Subtite: If You Want Blood, You've Got It
The MC5 once talked about kids being locked up "for living the words we sing." If (contrary to what critics tell us) there's an essential core to rock fantasy then this is it: actually doing what the song talks about. This talk will explore a group of songs and acts that got kids (deservedly) locked up, and how they turned into a successful Whitney Biennale show. Is Banks Violette, whose visual art slyly references the church-burnings and stabbings of metal subcultures, just continuing an exploitative tradition of PR violence—Nerf terrorism for cool kids? Framing publicity-seeking murders for gallery audiences makes for some pretty guilty pleasure. So what does it mean for him, and us, to be "a tourist in someone else's tragedy?" (like those 9/11 soundtracks in the Village Voice, as if the most important thing for writers like Eddy and Christgau was to hit on just the right thing to *listen to* to accompany a moment like that?) Violette claims to be doing something more, and here he connects with the bands themselves, and an old tradition of stoking grief into something sublime. I will suggest that you can't understand music without those things. But if so, what the f**k is the deal with Matthew Barney and Slayer? I'll try to open up the spectrum (really, Pandora's Box) of moral and aesthetic possibilities that the use of Metal as "outsider art" invokes.
core concept stolen from a random conversation I had on a library payphone with Weasel Walter, presented at the 2006 EMP pop conference.
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Wow, for the first time since I actually read this post, I looked up Banks Violette on the web. These two works:
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/banks_violette.htm
(on the unlikely chance you haven't seen them) have sold me immediately.
I just wanted to say in response: something that interests me is what happens to art *after* the wish-fulfillment is accomplished. I suppose that could be a banal question - we'll move on to other wishes, obviously - so perhaps the question only makes sense on the level of, What happens after our art is no longer something about unfulfilled desire? Referencing the Banks Violette wikipedia entry ("Violette refers to an over-identification with fiction, where fantasy and reality are blurred"), perhaps wish-fulfillment by proxy of art is really nothing more than a dream world; my question then is What happens to the dream when we allow it to touch reality? And I don't mean the dream of violence - those kind of acts, of realizing a dream of blood, to me indicate already some deeper, unbridged disconnect, perhaps not fully acknowledged, perhaps no longer bridgeable - I mean dreams of good too. It's interesting to consider the arc of an artistic statement were it to come from a source that rejects fetishism of the world it wants to create, in which it wants to exist.
Hope this ramblage made sense. :)
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