Splat: the Art of Bjarne Melgaard

(2019)

I.                   Scriptophiliac

The vehicle in a state of constant movement – across the canvas, across the floor. Across the continent. Jerking and swaying. Shivering and ejaculating. Cold sweat, hot sperm. Fueled by chemicals and paranoia, selves splattering themselves across surfaces already densely layered with previous splatterings, prior images covered over with brand new eruptions, tarnished and preserved, preserved through their tarnishment – the scriptophiliac splatter holds sway over any possible articulated Apollonian meaning. This is what it is to write with the body.

Emotions can be extreme things when you have no real desire to control them. “[Bjarne] Melgaard’s art comes across as something much closer to need itself,” writes Jerry Saltz, “something maniacally important he’s trying to get at – even if he knows that in our oversaturated, defensively cynical moment that this is almost impossible… [the result is] death drive and life force in collision.” Sex and death: both aims driven by desire. United in a vehicularity, a drive that, like every bad art object should, dessicates the frame, giving rise to a froth that resists containment.

Melgaard is the sort of artist that the art world hates to love. And in return, he hates them right back; as he writes in his 2012 novel, titled bluntly A New Novel: “In New York, the social etiquette is lying. Nowhere do you see this more clearly than in the art world. You never have to worry about what stupid sentences came out of your mouth the previous night, ‘cause everybody is so self-involved that they never even remember what you said. Never is a story told twice the same way, ‘cause everybody is entrenched in lies they read as truthful only ‘cause they’re so transparent.” Like Dieter Roth, the “everything artist” for whom the supposed boundaries between disciplines is something to be violated rather than revered, he’s responsible for thousands upon thousands of works of art, paintings and drawings and pieces of furniture, often installed on top of one another, impossible to discern one work from the next.

According to various biographies and critical writing on his work, Melgaard has also authored dozens of novels – though his employment of the term reflects Gertrude Stein’s refusal to respect categories, as some of these “novels” were in fact exhibitions of complicated installations where text and image met, only to devour one another in the space. As Ina Blom, a Norwegian art historian who has written extensively about Melgaard, comments: “[T]he novel, here, is not a dignified cultural format and not a token for the benefits of reading. It is a name that stands for the resurrection of a specific functional site – a site where bad ideas are allowed to proliferate freely, where thinking and attention follow the wacky logic of what actually takes place rather than what should ideally happen. […] For this reason it is also one of the few places where it is possible to articulate not just the abjection but also the strange and expensive resources of the body in pain.” Like another bad artist, George Kuchar, Melgaard’s textual work has a deceptive concern with the diaristic. Deceptive, in that Melgaard has stated that he is not interested in autobiograpy, but with auto-fiction: the vehicular proliferation and perpetuation of self-mythologies across a space, whether that space be virtual or real.

At the core of his motives is an excavation of abnormality in all its ugly abscesses. He rejects the political correctness, the “progressivist” stance of mainstream neo-liberal society’s “enlightened” stance towards queer politics in favor of what we might deem an exceptionalism, which seeks out the extremities that such discourse willfully overlooks in putting forth its agenda. “Yes,” he stated in a recent interview, “it has been very important for me to explore the places where abnormality exists in society. For me it has to do with being homosexual. In many ways I don’t think there has been any real homosexual liberation, because this fight for freedom has in some strange way excluded what is different and divergent. The struggle to marry and have children has a reverse side, which shoves everything that doesn’t fit into the hetero-normative category into the dark.” Melgaard goes into that darkness; the darkness facilitates the eruptions of his vehicle. The eruptions, his splatterments, serve as an allegory, not just of homosexuality, but of a larger society in decay.

Norway seems to breed aesthetic extremities, disruptive forms of expression that often intrude upon the real in the most violent of ways. Throughout the 1990s, the Norwegian black metal scene made international headlines, not so much for the extremity of its music – with its high-pitch murderous screaming espousing Satanism, backed by repetitive droning guitars and drums – as for the sensational murders committed by some of its long-haired, corpse-painted musicians. Melgaard was fascinated by both for a period, to the extent that he even collaborated with some of the musicians/convicted murderers in the scene, in addition to producing independently several paintings and drawings depicting anonymous black metalists. “DEAD GUYS GET HARDONS TOO…” screams the text in one of these paintings. The text is inscribed in black marker on the left side of the painting, the words dripping cartoon drops of sperm, while on the right side, one black metal musician is on his knees sucking the cock of another. In another of Melgaard’s black metal paintings, with a blood red background, the text declares “CUT OFF MY COCK TO PLEASE MY DARK LORD,” and we see that the Viking metal dude has done just that with a large butcher knife. The details, however, are nearly obscured by the thick black wavy lines painted wildly, uncontrollably, inferring spurts of blood and semen overwhelming the pictorial plane. Throughout Melgaard’s oeuvre, one finds evidence of a pronounced scriptophilia, defined by Patricia G. Berman as “the love of the line, or gesture, of excess.” Or, to put it another way, we encounter the irruption of a frameless writing, the elucidation of a new syntax marked by the breakdown between line, image, word – but also dimensionality, as Melgaard’s flat surfaces erupt seemingly spontaneously in exhibition contexts, where the dense layering of the installations becomes an artwork in itself.

Despite the initial reciprocal interest between Melgaard and the Norwegian black metal scene – Melgaard was even featured as the sole visual artist in the 2008 black metal documentary Until the Light Takes Us – many of the musicians soon came to reject Melgaard owing to his integration of gay pornography in these works, even sending him homophobic death threats. This was but one of the many conflicts that Melgaard would have with his native country because of the nature of his work. 

II.            Contingent Vehicularities: Munch, Melgaard

The wealthiest country in Europe, Norway is also arguably the most nationalistic. As any visitor or resident can readily observe, the national flag is woven here more often than any other country besides, perhaps, the United States of America and/or North Korea. As a Danish friend remarked prior to my first visit to the country, “You won’t meet a Norwegian person who’s not proud of being Norwegian.”

Although Melgaard hasn’t lived in Norway for more than a decade, he is still often referred to in the press as the most famous Norwegian artist since Edvard Munch. In January 2015, this notion was cemented when Melgaard was invited to show at the Munch Museum in Oslo. The resulting furor surrounding the exhibition provides a tough challenge for those who believe that art no longer has the power to shock and outrage, suggesting that the Romantic conception of the avant-garde still has at least one flame-bearer.

“Melgaard + Munch” was the first in a series of exhibitions intended to establish a dialogue between the Norwegian expressionist painter and other modern and contemporary artists. [1] In the weeks following the exhibition’s opening, it was featured nightly on television news broadcasts and in front page editorials throughout Norway, garnering calls from critics, art historians, and a hostile public for the exhibition to be shut down. The show was even subject to a police investigation for its inclusion of Melgaard’s 1999 video All Gym Queens Deserve to Die; in one scene, a man sucks on the arm of a baby suggestively, leading someone to contact the authorities with the accusation that this constituted child pornography. (The police concluded otherwise and the exhibition remained open for its planned duration.) Somewhat surprisingly, another work in the exhibition, a blown-up photograph of a naked boy taken from a NAMBLA newsletter, evaded the authorities’ investigation. [2]

The dominant outcry, however, voiced by one conservative art historian, was that Melgaard’s overly sexualized work stepped over the line, morally, performing a sort of assault upon the viewer while tarnishing the oeuvre of Munch, a national hero. Such claims are historically naïve, however, in their forgetting to recall that Munch’s work also generated substantial scandal in his own day. His 1892 exhibition at the Verein Berliner Künstler was shut down as a result of outrage over his seemingly unfinished canvases and the artist’s hasty approach to form. (When sitting for portraits, Munch’s subjects were frequently astonished that the artist would complete a painting in less than twenty minutes. Such speed no doubt contributed to the prolificity of his output; speed, in perhaps another sense of the term, could be said to account for Melgaard’s.) Munch scholar Patricia G. Berman states that “such a ‘lack’ provided some of the terms of a ‘material-based’ modernism in which the visible traces of accidents, the rapidity of execution, and a lack of anticipated academic finish, signaled authenticity, the bodily traces that give form to intuition.” Munch’s friend Rolf Stenersen could similarly have been writing about Melgaard when he identified Munch’s “quest for a non-existent happiness, [which] was nothing but turmoil and need, sex, sorrow, and anguish.” Sex and need over form and polish: indeed, this is one of the identifying characteristics of both artists’ modus operandi, as Melgaard himself averred: “[Munch] worked hard to make things unfinished, he worked quickly and very sketchily. It was important for me. Being able to let things remain unfinished, leave areas of canvas unfinished by paint.” As it surfaces in the work of Munch, this “sketchiness” and unfinishedness is related to ideas regarding morbid and failed masculinity, according to Berman. It also chides with obsolete notions of homosexuality as being revelatory of a failed, incomplete masculinity. Before Munch, another oft ridiculed, bad artist named Paul Cézanne – regarded by Picasso and Matisse as the father of modernist painting – also exhibited his canvases unfinished, suggesting this as an originary motif of modernist painting. Ultimately, as art historian Oystein Sjastad reminds us, the conception of queerness has a lot more to do with just mere sex: “To be queer was to criticize the establishment through one’s life, the equivalent of being avant-garde.” In addition to the scriptophilia that both artists share, in the fluidity of their lines and shapes, the essential queerness of the avant-garde tradition unites the work of Munch and Melgaard.