flickered before our eyes. The Indian had to stand up, there weren’t chairs enough, but Katarina tried to solve it by offering him one half of her chair. The ceiling gave in, and already before the last debris had hit the ground and the roars of pain and fear began, the place swarmed with tiny Bob Geldorfs, attacking Otto ...
Through the years I’ve been doing a series of paintings, and written a series of texts, somehow dealing with vampires. The starting point is of course a kind of strong interest in the matter. But actually that’s how I feel about a lot of things. For instance my attention is often captured by largely everything that’s on print in Science Illustrated. But if I am to examine my own preoccupation with vampires, I think that it’s the fundamental unfruitfulness of the figure and its potential that fascinates me. I mean, they’re potentially immortal but always very dissatisfied about their situation, always ending up being killed anyway. A lot of greatness and a banging fall. An endless mass of displaced energy invested in totally hopeless projects. It’s hard not to sympathize with a figure like that. A middle-aged, divorced, morose Swedish cop can’t compete with that. I simply can’t identify myself with him, only pity him (get yourself together, man!!). (Yes, I guess it has something to do with the weak, self-pitying men, this fascination. Not that I myself am entirely un-weak. But if I am to pat myself on the shoulder, at least I got a certain degree of pathos. At least it’s a bit unsavoury. Reasonability is not something I worship).
In 2001 I was in Pisco, Peru. My own agenda in Peru was actually to snoop about for vampires, or to be accurate the South American kind of vampires. And I gathered a range of stories that was closely linked with the colonialist part of their past. The term ‘vampire’ is probably slightly misleading in this context, having very little to do with Count Dracula. But still, I’m not picky and I’m not a folklorist or an anthropologist. Nevertheless, at a churchyard in Pisco I was presented to a grave, without being asked, by some small boys who claimed it to be a vampire’s grave. It wasn’t such a big surprise that it was a European woman who had fallen victim of a male European vampire. Since everything that looks like vampires to some degree is being linked with the colonial period and its long aftermath.
Besides it didn’t prove to be such a good idea to ask about vampires. People became rather suspicious, and at one time my ex-wife was interrogated at an Indian teachers training college to determine if she was a vampire or had any shady connections to such beings. And that wasn’t really fun.
As said the figure is unfruitful, and asking about it causes dislike in some places. That’s why the un-dead are morose, restless and totally confused. And it probably hasn’t been illustrated better than in “The Informers” by Bret Easton Ellis, a book populated with restless, totally confused upper-class vampires. Besides I see the book as a direct precursor of “Four Blondes” by the author of “Sex and The City”. And then suddenly the shopping mall Fisketorvet and a twin baby carriage isn’t very far, both being parts of the motive in my painting that bears the title “Daywalker” (named after the Blade-trilogy). The (vampire) bat soaring above the baby carriage is not a threat but a prolongation, or maybe even the redemption of the unfruitful. Redemption, or perhaps a promise of something else, through the rather palpable method of placing the vampire in the midst of my everyday life, which indeed is real to me but perhaps less real to You, my readers. But at first that’s not my problem, even though it’ll brutally return at a later time. For instance when You’re looking at my works and quite shameless and quite without basis start talking to the nearest bystander about the way You kind of think and feel when looking at my works. Which of course makes me become a little tired and makes me wish I had stayed at the university to finish my studies and had become an environmental biologist or something else with the municipal authorities. And I guess that remark characterizes me as a typical leftover from the eighties, the last sour drag from the chillum (by the way, I haven’t seen one of those for a long time). However, I’m really not covering up an elitist outlook; I’m simply saying that if You want anything from art, then You have to surrender. It’s of no use if the only thing invested in art from the part of the viewers is Your own experience and outlook. What is it that’s so enormously interesting about recognizing Yourselves in others? Couldn’t You feel a little angst or at least become slightly alienated? The artist has a psychology but in fact art hasn’t.
Bottom line is that I miss a wallowing in Doomsday in mainstream culture. Not slasher movies. Nothing highbrow like Michael Haneke’s “Time of The Wolf”, nothing deeply depressing like “Ladybird, Ladybird” by Ken Loach. All the mentioned is something I enjoy and cherish. However, it’s specialties and I seldom shop specialties, I rather go to a discount supermarket (or more accurately, to some middle-class supermarket like Co-op, with a reasonable line of discount products). I’m thinking of something like Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” without a happy end, the Terminator movies without happy end, a disaster movie without happy end. Then it may happen that you stop watching the news with hopeful expectations, like some kind of vulture observing real disasters with pleasure, hoping ... but maybe that’s too much to demand of a person?
By the way, I took a Monday off to go and see “2012” all by myself. Actually it was a perfect movie, but the end disappointed me. I had only skimmed the reviews so I went to see the movie, believing that all life on Earth was going to be destroyed. It didn’t, and what’s worse, I estimated that about 144.000 people survived, and all of a sudden the movie turned from a cleansing of the mind into a gross biblical tale. But what pictures!
The difference in strength between Otto and the Bob Geldorfs was too big to be overcome. As battle machines the Bob Geldorfs and StingBono weren’t worth much. I mean, even Nis ate a couple of them. To me they represented the perfect victims. Aesthetically they’re some of the most disposable in the world, and ethically I really don’t care. It was annoyingly troublesome to empty the Bob Geldorfs of their blood. All the time something was caught between my teeth. But it was an absolute pleasure, though, to tear the throat of StingBono out and gorge in the blood with some salted peanuts to go along. The guests at the other tables, those not crushed by the fallen ceiling, smiled approvingly and raised their glasses to propose a toast. Now the evening could have ended there since Otto appeared to be leaving shortly. I don’t really think Nis was someone that Otto would benefit from possessing. But then it happened that Mikkel Bolt, Katarina’s boyfriend, hurried in through the door (or rather the hole in the façade). He hadn’t been able to find a babysitter for his dachshund, so he had made a swift decision, telling the dog that it was old enough to walk into a bar. Even though it had been somewhat sceptical about the idea, spirits rose considerably when it saw the lively company, and the dog burst out singing. This sort of indicated that the party would go on till the crack of dawn and even further. And it did.
We didn’t get Otto a new job that evening, but a couple of weeks later I think he met someone from U-Turn, and as far as I know they have cooperated since then, planning a performance festival.
That summer I’d managed to leave a bloody trail behind, across the holiday island of Langeland, and in Copenhagen and its immediate surroundings, without anyone having raised an eyebrow. That served me as an opportunity to do experiments as to which type of victims that made me feel the best. And not having many exhibitions in the pipeline (to put it nicely), I had plenty of time to find out how I felt about being a vampire, and not least to prepare a sort of defence - or what to call it when you aren’t weighed down by ethical considerations. I had the feeling though, that the situation couldn’t last for long. That this light pleasant atmosphere would come to an end. Of course some busy-body jerk would intervene sooner or later.
The first thing I did was to sit down by the computer and simply write a speech. But the result was horrible. Far too many phrases like “Human cattle”, “A new world order”, “I, the Ruler of Darkness”, “We raise our ruby-red goblets and propose a toast to the victory of the Underworld”, “Rub your genitals with our cloven-footed hoof”, “Fuck you, Pelle” etc. etc. For many years I’ve been having the dubious habit of writing some very discontent and angry mails and pushing the send-button without reading them. So I do have some experience with fucking up things in writing, and it wasn’t hard for me to see that this wouldn’t do as a presentation to the general public, and even though the possibility was perhaps a little tempting, or rather flattering, I knew that I would wind up feeling uncomfortably if people started throwing themselves at my feet.
So I mounted my faithful Raleigh, after having filled up my panniers with supplies and raingear (along with galoshes, you never know), and biked down Gammel Køge Landevej (The Old Road to Køge). Somehow this long straight road through the suburbs represents a sort of infinity to me. The fact alone that you pass by Friheden (Freedom Station & Freedom Shopping Mall) is in itself something which moves me every time. Immediately before the market garden, just after the curling centre, I took the road to the right leading me past Avedøre and Bymuren, ending at Vestvolden (an abandoned line of city ramparts). By and large the place is always deserted. No matter if it’s a summer day or a grey winter day, the soccer fields and foot paths are empty, apart from a single person walking the dog or a lost child.
Of course the idea was to empty my mind in all this lovely pointless space. But it’s such a perfect and tempting hunting ground so I broke into the aquarium club Bymuren, having seen some man shuffling around in there, and I tore him into small pieces and distributed his remains into the various aquariums.
Luckily I managed to calm down a little, otherwise I would have cleared out a couple of housing units and painted profundities on the wall with blood, out of sheer enthusiasm. However, that wasn’t really the reason why I had mounted the bike today.
Infinity is probably what fascinates me about the suburbs. The mystery of the suburbs is due to the lack of riddles, as some Swedish poet once said. Though it sounds well and true in a rhetorical way, I don’t think it will stand a test. The mystery is derived from the greater distance between the atoms out here, quite simply. This is a seriously deserted place, there’s more empty space in between the routines, and if you know how to cherish emptiness the place offers a great freedom. You don’t have to say hello to anyone. Toten und oden ...
In the painting “The Message” (2006) I have placed my oldest, and at that time very sceptical, son in the midst of the landscape that I easiest associate with Sydhavn (a working-class area south of Copenhagen). Lauge is very happy to live in this part of town. I guess that the aspects of the quarter which he likes, aren’t the same as I value but we agree that it doesn’t get much better than here. So I have taken this very pale, sceptical looking young man in his expensive designer wear and placed him in a romantic winter landscape. Potentially this is a pastoral, an idyll, but to Lauge the landscape is not only a typical background. He’s standing to the right in the picture with his side towards the viewer, the face turned in our direction. The landscape is a backup, rather than just being a background. The landscape is bare and classical, and Lauge, dressed in the hip-hop fashion of the winter, glances at us, appraisingly, sceptically, and they become one. The way I see it, the picture is the opposite to a memento mori. Nor is it a memento of the Creation of any deity. It radiates a potential aggression and nakedness which is too restless for death or God.
In return the painting “O Tempora, O Mores” (2006) is somewhat more melancholic, concentrating on the visual beauty of a landscape without centre, as suggested by the suburbs and the outskirts. In the foreground lies two slightly angular swans, one of them with its head below the water, the one in the front staring at us. In the middle ground lie a few boats by a wooden pier. Obviously they’re not leisure boats, more like fishing vessels. In the background some trees, some railway structures, a high crane and some larger buildings disappearing in the mist. To my eyes this is a complete and ideal landscape. Nothing lacks, except maybe someone standing on the pier, smoking. This is my pastoral, there’s a total absence of the middle-class as a superstructure, as an ideological directional. The landscape is open. There are no repressive structures within.
When I had biked around for a while it stroke me that I only needed to stick to my routine and pretend to be a little stupid and innocent. The purpose of this wasn’t to make people understand me, but simply to make them leave me alone and let me do what I’m best at. However, I have a reasonably good experience with putting an effort into it now and again, and nobody says that this effort has to be grounded in truth. I really felt a bit confused. I’ve always had the feeling that if I wasn’t on my guard, not looking sideways, I would be taken away, pulled up against a wall and gunned down. Literally spoken. I don’t really have a rooted sense of stability in the cosmos – or what to call it? And somehow I felt that for once it wouldn’t be of any use to phone my mother and ask for her advice.
I decided to call it a day. Nothing would come out of chasing a line of thoughts that was walking round in circles, and besides I had the feeling that there was time enough. The feeling kind of revealed to me that my problems wouldn’t begin until a while into the following year, maybe even not before the budget debate at the end of 2009, when the dizzying, catharsis-like ascent of the economy would be replaced by something else and probably equally breathtaking. (Damn, I missed by almost a year. The 9/11 of the economy, caused by Muslims cleverly disguised as bank employees, happened less than a month after I had written the above).
In the painting “A Little Misunderstood” I am touching this social paranoia, this dislike, this ... detest, I guess I have to call it so, of other adults in company with their children. Especially mothers, I must admit, to be honest, but not less male chairmen of co-operative apartment houses carrying their babies on their arms. These worried types buying ecological food, complaining about smoking, afraid of the weather and the city; who aren’t exactly racists, not in an ideological sense, but truly in action. I know that to some extent I’m projecting my own fears out on accidental people, but unfortunately my experience tells me that I’m not completely wrong all the time.
Of course it’s unreasonable that I’ve only painted mothers in the picture, but still it’s a good picture of this. I’ve never understood what all the grown-ups are doing on a sledge run when they aren’t going to ride a sledge themselves. There are more grown-ups standing, barring the way, than wild kids. Go away! Let us ride the sledge without these disturbances.
The same kind of mothers are seen in the painting “Sledge Run in Hvidovre (King Diamond, Return of The Vampire)”, but here they’re not the main characters, and they’re in danger of having their throats torn out and their blood drunken and their limbs spread out across the sledge run, causing considerable inconvenience to the sledge riders. The comic-opera Satanist King Diamond grew up in Hvidovre. He’s one of few opportunities to add a glamorous touch to the sledge run (Hvidovre is known to be a rather dull place). And it worked out according to the intention. It gave me the courage to counter the situation with greater optimism, in a more theatrical and less realistic way. The snow has been painted impasto with a spatula in very bright red and yellow and a very discrete blue on a mostly green background. The sky is pink and the firs dark green. The snowflakes dropping gently over the scenery are held in cleaner orange, blue, white, pink and yellow colours that has been sprinkled on. Again the main character in the picture is sceptical and alone. She’s a little girl, maybe four years old, sitting in the snow in a pink snowsuit with her black sled on her lap. She looks not too pleased. Whether she’s a professional helpless or she’s tired or something hurts without a grown-up to cry at, or she’s just having a break, we don’t know. But it’s obvious that she’s not taking part in the general merry-making in the moment of the picture. I have forever cast her into this not too pleased condition, which of course is completely unreasonable. However, I prefer this sulkiness and isolation to the chocolate cake-baking, fair trade-buying, parent-teacher meeting-molesting, fruit arrangement-initiating atmosphere that pervades the grown-ups everywhere around me. The picture is a tribute to the sulky, the passive, to the one that enjoys exhibiting his or her doubt and maladjustment.
After having decided to postpone the making of the spin that I would have to let off at some point or other, I went to my studio to go on with Ibi Grill. That’s the hot-dog cart which I mentioned at the outset of this story. I had assumed that it would be a very difficult picture to finish, but the choice to paint the grey sky impasto with a spatula put everything in its place, and the only thing missing now was to paint the sausages on the menu card. To begin with I was very much in doubt whether or not to include the killing of the sausage seller in the painting. But it all comes down to the question of delicate balancing on a thin line, so for a long time I’ve been keeping this kind of events out of my paintings. And it really is my experience that it’s quite impossible to include deviant behaviour in art, or any kind of behaviour that isn’t successful for that matter, in a wider sense of the concept. Somehow I would like to present my killings to the public if it wouldn’t lead on to condemnation, applause or indifference. I would very much like to present them as a difference within a general lack of difference. A bit like that movie about Nico in which her son calmly approves of his mother having taught him to use heroin. That was deviant. I can feel the courage to do so growing in me. But I also know that I have to prepare the ground to make it happen without me getting involved in all sorts of crap. I’m old enough not to bother talking about being misunderstood. I realize that the coding and decoding of statements, and the way they become statements at all, are mechanisms complex enough to make it seem rather self-absorbed to talk about being understood or misunderstood. However, having to go to jail because of my eating habits wasn’t a part of my plan, or something I was willing to endure in the name of relativism.
One of the problems that had been nagging me for a long time was all these younger painters who polluted the reception of paintings that weren’t 100 per cent self-obsessed. People are confusing the idiosyncratic with self-obsession. Of course I could have killed them all a long time ago, and maybe it’s the only solution that is functional within the real world. Maybe that’s the way I should prepare the ground: with blood and even more blood.
In the end it will most likely prove impossible to present it to the public. There simply are stories that can’t be told. Neither the words or the form exist. They won’t be misunderstood, or how you name it. They simply won’t be heard. And that’s where I’m at with my stuff for the moment. The part of the story that motivates my paintings can’t be seen: my intense dislike and my angst. I refuse to use a ‘psychological’ loaded figurative language, an abject cheap imagery.
Of course all these considerations made me feel over-excited, since I didn’t seem to be able to find my way out of it, easy or troublesome. I mean, in the end you’re pretty much alone with this kind of shit. And on top of everything I suddenly felt bad conscience about having killed that chairman of the aquarium club, solely because of my elevation. In the code of ethics I’d been building up, chairmen of aquarium clubs were protected, scheduled Grade 1. And something I hate, is not to respect the agreements I’ve made with myself.
When I was a lad, a somewhat small somebody, about the time I’d learned to read, I got hold of a copy of “Horror – The magazine for those who like blood.” About the same time I began to check behind doors to see if there were any vampires when I entered a room. These horror comics are probably some of the most titillating I’ve ever come across. They weren’t really scary, not very often at least, but the covers displayed such promises of inconceivable horror and fear inside. So I guess it was suitable that I bought my comics in Fantask which was at the corner of Teglgårdsstræde at that time. We lived in the neighbourhood (the Mecca of alternative culture in the centre of Copenhagen). Fantask opened on the same spot where a porn shop had been, and as far as I remember they’d sold hard BDSM porn, which I didn’t have the faintest idea about what could be. But it was with that as it was with the other porn shops in front of which I always stopped to stare at their window display with great interest, not grasping much of what was going on, apart from the fact that it was extremely interesting. And I weren’t completely wrong about that, I realize today.
But the stories that left the strongest impression with me were the ones about werewolves and vampires, because of the constant ambiguity in the characters that actually added some depth to them. And that story about the biker in his leather clothes, the son of Satan, whose head was a naked skull ablaze. Not to mention the vampire magazine I was reading while I fell asleep in the Norwegian skiing hotel. It was probably at that occasion that my transformation took place. My memories about it are a bit vague. However, a number of my opponents in a chess tournament, I’d enlisted for, disappeared during the skiing trip ...
With us on the skiing trip for maladjusted kids was Thøger Birkeland, the author who wrote “Krummerne” (i.e. “The Crumbs”, popular Danish children’s film). It must have been due to my lack of experience, or my insecurity as to who I was allowed to kill, a simple deficiency in my general view on the consequences of my actions, maybe hesitation at the fact that he was a grown-up, even one who wrote books. And that was something significant in my universe: books. I met him alone in the corridor, and it would have been fairly easy to stiff him and thereby gain a more nutritious meal than the tomato soup earlier mentioned. I got as far as to paralyze his mind and all I needed to do was to open my mouth and bite hard. What stopped me in the end, I think, was that I hadn’t read any of his books yet. When I did read one of his books after the skiing trip, I regretted for the first time not to have made a killing, solely for aesthetic reasons. I actually felt cheated, having spent all this time reading the book. At this age I wasn’t able to express that I found things to be too correct and too awesome and way too bloody annoying. That’s the feeling though, I recall today, years apart. The only thing to match that feeling in my years of adolescence, talking about books, is a youth novel which my uncle recommended to me. It contained a scene in which a young girl teaches her mother the joys of a dildo. It was somewhat heavy and not very randy, almost clinical. Punk came as a relief to a lot of us.
The dimness that prevailed in my head regarding my eating habits grew stronger in the following years. I want to make it clear that it has absolutely nothing to do with puberty, it wasn’t any kind of sublimation of a waking sexuality; I had simply become a vampire and I was in a mess because of it. It didn’t make it any easier that I was carrying a boner around half of the time, but there wasn’t any direct connection.
Quite a lot of ducks disappeared from the lake near Østerbro, the quarter where we now were living, everybody agreeing that it had to be migrant workers, as they were called back then. And after some years with a growing number of wild cats, wailing all through springtime in the backyards, the population of cats practically disappeared for several years. My class at Nørrevold School grew slowly smaller and smaller, until we were only seven pupils left, without anyone suspecting there were other reasons than the general moving away from the city centre. And if I’d been able to remember a thing of it all, I’m pretty sure it would have seemed like some of the happiest years of my life, at the age from twelve to fifteen. But the only thing I remember from those years, is my then really voluminous collection of comic books, which my little brother later on exchanged for hashish, bit by bit.
The only reason why I’m dealing with this oblivion, is that I feel certain that I was having a lot of fun, behind my own back, and somehow it’s not fair. But fuck that.
The first killing I clearly remember is closely related to the budding artist in my stomach. I’d been on a hitchhike trip through Europe with my hashish buddies from The Free Grammar School. We started out hitching down to a peace march, initiated by a group of Norwegian feminists, which was headed for Paris, fronted by a gang of Buddhist monks dressed in orange, beating their drums all the time. It was so eighties. At the communal meetings during the march different fractions refused to translate for each other, and all sorts of sectarian follies of the eighties flourished. They had peace services and what not, and there was so little pussy in the air that the fact even dawned on me who otherwise was hundred percent tone-deaf in girl matters. The chess club hadn’t left my body yet.
We had reached San Remo at the Italian Riviera and had decided to score some LSD, the great Beast in Revelations in those years. Considering the fact that we had been raised to buy our dope at Christiania (a half-legal squatter’s area in Copenhagen) under safe conditions, we were of course easily cheated in the most classic way. The pusher insisted that we paid him the money in advance, and then he would return ... Of course this was sufficiently humiliating but no worse than we could find a new pusher who then, under proper surveillance, sold us the goods we asked for. What the others didn’t realize was the feeling growing in me, a feeling which I only know too well nowadays; I felt offended, and I’d kind of tried that before. However, the fact that this offence wasn’t of the school courtyard kind but actually closer to an imaginary offence since we really only had our own foolishness to feel offended about, or to put it more accurately, our foolishness had been held up in front of us with a grimace; all this only enraged me more. So this gross pusher bastard became the victim of my first conscious blood craze, and none of those assholes have cheated me since then. I smeared him across the façade of a casino, I polished the bones in his little toes, and that night they were used at the roulette as balls. With his bowels I caused a constipation in the bidet in the ladies’ room behind the VIP lounge, and on the whole I displayed a stupendous creativity, or inventiveness as I prefer to call it, in order not to mix it up with the process that’s taking place in my studio.
It wasn’t the first time I had taken hallucinogenic drugs, though, but it was the first try with LSD. I’ve always had my doubts as to the mythology surrounding the classic part of drug culture. Everything has to be negotiated in plenum all the time. The nonsense is so abundant that I rather expect to be presented with the minutes of a meeting than to be stoned. On the other hand we have the modern drug culture, everything simply revolving about ‘hard on and hair backwards’; and then into a casino to hang around and shout that women are bad artists. And that’s too fucking stupid. However, my naive curiosity towards drugs wasn’t wrecked yet, I hadn’t gotten that far. So an acid trip of moderate power under palm trees swathed in the coloured light from lampions was just what I was looking for. The combination was rather perfect. Aesthetically there weren’t much in the scenery I was familiar with, we were far enough away from home. It wasn’t anything stupid involving a dark forest and nature. Well, we ended up sitting at the harbour, looking at fishing vessels on their way out. Even though we didn’t realize exactly what we were looking at until well after sunrise. It must have taken us hours to figure that out, and all things considered it probably wasn’t so bad that we weren’t in our usual surroundings. That would have been an unnecessary disturbing experience.
Well, to return to the point where I began this anecdote, and how it’s connected to my discoveries about art: I’m afraid that I’m not sure if there is a connection. Maybe the killing in itself did it, rather than the acid trip. The trip was part of a check list. The function of the list was to ensure that you were a bad lot. And I’m not saying so to make fun of myself. If it was your wish to become a nice guy, it likewise included some specific actions. So did the opposite. The worst thing that could happen to you, was simply floating around on the outskirts of everything, not being anything. The killing was somewhat too indefinable to be of any use. I will go as far as to say that it would have been explained away if the others had discovered it. And that’s an experience I brought along when I began working with art. Transgressions are only being seen as transgressions if they still include all the elements of that which is being transgressed. Meaning that nothing is being transgressed at all. The acid trip wasn’t any different in that respect. When I was introduced to Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shift at the university, I was endowed with a valid explanation of my experiences. My interpretation went like this: Every transgression within a system working under a paradigm is inadmissible, no matter how small this transgression may be, prohibited because it puts the integrity of the whole system at stake. And every part of the system contains the whole of the system within itself. That’s where LSD comes into the equation, since it’s really nothing but a trivial opposition to everything neat and tidy, whereas mass murder not really can be interpreted in any reliable way. Not even as alternative eating habits, even though it’s a very modern concept.
So my acid years are easily evaluated as a well-behaved excess, especially considering the fact that I was suitably scared of needles, pills and stuff intended for the nose; I stuck with little bits of blotting paper and nature’s own gifts, very affected and actually rather sensible, considering the circumstances.
To summarize the previous, I think people tend to see me as a kind of hippie, of the same reasons as explained before, and not at all like I see myself, which is something more like a morally ambivalent mass murder. But of course, people are stupid, aren’t they?
And now I’m laughing, a rather diabolic laugh. I don’t have a ruined medieval tower to perform my laugh in, but I’ve never really been very particular about accessories. I emphasize the routines, the things aren’t that important. And one of my routines is a heartfelt diabolic laughter that only feels so much more fatal when it’s being laughed in a wooden allotment house, which Jes Brinch so accurately has pronounced a neo-Nazi hencoop. Sometimes I miss him here in the city. It’s on those occasions that I allow myself to despise the human cattle, my food, my toy. But it wears off fast, and it always makes me feel ashamed afterwards.
A universal language has never really been a possibility to me, and surely this has made me rather sceptical about the abstract since it tends to deteriorate into symbolism. However, it’s the starting point for “Kinder Magic (A Universal Language)”. Three collages transferred to tarpaulin cloth, and a tablet with text, 2 x 9 meters in all. The pictures are enlarged collages. In my understanding collage is sampling, and in my optics sampling has either infinity or the tasteful as its problem. The story is about a brother and sister who, besides having a sexual relationship, slowly construct a universal language out of things they find inside Kinder Magic chocolate eggs.
Excerpt from the text: “Inside the Kinder Magic chocolate eggs they had found a common language, a fixed centre of rotation. Not a secret code, but a universal language. Hence their enthusiasm that day at the café when they had collected all the elements of their language for the first time. As soon as the events had settled themselves they left the café without eating their food. They even forgot the camel with the monkey on its back which they already had in duplicate, something that would have caused a terrible argument on any other day. But not today.”
“What happened that night in the master builder villa? Until the next day when their language again was incomplete?”
The collage has always been a practical problem to me. Not to be understood like I’ve never ended up there at least a thousand times. But how to put up limitations to your choice of sources and motives? A lot of fine answers to this question has been given but a doubt always remains with me. When you throw yourself into a cannibalistic orgy like that, then what are you letting go? That’s the feeling I’m always left with afterwards, and it’s the feeling I’m discussing in “Kinder Magic”, in text and picture. One thing that I know I fear, is death by consensus, which in my story has been placed physically in a sort of prototype suburb. The spiritual devotion to the ordinary, to non-conflict, to all that which I actually don’t believe in the existence of. All that I sense as a kind of phantom zone, a non-life, a life devoid of dislike. I worship and adore my dislike. It may seem affected but there’s a good energy to it. Or to put it otherwise: It may be that the work can be of use to me when I talk about the breakdown of Utopia. And this breakdown is inside it somewhere, but Utopia is placed in the suburbs. And as Utopia the suburbs are pretty poor, but as a seat of dilution and decentralization they are perfect. So I guess that’s an ambiguity in the work.
Partly the work began with a book by Samuel R. Delaney, “Babel-17”, in which a universal language is the subject. However, it wasn’t because I thought the book was good. I found it to be somewhat wobbly at the knees. Quite opposite to “The Einstein Intersection” by the same author, one of the all time favourites of my teenage years. The gallery of characters in “The Einstein Intersection” is rather heterogeneous, marked by a genetic breakdown, leaving mankind strongly differentiated. Like a collage. “Kinder Magic” is balancing between those two books.
Another part of the work set off with a family I saw at a café in Brussels, complete with a senior mum wearing a beige blazer with a Minnie Mouse on the breast pocket. I was shaken. Brussels wasn’t my cup of tea anyway. I mean, that was the place where the local sheriff phoned me after I’d been living there for some months, to ask me if I was learning French. I answered no, of course, I was only going to stay there for six months, and then he got angry and hung up while yelling: “You should integrate!!”
I experienced a similar urge from outside to redefine my knowledge and my being. I was doing a morning walk with Sonja down by the waterside in Valby Park, staring out into an undifferentiated grey. Other places in the world know of ‘white out’; here it rather turns out as ‘grey-out’. Some patches of melting snow lying about softened the impression. Out over the water there was only grey, however, with a few grey birds floating depressed on the surface. Now it would be to lie to say that it had a depressing impact on me. There’s so much space and endlessness in that kind of grey. It doesn’t arouse any enthusiasm either, though. Not like some of those calm and clear winter days. Those are days where I lay down work. I don’t do that when the grey is spreading. No matter how fascinating it may be.
Out of this grey a group of paintings has grown. They originate from the fact that there’s no certain way in which the world looks, not if you go into detail. Everything looks different each time. There may be a pattern. But it’s weak, and you shouldn’t let yourself be fooled. Everything is swindle anyway. My dull day paintings are an establishment of the fact that you can paint anything you want, it doesn’t become more or less realistic because of that. The eyes are anyway seeing what they expect to see, whether looking at a painting or the sky. Sometimes it makes me bitter, sometimes I see it as the conditions of art; according to the way in which I’ve slept during the night. However, this text is probably tinted with a certain resistance to it. At any rate. This feeling that everything is swindle. Somehow I think “Gruppen für drei Orchester” by Stockhausen would be a reasonable soundtrack.
Well, out of this gauzy infinity sounded a loud barking and roaring; some large dogs were apparently becoming strongly emotional. The sound came from ‘The Gold Coast’, a small illegal settlement between Tippen and Valby Park. Only twenty meters of water separated us from the trouble, so it wasn’t hard to tell what was going on. Several men with hand weapons, all wearing waistcoats, was climbing a fence and more were waiting for their turn a little behind, half hidden. My fantasy doesn’t have a wider span than to assume a police action was taking place. The kind of thing that you better stay away from. Which I know from painful experience as I at a relatively young age interfered with an arrest in connection to the clearing of an occupied house in Ryesgade, thereby securing myself a solid beating, a night in prison and a charge of conspiracy. If it had happened in today’s somewhat rotten political climate, I would have been thrown in jail for at least six months (which, I suppose, I now have to correct to about a whole year, considering the latest legislation). But then, yes, with age I’ve grown more curious than I was in my youth or childhood. Back then I could walk by a juicy traffic accident or a fire without looking to the side. I simply wasn’t interested. But now I feel tempted to open the letter slit and peek into people’s flats, and I’m tiptoeing when I pass by a hedge if there’s any chance of having a look inside.
Anyway or some other way I changed into a bat while Sonja attempted calling me to order. She got hold of one of my wings but I bit her hard in the finger. Excited by the taste of blood I swung myself up in the air, humming “Troops of Tomorrow” by The Exploited. Damn, I was going over to see a real police action with guns and all, so a proper soundtrack was needed.
The house, which the police action was directed towards, looked like a slightly mouldy allotment house that had been painted in a military-like grey. The house and the fence and the whole lot. Right behind the fence, hidden by the outer fence, was another very masculine fence, complete with spikes and barbed wire and surveillance cameras. Serious paranoia.
Well, behind the fence a policeman was treating a really gross dog, that had attached itself to his leg, with both pepper spray and truncheon. It just didn’t work. So a colleague came to his assistance, helping the animal out of its miserable life by cutting its throat with a very large black knife.
If I hadn’t bit Sonja in her finger and thus already had the taste of blood on my tongue, then the sight of the dog’s head hanging loose merely would have amused me and not aroused a rather misplaced enthusiasm in a pretty stupid situation as it now did. The cops was obviously ransacking what apparently was the local biker gang’s fortress, in search of drugs and weapons. Certainly quite a lot of both were found, and this fact doesn’t shed any mollifying light on the following events. It feels pretty strange, though, to have been living in a neighbourhood for so many years and even passing by the place several times a week, without knowing a tiny bit about what’s going on right behind the hedge (“Did he really kill fourteen young men with a potato peeler during the last five year? But he seemed like such a nice and quiet fellow). I didn’t have the faintest idea about the biker gang’s fortress being there.
Most of the policemen were already inside the house, and besides them a bunch of hopeful local drug and weapon dealers were sitting in a plastic couch, trying to look cool with a lot of guns pointed at them. A smart vampire would have pulled the plug right here, leaving it to the humans to deal with their own affairs. Again and again, as a responsible grown-up, I’ve taught my children the use of paying attention to what the cops are saying, and once I had to pick up one of them at the police station (now it’s two times); he hadn’t listened to the wise words of his father. But no! I changed back into human shape, standing on the tile-topped table. Which proved to be a bad idea since I was standing with one foot in an ashtray at the size of a discus, unfortunately with a large chillum laying in it, and since my weight was resting on that foot the chillum rolled away under me and I toppled over, landing on the lap of a very fat biker with a face covered in day-old stubble. Oops, I say. And then Hell broke loose.
As mentioned before I’ve often passed by this biker’s fortress, drug dive, or what it was, for many years without knowing anything, so when I realized the true nature of the place it gave me a feeling of being out of sync. A bit of water keeps me separated from the place most of the time, but still. The police action in question was witnessed by Sonja who was out for a morning jog, but seeing this before her eyes didn’t ease her understanding of what was going on. Not until a couple of days later when we watched a crime program on TV2 called “Station 2”. They were running a theme show about the South Harbour District, our own neighbourhood, and this enlightened us as to the real state of affairs. Somewhat surrealistic. It reminded me very much about the first time I saw the Danish movie “Pusher”. I saw it in the cinema theatre “Vester Vov Vov” which lies close to Vesterbro Square. The movie literally took place in the immediate surroundings of the cinema, which added a bizarre spatial dimension to the viewing. It was the first time I substantially experienced how a place, well-known to me, was so violently fictionalized in a way that made it appear completely unknown to me.
The painting I have done on the basis of these experiences, I finally chose to empty of drama, apart from a pair of sulking coots. The painting shows the biker gang’s fortress as seen from the place where I usually see it when I’m doing one of my frequent walks. It has been kept in bright colours, different shades of mother-of-pearl, thin fluorescent paint, crayon, a bit of glimmering lacquer, and is carefully finalized with some oil paint. It’s not so much an expression of powerlessness against the secrets which the world is hiding, as it’s an ascertainment of the role that stories play in the way we act in the world. And here a story had appeared and changed a place in a rather radical way.
Somehow these kind of things, among other things, make me unable to declare myself for or against the work of art. It doesn’t make sense to me to choose whether the work is a thing in the world or if it makes up an autonomous space in itself. You end up being run over by meaningless choices.
(Maybe it’s the immortality which makes it absurd to me to distinguish in a decisive way. Being immortal in itself tends to isolate you quite a lot from problems of that kind. They seem so changeable. Immortality works with you in a slightly de-personifying manner. You always want to start all over again, there’s plenty of time. On the other hand there are periods during which you cultivate rigid habits, close to actual rituals. But then again, it always ends up with you getting obsessed with something new and freaking out. Let me reveal to you that your memory doesn’t get better with immortality. Of course you have a somewhat longer perspective than the mortals, I shouldn’t be putting it too much down, but mostly you mix up things, you are helplessly unable to separate one thing from another. There’s a great deal of administration in connection to immortality.)
From then on things became a bit nasty, you may say. I kind of couldn’t keep up with my low profile. My sense of situation was worn down by bitterness and confusion. The result was a terrible mess. Not just something like being too drunk and stupid. From now on it’s going to be increasingly difficult to be discreet about my eating habits.
I’d been slightly ill most of the week, lying bored as Hell on the couch, and in general not really feeling up for anything. Sonja had gone to South Korea for some biennial, and I felt kind of alone in the world since none of the kids were at home either. However, Nicolai Wallner was throwing a fifteen years jubilee celebration at the gallery, and later there was a party at the opening of U-Turn, and I wouldn’t miss that.
So I mobilized a bit of enthusiasm. But it wasn’t really my night. The vernissage at the gallery and the following dinner was of course pleasant but I was a morose prick, so the situation didn’t improve. I felt inclined to go home but after a week on the couch I honestly needed a bit of fun, even though the odds were bad. So I went along to the opening party, only to discover a mile-long queue and some ridiculous bouncers who wouldn’t let anyone in. But I succeeded in jumping the queue by acting important or something like that. Don’t ask me. Well, I hate discotheques and have always done so. Probably it’s related to the fact that I hate other people or something in that vein. In reality it’s probably related to the fact that I’m half deaf and don’t understand a shit of what’s going on around me if there’s too noisy. But this! It surpassed the level where I usually give up. There were young people all over the place. Two thousand of the kind. I met Jacob Lillemose and Nicolaj Recke, and their positive energy, and a few blows of weed, soothed me. But my misanthrophy was potent and fully erected and an old plan which from time to time had emerged during my fits of bad temper, reappeared, fully unfolded, lucid in every detail, totally cleansed of any consideration or effort to calculate the consequences; they all had to die. Don’t ask me how I reached the conclusion that it was a good idea to go through with the plan, in real life. But nobody got away. Every little fucking art poser ever mentioned on kopenhagen.dk were splattered on the asphalt of the Carlsberg lot, the upcoming fucking creative capital. No one was innocent, there were no excuses like: “But I just happened to pass by.”, “I was only obeying orders.” or “Man, I’m so pissed, do you have some coke?” Now, a thing like this doesn’t last too long when first you’re set into motion. A few verses of “I Walked with a Zombie” that had been on my brain the whole evening, that was how long it took. Damn, what a mess. Damn, it was beautiful.
I don’t know if I mentioned this earlier but once in a while killing is accompanied by oblivion. Catharsis has a tendency to erase the hard desk in a way that seems slightly unhealthy. And this time it felt a little strange since I had gone to work in a highly elevated mood. I was serene. I was looking into the core of the problem and acting at the basis of my knowledge. This was problem-solving. And what was even stranger, was the fact that I really can’t remember whom I met at the opening party, apart from Jacob, Nikolaj and Lars Bang. I’m completely empty. I remember funny remarks and dumb comments, and later on separated limbs, blood and screaming, but no persons. I didn’t really care at that moment though.
Within minutes the smell of blood had attracted the pigeons from Enghave Park. Gross animals. But I was already leaving when they came flying, cheerfully cooing, staring with bright red eyes. And for once I didn’t feel especially guilty. There was a sense of dawn, of tabula rasa, of freshly baked buns sprinkled with poppy seeds. “I Walked with a Zombie” faded out and was replaced by “Night of the Vampire” which is a less psychotic song to have on your brain. The repetition of the chorus “I walked with a zombie, I walked with a zombie, I walked with a zombie ... last night” can make anyone go insane. “Night of the Vampire” is a somewhat easier song to rotate in your mind if you feel like I do. And the freshly baked buns materialized, handed over the counter by a sulking girl in a baker’s shop, who on this special occasion was allowed to go on with her miserable life. I was brimming with optimism. Now Danish art was mine alone. For a time at least. And that wasn’t bad at all. In this way Sundays are lovely.
Unfortunately it didn’t last for long, this well-balanced happiness. Things began to happen that made me doubt, leaving me shaken to the roots.
I’m sure I saw Jesper Just in town a couple of days ago. And I feel absolutely certain that I tore off the heads of Jesper and Lillibeth and stuffed them up their respective assholes. But I must admit it all happened rather fast. And the other day I ran into Jacob Lillemose on Istedgade. Of course I’m happy and all that, that he wasn’t included in my somewhat petty-minded mass killing. But still I’m seriously puzzled. Normally I don’t scamp with art and food.
To mount the horse again quickly I went to a vernissage. And the place was crowded with people whom I felt pretty certain to have killed, all standing, smiling emptily into a void like zombies, drops of saliva dribbling into their draught beers. Actually it was rather scary, but already at this point I knew something was wrong. Of course it didn’t grow less scarier from the fact that the exhibition in itself was zombie-like. Something which in the end was a completely self-referential affair, something about photographs of books I hadn’t read. The hanging was very nicely done but it didn’t make sense without the press statement, and even that didn’t offer much help. It was one of those days where I find myself standing in a corner, mumbling conspiratorially to whoever that wants to listen, drinking too fast. For some reason there were inconceivably many children present, who was darting around, pawing every object they could lay their small greasy fingers on, with their anxiously smiling parents following their trail. The small beasts fiddled with everything, throwing objects over, and their nervous parents didn’t do anything but becoming even more nervous. I know very well that zombies don’t put much effort into learning manners, but some kind of inarticulate sound would have been in the proper place. I went outside to bum a cigarette because that’s where modern parents draw the line; they are not allowed to smoke, probably not even to go outside without wearing a snowsuit. I thought it proper to try killing some of them. Just to see what would happen. It involved a rather mixed group: Jakob Jakobsen, Søren Martinsen, Henrik Plenge, Lars Bent Petersen, a handful of childless students from different art academies, and Søren Hüttle who was standing outside, screaming that he wanted the Turner Prize. I had the suspicion that the slaughtering most likely wouldn’t harm them in any noticeable way. Which proved to be the case. They got up after the massacre, shaking their heads with bewildered expressions, and continued smoking. The smoke couldn’t really get into their lungs though, but oozed out through their torn throats. Then Jesper Fabricius turned up. He didn’t look as much as a zombie as the others I was talking on but I thought it had to be a mistake, so I attempted slaughtering him as well. It was an unusually messy and noisy affair. Afterwards the situation was extremely embarrassing because it proved to be the case that he wasn’t dead at all to begin with. But I’d changed that, hadn’t I? Luckily there weren’t anybody but zombies out smoking at that moment.
I had gained something resembling certainty that all those I’d killed at the U-Turn opening party in fact were already dead, or un-dead to be accurate. That they had been zombies all along, or androids or one of those angry-assed Jewish monsters of mud, what’s the name? Who were attending that opening party anyway? Most of those I’ve been talking with, were denied entrance by the bouncer zombies. I’d better just forget everything about this, but the events on this evening brought on my always potent paranoia and made it stick out in all directions. So I went home to watch the Talent Show finals with Sonja and Asger. Sonja was still suffering from jetlag after her trip to Korea.
Now some time has passed since these events took place. They have left their mark on the local art life though. Activities in the area bear the stamp of the un-dead who are upholding the scene. Lately I’ve been confused about this, and as my bitterness has lightened slightly I’m mostly in favour of forgetting the whole thing. It doesn’t bother me that the un-dead are walking amongst the rest of us, acting as pillow stuffing. If it hadn’t been that Sonja and I shared a vision on New Year’s day when we were watching the first part of the new X-Factor Show. One of the new judges is a gentleman calling himself Karsten “Soulshock”. There were no doubt to us that Jacob Lillemose was trapped inside him, and maybe Mathias Hvass Borello and a couple of more artists too. Perhaps this could explain what happened to all those I killed a couple of years ago. Their souls are being contained in another holster while their bodies hang around, drinking draught beer and applying for legacies amongst the living. It’s a logical choice to possess people whose bodies appear on television, since there’s no doubt in this connection that these bodies see me like I see them. Sort of like on Facebook. Many pieces of the puzzle are coming together, if I’m right. Then it would be a matter of course that Frank Jensen makes a political comeback. He must be hosting at least three or four hundred artists. And generally you only need to keep your eyes open, then you’ll know who’s inside who. It’s not that mystical after all. Of course it implies a new set of conditions to us who know what’s going on, on the mental level, but basically everything is business as usual. The gap isn’t that wide between the drivelling, lethargic, draught beer-drinking zombie artist and the consensus-seeking, legacy-applying, draught beer-drinking normal artist.
By now, while I’m writing this, I’m working on a painting with the provisional title “Sacre du Printemps” (boys and girls dressed as their mothers (or something like that), performing the Danish Shrovetide custom of tilting at a barrel filled with candy). Of course I’m not sure if the painting is going to be shown in the
form which I’m describing here. But it looks rather finished to me. The sources for the painting are a photograph of Asger and his friends tilting at a barrel some years ago, and the novel “The Road” by Cormack McCarthy, and a book by Dan Brown (The one who wrote “The Da Vinci Code”); I’m sorry, I don’t remember the title. The reference to Dan Brown was brought into the picture through the somewhat smart-assed reference to the element of sacrifice, mixed up with European fine arts, that’s involved in the barrel-tilting. In his books Brown always points out the archaic and bloody origins of all sorts of signs and ceremonies. In “The Road” everything is wrong too. The father in the book refuses to let his son die, justifying this by referring to themselves as good, one of the reasons being that they don’t eat other survivors from this universal, but not closely described, catastrophe. Surely the author does his best to discourage the two protagonists. I’ve never read a book that traverses a monochrome landscape like this. A pastoral in grey. Well, until the end of the book the author lets his story develop in the direction that a dystopia ought to develop: downhill, towards the darkness. Everything is indeed as it should be, evil and hopeless. A few pages before the paper runs out the father becomes ill and dies, quite along the line of the story. And at this point the boy should have perished as well, in the same stroke of the pen; all the way through the book the boy himself has more than suggested that this was his wish. But no! The first good man jumps into the scene (blare of trumpets!!) to save the boy and bring him home to wife and children and raise him in the spirit of The Word. Oops! I say. The first complete nuclear family in the book suddenly appears on the last page, out of the blue, suddenly the hope of all future. What’s the fucking point? Any humility towards the weight and inertia of the story itself has vanished. Then I prefer the movie “Time of the Wolf” by Michael Haneke though I can’t remember the end, which is as it ought to be. But the two books mentioned above have moved away focus from the dear children in the painting. By the way, it’s as good a case story as any to describe how I work. Anything that’s able to pollute a clean form is welcomed by me. Well, once again I remember that the individual appearance, or psychology, isn’t my main interest. How could it be possible to deal with such matters in a way that makes sense in a painting? I don’t know. So once again concrete painting defeated the drooling idea about simply painting the specific. Or it didn’t quite, actually, because no matter how much you turn it over and over, the question of reference in art is a shady affair. There’s no sanctuary, there’s no such thing as an innocent position from which you “simply” do art. That is, nobody’s preventing me from doing whatever I want to, not as such (which by the way is a truth with some modifications; I’m letting this be at the moment though). But it easily ends up with your work simply not being perceived by others. Not misunderstood but invisible, inaudible, not readable. Misunderstood is great. Invisible is not. To return to the painting, it’s thus driven by a mess of motivations. Before I began to paint it and later on. I’d been looking at the photo for a couple of years, not knowing what to do with it. It’s a family photo. It has nothing to do with my usual habit of registering my surroundings for use in paintings. This photo has a sentimental purpose but represents a solid blend of mixed emotions. As mentioned before I have some difficulties with the rather softheaded relation our culture has developed to childhood, a sort of catch 22, a surrender to the normative power of a few individuals that knows the truth and use it as a tool of power all the time. Especially at gatherings like Shrovetide. And that’s why the photo attracts me; it represents ambivalence, both something unpleasant and rejoicing in the offspring; and probably a lot of other stuff which I can’t identify. Working with the painting was easier. The plan I’d made before was based on experience from another painting that probably will be included in the exhibition as well, a dark one with a soaring, half horse. It wasn’t supposed to be like that but it went wrong and ended up somewhere far beyond the blueprint, and that always makes me feel strange. Something concerning a kind of attachment and loyalty to the origin of the painting outside myself. Or something like that. And by the way Tøsen was a mean little Shetland pony who was in the original photo source of the horse-painting, and I have a private mythological relation to her because she once kicked me when I was supposed to give my second son a ride. But she was thrown out of the painting. And this line of questions I wanted to pursue in another painting, since it gave me this slightly uncomfortable feeling. So what I had was the subject of the photo, the children at Shrovetide. The vague premonitions I must have had as to the procedure disappeared in the enthusiasm for the self-willed paint. And then this way to paint had already become normative. Now I have a reasonable idea of how to do such a painting. I haven’t painted the faces of the kids. The reason was solely practical to begin with because Asger, the one in the pink down jacket (that Mamma lend him), had the wrong face in the photo I’ve used as model, and I’d forgot to print out the face I’d found in another photo, but it proved lucky, the painting did more than well without the faces of any kid. These coincidences, this impossibility of changing your actions. Having to consider your actions from outside because they’re finished and unchangeable, to be in dialogue with yourself like a stranger, to feel estranged from yourself, that’s my most important and goddamn motivation while I’m working. And maybe this, with a sudden loop, leads us back to the vampire, because the vampire has no reflection in the mirror and thereby can’t be represented to himself in a basic way, the vampire who must turn to ambitions hard to represent in their turn. And hence this tasteless bloodbath and the banging fall of the vampire and a stick through his heart, dissolving, turning into dust, barely a whisper.
Translation: Thomas Krogsbøl (tkrogsboel@gmail.com)
