Girls Against God

by Jenny Hval

  In Venke’s flat, colloquially referred to as the witch’s den, Venke is stretched out on the chaise-longue drawing graphic erotica. I’m seated by the fireplace typing in an Å or girls hating through centuries, THE END. Terese is time-lapsing sourdough loaves rising on the kitchen counter. A new, long conversation has been happening between us, over several days, and it continues every time we meet in the hallway. We discuss what’s progressive, what could be subversive, why we care about it. What’s the point of confronting anything at all in Norwegian society? Can art express rebellion in our time? It’s been fifty years since performance art got explicit, and soon it’ll be thirty years since the arrival of black metal, riot grrrl punk and Gender Trouble. If there’s anything at all that might still have a subversive effect, says Venke, what would it be?

  How would people today have reacted to all that performance art, those horror films and subcultures? asks Terese.

  Perhaps by just ignoring it all, excluding it, quickly sweeping it under the rug, like they did to black metal before all the crime, I say.

  Weren’t the black metal bands actually still there, even after the murder and the arson? Terese replies.

  That depends how you define black metal, Venke interjects.

  And how you define ‘excluded’, I say.

  Think about that word, EXCLUDED. To exclude something, to explain something. The nature of the subversive isn’t actually to be directly visible but to roam the shadows, to give texture to the seemingly shiny and clean, to scrawl public walls with inexplicable nonsigns that refuse to materialise into language. The subversive desires to be seen and not seen simultaneously, it desires both to be excluded and to be explained. But it’s so easily muted, left behind, forgotten, excluded without being explained. Or it gets picked up and transformed into a language we all understand, that is, explained, but for some reason that always seems to mean commercialised.

  In 1991 you could, on the surface, ignore black metal and its subversive content. Norway was too secular to be shocked by upside-down crosses and guitar riffs without the usual muting of strings. It was as if they didn’t exist, until murder and church arson existed: conventional crime, dangerous young men. That was a language that could be understood. Later, black metal music was commercialised, too. It was translated, adapted for sales, polished and tightened, giving it a more saleable image. When Varg Vikernes was imprisoned, society’s idea of rehabilitation, the music lost that messy, fat-stained, insect-like buzzing, and was remastered into a more modern, healthy and powerful rock image. Man emerges from the gutter, transformed into the übermensch, again, as always. An understandable language. Crisp and crackling photocopier fanzines projected into the big and beautiful picture books of nostalgia.

  The genuinely subversive is still untouched, the hs are still silent. What is it we’re lacking if we, in art and in life, just repeat and repeat and repair and repair versions of ancient hierarchies and rituals? What do we exclude? Can you hear it? What is it we’re still not saying?

  Terese lowers her head until her ear rests on the kitchen table. She’s filming one of the sourdoughs, one that has risen over the edge of the bread tin. It looks as if she’s listening to something inside the woodwork. Venke is stretched out on the couch, arms dangling over the sides. If I photographed her now, she’d resemble a young Varg Vikernes, with that long hair and graceful posture. That image is far too romantic, nostalgic, adapted for sales. We paint it black. The death of art.

  That’s what I need to write. The death of art. That’s the black screen. That’s where we have to begin, where writing has to begin. It makes more sense to talk about art’s potential if it’s already dead. Total misanthropic black. With art-death we have the opportunity to see the significance of the resurrection we desire, the colourful text that’s slowly typed and fed into the black screens, keeping time with the fermenting dough. The band searches for a resurrection. Maybe that’s why the only scenes in my film that I’m able to write are the ones where someone dies or disappears. Maybe it’s not just about God, and maybe hatred isn’t about burning something to the ground, but about discovering a flame that illuminates the darkness, a match that ignites or creates something new.

  This conversation has been carried on in band practices and knights’ duels. But this afternoon it’s more extensive. We look at each other, Terese with her ear to the kitchen counter, Venke with her head resting upside down on the couch, me through the laptop screen, and without a word, a pact is written in black misanthropic ink on a parchment of gurgling sourdough. I, we, start to see the contours of a future where we can dig up a few ghosts, find a few new and radical definitions of art, of relations, participation, creation. Maybe we have to kill off our entire definition of what art is. Because didn’t art distinguish itself through separation of aesthetic practice from rituals, magic and revolt? Ritual, magic, people’s revolts, they are the thick brush, the bad art.

  We know that the band, and the symbiotic relationships we create, have to be centred. We know that’s what people are looking for: the relations, the symbiosis. We want to experience them, and create them, see them swell and form between others. We want to study and act; we want to be actors and voyeurs. The goal has to be coming together, an artistic connection, ingredients that together make a brew. Is it at all possible to get close to people that way, or in any way? Was that how I was able to see you during the gig? Or was I? What does it mean to ‘get close’?

  Maybe this is what writing could be, too: a place for communal, creative rituals, instead of that lonely voice confined to a white text document. Am I actually lonely when I write? If I am, it’s only according to that one definition of reality, the one that reproduces the subject in God’s image, and so declares that I am alone, that I occupy the role of the solitary genius. Maybe writing could be redefined, so that it isn’t a position but a search: I’m in search of community, and I search for that place where God isn’t. God isn’t the one writing anymore; it’s all the girls sitting inside paintings, hating. I’m looking for us.

  THE END, for now. I put aside writing for a while, and we the band begin our search for ingredients for what we no longer call gigs but rituals. In this expanded band format we begin by studying Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches’ notes on witch practice and the witch trials. But instead of looking at the arguments and the content of the descriptions, we study their tone and the sound, as if they were music. The descriptions are full of meticulous detail, of the witches’ rituals and of society’s – the torture and execution of witches. Crime and punishment are set to surprisingly similar tunes. The language looks like one long black metal text, Venke points out, and she’s right, the sentences downright glisten with their own dark ecstasy. But the perspective is more specific, clearly punching down, delivered as dribbling phrases driven by misogyny and xenophobia; the bourdon notes of the dominant. This is patriarchy’s own seething witch’s cauldron. We dive below the surface and go deeper into the books to find what we are looking for, what concerns us.

  The Hammer of Witches was digitised a long time ago and can be read on any screen in the world, but there are printed copies in existence, too; they’re nestled deep in old library shelves. You could easily confuse these editions with other medieval manuscripts, but they differ from such books in one particular way. The paper’s makeup, if examined through lenses and tested in a laboratory, would resemble a porn magazine more than your typical old manuscripts might, because of the conspicuous number of stains smudging the text. Some paragraphs are practically illegible; they feel rough to the fingertips and page after page sticks together. The chapters on punishment and torture are particularly difficult to decipher without having to resort to the digitised edition. The book has been subjected to some rigorous use over the centuries.

  But no one has looked at these stains under a magnifying glass. The physical content of this book hasn’t received the same depth of analysis as the textual – all those hundreds of pages of inform
ation and discussions concerning the nature of witchcraft, and crime and punishment. The confession and punishment scenes have attracted the most diligent attention and therefore have the stickiest paper. It’s impossible to determine what the stains are composed of … if it’s spilled wine, coffee, milk, sweat, or semen. Venke, Terese and I reckon it’s the effluence of excited genitalia.

  What is certain is that the stains are part of a conversation, a comment section that transgresses time, place and dimension. A stain is also an imprint, an imprint from one person’s situation, something that stretches out of the body and is projected, involuntarily, into the future, where another body in another time, in another space, will open that same page and study the stain. We can pick up a print copy of The Hammer, and assume it contains traces of another reader’s kinks, the mounting desire, the climax and that pathetic mortal dread that follows. The absorbent paper soaks up the body’s signature, the musical notations of desire. The stains symbolise what the book itself describes with the utmost empathy and precision: The Way Whereby a Formal Pact with Evil Is Made.

  Terese adds the book to her tablet, searches different words and discovers that sperm is mentioned a total of sixty times, appearing throughout the book. That feels like a disproportionate number, and at the same time, in light of the paper’s consistency, completely fitting. Venke thinks that word searches and word counts could be our modern ingredients list. In which case, The Hammer of Witches would make for quite the interesting brew.

  The text describes semen as a sacred fluid, unlike the filthy blood of menstruation. Semen is white, too: the sacred stains cover the black ink with white, layer on layer, exceeding the paper’s capacity for absorption. A whiteout of witchcraft, like a form of social cleansing, an erasure.

  The book repeatedly describes how the inability of devils and witches to reproduce has been verified, and that they instead collect men’s sperm to create perverted demon children. Those who might threaten the balance of power in society are often described as sperm collectors. Europeans were referred to as such when they began to infiltrate the portside brothels of Nagasaki and other Japanese cities. When Europeans appear in shunga, Japanese erotic art, they are frequently, and strikingly, shown collecting sexual juices in cups and other containers. Witches’ brew.

  Witches are sperm collectors, then, according to The Hammer, which does not know that its very own pages have performed the same task. In an attempt to pinpoint what witchcraft is, the book itself becomes a blasphemous document.

  It’s impossible to predict what the effect might be if we were to rip out the most porous pages of the book, crumble them into the witch’s cauldron over a low heat, and then drink a nice cup of tea from the brew. But that’s what we have to do to create our own rituals. And so we sign our own formal pact, in blasphemy with each other. We enter into a magical triangle: a satanic community, spawn of Satan.

  It’s been a few months. I’ve completely abandoned the idea about Munch joining a band and the Puberty revenge scenario. I’ve put the disk with the film file in a drawer. Instead, I study rituals. I’m sitting in the witches’ den watching Otto Muehl’s therapy scenes in the film Sweet Movie over and over again. The scenes depict Muehl’s real-life Friedrichshof commune, in what is obviously the mid-1970s. Everyone eating together around a table. It feels like a party. People play with their food. Its consumption looks like a revolutionary ravaging dance. Then the members of the commune start throwing up, at first a little hesitantly, and then with practised professionalism, their fingers digging the food out from deep down in their throats. When they’re done, they start shitting, as if they’ve been digging further and further into themselves, further down, inside the body, downwards through the chakras, all the way to the deepest and dirtiest, the most frightening and perhaps also the most human. In the end a few of them sit in a ritual circle, shitting on their plates. The other participants watch and cheer them on, and later they honour the faeces, dancing with full plates of excrement and offering the contents to each other and to the camera. As a finale they smear the skin of one participant with shit, then smear several more. They smear each other’s outsides with each other’s insides.

  The poo ritual is a version of HHHHH, a display (and total transgression) of everything that was silenced or repressed in postwar Austria. I recognise it; it’s the biblical sick, a catharsis of repressed social democracy. The commune delights in society’s most private waste. It’s social critique in the form of an attempt at a parallel utopian society that lives out both primal desires and revolutionary artistic visions. Through performing these forbidden, primitive actions, the commune tries to do something creative with the dark-brown colour that the Austrian (and European) postwar era had repressed as deeply as possible and never reckoned with: fascism.

  Sweet Movie’s main character, Miss Canada, winds up in the commune after a series of degradations. At the start of the film she is crowned the most innocent girl in the world. The competition is a beauty pageant in which girls from different countries spread their legs before a vagina inspector. When Miss Canada lies down in the gynaecologist’s chair and spreads her legs, an almost sacred light beams from her cunt, a light that these days would remind you of a laptop opening (‘… and then there was light’). After winning the competition, the innocent girl experiences a series of humiliating sexual encounters, representing her deep submergence in the buried trauma of postwar Europe. And now she’s here with us, a spectator to the faeces ritual.

  The first time I saw the film, watching the ritual was dark and horrifying. It was a descent into hell, total chaos. It’s a much more violent assault on the senses than misanthropic black metal. Rewatching the film now, I’m not as frightened and I can understand what’s cheerful about the shit ritual, that destructive energy in actions that transgress and mock all boundaries. We’re far from The Hammer’s consequences for ritual transgression; punishment and torture have been replaced with excitement and banter. But I also see the structures within this so-called complete transgression. I see Otto Muehl, the alpha male who reigns over this highly hierarchical commune. I know about the abuse that grows from this hierarchy; I see the evil in the attempt to transform a single artist’s vision into genuine collective self-expression. I see a tribute to patriarchy and capitalism, because they’re paying tribute to production, albeit a primitive production, but capitalism is after all already primitive. In the end we’re all producers, dreadfully productive ones, too, and there’s nothing capitalism loves more than productivity, eternally accelerating and ever more efficient production. Shit is the root of capitalism. The Friedrichshof commune has traced productivity right down to its roots, to the faeces, and as a result the ritual only loops back to the same Austria that they want to transcend. I see social control, I see capitalism, I see patriarchy, I see God.

  The scenes that follow are the last we see of Miss Canada. She’s in a mud bath, performing movements that verge on erotic dance. Her whole body, apart from her eyes, is smeared with Europe’s brown mass. She spreads her legs, but there’s nothing between them, no laptop light and no genitalia, only brown thick mass. This scene is beautiful: Miss Canada has lost her own form, she’s part of the mud, she lives in a space filled up with a brown, shapeless substance.

  I want someone to melt or disappear like that in my film too, like Miss Canada in the brown mud. But instead of first degrading them, I just want them to appear and disappear. And I want the agent to be black. Black is my colour, the colour of the Norwegian underground; brown is too similar to Austria, too Central European. It’s darker up here, smoother, quieter. I picture something that corrodes into black and disappears; perhaps we’ll all be digitised and I can live entirely online, or maybe it will be a more straightforward corporeal death. Perhaps the black fluid is coming from the body itself: the gall oozes from people; the insides take over, destroying the outside, our subversive components give us a texture that we didn’t know we had, but not with something we produce, just
something that’s always there, something we don’t feel. Something that exists, shapeless, inside us, like blood, because we can’t stab our blood and feel pain. This blackness should disintegrate us. In the end we’ll look like little foetuses, and then we’re gone. THE END.

  Maybe the only way an artist can escape capitalism and patriarchy today is to use art to disappear as an individual. The artists must completely wash away their person and self-expression, along with their individual characteristics and even their own imprint, their own life in the physical world. The artist’s person, ego and even body must disappear quite literally into gunk, shit and black bodily waste. That’s where something new can start.

  I won’t be able to write this, but I’ll try. I want writing that can summon death, that can summon the disintegration of human tissue. The tissue melts in a chemical, or magical, or alchemical reaction. I don’t desire total freedom, or total misanthropy. Do you get that? I desire magic, the same alchemical reaction that transforms hatred to a new or strange form of love.

  That might be why I’m writing this to you. I need someone to write to, someone else, someone who isn’t here and who I’m pulled toward. This yearning for you is a yearning for the unknown, the unwritten; the impossible place. Like the love reflected in the death scene I want to write in the film, or the love in a collective suicide. What sort of love is this? Self-sacrificial love in its furthest extension? Or is it love of the object, art, self-destruction? The destruction of our incomplete interpretations of relationships, life and death, you and me?