Elegant Bareness
Elegant Bareness
Banks Violette’s Death Metal
A murder committed by teenagers leads to a trial which holds a rock band mutually responsible for the crime – this is the theme of two recent installations by the English artist Banks Violette. Maxine Kopsa examines the extent to which these extremely refined installations are able to reflect the cruelty of life.‘Of all the beings that are, presumably the most difficult to think about are living creatures, because on the one hand they are in a certain way most closely akin to us, and on the other are at the same time separated from our ek-sistent essence by an abyss.’– Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, 1946In 1995 three teenage boys in Arroyo Grande, California murdered 15-year-old Elyse Pahler in order to promote their high school band, ‘Hatred’. To become famous, to be more black, they committed a deed they thought their heroes might have carried out. The idea was to kill the girl and acquire a true Black Metal reputation. The three boys were devoted fans of the heavy metal band Slayer; they envied them, wanted to be like them and thought they had found a way of attaining Slayer’s fame. But it was not only Slayer’s stardom that they desired – it was their entire persona. After the girl’s body had lain for eight months in a eucalyptus grove, one of the boys finally caved in and confessed. During the trial, Slayer was brought in on the grounds of possible motivation and influence. It was believed that Slayer might have created an environment which encouraged the boys to commit such a crime. The band’s ten year career was scrutinized in terms of lyrics and imagery, as if their image and reputation were not only conducive to such behaviour but indeed directly responsible. In 2002, Banks Violette had an exhibition at Team in New York called Arroyo Grande 7.22.95. In it he showed the work and fucking gone, a rather black installation comprising a high-gloss, relatively thin round podium or stage encircled by cymbal stands, holding bongos draped in black, and an amorphous, hand-cast pewter tree trunk situated half on, half off the resin stage. The gallery’s other space was devoted to the more feminine side of the story, so to speak. A white unicorn on a similarly round, but white, podium was installed in front of a photo-realist painting of a woman’s eyes, including what look like tears falling from her left eye. Referring to his use of the Black Metal aesthetic, Banks Violette said: ‘If subcultures represent a really meaningful version of dress-up, Black Metal is just a cultural moment when actors kind of forget they’re on stage.’1 The exhibition Arroyo Grande 7.22.95 is of course a direct reference to the hideous killing of Elyse Pahler. And although they are quite specific, the works that were in the show are more about the implications of the possibility that anyone (everyman) could be capable of horrid violence, rather than the depiction of beastly brutality itself. Banks Violette’s work is a bit tricky that way – even when his frames of reference include killings, arson, Death point Metal and mass suicide, the installations are very polished, quite refined, uncompromising in their gloss, even graceful, or ‘lusciously material’, as they have often been termed. In a more recent show at Maureen Paley in London, this lusciousness was again on view; although I must say that this time the gloss left more room for shock – but ‘shock’ is not the right word: this show was more in-your-face, more aggressive, more present; and yes, indeed, perhaps even closer to bare life than previous works I had seen. The ground floor held one installation which was kept after the doom metal performance by Stephen O’Malley and his band sunnO))) (pronounced ‘sun’), with singer Attila Csihar in a sealed coffin. What you see if you missed the performance is Untitled – black performance space (2006), a set of 8 black podiums or stages lined up in two rows, with 4 high backdrops just behind, all black, and a white coffin, its lid a little open, resting on top of a thin circular plinth cut into 4 quarters, also slightly askew in front of the whole. All of them are clearly used, for there are footprints and dust on the podiums and the plinth. Upstairs, the installation is repeated, the 8 stages and 4 backdrops arranged somewhat differently, and including all of the equipment used for the performance downstairs: guitars, speakers, amplifiers, keyboards. Most significantly, here everything is recast in salt, a white layer covering the whole of Untitled – white cast salt space (2006). At the risk of sounding cliché, it appears ghostly and quiet.Barthes called it the ‘punctum’, the moment when you look at a work (he was referring to a photographic image) and its impact grabs you, makes you breathless. This is the moment when the real cuts through the shell of the artifice and ‘pierces you’ (Barthes); or creates a ‘tuché’, according to Lacan; an ‘accidental causality’, according to Aristotle. This is the moment Hal Foster describes in Warhol’s White Burning Car III (1963) when the innocence of repetition serves instead to ‘screen the real understood as traumatic. But this very need also points to the real, and at this point the real ruptures the screen of repetition.’Could we be talking about an encounter with bare life here? Doubtful. We’re still very much inside, safely within the realm of representation and translation or interpretation, and the question remains whether bare life can exist within representation. Perhaps it can, just as homo sacer balances on that fence of inclusion and exclusion – just as words are fixed but disconnected to the things they refer to, so can the art object be related to bare life. Foster continues: ‘It is a rupture less in the world than in the subject – between the perception and the consciousness of a subject touched by an image.’And just as words are a convention we have all agreed to adhere to, so the art object forever alludes to the bare without ever being the actual bare. Is it instead always an elegant bareness? An allusion to bare life, a translation and interpretation of it? Is Banks Violette’s installation a demonstration of bare life? Pointing to it – shocking us, maybe – but shocking us elegantly? Can we get any closer?
Maxine Kopsa