Interviews

Martin Bladh interviewed about DES: The Theatre of Death by John Wisniewski

1. Martin, why did you title the book about Dennis Nilsen “Theatre of Death”?

For different reasons. First, I wanted the material included in this book to be a progressing drama, a form of method acting, that would give me a more accurate understanding of my lifelong obsession with the artificial aesthetics of death. The work was initially intended to be about personal self-discovery as much as a study of Dennis Nilsen the serial killer. During the process I invented a Nilsen persona, a distorted Hyde-double, to bring Dennis closer to my original romantic notion of him and his crimes. I tried to channel my creative outlet through my idealised version of what I wanted him to be, and by doing so I abandoned Dennis the man for Des, an artificial Nilsen Character. This roleplay ties my endeavours to the theatre, but it’s not a play, a series of choreographed mise-en-scènes, or a multifaceted piece of dramatic rhetoric, as much as it is a Theatre of the Mind.

Secondly, Nilsen refers to himself as a movie director and his victim’s as “beautiful props” acting the roles as “love interests” in his carefully staged and executed scenarios. Nilsen, in his confessions, referred to his victims as masterpieces akin to great sculptures; beauty revealed through murder, his hands transmuting living, breathing matter into deathly aesthetic perfection. It is my conviction that Nilsen was turning murder into fine art; that he possessed a unique sensibility, even tenderness, which I find lacking in the crimes of almost any other serial killer, and this book is proof of that.
The third and less important reason was to distinguish DES: The Theatre of Death from the 2020 ITV mini-series Des. The first printed version of the work published by Paraphilia Studies in 2013 was simply called DES.

2. You corresponded with Dennis Nilsen. Could you tell us about this?

When I started the project which would eventually develop into DES: The Theatre of Death, Nilsen had no part in it whatsoever. I imagined a rigorous introspective work without boundaries that would expose me to ‘real’ existential danger. My initial inspirations were primarily works of world literature such Charles Baudelaire’s unfinished confessions My Heart Laid Bare, Michel Leiris’s Manhood, and above all Yukio Mishima’s autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask. But I wanted it to expand beyond words and make a Gesamtkunstwerk. It was of particular importance that my own body would be one of the primary projection surfaces; after all, this was (as I’m not ashamed to admit) a work deeply steeped in narcissism. It needed extreme corporeal dimensions and theatrical aspects. I had been fascinated by the Nilsen case for more than a decade and had used Dennis’s fantasies as inspiration for at least two performances and now, through my research, he had found his way back to me. There is an uncanny likeness in Dennis’s autoerotic fantasies to that of my own artistic practice, as if his ritualistic murders, his “performances,” make sense to me. It was as if he had unlocked new possibilities to explore and, to a certain degree, recreate within the confines of my own obsessions; especially the erotic fantasies which involved his own naked body and mirrors. I was fascinated and a bit shocked, as it dawned on me that these rituals were highly reminiscent of my own recent video and performance works. And to be honest, we even looked like each other! By now I decided that Nilsen would make up the structure and method which I needed to fulfil my project. He seemed the most suitable double antagonist for my drama. Slowly, throughout the months, Dennis Nilsen did unwillingly (?) become the core of my desire: I became obsessed with him. I felt a strong need for concrete answers, a strong need for him, the real man, flesh and blood, to be part of what I was doing. After some consideration, I decided to send a letter to Full Sutton Prison, Yorkshire, where I knew Nilsen had been confined since 2003. To my great surprise, I found a letter dispatched from the same prison in my mailbox just a week after my letter had been posted.

3. Why did Dennis commit these crimes?

It was never my intention to be an amateur detective and ‘solve’ the mystery behind these crimes. Dennis has been giving different contradictory accounts of the reasons behind his actions. They have changed gradually from his first confessions as published in Brian Masters’s Killing for Company to what he has written in the autobiographical essay The Psychograph and in the final recollections from his posthumously published autobiography History of a Drowning Boy. I believe there are different, contradictory motives involved, which I’ve tried to explore in the chapters titled Mythology, Fantasy, Murder and Ritual. There’s the obvious sexual motive, then there’s the godlike Superman who possess the power to take and resurrect lives; there’s notoriety and prestige – to be Britain’s most prolific serial killer, and then there are the artistic aspects as well. There’s the childhood trauma involving Dennis’s loving relationship with his grandfather who died when Dennis was just five years old, which supposedly resulted in the subsequent withdrawal into a fantasy world where death and love fused together. Then, in later accounts he accuses the same grandfather of drugging and sexually abusing him; that these acts of molestation gave rise to his fascination with pampering and manhandling unconscious and dead bodies. He even insists that the predatory figure of the old man came to represent his own destructiveness, while the helpless boy child represented the meeker submissive part of his nature. This strange dyad leads the way for his most fascinating statement – that he killed himself in the reflection of his victims; that he was simultaneously able to identify with an active predator and a passive victim when he carried out the killings.

4. When did Dennis Nilsen commit the first murder? Why did he turn to murder?

The first murder took place at 195 Melrose Avenue (Cricklewood, London) in the early morning of the 1st of January 1979. The victim was Stephen Holmes, a 14-year-old Irish youth who Dennis had met in a local pub the evening before. Now, for the first time, Nilsen’s interior world exploded as he decided to “invite” outsiders to participate in his “performances.” The deed seems to have been propelled by some severe personal setbacks; he felt unrecognised for his hard labour at the work and betrayed and abandoned by a former lover who had stolen his precious camera and sound projector. If we are to believe him, he just couldn’t bear the thought of being left alone over the New Year’s holiday! At this stage, his own body – his mirror reflection – was not potent enough to satisfy the urgent desire for death, and his private dream world had to manifest itself in the world of the “other,” in reality that is. Stephen was strangled unconscious with a necktie and later drowned in a bucket of water. Whether the murder was pre planned or not, it bears all the hallmarks of Nilsen’s succeeding “ritual,” including the lifting, carrying, washing and pampering of the limp body; to dress (and undress) his love interest in white y-fronts, socks, and a tanktop (the same outfit Dennis fancied in his mirror fantasies); to suspend the body by the ankles from a wooden platform and masturbate over it. This first transgression also includes the use of mirrors, and it’s fascinating to read how the killer still insists that the victim is a substitute for his own body. The corpse was then lowered under the floorboards and brought up on numerous occasions before the stench of putrefaction became too overwhelming.

5. Why did mirrors play a part in his rituals and sexual fantasies?

To me, this is the most fascinating part of Dennis’s theatre. Before the murder cycle started, Nilsen claims that he derived his strongest sexual sensations from studying his own reflection in the mirror. By placing a large, long mirror on its side, strategically beside his bed, he would view his own reclining reflection. At times, he was extremely careful to avoid the sight of his face in the mirror, to detach the image and to distance it from the ‘living’ Dennis on the bed. Now he would imagine the body of the ‘other,’ and the reflection could evolve from being a resting or sleeping body into a newly deceased corpse. Dennis would add other theatrical aspects to these executions such as powdering his skin white and simulating gunshot wounds dripping with fake blood. Recalling Baudelaire’s poetic sublimation, “I am the wound and the knife,” the actor/director casts himself in the role of the victim – but, at the same time, also as the ‘potential’ killer’s intended victim; a murder which was to be executed by the scenario’s originator, the killer himself.

6. Did Dennis Nilsen see murder as an art?

He never admitted to it up front, but if you read him between the lines, that’s my opinion. Statements such as “He [referring to his last victim] looked really beautiful like one of those Michelangelo sculptures. It seemed that for the first time in his life he was really feeling and looking the best he ever did in his whole life” and “I have been my own secret scriptwriter, actor, director and cameraman… I took this world of make-believe where no one really gets hurt, into the real world … I have become the real character in the movie. The notoriety in Brixton became more real than anything I could have created in the movie world” and “I still don’t know the engine of my performance” seem to prove it. In prison the killings inspired him to produce sets of drawings, to write poems, musical compositions, and even a film manuscript; not to mention the six thousand pages manuscript Epic Nobody of which his published autobiography History of a Drowning Boy was only a short part of. I’m sure he was very flattered that artists took interest in his case and that it has inspired everything from dance performances, to films, plays, television series, songs, novels, and multimedia works such as my own.

7. Is there a relationship between victim and their killer?

I wouldn’t say that it’s a universal truth. But these are the cases which I find most appealing. I’m not just talking about real-life violence and murder as much as the world of artifice. Nilsen’s theatre is a most perfect representation of this paradox. I know that I repeat myself endlessly when I quote from the prologue of the 2013 version of the book, but the following short statement is the whole work’s raison d’etre:

I’m attracted to the tension between the perpetrator and the victim; both parts are of equal importance to me. When I put myself in a situation which I find degrading or even repugnant, I wear the mask of the victim. When I make use of authentic voices from real life victims, put them in a new context where they are forced to act as characters in a peepshow, staged and directed by me, I take on the mask of the perpetrator.

One of the aspects that really interests me is how a victim might change shape throughout the years and transform from the role of the abused part into that of the active perpetrator. How the unwilling masochist slowly matures into a willing sadist. But there are other intriguing examples as well. One being the strange relationship between Dennis and his ‘surviving’ victim Carl Stottor, who the killer decided to revive and bring back to life. Stottor would maintain an equivocal relationship to Dennis for years. He kept pondering the same questions again and again: Why was he revived? Why was he special? Did his would-be killer in fact have real feelings for his would-be victim? Was it love? Dennis has described the letters he received from Stottor in prison as “presented in the most intimate of endearments… almost like love letters.”

8. How did Shane Levene contribute to the book?

Back in the late summer 2010 I was contacted by this guy who claimed to be the son of Nilsen’s 14th victim Graham Allen. I first believed the message was some kind of prank, but it turned out that Shane – a prolific writer with a cult following – was an avid admirer of my DES project and had followed the work in progress on my (now defunct) blog. He was intrigued by my unconventional correspondence with Dennis and moved by a series of photographs based on Dennis’s Sad Sketches drawings (which he felt depicted his dead father in a sublime manner). Shane had a complicated relationship with his father who was a heroin addict and a small-time crook. Allen, or Puggy, as his friends called him, was not gay, but he was no stranger to the art of ‘rolling’ homosexuals for money, which was probably his intention when he hooked up with his killer and followed him back to his flat. Ironically, it was Allen’s flesh that clogged the drains in the three-storey house of 23 Cranley Gardens: the incident that led to Nilsen’s arrest on 9 February 1983. Shane astonished me when he confessed that:

At the age of 15 when I really started reading [Nilsens’s] words, they left me sad and inquisitive and attracted towards him. As I matured he kinda wormed his way in amongst the artists and poets and writers who have influenced me. Even today I feel a closeness to him – on an emotional/human level. I’m proud to have had him kill my father. That sounds pathetic, I know, but the truth is often that.

I understood from the start that the Shane Levene connection could bring a unique angle to DES. Having had the executioner speaking directly through the work, I now had the opportunity to involve a real-life victim connected to the case, and by doing so tap into my murderous persona in a way I couldn’t even have imagined one year earlier. I asked Shane if he would be willing to participate in a correspondence solely focused on Nilsen, the death of his father, and the connection to his own creative outlet. I warned him that the questions asked would be persistent, they might come across as ghoulish and insensitive, yet he agreed Instantly. The text was illustrated by a series of so-called Body Mails: word messages that Shane had cut into his chest with a Stanley knife and then photographed. The finished result was included in both versions of the book as the chapter I’ll Be the Mirror. Then, in December 2013, I invited Shane to participate in a performance connected to the launch of the first published version of DES in London. I knew this could be difficult. Shane had left England for France in 2004 due to problems with the British judicial system and was now living in exile in Lyon. Bringing him back to the island, even for a couple of days, entailed a certain risk with the border control. Nevertheless, he agreed instantly. This performance turned out to be a very powerful experience for both of us. Shane enacted the role of his father, and I became Des, the Nilsen character. The action took place in front of a live audience where Shane was symbolically killed, his body ritually washed, pampered and finally arranged and photographed in accordance with Nilsen’s Sad Sketches series. The performance score and photo documentation are included in the book.

9. What was the experience like working on DES for 10 years?

It had a profound impact upon me and the life I lead today. I don’t exaggerate when I say that DES is and will remain my most decisive work and that Dennis Nilsen (for good or bad) has been one of the most decisive men of my life. First and foremost, it was through this project that I got in contact with my partner Karolina Urbaniak in 2011 (our first meeting is referenced in the chapter Tour), which indirectly gave rise to Infinity Land Press, which in turn made me abandon my native Sweden for London in 2014. DES was always in a state of flux and much has changed since I wrote the first letter to Dennis. Reading our correspondence today, I’m quite astonished how much I had taken Brian Masters’s (Killing for Company) interpretation of Nilsen’s life, deeds and personality as truth. My own idealised version of Dennis was so strong at the time that it almost seems like I was talking to a mirror reflection of myself as a sentenced killer. I was so eager to reach out to this other ‘me,’ and to mould him into my own ‘murderous image.’ I bombarded him with names of authors whom I believe he must have read – who I would have read if I were ‘him,’ the ‘Killer Artist.’ The correspondence was insightful and in many ways revealing, but it dampened my initial romanticism considerably. Dennis turned out to be more terrestrial than expected; more of a lecturing schoolteacher than the enigmatic man that I had envisioned. The consequences of this realisation would propel me into a new direction that departed from my original intention. If Dennis wasn’t me, I had to become Dennis. I wanted to typecast him into a character, which was a distorted reflection of myself, and by doing so channel my creative outlet through my idealised version of what I wanted him to be. He/I became Des, the Nilsen Character. If my initial idea had been to use Nilsen as an instrument to dissect and uncover an intimate pathological condition, the sole purpose of Des was to unlock unknown extremes. How would it be to be Dennis Nilsen, to act and re-enact the vicious circle of victim turned killer turned victim… But instead of being a tool of inspiration, Des became a contagion which clung to me obsessively. I developed an urgent need to turn myself into a sublime object by staging and restaging the most perfect depiction of my own dead body. This desire inspired a series of works which run parallel to and were intricately linked to DES. I wanted my corpse to be perfectly framed and choreographed in these photographic series. I liked to look at it on gelatine prints, in the pages of books, or hanging from gallery walls blown up to gigantic proportions. No Breath of Sound – The History of Drowning (2013) was to be the culmination of this longing. It was a spontaneous work, suggested by Karolina, shot one late summer afternoon on a pebble beach beneath the cliffs of Hastings. No props included, only my naked ‘drowned’ body splayed out on the rocks in various, undramatic positions, as if it had been washed ashore. It wasn’t until months later when I saw the black and white medium format photographs, that I was convinced that the work was complete, and that Karolina had captured the most sublime image of my ‘corpse.’ And it was then that I became convinced that my real obsession was not Des the killer, but my mirror reflection of myself as the corpse in his fantasy world. It was not about murder as much as my own murder. The romantic Murder Theatre had turned into a Theatre of Death, where I played the part of willing victim. Yes, I thought my staged, perfect death was the end, and that I had exhausted the obsession. This assumption came to a halt when Dennis suddenly died in May 2018. I had a nagging sensation of being deprived of something. Whether this meant that I would never be able to reconnect with the real man on a personal level, or that all opportunities for him to experience my work were gone, I couldn’t decide. It was naïve to assume that my obsession with this killer-cum-artist would end with myself impersonating his most beautiful victim. The romantic contagion, the feverish desire which would flare up time and again during the five-year span 2008-2013, had now been replaced by a more calculated and analytical approach to Des and his theatre. But it was obsessional, nonetheless. I felt the need to reconnect with the active part of the perpetrator, the killer instead of the victim’s corpse. I didn’t want to unravel the mystery of why Des became this killer, but the aesthetic system the murders entailed. I had to put myself in the murderer’s perspective to write his script: a multifaceted drama, which stayed close to Des’s own words (what he had revealed in his writings and confessions), but to structure the execution of the act and its aftermath according to my own will.

On a final note, it’s fascinating to see the general public’s increased interest in Nilsen following his death. When I started this project, he was forgotten about by anyone who didn’t nourish a special interest in true crime. Compared to other infamous British serial killers such as Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Fred and Rose West, Peter Sutcliffe and Harold Shipman, the name Dennis Nilsen had mysteriously slipped into obscurity. Now he’s become a household name due to Netflix documentaries, television mini-series and the posthumous publication of his autobiography. It’s uncanny, but Dennis seems to follow me. By chance I ended up living next to the academy where he lived and completed his police training; I pass one of his favourite Pubs every other day on my way to work as well as the Job Centre where he was employed during the time of his arrest each time I visit my local GP. To my great surprise, I’ve also seen references to my original correspondence with Dennis and the first published version of DES turning up in the British gutter press (The Mirror and The Daily Mail), and finally – for reason beyond my control – a portion of his ashes ended up with me. When I was putting the finishing touches to this book in the summer of 2021, I was sure that this was the end of DES, but now I’m convinced that that is not the case…

_

Martin Bladh interviewd by Michael Barnett

Martin Bladh is a multi-faceted artist. Over his years in the public eye, Martin has worked on numerous visual, musical, and performance art projects. He entered the public realm through his power-electronics project, IRM, with Erik Jarl, and later joined by Mikael Oretoft. He would soon join forces with Magnus Lindh creating the musical force know as Skin Area. Martin has also done musical projects with Sektor 304, entitled Ruby, and with Bo I. Cavefors, entitled The Island Of Death, as well as a number of his own personal musical projects. Delving into the medium of film, Martin has created a handful of videos, many of which can be seen on the DVD accompanying Epicurean Escapism I. He also played a large part in the production of the feature film, Gasper. In the visual art world, Martin has joined forces with Karolina Urbaniak, starting Infinity Land Press. Through Infinity Land Press he has already participated in the production of a number of books, including The Rorschach Text, To Putrefaction, and No Breath Of Sound – The History Of Drowning. With all these projects in the works along with more that I haven’t even mentioned, and others which haven’t yet found their way to the public eye, Martin Bladh is a very busy man. I am honored to have the multi-media artist take a little time out of his dizzying schedule to answer some questions about his art and some others which lead in a more personal direction.

Michael: I have to admit from the start, I was a bit nervous to conduct this interview. So often these days in entertainment, artists follow their own path, without much attention to overarching themes or the history of art. I get the feeling when observing your various forms of art, that there is a serious depth, hidden meanings, allegories, which all need to be taken into account to fully appreciate your body of work. Do you have a formal education in the arts, or has this always been a natural passion for you?

Martin: I’m interested in the history of art, and yes, I’ve studied it at the university as well. Even though you don’t need the faculties I really believe this is something people need to know and understand, before they can call themselves “artist,” or using words such as “important,” “urgent,” “brave” or “original.” I also went to so-called art school for some years, which was, and is nothing but utter BULLSHIT that should be shunned like the plague. I’m sure that at least 95% of all this silly playground nonsense does more damage to the so-called artist to be and the art-world in whole.

Michael: Considering my previous question, do you find that fans often notice the underlying meanings?

Martin: Well, I’ve different kinds of fans. Some of my “music fans” are mainly interested in noise and the pitch of my voice. I mean if you haven’t bought the latest IRM and Skin Area CD’s, read the lyrics and looked at the artworks you have a very vague idea about the content. You can’t listen to an MP3 and experience it, that’s just impossible. Then of course you wouldn’t count as a FAN if you didn’t buy the actual record, right? Saying that, my work has a vagueness, and ambivalence to it, it points you into specific territories but it doesn’t have one specific meaning.

Michael: Are you equally happy to see fans enjoying your art, regardless of their understanding of the underlying meanings?

Martin: I don’t like laziness, which is a huge problem these days. There’s too much information out there and it’s too easy to get it; that instead of really analyse a subject people are just scratching the surface and move on to the next download. I mean, the day people will start to buy kindle art-books everything is fucked! But of course, it’s always nice to be appreciated, even if it’s only for having composed a curious tune, or a framed decorative piece of tapestry.

Michael: You have recently started a company, Infinite Land Press, with Karolina Urbaniak. Would you like to tell readers a little bit about the goals of the press and some of the recent publications?

Martin: Me and Karolina Urbaniakstarted Infinity Land Press back in 2013 as a means to publish our own material without having to deal with any middleman. I still lived in Sweden back then and Karolina was based in London. Our first book To Putrefaction (2013), a romantic ode to death and decay, was strictly limited to 50 copies. We then got the idea to publish books with other artists that we admired, such as Dennis Cooper, Michael Salerno and most recently Philip Best, and collaborations between ourselves and other artists – Karolina did Altared Balance with Jeremy Reed and The Void Ratio with Shane Levene, and in the beginning of 2017 me and Jeremy Reed’s book Darkleaks – The Ripper Genome will be released. We usually deal in strictly limited editions because that’s what we can afford and stock in our office (which is our living room), and we’ll continue to publish as long as we find material that’s interesting enough. Our credo: Infinity Land is a realm deeply steeped in pathological obsessions, extreme desires, and private aesthetic visions. Having disappeared over the horizon from the nurseries stocked with frivolous babblings of apologetic pleasures, Infinity Land is foundationally a geography configured by the compulsive, annihilating search for impossible beauty. In the words of Yukio Mishima, “True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”

Michael: As I’ve already alluded to, your artistic vision is truly multi-faceted. You have released everything from books, to DVDs, to albums. You have also done some stage shows which combine aspects of all these projects. Can we look at your entire body of work as part of a whole? Is there an over-arching vision which anchors all these ideas into one central theme?

Martin: I like the Wagnerian idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, where different artistic media bleed together into one synthesis. It might be a weakness, but I’ve never felt satisfied by expressing myself through a single media, and I’ve vivid memories of the suffocating frustration that I went through from the period 1998 – 2003, when sounds and lyrics was my only outlet. The multimedia expression has become an absolute necessity for me, if you read my books DESand The Hurtin’ Club you know what I mean. And yes, every new project I do has a specific content which I try to filter through these various medias.

Michael: Out of all your musical output over the years, I was the most intrigued by your work on Ruby with Sektor 304. The vocal style was totally different than I had experienced on IRM or Skin Area albums. I wonder if you could give us some insight into that album? How it came about as a collaboration between you and Sektor 304. Also, I wonder what your connection is to the character named Ruby, the main focus of the album.

Martin: I’m glad to hear you saying that as I believe it to be highly underrated. The Sektor 304 guys contacted me back in 2012, and wanted me to send them a guest recording for a live broadcast they were doing for the Portuguese radio. When I heard the result I was very pleased and asked them if they wanted to collaborate with me on an album. I remember making clear from the start that this would be something different from what I’ve been doing with IRM and Skin Area, and the guys were very sympathetic and excited about that. The whole narrative and background story of Ruby (the name’s got an alchemical inclination) came out of a clinical study from the late 50ties, about art therapy and schizophrenia which I’ve read. It was based on dialogs between a psychiatrist and patient, how the patient’s explained his painting for the psychiatrist and the interpretation process involved. I kind of re-wrote this material for my own purpose, which (obviously) took it into even darker territories, and that was the birth of the androgynous Ruby.

Michael: I had the pleasure of witnessing an IRM performance last year, on the APEX Fest Tour. The performance was magnificent. You had an extremely theatrical stage presence, which seemed almost choreographed, everything from your facial expressions to body positioning, and the handling of the two microphones. Do you put a lot of preparation into your live sets for all your projects or was this a natural presence which just seemed to be calculated?

Martin: Nothing I do on stage has been prepared or choreographed beforehand, but I’ve done these performances for quite some time now, so I might rely on my body memory. The only so called “preparation” I do is to drink, and let the alcohol sensation peak when I go on stage, I guess it’s somewhat similar to an Dionysian frenzy, and I really work myself up when I’m up there; so I’m not really aware of my body postures or facial expression until watching the reproduction of the show afterwards (which I do very seldom).

Michael: Continuing on the topic of the APEX Fest, I was delighted to read in the “Through My Eyes” article on Santa Sangre Magazine: “Any moment of 2015 you’ll remember on your death bed? The city of Baltimore. I never seen anything like it in the western world. A hellhole. Amazing.” Obviously, coming from Baltimore, I found this remark quite interesting. Baltimore, as with much of the United States and Europe, is currently undergoing a lot of social changes and realizations. I would be interested if you could take that previous statement into a bit more detail, and describe to the readers exactly what you found so different about Baltimore.
Martin: Ha, ha, well I guess that statement was a bit unfair, cause I only saw some of the roughest parts of the city, which actually reminded me of photographs of Berlin 1945, with whole building blocks caving in on themselves. I know there’s another side to the city as well, but I never seen anything like it neither in Western nor Eastern Europe. I remember asking the organiser for a pharmacy and she told me there was one just a couple of hundred meters away, but to get there I should take cab because otherwise it might be too dangerous.

Michael: In 2014, your most enduring musical project, IRM released Closure… through Malignant Records. You also released the track, “Triptych”, which is a sort of crash course of the whole trilogy which included: Indications of Nigredo, Order4, and Closure… Since finalizing this chapter of IRM, have you begun to work on something new, or is IRM currently on hold as you guys focus on other projects like Skin Area, Jarl, and Infinity Land Press?

Martin: IRM haven’t worked on any new material since finalising Closure… , and I’m not sure when we’ll start again. Everything is a bit more complicated since I moved to London and the other two guys are still in Sweden (living in different cities). Our records are recorded and put together very carefully, and the process of making the last two full length albums was very time consuming. Me and Magnus are actually in the process of putting together a new Skin Area record though, and we work on it every time I visit Sweden.

Michael: I recently reviewed the Pale Thorns debut album, Somberland. Pale Thorns is a solo-project by Magnus Lindh, the other half of Skin Area. When I spoke with Magnus, he mentioned that you had looked over his lyrical content on the album. We both agreed that your lyrics are totally unique and deliver extremely powerful imagery. I wonder if you can think back to when you first started writing lyrics. Were you a child when you first put the pen to paper, or did this come later in life as you started IRM with Erik?

Martin: As a kid I had a very vivid imagination, but I was more keen on drawing than writing. It was back in 1992 that I made my first attempts to write – coloured by the second wave of Black Metal – and from what I remember, they were hideously bad. It was later when I started to nurture a genuine interest in literature that something happened. Oedipus Dethroned (2000) would probably be the first serious example of some kind of craft.

Michael: Which writers or filmmakers have been the most influential on you throughout your life? Has this list changed much over the years as you have become an adult?

Martin: As a child I was obsessed with comic book- and James Bond villains, the only “books” I ever read were things like Flash Gordon. When I was a bit older I discovered H.P. Lovecraft and horror films. Then writers like Sade, Burroughs, Lautreamont and Mishima together with filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch and Pasolini turned everything topsy turvy. And then as an adult, “mature” man, I might settle for writer such as Antonin Artaud, Georg Trakl and Jean Genet, and as for film Ingmar Bergman, Fassbinder and Michael Haneke.

Michael: Sweden seems to be a place where so much unique talent enters the public realm, especially when it comes to the darker side of media. What do you think it is about Sweden which produces such dark and introspective artists?

Martin: That’s what an outsider sees when he scratches the surface, dig a little deeper and you’ll find that most of it is rather harmless and PC, filled with individuals who have a morality quite similar to your own mother’s. But yes, there are a lot of acts that originate from Sweden, and some of them are really good. A lot of it might have to do with luxury angst; to live in a safe and pampered society might give you a desire for controlled danger as spice to the boredom of everyday life. Then when it comes to medias such as literature, film or conceptual and visual art the country is a desert – total shite that is.

Michael: You have since relocated to London, is the U.K. a more fitting home-base for your operations?

Martin: I’m closer to Karolina, and it’s of course much easier to run Infinity Land Press from here. I have two-day jobs and I’ve never worked as much as I do now, but because of that I’m pricing the time I spend on my “real” work much higher.

Michael: Do you think the apocalypse is coming, if so how do you think it will happen?
Martin: Some kind of apocalypse is coming our way, but even the apocalypse isn’t the end…

——————————————-


“THE HURTIN’ CLUB”
INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN BLADH
BY THOMAS MOORE - MAY 2016

THOMAS MOORE: “The Hurtin’ Club” feels like something that has come from a certain amount of research. Can you talk about where the book and your interest in the subject matter came from, if in fact there are two different starting points?

MARTIN BLADH: It all started with me researching the darker aspects of fairy tales. I was interested in the amount of violence and camouflaged sexual themes in the Grimm Brothers’ and Charles Perrault’s work; the amount of cannibalism, mutilation and incest within tales such as “Bluebeard”, “The Juniper Tree”, “The Three Army Surgeons”, “The Girl Without Hands”, “Hansel and Gretel” and “Hop-o’-My-Thumb”. I also went through modern children’s books with darker themes, some of them written to comfort kids who came from broken homes and dysfunctional families, and was amazed when I came across a book called “Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy” written for survivors of satanic ritual abuse. I remember stories circulating in the media during the early 90s, I was a black metal kid at that time. Fundamental Christian groups, militant feminists and opportunistic journalists claimed that hidden satanic networks were operating everywhere and paying tribute to the devil by raping, sacrificing and eating babies. It was a repetition of the “Malleus Maleficarum”, the renaissance witch hunts, giving rise to new myths of horror. Several child psychiatrists stepped forward and claimed that the ‘survivor’ children experiences within the satanic cults were so traumatic, that their egos split into different personalities, and the repressed memories could only be revisited through therapy. I read everything I could find on the subject and a couple of years ago I came up with the idea of making my own fairy tale based upon the material.

TM: I’m interested in your approach to the subject matter. Do you see yourself coming from a personal investigation into the effects of Satanic Child Abuse or more from a scientific approach to the various forms of therapy that are used to look into the field? Not that it has to be that kind of binary approach, but I am curious about your mindset when looking into this stuff.

MB: I wanted to mix a psychological, scientific method with the occult and phantastic. What I found most interesting was the actual stories, the case studies themselves, but I also needed the fairy tale context to make it work. My book is not a criticism of psychiatry or an attack on right wing Christians or moral panic. It doesn’t matter whether these stories are ‘true’ (which they are obviously not), they still make great reading. I collected and compared many case studies from around the Western World and the similarities between them were stunning. The ‘victims’ repeat the same stories again and again – how they’re being drugged before taking part in rituals, how they are forced to witness babies, children and grownups being sacrificially slaughtered, how they’re being forced to take part in these killings and to consume the flesh of the victims, how they’re submitted or being the perpetrators of sexual torture, how they’ve been watching or took part in summoning the devil, how they had demons or foreign objects magically operated into their bodies, how dead sacrificial victims are being resurrected and killed again, and how they witnessed or took part in the mass cremation of corpses. The list goes on and on… It’s just too good (or too horrible, you decide) to be true.

TM: Do you have any personal opinions regarding different forms of therapy that are used in relation to kids?

MB: What is certain is that several of the play therapists which helped to create the satanic panic, provided their subjects with a certain selection of toys to play with – often related to death, fear and disgust – like skeletons, creepy crawlies, monsters and slime, to suggest specific scenarios. Then of course we have the whole issue with anatomically correct dolls. I mean if you give a child a doll with anatomically correct genitals he will of course pay more attention to that curious detail. Leading questions and simpleminded Freudian symbolism runs through most of these sessions. Like the great man once said: “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Child’s play is often violent and even transgressive in nature. I have fond memories of mutilating action figures, setting them on fire to watch them melt, as well as blowing off their body parts with fire crackers.

TM: The book makes me think about memory, and how different memories are reconstructed, and how it is painfully impossible to really remember something. Part of someone remembering something is an attempt to piece together mental interpretations or versions of physical experiences. I’d be interested to hear how you think memory is represented in “The Hurtin’ Club” and any whether you approached the work with memory as a theme.

MB: After spending hours and hours being interrogated I’m sure that many kids believed these things actually happened to them. But there’s sometimes a confusion whether the ‘experience’ was traumatic or not. In these cases the children’s memories are often experienced as pictures from a scary book. I believe that innocent games like playing doctor, or dissecting dolls are taken too literally as evidence, and that the children get confused by how seriously the grownups react to their stories. The trauma seems to be a bigger issue for the adult victims who recollects their ‘repressed’ childhood memories because they have a better understanding of the stigma involved. Then of course we must remember that two of the most notorious cases of ritualistic satanic abuse – as represented in the books “Michelle Remembers” and “Satan’s Underground” – are based on deliberate lies. “The Hurtin’ Club” is constructed as a polyphony of memory recollections from a variety of child personas.

TM: How do you see the four distinct sections of the book operating in relationship to each other?

MB: I wanted each section to be exceedingly different from the other. I won’t give away too much, but each of them deals with a specific therapy method, which of course is obvious when you look at the visuals. These sections are components in a bigger sadomasochistic construction where several interests are at play.

TM: Looking back now at the finished piece, have you drawn any new conclusions from writing the book?

MB: Well, I understood that I really enjoy to work with fiction. It felt like a relief. I used to believe that I was cutting myself out of the work if I didn’t stick to my usual autobiographical wanderings. Instead, “The Hurtin’ Club” helped me to dig deeper into new territories and bring up images I hadn’t come across before.



Martin Bladh interviewed by Peter Sotos

This interview with Martin Bladh was conducted by Peter Sotos during the autumn of 2007.

PS: I’m intrigued by the idea that the many references you use in the text may conjoin only through your work. The references aren’t so disparate, seeing as an example that the confluence between Artaud, Nitsch, Bataille and Freud has been heavily and routinely discussed, but I’m wondering if the ideas you mine may make more sense for you as a writer rather than a performer, musician or a filmmaker. That maybe you personalize the effect these references have? That they chart a history? That you’ve eroticized… the possibilities?

MB: All these fragments are raw-material, a starting point; the actual artwork starts with a vague idea, a picture or a text, and then suddenly a scenario grows from that. In many cases they make more sense to me personally than to the observer or casual reader, but in works such as Matt 5:29-30 the text reference is very obvious and gives the work a new dimension which I think is possible to grasp. As you’ve mentioned these “raw-material” often follows a context and are not as disparate as, let say…Bacon’s visual raw-material which can link together a car crash victim with an umbrella, a Velasquez painting and an Eliot poem. Take a performance work such as The Death of Narcissus where I started out by making a connection between Dennis Nilsen’s notorious autoerotic obsession in front of a mirror and John Nathan’s speculations about Yukio Mishima’s narcissistic and deeply erotic suicide. There is definitely a kind of semi-storytelling here, and I’m very precise when it comes to putting these references together.
I wouldn’t go that far, and it would be ridiculous to state that I “live” these texts references, but I try to find connections between them, my own words and body. The idea of taking them upon me; using myself as a sort of canvas or a crash test dummy for other people which I feel related to or a topic that fascinates me. There’s a strong bound here that makes perfect sense to me. Then, take a guy like David Nebreda, which is the most amazing thing I’ve seen; this guy is obviously very sick and it would be ridiculous to even try to come near or replicate his extremely insightful personal work, but his pain, compulsive aesthetics and the obvious danger he puts himself in excites me enormously… So what is left in the end…my own narcissistic urge, personal
fetish?

PS: Fetishism is a reductive idea, I would think especially here. Certainly, your aim is to expand these ideas? I’d never ask if experience is central to the work. You can look at what Sade created versus Bataille. Or Artaud versus Nitsch. And easily understand that what’s missing in both Bataille and Nitsch has to do with an extremely personal monologue that has nothing to do with immediate flesh or grandiose provocation. A friend of mine was recently selling some used books on porn theory to a bookstore and the guy behind the counter didn’t want them. He said they’d buy porn but not porn theory because it was too much like buying a book on beer. The guy’s an idiot, obviously, but what does make sense to me is that very few artists actually make something that is better, or more actual, than the theory. Sade and Artaud being two examples who do.
The point I was trying to make is related to Bacon, actually. In Bacon’s work, I think, you’ll find that these various, seemingly unrelated, instances come together to make a very personal reality. Bacon’s work is then something that exists far above the simple references, removes, practicalities. It doesn’t make sense to pull apart his work into analogies or backwards gossip. The work exists as a convergence, perhaps, but not an assembly. It’s not defined by its surreality or improvisation. You couldn’t say it’s a statement on sex, or umbrellas, or even a proxy, but you could view it as a sexual experience that couldn’t be captured in any way other than creating that specific painting. What I was trying to get at was if you thought all the information you collect and then itemize come together through the work you release in a form that is greater than the parts. I think it is. And since you ask if it might be a narcissistic urge or fetish, I have to ask first: What do these trawls suggest back to you?
Nebreda, to use your example, is more than a document of madness or physical suffering. Just like Artaud. Though it’s very common to see his work treated as such – by academics who’re looking for word-play extremes or lazy voyeurs who think the material is part of a sadistic giggle. How does narcissism play back? Or do you just indulge it…?

MB: To me the final product is the most important thing; a work isn’t good if it doesn’t amount to anything. I’m not really that interested in theory. In art, theory is useless if it can’t give any form of delivery. These kinds of quasi scientific theories often tell more about the artist’s own pathological state then he would like to acknowledge. It’s like – “why do I have this urges, I can’t be alone, so it most have an explanation that comes to everybody’s (mankind’s) benefit, and I was meant to be a ring leader for this new insightful philosophy.” This kind of thinking approaches a universal almost utopian vision; a claim for greater human values which doesn’t speak for the artist alone but the whole world. And it’s here I think Nitsch goes wrong; his great visions are still after all these years only partly realised, and lately he’s even reduced them further by not having animals slaughtered during the actual actions due to fear of death threats and reprisals from animal-right groups. He is bigger then ever and still he is farther from his bombastic theoretical texts then ever before. Artaud literary lived his own words, which probably annihilated him in the end, but he had no other choice and stayed very true to his work. My anthology collections are much more suggestive than theoretically explaining, and when put together as a whole (with the actual performance and the later reproductions) I think they expand and give the work a new dimension, which I find very inspiring and even seductive.
I feel very close to Bacon and I totally agree with what you said about him; that his work couldn’t come out in any other way. Just as with Bacon, sensation is the central key to what I’m doing, but compared to him I’m far too eclectic and there’s a long way to go before I reach such a genuine and personal way of expression. As you know, one of my action pieces is called Sensation is Everything. Everything comes down to sensation: sadism-masochism-exhibitionism-narcissism-fetishism-egocentrism… To depict myself in a particular violent fantasy, gives me a rush which comes very close to sensation and of course gratification. I’m always looking for an adequate picture of myself, or of myself as the staged wound. To have this distorted, damaged reflection of my own body thrown back at me is a very sensual experience. I can relate to Mishima’s rigorously staged and perfectly aesthetic photographs of his own death. This might be looked upon as a futile process, both romantic and pathetic, but to me it’s of great importance. And satisfaction is what hopefully comes back, as private sensual experience. After all I’m only concerned with my own private universe and the people I choose to impersonate and thereby drag into it.

PS: Is there a requirement for an audience in what you do? I’m trying to understand the difference between a ritual and a personal exploration, perhaps, but also your reasons for writing scripts as something that is in essence a fantasy. Or is it essentially something else entirely?

MB: A present audience isn’t always that necessary, but communication is. It’s a limitation to always relay on an audience. The most important thing is to make something which exalts and inspires me. I see artistic creation as an urge, and sometimes the urge is an exhibitionistic one and an audience is needed. But there’re also pieces that require more perfection which I rather perform alone in my apartment. I always use some kind of reproduction media such as photography, especially polaroid, video and accompanying texts. Some of my favourite works that involve the artist’s own body were performed alone with the camera as the single witness. When it comes to drama I often prefer the text before the actual realised work. I’ve actually written some drama pieces that are meant never to be performed neither for an audience nor a camera (not only because of the delicate subject matter), they couldn’t possibly be realised in the flesh…the suggestive power of words becomes everything.
I like monotony very much which has been reflected in my work again and again. I guess this fascination gets very close to what is referred to as ritual, but to me repeating a pattern is more about form than some kind of spiritual experience or magic reality.
I’m careful about using terms such as catharsis and therapy through art (although I find Schwarzkogler’s and Artaud’s concepts very inspiring). I prefer terms like fantasy, fetish or sensation. I’m no modern day shaman or priest.

PS: Why is the writing so cold and detached? Is the process of carefully itemizing the things that inspire you vastly different than the life that might erupt through the performance pieces? How does a personal fantasy find locus in the “suggestive power of words”? I’m thinking, especially with your films, that you want to see… more?
I started making some films recently. And the idea I wanted to deal with was based in taking the words away from the people who would agree to sit in front of a camera for me. I only asked people that release different forms of pornography. Because, to start with, I was interested in dissemination rather than the hackneyed impulses behind their sexual tastes. I wouldn’t mention this otherwise as I hate work that begins with an experiment so that the final work is seen as “experimental” –essentially a subjective marketing or craft strategy. The genesis of the work doesn’t complete the idea. But I found the interviews to be truly excruciating. I had to try and find what I was interested in locating in another way. This isn’t to say that I was only interested in what I thought I wanted to hear. Every person I listened to would yap about their exhibitionism and then slide that thin confession into an even thinner understanding of what they might expect back from an audience. Personally, I don’t believe art requires an audience and I don’t believe that you are trying to do anything like a shaman or priest. Obviously, you couldn’t perform many of the texts you’ve written. And I don’t think you’d have to. But there’s a calculation to them as scripts in that they resemble instructions and practical requirements rather than disgust driven or sexually desperate screeds or even a pornography that might have a more recognizable or inhabitable style…?
Of course, Dennis Nilsen thought he needed bodies to experience what he thought he wanted. But he also – like Dodd, Dahmer and so many others- wrote elaborate plans in diaries. Whether he found the experience as frustrating as the fantasy is interesting but hardly relevant when art is concerned. I don’t think you do what you do for an audience. So can you explain what you mean when you say communication is necessary?

MB: Yes I would want to see and to show more…but there are things that couldn’t be done in front of the camera because it involves other people. It feels a bit awkward to talk about these text- or drama pieces because they haven’t been translated into English. Matt. 5:29-30 and Off Stage: Slide Show are both masochistic fantasies which involves extreme violence. Matt 5:29-30 is a video installation piece which also involves damaged polaroids and drawings. Off-Stage is a photo piece that consists of 16 polaroids. I’m the only protagonist in these pieces and the violence depicted on the video and the pictures are obviously faked, which I think works in these two cases. But the other texts that I referred to, that isn’t represented in this book, deals with grandiose scenarios that involve other people, corpses and animals. And I would never allow this material to be performed and thereby be reduced and simulated into nothing. It would totally destroy it. Still they are written as drama pieces which would be possible to perform on a stage or in front of the camera, and that’s the way I like it; that it is possible to follow the instructions and realize the text…but still you know it would be absolutely impossible…in the end only words could do them justice. Do you remember that we had a brief discussion some years ago about artistic implosion versus explosion? When in an implosion you wear your own work and it becomes a most personal thing and with an explosion you involve outsiders into the creative process which might be a problem to your artistic integrity. I would like to see these texts as implosions involving other people.
My texts are cold and instructional, and again this has to do with my fascination with form. Many of my ideas tend to materialise as rigorously structured scenarios, simple, clinical in an almost theatrical setting. And I can understand if it looks like I’m trying to erase myself from the text, but really I’m not, it’s just the way it comes to me, naturally.
With communication I don’t mean that I’ve an urge to explain or share myself, but what I do need is a kind of feedback, directly or indirectly from a spectator, reader or listener. I know and understand that what I read into and feel through the work is more than an audience can possible grasp, but there is still a need of some kind of feedback or dialog. I don’t really know if this is a simple kind of ego-trip, child disease or a basic human need, and frankly I don’t care. What about you? Your work is extremely personal. Do you still feel a strong urge to get your work published and read? I think I would have to carry on my artistic creation even if no one would see it or care about it. It’s a necessity; I do this because I have to and can’t stop doing it. What about you Peter?

PS: To me, the subjects I’m dealing with are too complex to write an essay or opinion piece. And there’s a problem that comes from an audience wanting the writing to be separate from life and so-called life experience. It isn’t. I’ve written books about why I write and why I publish -not just descriptions of sucking off men through glory holes or children being raped by explicit phrasing. To me, there’s not a question of why the work is personal. There’s no other way in. Also, to pretend that the books haven’t created me or that I could’ve remained somehow pure to an idea or stance or settled in comfortable public opinions seems completely opposed to why I would want to write and publish in the first place. So much of my work is about recognizing myself in certain others and the sickening, exciting elasticity of empathy –It’s never a question of brutal honesty or lies or trying to fingerpoint a universal truth and teaching an audience something about themselves. I’m not trying to prove anything, I don’t stick to a script and I’m not writing a confessional –the ones that read this material, looking for that, usually stop at gossip. That has nothing to do with why I write.
Look at blog writing or the new genre-version of memoir. People send me their work or direct me to their op-ed pieces and weekly blogs and I’m sure these dolts think they’re contributing something to the world as well as thinking that this is something they must do for themselves, first and foremost. I don’t see it. The experience of my tastes and interests have very little to do with the simplicity of numbers or flesh or art theory, in fact. What’s in my head would never make any sort of sense other than by writing. Another example could be found in the countless internet clubs where men masturbate onto photos and then post the cum covered shots. If all I did was photograph the spill and state my favourite character, the weight and personal significance of the experience wouldn’t exist. All the facts and choices and options that make something like that important to me would never mean a fucking thing otherwise. I’m not looking to stop, you know? And ignoring the act -and the interest in what the act is, or should be- would be an essay. This is far too important to me. But I can’t control the context that the audience reads in. Shame, embarrassment, bragging, performing: all the same lazy rigors of what creates a quiet pervert, marketing artist or a silly political voice. I think I know where the experience becomes real and it isn’t in fumbling or shouting or recalling anecdotes.
I’m trying to understand what makes you pick your medium. A photograph as opposed to a painting. Or a film rather than just a single stopped image. I suppose I’m wondering –as well- if there is a centrality to all your work? An aesthetic predisposition or rabid impulse…? I’d have to say that I think there is a single, wide personality and I’m trying my best to drag everything backwards. It may sound reductive but I don’t see it that way at all. Am I way-off?

MB: What I’m doing is trying to create a personal “legal” outlet for fantasies and obsessions; a private cell where you’re your own master and executioner, who’s got control and the freedom to lose control. It’s not a matter of what is safe or risky as long as it is urgent and needs to be done and feels real to you. During the last ten years I’ve tried almost every artistic medium as an outlet for my ideas and obsessions; painting, drawing, photography, writing, music, film, installation, performance…you name it. In comparison to your writing, one chosen medium couldn’t do it for me…and trust me; this is a source of envy. I had a period in the beginning of the millennium when I was painting constantly, but the medium didn’t work out the way I wanted; the immediate marriage between content and form to come together in a satisfying way. Music and live shows couldn’t quite do it either. With IRM we tried to incorporate performance pieces into the shows, but mixing a musical concert with theatrical elements often tends to get a bit awkward, and in the end I was uneasy about doing these shows. It cost us not only a lot of money but a hell of problem with stage managers and producers who literally wanted to beat us up. Also the ideas that I wanted to manifest with these shows couldn’t really speak for both me and Erik in a satisfying way, it became too personal but also disappointing… I found film and performance to be a great relief; the images that I have been living with and wanted to show now materialised properly for the first time. Lately, I’ve found the single snapshot/Polaroid to be an even more satisfying way of expression, although I wouldn’t say that I’ve “exhausted” the film medium, I know that I’ll come back to it, the same thing will probably happen with painting too…
To answer your question, and it’s very obvious, yes, there’s definitely a centrality to my work. Almost everything I’ve done in music, painting, photography, film, performance and texts show the same thing. If you look at one of my (earlier) paintings and compare it to a (later) film or photography work you see that there are great similarities, they’re actually very much the same picture/scenario.


PS: Can you tell me what your work has told you about what you wanted to see…? Thinking, specifically, of creating carefully itemized tableaus that may have then moved you to want to change things about yourself? Seeing proof of what you –perhaps only- thought? Or see more, of course…?
Is one piece defined by the next piece?

MB: I’ve been thinking about that myself lately… and I don’t have a good answer to the question. The actual act of self-dissection is always a stimulating experience, which has an almost heroic feel to it. This exploration has diffidently shaped the way I look upon the world and myself. If you ask me if it has made a difference to me then the answer is absolutely, yes. It diffidently helped me excavate what is important and what is not. But it’s very hard to describe it. A friend asked me the same thing not so long ago. I can’t say that what I’m doing has made me a better person, disgusted me or opened fantastic new ways of seeing etc. People tend to think that everything I do is about catharsis, due to the violent and monotonous nature of the work; my answer is always that even if it is, I’ve not seen it yet, and it’s not likely that it’ll show up in the nearby future either; it’s like a barrier moving further and further away, and I don’t know if that is neither good nor bad, but then I have no thoughts or plans about reaching a special goal and then stopping either. It is not a religious quest. It is not a breaking test in the vein of Burden or Abramovic and I’m not interested in breaking social limits and taboos just for the sake of it. I never ask myself, have I done this before? Will I repeat myself? What I do still excites me and that’s the only thing that matters. When I’ve finished one piece there’s always an embryo for the next one. It’s like I get an idea from one piece and it mutates further into something else which often makes me understand its precursor better. That’s the only natural way of working for me.

PS: I’m very interested in your definition of sensation. Do you think sex has more to do with sight than touch, for example? And does that mean that everything sensual pales behind the triggers that fire when looking for something…?

MB: To me sensation is mostly triggered by violence. I think sensation in essence is a violent act, an overload, an attack on the nervous system. It’s a very physical experience, which has to do with brute force, not intelligence. It might seem as I’m talking about some universal human instinct, and maybe I am, but the actual trigger is a personal fetish. It could be an explicit pornographic picture, an abstract recognition of lacerated flesh or a renaissance depiction of the crucifixion, but when you come across it you recognise it immediately. It doesn’t really matter if this “violence” is projected upon me in the actual flesh or an outside object through a staged scenario. Sight is of great importance to me, and sexually probably more important than touch: the voyeuristic tension between observer and object, between nausea and masturbatory fantasy. For me a piece is successful when it excites me and at the same time gives me an uneasy feeling.


PS: Would you like to discuss your masochism? Is it a desire to see the sadistic act above all? Do you have to take this on; inculcate both sides?

MB: The role of both victim and abuser is a very central theme. It’s definitely some kind of narcissistic urge, which I sometimes mistook for self disgust when I was younger. Nowadays these sides blend together as a symbiosis, and I think I found a balance. I love the idea of being the anonymous flesh in front of the camera while at the same time being the invisible interrogator behind it. When I’m putting myself in a situation that to me is humiliating and repugnant, I’m openly indulging in a masochistic act. Then, by using voices of real life victims and turn them into fictional peep-show characters, would most certainly by proxy be seen as a sadistic act (one example being Injury where I used a collage of different case studies of sexually abused boys who later turned perpetrators, to make up this “fictional” character that I’m impersonating).
Showing the actual act of violence isn’t necessary. In several of my pieces the violent act has been cut out and happens off-stage, and you’re left with its actual outcome. Although, the whole piece still revolves around this particular incident.
The tension between sadism and masochism is present in almost everything I’ve done. I’ve especially tried to manifest these opposites in my short films. In performance work it has much more to do with being passive or active; where a certain contract is agreed upon by the passive- and active actors. Pieces such as Porn Pigs – a Love Story and Dead Ringer has very articulated characters that makes it much easier to point out which one is impersonating the sadist and the masochist. I think the inculcation between the factors is all too present in the performance work Sensation is Everything where I switched the role from sacrificial victim to victimiser, but maybe not in a very satisfying way…

PS: What is lacking? I’d doubt that you think an orgasm is the final say in satisfaction.

MB: I think it was a dire mistake to use symbolical action when trying to stage a personal outlet for sensation the way I did in Sensation is Everything. Looking back at it now, it seems to have more to do with a layman’s interpretation of Freudian thinking, and maybe even allegory instead of direct personal experience. The actual orgasm isn’t really related to sensation; it always leaves you feeling empty. I think there is a need for suspense, and this suspense have been portrayed more successfully in my video works then in the performance pieces.

PS: I suppose you need to define success. Forgive me if I’m sounding base. But are you trying to sustain something or trying to craft a sense of suspense in the way that genre writers or movie directors try to engage an audience for shock or surprise –or whatever?


MB: Success is diffidently defined by sensation, a fulfilled and adequate depiction of the body and the staged scenario. At least, that’s what’s worth striving for. I’ve absolutely no interest in the classical “Hitchcock” way of staging suspense, or genre scare and shock tactics. Again, here monotony plays a central part. Warhol occupies this territory in films like Blow Job and Vinyl, Pierre Guyotat does it, and you do in your books. I’m not looking for the usual dramatic or cinematic shock outbursts, but a slow steady process that holds me in sustain.

PS: I’m not sure what you mean by being anonymous -an audience comes to your work looking for you, right? You’re not performing so that an audience finds themselves or a unique way of looking at sex or sensation.

MB: What I’m referring to is the (my) headless body in the short films and video works. This work was made by me, alone in front of the camera without any audience present. I use the headless body and the distorted voices to reduce obvious or false references to my own person, it makes the viewer, and even myself more uncertain who is behind and in front of the camera, who’s talking and who’s answering the questions etc. Then of course it enables me to cast these “fictional” characters in a more satisfying way. By excluding my face the observer will not be able to read too much of my own biography into this fictional stories. So, to some degree I’m a projection screen, a canvas of flesh that has to be filled with a fictional meaning. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m cutting myself out of the work, my own pathological interest for the subjects I choose to impersonate is present in every single piece I’ve done.


PS: I’d argue that you may like to think you’re anonymous but that you’re really anything but. Thinking that you’re anonymous may make the work easier for you to do, though. Does it? I think a certain consistency in all of your work –or obsessions, if you like- provokes me to see it as a whole.

MB: I’m not saying that I’m being objective, but thinking in terms of role play and fiction, enables me to exclude different aspects of myself and exaggerate others. As I stated before, all these scenarios and characters that I’ve created revolves around the same topics, obsessions etc. and might very well be seen as lesser components of a greater oeuvre which includes my musical projects and earlier paintings as well.

PS: I suppose, on another level, you can explain if you’re looking for some form of personal negation.
MB: I’m quite convinced that a successful work of art lies somewhere between what is deeply personal and traditional, a kind of concentration where your own pathological and aesthetic obsessions blends together in a perfect unity. My own body is always the origin of the work, it is my own private invention, but I’m still able to communicate with an audience due to its recognisable expressive power.

PS: This may be my problem. But I know your audience. Aren’t you disappointed with most of the reactions from the idiots who post on forums and gossip on blogs? Why see your work as some form of communication that includes LCDs? How do you reconcile the private with the public? Why worry about letting morons in?

MB: Sure, most comments I’ve read are made by morons (posted on PE or industrial music forums) and have nothing to do with what I’m actually doing. Still, there are some opinions which I do cherish. Some feedback has been nourishing. Although, this isn’t the kind of feedback I’m looking for in the first place. I do this for myself and if some people tend to like it that’s fine with me. I can’t help to think of some kind of receiver. It all comes down to pure ego, can’t you relate to that? You must have found Jean-Jacques Pauvert comments flattering, even if it doesn’t affect your actual writing?

PS: No, I can’t relate to that. I’m trying hard to figure out what sort-of agency you think is involved in your work. Ego is a word that others, including you, might use in a cavalier manner and I don’t think it has any place in my work. In the gratification way I’m pretty sure you’re using the word. My writing deals –to a disturbing degree- with how I’m perceived in this world and that, of course, is an applicable definition of Ego. But our worlds are a bit different. The answer I was trying to elicit from you dealt –primarily- with how you may or may not see your compulsions ghettoized. It’s you that contends you’re interested in a form of communication. If nothing else, I’m asking you who you think you’re talking to –the ones that recognize the “expressible power” of the body. Who are they?

MB: This is foremost an exhibitionistic need, and the outcome is personal gratification. Even if the turnout might be futile, there’s still an urge. I don’t claim that my work contains a hidden dialog that speaks to the spectators in some kind of telepathic way. I don’t believe in what several silly body-artist calls spiritual contact with the audience. Neither do I care for simple art-house provocation or people that want tacky gore-feasts. There are no special types of groups or scenes that I’m referring to or trying to get in touch with. My work has started to attract a new, pretentious art audience here in Sweden which I can’t relate to at all. If someone approaches me after a performance or a screening and says that he found it to be erotically charged, that to me is communication. When someone contacts me and explains why my work has inspired him, is also communication. If I would hear that someone had actually masturbated to one of my flicks, that would also be communication and thereby gratification. At some rare occasions people have pointed at things which I myself have overlooked, and which afterwards make perfect sense to me. But what is more important is to know that my body is being looked upon during the performance or the knowledge that someone will be watching it later on a TV-screen.

PS: Do you think a contempt for what you do and want is important to, or evident in, how you conceive your “characters”? Are the different voices and mediums you choose an attempt to write a bigger monologue? In the sense that the method used forces you to talk back, essentially, to yourself?

MB: I’m sure that these creations, at least in some way are different reflections of myself, but I wouldn’t use a word such as contempt. All of these characters have a specific relation to violence which I find seductive and inspiring; being it the religiously deranged self-mutilator of Matt 5:29-30 or the masochistic rent-boy-artist of the Talk Show trilogy. Still, there is no love or compassion, and some aspects of these personalities do disgust and unnerve me. I would like to think that I’m writing a bigger monologue, that I’m talking with or back to myself through these fictional dialogs and monologues. I would like to still be able to use “characters”, but to make them speak for me and not just through me. This is what I’m working on at the moment; to find the inner monologue and the best artistic outlet for it. This is a problem which is hard to get around in a satisfying way… I’ve always had a problem with manifesting my own acute desire and to avoid the risk of sinking to deep into the world of fiction and become a mere storyteller. Your own work derives much of its strength through actual real life experiences, which I’m lacking. I’m bound to a paradoxical fantasy world that revolves around my own body.

PS: I think that is very important, frankly. You do away with this objectivity and see yourself superimposed on these”characters” that most usually come wrapped in sympathy. So, it’s not really just fantasy, is it?

MB: You might be right… It’s a paradoxical way of looking back on reality.


PS: Come to any conclusions then? I’d like to see you explain your exhibitionism, for example.

MB: The performance in front of an audience or a camera is to me very erotically charged. And as I have a strong tendency towards narcissism, my own reflection in the mirror is of great importance. Watching me in the mirror or being watched on the stage, together with the fictional, often violated character upholds as you pointed out a discourse, which I’m leading with myself. It’s an erotic image that foremost speaks back to me. There are a lot of references to theatre and stage props throughout my work: the makeup-mirror, the rows of light, talcum powder etc. And in some pathetic kind of way I’ve managed to turn these props into some kind of fetish objects which boost the experience of the performance. I think the actual idea of performing is very charged; the body on the stage is a turn on. What I do wouldn’t make sense without the reference to the stage, or the theatrical setting. And this might also be the answer to the use of role-play, I don’t think a performance act could be casual, it always involve some heightening of the ego and the senses. It is like entering a new state of mind, and this kind of artistic outlet is quite different (at least to me) from writing, painting or editing, although these components becomes very important as preparations, but also as fetish value when looking back at the reproduction of the piece. The body becomes elevated when being put in this specific context; erotically or even heroically charged; a body that is my own, but at the same time put together by a variety of other people. It’s almost like I’m building my own personal mythology, with a hall of fame which assembles different voices and heroes. To see my own body reflection covered with fake or real wounds could be compared to a masturbatory fantasy. As an example, I found Nilsen’s fantasy that includes his own dead body to be very powerful, I can relate to it, and will dedicate a whole piece to this scenario.


Interview: Bad Alchemy 2008

BA: Your work is a unity of sound, lyrics, vision & body (Vienna Actionism, Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries). Are You seeking for a synthesis of art & life, or how are Your talents and passions related?

MB: To me it is absolutely necessary that art and life frequently overlap each other. If you’re passionate about something you carry it with you 24 hours a day. I think it’s very important for artists to dare to be pretentious; you can’t make art as a hobby or a nine to five work. Then I wouldn’t go that far as to state, like several silly Fluxus-artists have done, that drinking a cup of coffee or blow air into a balloon is art and thereby important. It’s always a hard and exhaustive struggle for an artist to look for and settle on his chosen medium. Only because you’re a good draughtsman doesn’t necessary make you a good artist. Music was my first artistic outlet, but after a couple of years it seemed futile for several of the ideas I nurtured. I then turned to painting, writing, performance etc. and still I haven’t been able to restrict myself to one media. So, yes I’m interested in a work that spans over several different mediums and thereby works as a synthesis on different levels and senses. I guess Wagner and Nitsch have helped me to legitimise this whole idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. This way of working is very important to me, and has helped me enormously when I’ve tried to pin down my obsessions and special interests.


BA: If You had to go back in time for a ‘Self-portrait of M. B. as a young monkey’ (to steal from another M. B., Michel Butor), when and how did it dawn on You that You are… different, maudit, an – artist?


MB: When I passed on from being a mere listener and observer to being creative. At a certain point (probably by the beginning of the millennium) I decided that I didn’t want to dedicate my life to someone else’s work. Certainly, after IRM had recorded Oedipus Dethroned [2000], I thought that I had something going that I wanted to dig deeper into and would take years to exhaust. A couple of years later when I first saw my own vision materialised in the flesh, I got quite exited cause this was an image I’ve been thinking of for years. The action work Sensation is Everything was of great importance to me (although I don’t fashion it as one of my better pieces today).

BA: The emphasis on excess and enjoyment at any cost, what You call ‘sexual absolutism’, and the motto: Agere contra (to act against) seem to contradict the ‘desinvoltura’ of Ernst Jünger’s ‘Anark’, another heroic model of Yours, whose attitude is to resist power by ignoring it?

MB: My work is full of contradictions. But I cannot really see the contradiction between the Jüngerian Anark and the supreme libertine. Although I respect Jünger’s work I can’t really say he’s been that influential on my part, the manifesto was written in collaboration with Bo Cavefors. I myself have nurtured a project which I used to call The New Theatre of Cruelty and Bo got his own project called Theatre Decadence. Bo is a huge admirer of Jünger and he was one of the first to introduce his work to the Swedish audience in the sixties. The main reason for quoting him was to illustrate how we don’t care about the political movements of today, and thus through our theatre feel ourselves liberated from them. As stated our agere contra is a very personal one and has nothing to do with a collective utopian following, it has to do with being aware of the world, but ignoring it and thereby act against it; to live inside a society but at the same time be able to live outside of it. I don’t see this as a heroic act but a necessary one. Communication is what it is, and foremost directly related to our own carnal desire, exhibitionism and narcissism, masochism and sadism.

BA: Many of Your motifs (like Isaac, Oedipus, Jesus, Sebastian, de Rais, Jack the Ripper…) are about violence in a sado-masochistic vexation of offender and victim, of the sacred & the infame. How does this recurrence of the body as battleground of pain & lust relate to our more and more virtual and abstract times?

MB: Discourses such as sex and violence are of great importance to me. And all the names you mentioned are more or less archetypical examples of these discourses combined. They are icons, some of them considered holy, some infamous, but I also think that all of them have a pornographic quality which I find very seductive. And this is very obvious, when looking at how they’re depicted in today’s media and arts. These “characters” and there tragic or heroic destinies are also important as mirror images which I can superimpose onto myself, as both the victim and aggressor. I’m not making a political statement on art or media, my work is all about me, my taste and obsessions.

BA: Am I wrong, or is there also an oxymoronic mixture, or undissolved tension of ‘hot’/organic/red (flesh, blood, cry) vs. ‘cold’/anorganic/black (machine noise, skull, razorblade) in Your work?

MB: You’re absolutely right. The paradoxical marriage between life and death fascinates me enormously. I wouldn’t take it as far as to say that I try to illustrate the Freudian death drive versus the pleasure principle struggle, but this kind of contradiction is very dear to me; the aggressive sex drive and the programmed inner yearning for an inorganic state. The relation between love and hate, masochism and sadism, the cold razor and the warm flesh. A piece is only successful if it got the power to unnerve me and seduce me at the same time.

BA: An IRM album is called Indications of Nigredo, and there seem to be alchemical motifs in the Heliogabalus cycle too. Or rather motifs of the Apocalypse, when even kings and bishops will be fodder for swine and wolves?

MB: First of all, I’m not a religious man. I’ve used esoterica in a metaphorical way, somewhat in the same way as Jung, and to point out contradictions; the marriage of the opposites etc. Although, religious and mythical themes tend to fascinate me, and especially the alchemical state of Nigredo has been influential. The “apocalyptic” illustrations from the Heliogabalus cycle are referring to the bodyguards‘ dismembering of the queer emperor.

BA: The ‘part maudit’, the ‘accursed share’ in Your work seems to be the (male) body, often as a split cadavre, more often headless (acephalos), or mutilated / castrated. Is the body and especially the Male Sex part of the problem, or part of a solution?

MB: I don’t see it neither as a problem or a solution. It’s matter of personal taste and obsession, in the end everything comes down to the human flesh, it’s all that matters. A work of art has to be centred round the body to hold any real interest to me at all, and often so, the mutilated male body (my own or a stranger‘s). What I seek and what I’m trying to manifest (on paper or in the flesh) is a personal depiction of sensation, a strong sensual and aesthetic form of exaltation. The headless body is foremost a way to get rid of the obvious connection to my own person, to make the work more vague and suggestive: an anonymous flesh. The wounded genitals are the most obvious and symbolical way to impersonate the crippled and futile body, and what a wonderful seductive picture it is.

BA: There is always the human weakness to identify with the aggressor or the aggressive, which makes Industrial, Harsh Noise or Black Metal etc. so attractive as camouflage for sissies. What is Your artistic angle in this dilemma?

MB: I’ve never been interested in provocation, or breaking taboos just for the sake of it. The people you’re referring to use these “extreme” subject matters as a legal and safe outlet for inner urges and fantasies which they don’t dare to step further into. They never go beyond a certain point, and that in the end makes their work futile and uninteresting. I don’t think I ever ventured into this small minded “sadistic” area myself; I’m equally interested in the victim’s role as the executioner’s.

BA: As poet & voice of IRM You are delivering Your heart on Your tongue. Articulating phobias, spitting words about martyrium & katharsis, suffering & self-mutilation, about an unnamed desease or wound. On Four Studies for Crucification (2002) You called the desease ‘time infection’. Is it mortality itself?

MB: Yes in this case I think your remark is accurate. The disease might be seen as life itself, the human body; this great exhilarating and obnoxious disease. At the moment I’m involved in a collaborative project with Swedish artist Stefan Danielsson, in which I rework old IRM lyrics and present them along side his beautiful collages. It will be very interesting to see someone else animate these words. And the lyrics for the piece you mentioned were actually used as a starting point for this project.

BA: Your paintings are like illustrations to A. Artaud’s >Heliogabalus: Or, the Crowned Anarchist