by Jenny Hval
The magic of community, of the defeat of death and loneliness. Å, I’ve missed you.
Venke, Terese and I are a band from the moment we meet at the exhibition opening at the Munch museum and get talking. The tone of the conversation changes abruptly from polite and introductory to witty and dynamic. We realise we can talk about the same stuff, totally relaxed and therefore at terrifying speed, without breaks; we’ve jumped into a jet stream that’s so powerful, we don’t notice that the event is over until the museum is empty and we are pushed through the doors out into the darkness.
In the days that follow the opening we continue the conversation on all the applications of the internet. We leave a chain of invisible but glittering email threads, Instagram group messages, and iMessage bubbles behind us. Even when we don’t get back to each other for a while, I can feel the stream, the energy; imagine the speech bubbles being produced. Venke calls it the phantom conversation. I call it songs.
I call it songs because we can speak openly and without fear. Our conversations always flow continuously, safe and at the same time elastic, steady like the beat of a bass drum and fleeting like cymbals and gentle percussion. Most of all, there’s a harmony, a flow of compassion that opens our currents to each other, bringing us closer together. We write and talk ourselves into each other. We become songs, together.
The first thing we talk about, right away when we meet at the exhibition, is Munch. After a while the conversation touches on one of his paintings not featured in the show, Puberty (1894– 1895). In this painting, a very young girl sits naked on a bed, with her arms loosely crossed over her crotch. Her body casts a big, dark shadow that hits the wall behind her. The shadow looks unnatural, as if it’s not coming from her but from something separate from her, something hanging over her.
It’s summer and peak season when I visit the National Gallery and look at this painting. There’s such a crush of people between me and the girl as I move toward her that I can only see her head, and she looks as if she were dressed. When I finally reach her, it hurts to see her naked body surrounded by the tourists’ incessant clicking and yapping – tourists with their waterproof trainers, windbreakers and sensible backpacks crowding her bed, her shadow and her skin. It turns the painting into pornography, an illustration of the commercial exploitation and determined conservation of paintings with naked young women as motifs, or what we call ‘art’.
But maybe the girl from Puberty, and all naked young women in all paintings, are actually sitting there hating. Hating the painter, hating their boring gloomy life, hating the king and the president and the bishop and the prime minister and the authors and society and their own place in it. Maybe it’s not a shadow climbing the wall behind her, but smoke from the spontaneously ignited occult fire of hatred.
I’m struck by the naïve notion of taking the girl home, painting clothes on her, black clothes maybe, painting her into a new framework, as the Canadian writer Aritha van Herk does to Anna Karenina in Places far from Ellesmere. In this book, van Herk wants to save Anna from being another woman character in literary history who’s crushed by a train, and she plucks Anna from Tolstoy’s novel and gives her a new frame, a new text. She demonstrates how literature and art can tamper with their own past, create new bonds. As far as I know, no one has tried this witchcraft on Munch and his Puberty (she doesn’t even have a name), but now I want to paint or rewrite the girl in the painting, save her, save us. Because it’s definitely just as much about me, about saving myself from the position of a contemporary subject passively accepting the narratives offered it by past art, past stories about gender, expression, hierarchy. I want to save myself from nodding in acknowledgement to Munch, to 1890, from the outside, with insight, and accepting that Puberty is the mirror art has installed for me.
Aritha van Herk refused to accept the idea that artworks are static and complete and that stories can’t be edited. She brought Anna with her, out of Anna Karenina, when she left her home in Alberta for Ellesmere, an island up north in Canada. Up there, far away from Tolstoy’s hands, in the white icescape, the geographically blank map, she could write a new story. Facing Puberty and her flickering shadow, I think about my studies in New England, about how I, too, wanted to re-create myself, to save myself from the South. But I was alone, without an Anna or Puberty; I had no art, no more ingredients. I couldn’t form any bonds, had no ability to resist new authorities or the traditions in the American university system. Here at the National Gallery in Oslo, with Venke and Terese and our electric conversation at the back of my mind, it isn’t just about getting away from our homes. It’s about finding bonds strong enough to tamper with both art history and our own history. It’s about no longer being the match girl, the one standing outside looking in at society, with insight, in the light from the little flickering flame. I’d rather use that match to ignite the occult fire of hatred.
I’ve been taught to think far too much about the autobiographical, about what could be called private or even weak in the art that rewrites other art. As if how close the ‘I’ is to reality overshadows all other questions. Shouldn’t we rather think about the bonds that are formed, that connect us? I imagine the shadow of Puberty, the bond, stretching out toward me and embracing me, enveloping me in its flame. In this connection, art is a magical place where reality and fiction finally are just the end points, not the underlying substance, they are full stop and capital letter, comma and line break, while the place that actually emerges, that’s what’s magical.
This is what fascinates me: not writing as art, I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to understand that, never figuring out what it is, for that I’m too primitive or inadequate to understand. But writing as magic, that appeals to me, and writing as the creation of bonds and bands, that I can understand. Connect-the-dots drawings and the invisible links between them. The band is a desire to blaspheme the beloved icons of the art institutions; a desire to save and be saved, and to rewrite: the desire not to be a passive recipient.
I haven’t considered my work blasphemous since my early student days. Many years have passed since I told myself I hated God. I’ve never thought about magic. But in the days following my visit to the National Gallery, all this is woven together in my head, and on my old American keyboard I create a new document and begin to write something, a film, without a commission or a project in mind. The first thing I do is type Æ, Ø and Å, again and again, internalising the keyboard shortcuts as if I were playing a theme on the piano, again and again. Suddenly I’m sitting studying the old black metal clips on the bonus DVD in the Darkthrone records. Now I feel all that black returning, as if it never really left me, as if everything I’ve done to reinvent myself as mature and subtle and a natural creamy blond has been completely eradicated with a tiny click. The black metal clips make me want to start a new band, not to play music but to start creating something here, in community, in bonds, in hatred, in the simplified complexity of swirling tree tops in black and white, in the pixelated fractals. The creation has to begin with blasphemy, the hope in hatred. I have to get back there.
In blasphemy there’s a secret pact, a desire for a community that isn’t rooted in the Christian, Southern spirit. Blasphemy protects us against the moral fables we grew up with; blasphemy renounces anything that requires our submission. It shows us a crack in this reality, through which we can pass into another, more open meeting place. Blasphemy has not forgotten where it came from; it maintains that defiance and energy. Blasphemy looks for new ways of saying we. And the band is a we, a community that happens without anyone asking. It’s an unknown communal place, an impossible place. In a place like that, we can make art magic.
A few days after we first meet at the museum, Terese and I receive an email from Venke inviting us over for coffee and a duel. Terese replies enthusiastically, saying that she’s bringing her metaphorical sword, and asking for milk, sugar and biscuits with the coffee. I send a link to a book in an online bookshop as my reply. It’s th
e book on the band Hellhammer: Only Death Is Real. The black metal bonus material relates to everything, it sticks to everything in me, and in us.
In the book, Tom Gabriel Fisher recounts how Hellhammer’s members, later regarded as the most important forerunners to Scandinavian black metal, used to stage sword fights in the middle of the night at a traffic crossing in the Swiss suburbs. At that time they spent their evenings rehearsing and recording cassettes, while working menial day jobs in garages and factories. The band members, sick of the stifling Central European post-war era, had to invent their own rituals, and the music, inspired by heavy metal, punk and lots and lots of hatred, was the catalyst.
They put on costumes and hid by the traffic lights late at night, and when a car stopped for a red light they charged into the street and started to fence, stopping only when the car got a green light. This was the early eighties, long before there were live-action role players or metallers in black capes and medieval outfits, and seen up close through a thin car windowpane, it must have been a frightening and absurd sight.
Driven by anger and the urge to rebel, Hellhammer’s members wanted to play the part of knights on that boring suburban stage. They wanted to find meaning in an existence marked by submission, quietude, conformity and tradition. The sword fight was band practice, a gig, a protest against uniform everyday life and the hopelessness awaiting them in modern adulthood. Their battle was fought on the streets, in front of warehouses, shops, housing estates, parking lots, garbage dumps and the Swiss Alps.
After reading the book I had a clearer idea of that role-playing scene than of Hellhammer’s music. At first I thought it was because sound is more difficult to describe, or that I didn’t understand the music well enough, but there’s another reason. Sword fights feel like complete rituals, almost like activism. They are problematic and violent, but also absurd and distinctive. Music, on the other hand, is accommodated in existing formats like records and gigs, and the descriptions of how Hellhammer found its musical expression are saturated with references to other bands and genres. As musicians, its members are defined by their instruments, their references to other bands, and the hope that their band will lift them up a level in the hierarchy and empower them.
I think about my metal band in 1998 and the disappointment I felt at the banality of the concert format and the concert venue. I think about hundreds of solo shows and projects in the years to come, and the constant pressure of conformity on what I hoped would be another word; the predictability of set lists, the pattern of the album format, the stage edge and stage times and tickets and merch and budget and ads. Hellhammer’s music was created under that pressure, and Norwegian black metal, too, but bands were also formed outside music – bands formed by bonds. The bands’ actions turned violent and tragic, but it could have been different. The other bands, beyond music, could have been art.
I note in my film document, ‘A band is a desire for blasphemy against the disciplines.’ I desire a ritual, multidisciplinary, intricate form of expression where technique and genre and subjectivity and other predetermined systems are subordinate to the community, or the desire to hate together.
Oslo seems different now. It’s as if I can look down at the ground and see straight into the soil. History is there, in ever-changing strata, layer after layer of subculture from different eras.
It’s been twenty-five years, thirty years, since the golden age of black metal, and even longer since Hellhammer’s activist knighthood. Even for me, almost twenty years have passed since I dressed in a cape and searched in vain for black lipstick at H&M. The world is different now. Our corpse paint has long since streaked our cheeks, run into the Alna river and through Lodalen valley, under the train tracks and Schweigaards Street and into the neoliberal brackish water in Bjørvika.
Our hair, which for most of us at some point was long and black, mine even on my driver’s licence photo, and was modelled on capes or lowered stage curtains, has returned to the colour of its roots; our hairlines have receded; strands from our bald spots have run down the shower drain, down to the underground where they came from. My hair was cut short a long time ago and its black chemical pigment is history. Our provincially black clothes were long ago donated to charity shops, Christian thrift shops with a saviour complex.
We’re in Oslo now, and our past is mostly invisible. Our black sign language is broken, hidden away or drained into the sewers along with cocaine traces from Western Oslo, traces of performance drugs from Sognsvann Park and heroin from Grønland. Even the Old Town tilts and slides down toward the Barcode development in the fjord. Subculture always flows downhill, backward. Black metal is world famous now, but it has washed itself clean of subculture, the way social democracy rinsed off socialism. Black metal isn’t black anymore, it isn’t a protest or a warning, it comes dressed in brawnier, more mythical and commercial colours.
But soon our band is complete, our band which is neither brawny nor mythical, but runs over, flows down in spirals to the underground. Around us Oslo East crumbles, corrodes, rots and sinks. The band makes bricks, concrete and steel beams, the places where the city is joined together flake. We pull the structures down with us.
Venke has been standing next to me, staring at the school building where we agreed to meet. Now she follows me along the school’s fenced perimeter, a duffle bag dangling from her back. We’ve been trying to remember what questions we were set in the Norwegian exams at college. Venke claims to remember something about climate change and science fiction, but college exams were long ago, and we remember them incompletely, sometimes so incompletely that I wonder if we’re confusing the essays we wrote with our real experiences.
I’m pretty sure I remember writing about Norwegian fairy tales. The text I chose was the fairy tale that frightened me the most during my childhood, ‘The mill that grinds at the bottom of the sea.’ Venke doesn’t even remember it. She’s sitting on a bench in the sun now, with her arms on the backrest and legs stretched out in front of her. Terese hasn’t arrived yet. The fairy tale, I say, is the story of two brothers who take turns owning a mill that one of them acquired in a trade with the devil himself, in hell. The mill can grind anything the owner wants, be it Christmas dinner or gold, and in the end it gets stuck and can’t be stopped, and one of the brothers almost drowns both himself and his entire family farm in herrings and gruel. It was this drowning motif that scared me the most, more than hell and the devil: the scene where you suffocate in traditional, grey pale Norwegian home cooking.
Maybe this is what I’ve had to travel to get away from my whole life. Herrings, gruel and God.
There’s Terese. Three sisters.
Where are we going? asks Terese.
Hell, says Venke, and I laugh as I always do at the word hell. It’s got to be the South that returns and still exists in me, the hope in hatred.
We’re on our way now. Our feet step on the hard asphalt, but also on something soft. Had this been winter it could have been snow, but the snow has melted, and we’re the only ones who can feel it. We’re in the centre of a sea of invisible herrings and gruel. It’s the refuse from all the white, fermented, rotten and aging stuff. We’ve spent hundreds of years perfecting a totally airtight method for flushing out and down our own dregs and decay. Even the mill winds up in the sea when the fairy tale ends.
But everything leaves traces, memories or ghosts. The mill still grinds at the bottom of the sea. It grinds out an endless supply of herrings and gruel, or black oil for what they call the Norwegian Oil Adventure. It grinds, scratches, simmers and crawls. The Scandinavian minimalist greed surfaces under our shoes.
Trash, the modern cousin of the overflowing gruel, drifts through the streets of Oslo. On the supermarket shelves it begins as an exemplar of our contemporary Pietism: sober portion packaging, proclaiming extra vitamins, low fat and sugar, pasteurisation and homogenisation. The packaging containers are safe, clean and hygienic. Eco-labelled with God’s blessing. Now, if you just look clo
sely, they’re transformed into a congestion of sour cardboard, slimy plastic and sharp rusty metal scraps that rot openly in the cityscape. What once gave form to our grey-white groceries, to skim milk, oats, brown bread and fish pudding, is now semi-translucent, porous, and compressed. All the text and all the colour has been washed from its pale plastic skeleton. Most people don’t see it as clearly as we do; they only notice ordinary litter and a whiff of sour wind. For us, the image of Grønland’s streets appears in double exposure: contemporary world and ancient symbols. It’s as if we’re caught in the aura, that phase before the migraine when you hallucinate or see multiple worlds on top of each other, or before a serial killer commits another murder. This has to be the Norwegian aura: two worlds on top of each other, the real and the waste of the real.
A new double image is exposed: the Pietistic and the Occult, the glowing snow in the woods and the whirling, dark tree crowns, the purified subjectivity and the piercing hatred. Here lies that old Southern aura, layer on layer, the Christian and the blasphemous, the white and the black. The black threatens to crack open the white: the unceasing threat of heresy. The black spots are white’s problem. This is what we’re stretched between. What they call light, and what they call darkness, the ground and the underground, hell, amen!
We want to move the underground up a notch. Hell is a place on earth.