Banks Violette

No matter what life you lead
the virgin is a lovely number:
cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper,
arms and legs made of Limoges,
lips like Vin Du Rh™ne,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes
open and shut.
Open to say,
Good Day Mama,
and shut for the thrust
of the unicorn.
She is unsoiled.
She is as white as a bonefish.

from Anne Sexton's 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'

In Summer 2002, Banks Violette had a solo show at Team Gallery entitled 'Arroyo Grande 7.22.95.' I went to see it, and I immediately thought of the kid who sat next to me years ago in my sophomore algebra class. He didn't speak and hardly ever did the homework, but he did produce reams of exquisite notebook drawings in No.2 pencil of eagles and blood and razors, which chilled me to the bone'and which I couldn't take my eyes off of. Then I thought of Diamanda Galas' wailed rendition of Johnny Cash's '25 Minutes To Go.' But mostly I thought of Anne Sexton, who, in 1971 rewrote her favorite Grimms' fairy tales as concise instances of wicked present-day death metal poetry. Her secular Snow White has more than a little in common with Violette's.

'Arroyo Grande 7.22.95' presented a number of ossified, elegant, elegiac elements that, taken as a whole, commemorated a ritualistic violent crime, the likes of which are becoming sadly commonplace. Three pubescent aspiring death rockers (band-name 'Hatred') slaughtered a female schoolmate as a kind of will-to-fame, a sacrifice in the name of celebrity. In Violette's telling, shiny black epoxy icicles, a stalactite ridden stereo, a melting unicorn, and a canvas of weeping china-blue eyes without a face offered the event back up as modern fable. Indeed, if there is a contemporary Brother Grimm, he is none other than Violette who sequesters the terrible and polishes its surfaces into gleaming refractions of ambivalent desire. Using album covers and the ever-grim dailies as his source material and death metal as soundtrack, Violette alchemically fashions fetishistic relics that are at once seductive proof of and resistance against the fundamentally horrific nature of the human animal.

Johanna Burton

Bjarne Melgaard

The Rectum is a Grave 1 (What We Do Is Secret 2)

slipping up, through, until your arm is nothing more than a phantom limb guided by remote, your eyes making up the distance between what's invisible and what you feel. The force with which you extend is obviously up to you, but you should probably be careful. Just keep it in mind, don't forget that this is someone's body you're dealing with. Remember that. Otherwise, you could really fuck somebody up.

****************

Of course there are parts of yourself that you do your best to conceal, the parts of yourself that exist only because you know that you can never show them to anyone. Construct your exterior so that it's believable enough, so that no one knows what's happening inside of you until it's too late to back away. Bjarne Melgaard's work is like asking your lover what they're thinking and hearing them tell you that they're considering what it would mean to rape your grandmother while the neighbors watch. It's that moment of impact, the crisis when someone realizes, seconds too late, what's really going on. You can watch what Melgaard keeps secret, a splatter pattern of intimacy and hatred that enacts both surveillance and self-awareness in the voyeur, the anxiety of seeing yourself through someone else's fantasy somehow both disruptive and exhilarating. Melgaard is the reminder of the schism between what you want and what you are, an alarm that re-inscribes the secrets of your body onto the veil of memory.

Alissa Bennett

_________________________
1 Bersani, Leo. (1988) 'Is the Rectum a Grave?' London. MIT Press
2 Germs, The. (1981) 'What We Do Is Secret.' Slash Records

Allow me in introduce myself. I am Michael. I have a very vague concept of my relation to Bjarne and I am not sure why I write this.

I am sorry for the last email you received because it was not from Bjarne but from David. Sometimes David just does this kind of dumb thing, he's good at cracking codes for email addresses and stuff. He's a bit hard to control, sorry about that. Don't think Bjarne would have written to you in that Grandma Cooper way about just finishing someone off. That is more David's thing. The whole post punk stuff, you know, thinking Gene Darby from the Germs is a saint when he was just a gay looser. Bjarne would more send you short lines, like 'Punk was just hippies with short hair'.

Think Bjarne hates more than David. Don't assume that he wants to use so much time on anything- especially not words. We are now in Marsielles and Bjarne is doing some projects with Centre Pompidue and he's already driving them crazy from all the complications that surround him. Bjarne once worked with this female curator who seemed to get very uncomfortable around him. We saw her yesterday. I know Bjarne once was at her place, although I think Bjarne is more into women when they're unrelaxed. I know he has this thing about going to straight clubs and passing as a straight guy. Once I saw him kissing a girl in a club but I don't think she was really into it because she said later that she usually prefers a classier guy.

Bjarne hates Dennis Cooper, J T Leroy and this 'I just want to kill my boyfriend but never quite get around to doing it' set. I mean, maybe a few less poetry readings and a bit more action would not be a bad thing. Bjarne hates this post punk 'wish we were still there' thing. Maybe also because when Bjarne was doing stupid stuff at 17 nobody was interested in his words. He never got a reply from anyone. Most people just found him weird. And Bjarne was never punk.

Bjarne is not into killing your boyfriend or whatever. I think he is more into the abusing your girlfriend kind of thing. He calls me Alissa now.

I know that David is not dead, but just skinny, walking around the house all the time because he took too many steroids, got a heart problem and then just flunked out. David's stays under the sofa in the living room and I know that for sure once when he tried to wrap his fat little fingers around Bjarne's leg, Bjarne kicked him in the face so he lost six teeth. David cried after and asked, 'Why did he have to hurt my snout', like he was some kind of reindeer or whatever. Usually he stays there under the sofa looking at Bjarne, watching him when he's fumbling around or watching TV.

Bjarne hates teenagers too. Think he is more into bitter midlife 30ish crises. Bjarne hates doped out kids of any age, though he use to do a lot of stuff. Think he was very into injecting guys with steroids, 'The equality of the needle' he often talks about.

A sentence Bjarne would send you could be, 'First we injected ourselves with steroids and then we went to Ibiza and tried to infect as many as possible'. Think it is a big turn on for him if his boyfriend says' fuck me like a woman' or calls his asshole his cunt. Personally I find it a bit old fashioned. He treats his boyfriends like shit. He treats everybody like shit.

He also wants to send you some photos. One is where he is doing his 'I am kind of cute, but way past everything rock roll. Much more sociopath gone to the Foreign Legion'. Not bad but not great either. Another is of him in bed with a cast on his arm from when he broke his fingers in a fight. Another one is when he is just waking up, saying 'Hello.' Bjarne said he would like to send you some stuff. Maybe I personally would not recommend you giving out your address like that, but it is your choice. He wonders if he could send you some thing like a tee shirt he has been wearing because he said he likes to think that maybe you would like to smell them because they smell of him. I asked why would you bother smelling his stinky tees and he said you probably would not, but even if you don't like him he can still like you.

Bjarne thinks in general there is too much respect for women and he can go on forever nagging about it how they just love it the harder you fuck them and the worse you treat them the more they like it etc. It drives me nuts sometimes. So vulgar. It is weird because sometimes women disappear around him. Not that he killed them or dumped them in a truck, but more like they mentally just are not there anymore. Like his sister.

Do you think violence is easier for a woman if it comes form a gay man? Like Cooper, any post punk's best girlfriend. What if violence to women is directed by a gay man? It is different, probably a bit more arty, but stillÉ Can you get raped by a gay man Alissa? Should not gay men in general stay away from female genitalia??? At least not mutilate them? Could you see yourself mutilating your own female genitalia, so you end up with just one big wound between your ass and your cunt?

Beyond systems.

Could you Alissa?

Bjarne hates more than me. He is more full of repressed hate. Not many have loved his hate, although he doesn't look hateful. Actually the oppositeÉDavid loved his hate and look what kind of existence he went to, from doormat to carpet under the sofa. And I don't really even know what happened with me. I know for sure Bjarne knew this guy who had raped a girl with a screwdriver. That's how it all started. When I met him the first time. Mutual friends I guess you could call it.

A sentence Bjarne would send you could be 'I was always a recording artist, I just recorded all the tracks in my head'.

Bjarne does not want any written words to be considered fiction because it is not intended for publishing anyway (and who cares ?) but know he likes words like 'unclear', 'depressive' and 'foggy.' Also I think he will send you whatever he is going to show at Anton Kern directly to you, so that you can open it in your home and place it as you like at the gallery. While you do it Bjarne would like you to keep a small object he will send you in your pocket. Would you mind?

I once read a book called 'Bad Sex' that had different crappy stories in it and one was about a women who found out she had a demon for a boyfriend because his eyes glowed red in the dark when he was sitting by the bed looking at her. So unbelievably stupid but it kind of reminded me of something Bjarne once said about how my eyes glows a bit in the dark. But more purplish than red. I guess what I would just like to tell you is that I think instead of being every girl's gay friend Bjarne likes to be every girl's worst enemy.

Thanks for your time Alissa.

Michael

Brock Enright

When I was thirteen, I awoke in my walk-in closet trembling with fear-ÑI'd been kidnapped. I looked up and saw my clothes hanging above me and realized that it was only a dream. But the rush of adrenaline and terror felt totally real.

A similar fabricated terror and resulting rush emanates from Brock Enright's VIDEOGAMES PROJECT. What began as an attempt to 'create a monster/Frankenstein/ tornado/robot/computer that would be framed by others' is now a business of 'extreme kidnapping' that serves a client, yet is also an act of conscious art making. But Enright holds that kidnapping has nothing to do with his work: it's merely a device used to 'create a mess that will be combed through' once the project comes to an end. The project grew out of Enright's interest in constructing a game with no rules, no beginning, and no end. He relies on the 'misunderstanding of image and information' using 'decoys that are decoys for decoys.' Motivated by the fear of failure, Enright follows in the footsteps of a mad scientist, part Buster Keaton, part Dr. Strangelove. He controls certain elements while leaving others open to modification through the players involved and circumstance. The act of kidnapping is merely a means to an endÑa tool used to tempt fate and taunt failure. 'I have to make it look like I'm doing it in order to accomplish my task. Make it look like I'm building a dollhouse, but I'm really building a bomb." In Enright's work first impressions can't be trusted.

Ali Subotnick

Cameron Jamie

I know nothing about Cameron Jamie, but I suspect that 's not even a problem as obscurity is crucial to his world: all his universe seems enveloped in sinister, at times sordid, shadows, brightened up by the occasional scream of an electric guitar, courtesy the Melvins. Teenagers fighting in the garage, Halloween parties transformed into frightening abuses of power, psychotic sketches as explorations of some cheap, collective unconscious: through his videos, performances, and drawings, Cameron Jamie is excavating the junk space of contemporary culture.

Like some sort of archaeologist of the vernacular, Cameron Jamie unveils the ruins of Western civilization, amplifying the latent violence of mass rituals and suburban angst. Picking up the legacy of backyard anthropology as conceived by Cady Noland and Paul McCarthy, Cameron Jamie is composing a subterranean novel of exceptionally raw power, where zombie-like creatures chase the ghosts that haunt middle class houses.

A diffused sense of uneasiness creeps through his images, like an infective disease: it 's an absolutely contemporary malaise, a virus infesting the soul of the affluent society. And yet Cameron Jamie 's work also evokes archaic fears and gothic anxieties, finally proving that Dracula and Michael Jackson are more than just distant relatives.

Exploring the dark side of white America and the carnivalesque traditions of old Europe, Cameron Jamie embarks on a macabre journey to the province of the Empire, where ancient and morbid rites mix with punk, fuck-it-all attitude. Both an exorcism and a black mass, Jamie 's work is a descent into the heart of darkness.

Massimiliano Gioni

David Altmejd

David Altmejd's grotesque sculptures, usually of heads or other fragments of monster bodies, directly engage the repressed underside of our imagination. He looks past the imagery of B-movie horror clich's to a morbid, Victorian-era definition of the heinous (typified by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein); he conjures implausible sculptures into being as if channeling spirits through the Ouija board. When peering closely at the details of Altmejd's decapitated and decaying hand-crafted heads, it is difficult to shake the uncanny sensation that the werewolf eye may blink open at any moment, springing to life like Dr. Frankenstein's monster. Yet the intensely appealing layer of crystals, glitter, rhinestones, jewelry, and other materials that seem to sprout organically from the plaster sculptures defers the horror of beholding such objects. Altmejd understands that the process of decay carries within it the promise of growth; his objects arrest the moment where the former transforms into the latter.

The sculptures are often integrated with pedestals that recall mid-century furniture or modernist sculptures. They present horizontal surfaces at different heights, often have mirrored elements, and, importantly, allow for a theatricalized placement of the heads. Altmejd frequently carves box-like tunnels out of these structures, placing a head in a form-fitting hall of mirrors that distorts perception and calls to mind Robert Smithson use of the material and exploration of entropy. Yet unlike in Smithson's work, Altmejd's structures seem sound (his 2002 solo exhibition was titled 'Clear Structures for a New Generation.') It is the body that inevitably decays.

Several of Altmejd's most recent works attach the werewolf heads to bodies. For an installation at the Istanbul Biennial, the mirrored boxes were not only carved out of the pedestal, but also from the body itself, exposing bones that traverse Altmejd's otherwise empty mirrored cubes. Like a mad scientist, having brought these unnatural creatures into being, Altmejd is now meticulously picking them apart.

Brian Sholis

Dora Longo Bahia

Phantoms and Fantasies

Wakeful and disquieting, Dora Longo Bahia's recent work continues a lineage of art dealing with the body and violenceÑmore specifically, the body as a stage for violence. In her works from the Who's afraid of red? and Untitled series of 2000-2002, Longo Bahia rather gracefully manipulates the mediums of painting and photography in the creation of ghostly images of what the artist defines as 'a future memory [rather] than a past memory.' Lured in by luscious layers of color and mysterious flickering light, one discovers complexly painted snapshots that, at once, question the present status of painting and photography in visual culture, while hovering eerily in the boundaries between the real and unreal, between illusion and hallucination.

Melancholy and atmospheric, Longo Bahia's paintings often linger on life and death, pain and memory, without however, verging on sentimentality. She begins with images of generations of family, from the young to the oldÑposed for portraits, in domestic settings, and on vacationsÑunguarded snapshots that almost always suggest a pregnant moment where most anything can go awry. Reminiscent of Arnulf Rainer's violently-colored crayon marks over grimaced self-portraits, the projected photos deep within Longo Bahia's Caracas paintings, like Matthew, Federico, Carola, MaryleeÉ, 2000, are repeatedly layered, veiled, and scratched. Through the scarred top layers of acrylic paint, exposed by the artist's scratching and marking, residual surfaces suggest a residual presence. 'In a photograph, there is already the absence of a body, a feeling that the body is missing; in the painting originated from a photo therefore, there is a feeling of missing the feeling of the missing bodyÉ' Like Carolee Schneemann's 1964 performance Meat Joy, in its celebration of food and flesh in wet red paint, the marks, scratches, and splatters that Longo Bahia inflicts on her sitters, are the performative embodied in figurative painting. Likewise, in her red-tinted photographs, all Untitled, from 2000, it is through Longo Bahia's grave yet ironic handling of history, memory, and fantasy, coupled with her manipulation of the chosen photographs, that her subjects are set to perform like actors in an extreme scene or situation, either comic or tragic. About these works, she says: 'É fantasies are phantoms as wellÉ' As a result, her recent photographs too enliven illusory spirits which enact a kind of dangerous beautyÑone that can equally endear and repel the unexpectant viewer.

Brooke Minto

Matthew Greene

Notes on Gothic:

Night skies. Black seas. Matthew Greene's paintings might best be described as little windows of evil. Bruce Nauman's sign taught us that Evil spelled backwards spells "live". Death, paradoxically, would be "good". This is the binary that plagues philosophy. What is darkness as a state of mind? A mode of being? Gothic is the genre, both font and lifestyle. As Marilyn Manson's aesthetic it is a tongue in (pierced) cheek revamping of post-apocalyptic style; nihilism, via teenage angst, as a pseudo-punk pose. But prior to MTV's corporatisation of this genre, Gothic was another set of signifiers- chilly castles, pale heroines and foggy moors. Greene's repertoire of imagery borrows heavily from these literary origins: empty boats floating on black water, Gorkyesque spider webs, rainbows eclipsed by dark clouds.

Greene depicts allegories of a kind of Romantic decay. The figures, always witches, or parts of them, project their emotions onto the body- language becomes symptoms. The secret rituals of witchcraft are alluded to in the visual fabric of the picture, as if the act of painting itself might be a form of sorcery. The bodies, or traces of them, emerge like vapor in the swampy landscape. The sword is the only reference to a possible duality, but it always appears left behind in surrender; a battle lost. There is no culture, only nature. Like a mirage, the scenes form on the verge of their disappearance. Death seems everywhere present, but never really available, like a hideous perfume. Shifting between consciousness and dream state, these scenes float in limbo. Greene narrates these little gothic romances, always doomed, its characters in a state of slow deterioration, haunted by memory.

Chivas Clem

Michael Wetzel

You should never leave the city. Terrible things happen in the woods. Trees conceal and provide cover; they mute cries for help. Ichabod Crane got his head chopped off in Sleepy Hollow (aka Tarrytown), Martha Moxley bought it in verdant Greenwich, and the characters in John Cheever's Shady Hill stories had to keep the gin flowing just to hold the sorrow, fear, and moral rectitude of suburbia at bay. Horrors within, horrors without. If a drunken fall into an empty swimming pool doesn't kill you, then the Headless Horseman just might. The darkest depths are, of course, as close at hand as that bottle of Mount Gay rum Dad squirreled under the front seat of the sedan for those drives up and down the Saw Mill, as close, really, as that maximum security women's prison is to the town of Bedford, New York. Michael Wetzel grew up there, where the old, pretty houses are separated by dense wooded patches and there might be a Colonial-era graveyard just across the road. As a kid he watched horror movies with friends and got scared shitless thinking about potential escapees from that correctional facility or the cemetery.

In Wetzel's paintings the gothic seeps willfully into the pastoral. A tastefully wallpapered hallway stretches infinitely forward, as if to suggest that you'll never make it to your room before whatever is chasing you catches up. Homes stand behind iron gates or stone walls, objects lie smashed and abandoned, and in one work, a paddle tennis court has fallen into neglect now that the game is merely an abandoned bourgeois fad. Always, there is the sense that a trespasser or stalker stands lurking at the edge of the property. But Wetzel leaves everything purposefully vague, like a hair-raising establishing shot in a movie, they manipulate you into delicious anticipation of the coming terror.

Meghan Dailey

Sue de Beer

Teenage Horror (Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Killed Me)

Nancy is having nightmares about a frightening, badly-scarred figure who wears a glove with razor-sharp "finger knives". She soon discovers that her friends are having similar dreams. When the teens begin to die, Nancy realizes that she must stay awake to survive. Uncovering the secret identity of the dream killer and his connection with the teens of the neighborhood, the girl plots to draw him out into the real world.

Teens and horror have always made a sexy and scary combination, particularly in the history of film. From 1950s horror masterpieces such as "I was a Teenage Frankenstein" or "Teenage Werewolf" via 1980s classics like "Halloween", "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" to today's slasher films a la Wes Craven, such as "Scream". Sexy teens, serial killers and all other kinds of freaks and monsters are without a doubt a winning mix.

Despite repeated warnings to stay away, a group of fun-loving but none-too-bright teenagers set out to reopen the eerie Camp Crystal Lake, which closed 20 years earlier after a series of bizarre and unexplained deaths. Now someone is lurking in the woods, spying on the happy campers, and plotting a gory, grisly revenge on those who would disturb the camp's slumber.

In her most recent series of video works i.e. "Hans & Grete" (2002), "Dark Hearts" (2003) as well as in her new work "Disappear Here" (2003) Sue de Beer looked into the darker side of troubled adolescents. While the two most recent films show the horror of teens being simply misunderstood by the adult world 'Hans & Grete' discloses how teens in fact can turn into little Freddys, Jasons or Michaels themselves. The work investigates the psychology of so-called school shooters and is based on the actual massacre at the Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in 1999. A blood bath without precedent and still only another episode in an endless series of killings among teens in recent years: Springfield, Ore., Jonesboro, Ark., West Paducah, Ky. and Pearl, Miss. among many others.

A teenage girl becomes the target of a killer who has stalked and killed one of her classmates. A tabloid news reporter is determined to uncover the truth, insisting that the man who raped and killed the girl's mother one year earlier is the same man who is terrorizing her now. The girl's boyfriend becomes the prime suspect and the horror begins.

De Beer's work is neither an impersonal documentary on PBS about the seemingly immoral and nightmarish abyss of teenage life nor a voyeuristic and exploitative look into the daily behavior of US teens a la Larry Clark. She genuinely combines teen subjects with her insights into teenage subcultures in which we find everything from "Hello Kitty" toys to V.C. Andrews books, Morrissey albums and elements of gothic culture. De Beer lets her characters loose allowing them what most of them dream about: to take revenge for losing their innocence and having to face a complex world no one prepared them for. The artist is doing this while exploring and glorifying the particular realities and cultures US teens have created for themselves as a counter reaction to the adult world that seemingly confuses them so fiercely.

Jens Hoffmann