Girls Against God

by Jenny Hval

  Where the writing is going, and where Venke, Terese and I are headed, I don’t know yet. But I wanted to write to you. I just feel like I’ve gotten closer to you now. Am I crazy?

  I rummage through the bile gunk, that gelatinous black background, with my little white letters. I find something in there, little blind bits. I’m getting closer to something. Intimacy. Love through murder, writing that kills, fusion. Do I write people to death to get closer?

  I write a satanic pact between you and me. THE END.

  Rituals

  As I type in I write a satanic pact between you and me … in the email application, the word I is corrected to AI by the automatic spell check. Representation and subject are switched. In the future there are no boundaries. YOU could be UUE, or maybe that O could stretch a little further, into the magical DOC or DOCX of the text. ME could be MPEG or MP4, the same file format as the black metal bonus material, the same format that my film will become in the end. The transformation and magic have already begun, the formats converted to rituals around us.

  Let’s all zoom out a little, and turn the camera to face out. We’re on a street. It’s dark, it has to be night. The wind howls. The beams from the scattered street lamps don’t reach each other, and we are in the dark spot between two lit stretches. Further up we can see the branches of a tall birch sway in the wind, but around us it’s dark, as if we have to see through darkness to get to the light. The here and now is blackened. It has been rubbed out, or doesn’t exist for us. But the future, over there, that we can see. Behind the swaying branches we see the contours of a building. Slowly we close in on the light.

  The building in front of us looks familiar, the colour, the contours, it’s got to be the old Munch museum, but as we move closer, time gradually picks up its pace. This has to be 2019, so the paintings have been packed up and moved to their new home in Bjørvika, and now it’s closed, it’s probably 2020, and the new museum will have opened a long time ago. By the time we get to Sirkus Square, several more years must have past, and the old building in Tøyen collapses, paint flaking.

  Slowly, culture is transformed back into nature. The building’s white halls and the cloakroom’s warm yellow hues fade, as if the paintings were what held the walls and the pigments together. The museum rooms have become set pieces in a story that’s finished, a reality that’s no longer real. The metal detectors remain, continuing to scan their own machinery, and the cameras in the corners film nothing so many times over that the image creates its own feedback loop.

  This is where I’m writing, in the abandoned museum. Munch’s bonus material.

  When we push open the old glass doors, the building lets out a sigh, as if we’ve opened a bottle of sparkling water.

  ‘Munch burp,’ says Terese. She’s at the front and got a gust of musty air directly in her face.

  Venke sniffs through the opening, yells HELLO! and wriggles her way through the crack we’ve made.

  The echo travels around the empty exhibition rooms before it seeps back out again, toward us.

  It’s quiet in there for a little while.

  Venke, I whisper, to no response.

  Then the sound of a machine starting up is heard from the far end of the room.

  We’re sneaking in through the crack now, Terese and I, along with all the others who have begun to follow us. The rumour has clearly spread. The conclave expands. The future is caught up and devoured by the present, the image moves back and forth.

  In the biggest hall the rain trickles down the walls from rot-holes in the ceiling. There are still marks from the biggest paintings. The Researchers used to hang here, the painting with Mother Earth sitting nursing in the middle, with an edging of children’s bodies, all joined together, surveying the sheep-backed rocks in the background. ‘She provides the milk of science’, Munch is supposed to have said about the female figure in the middle. If you squint at the middle of the imprint left by the painting, you see the water collect into large falling droplets, stained golden white by chemical pus, environmental toxins and old paint, as if there were still an engorged breast where the art once was.

  Terese and Venke immediately begin working on the wall, redirecting the water-milk in formations across an imagined canvas, like a little water carousel that slowly paints its own artwork. A couple of other artists have started painting abstract motifs directly onto one of the other walls in blood-red. Their hands drip with the blood, which drips from our eyes too if we get too close.

  In the middle of the room is an oblong machine. At over two metres long, it’s like a small train carriage. Two people are operating it from a panel on one side, twisting and turning oversized buttons and levers. Solid fasteners hold together a large steel plate that stretches out into a short tray on the other end. It looks like an enormous, old-fashioned Geiger counter or some sort of nuclear energy research device from the Los Alamos laboratory in America, but it’s an old 3D printer. The operators gently nudge it. The machine coughs a little and the rear end is raised and then opens slightly to let out the cough.

  ‘Is everyone here?’ asks one operator.

  There are quite a lot of people in the room now, maybe twenty or thirty. I recognise a few of them. Only I and a couple of others are standing around the machine; the rest are busy creating and hanging their own artwork.

  ‘What are you making?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s not that easy,’ says an older woman with her arms crossed.

  The printer is too old to follow instructions. It was made before they really got the hang of the technology, and age has left it both enchanted and inebriated. It doesn’t produce the programmed results. But maybe it can show us something we’ve secretly wished for, made from recyclable plastic packaging. Behind the operators are several black bags, bursting with trash off the streets. I exhale, relieved. I just remembered the mill at the bottom of the sea and hope no one asks for herrings and gruel.

  Something’s being printed right now. It takes a long time, almost an hour, and the machine occasionally huffs and puffs, like a dying Dot Matrix that has to be repaired and rebooted over and over again. Finally, something is spat out of the metallic colon: an almost living 3D baby.

  One of the operators picks up the baby, in that way you do, scratches it a little under the chin, cradles it and carries it over to the other operator, who looks sceptical but also a little impressed.

  Did anyone think about this?

  No one answers.

  The plastic mould is still warm, she says.

  The figure is passed around. The quality’s poor. Messy dimensions and with plastic residue hanging from the ends of toes, lips and skull; but it still looks lifelike, and it’s warm, like a living body, though rapidly cooling.

  Venke and Terese’s milk painting is completely soaked, and shapes have started to appear in it, a breast, or an udder, or perhaps that’s a poison gland on the canvas. Under the image, in big red letters, they’ve written: Suck on me.

  Throughout the day, the printer continues to spit up human-like figures, at first warm and soft, then hard and cold. We hang them around the room, and begin increasingly to wander about, as if we’re now an audience at our own exhibition.

  In a moment one of the operators has grasped the first art baby’s head and torn the figure off the wall, swinging it around. The rest of us start to do the same. I grab a slightly larger plastic baby and begin swinging it around by its legs; round and round until the head takes flight and hits a wall and the shoddy plastic cracks.

  A gasp ripples through the room. Our movements take on a forced harmony before we carry on with our separate activities. For a brief moment the norms have surfaced, the South, or whatever we’re calling it now, in us, even in here, in the future museum. We’ve gone too far. A reaction is provoked. The plastic babies ask: Should art that depicts children’s figures have different values, different ways of communicating with reality than other images, even when they’re created from plastic or animated lines? Should
we be allowed to be a picture? ask the babies. Should we ignore the formats, shouldn’t JPEG or MPEG or RAW or TIFF exist, so we look straight at a subject that isn’t there? Should there be chips and pieces and holes in us that aren’t permitted to be art and fantasy?

  In that brief moment of hesitation, we’re caught between art’s conservative ideas about the independence of the artistic genius, and a moral understanding of reality as a place where some ideas are not permitted to be imagined, even though the imagination exists; even though, for us, it could have been something else, given us something, created something. This is also where Puberty is positioned. Not just in the rift between child and adult, but between Munch’s canonised genius and the exploited girl who models for him, either literally or figuratively. Can we save her without being accused of destroying art, I wonder, but here she is, in the middle of the scene, with every right: the right to hate, the right to destroy. She has almost ripped off her own head, slipped on a BDM-format animated teenage head that resembles her, and started headbanging.

  And then the rest of us move on, too. I continue to twist the plastic fibres with my hands, skin and meat and bone cells. The hatred, the rights of the artistic geniuses, and of their objects, swirl around the girl in the room. Here, all formats are transformed. Here there’s no collective shame of association. Here is BA (binary archive), and BAR (horizontal bar menu object file) and BB (database backup). We’re here, in this impossible place. The place God can’t see. We feel him searching for us though, for a brief moment.

  Art attacks itself. The exhibition is constructed, then destroyed again. We tear down the paintings. We wade through the blood paint. It’s streaming from our eyes. The entire house headbangs.

  Then the ritual ends. We start to zoom in again, back to our own time and our own witches’ dens, but as we reel back, we throw the art babies back into the machine. The children and the teenagers, now completely cold, completely hardened, cracked and broken. The printer has become increasingly alert throughout the day, and now it is really up to speed. It shreds the plastic moulds almost immediately, then reshapes and rechristens them. As the room expands and the details are erased in the distance, we watch it spit out the first victim of the shredding, an ugly IKEA vase, narrow and hollow, of the TAJT variation. A Scandinavian reproduction monster.

  Let’s rest in the side panel briefly, before we return to reality. You and me.

  Some rituals don’t need to be performed or written out properly. They can, for example, be written as lists.

  MAGICAL SCULPTURE PARK SCULPTURES

  1. Venke can be seen embracing a Rodin figure.

  2. Terese is deep inside Dan Graham’s chamber.

  3. I lick the bedrock alongside Jenny Holzer’s letters.

  4. Everyone squats pissing around Ann-Sofi Sidén’s Fideicommissum.

  And another list

  HOW I’M GOING TO KILL GOD

  has no content at all. It’s so pathetic.

  Sometimes, after working through the night, we sit tired and half naked on our beds, in pants and maybe only a T-shirt, in a pose that resembles Puberty but without the shame. And then something has begun. A new ritual. Without anything really starting. A ritual is a feeling, a band feeling, a sensation of the bonds that tighten into eternity knots and squeeze us together, not uncomfortably, just closer, so we feel the radioactivity in our bodies and are bound to each other.

  No one can see into the room; no one can spot us, photograph us, stream or paint us. The blinds are drawn for the people who sometimes smoke in the backyard, piss behind the corner or come to argue with someone on the phone. We’re not sexy, either, sitting on our beds in our underwear. For some reason it’s important to me to make that clear. Maybe because I don’t want you to see; the gaze on the naked body is so difficult. Picture us as containers, as meat and minerals and fluids, like bags: an outside made of leather, pockets in several places, and with contents of soft and hard body tissue, held up and in by a series of mathematical figures and fluid-based transport systems. Think of us as stage curtains, leaking yellow, red and blue light, and smoke from smoke machines, from every curtain edge. Picture it. That in itself is a ritual. I’m writing this to you.

  One of us has blood on her hands, fumbling a little with her crotch. She says: You know when you insert a tampon and it’s stuck sort of diagonally, like that? and points with a bloody finger. As if our insides always changed form, and the vagina always swallowed tampons and menstrual cups a little differently. We disappear toward the back of the room, to a toilet, and continue our discussion from there, in the background. Puberty, I’m writing her into the ritual, joins us there. From the bathroom we’re heard but not seen: only our shadows are visible. We talk about cups and vacuums and how they’re like leeches, sucking their way up the crotch, as we lift up nightgowns, pull down pants and use twigs to rub ourselves with black henbane.

  Someone has smeared blood over her thighs, and one of us gets it on her face. We begin applying makeup around the bloodstains, adding more colours, initially just on her face, then on everyone’s. One of us is painted in a black-metal style, but using green instead of black, and adding glitter. Puberty is painted across Edvard Munch’s Self Portrait on the Glass Veranda, blood all over the face with thick aquamarine lines. That seems appropriate, says Terese.

  Black henbane doesn’t burn the skin, on the inside or outside; it just warms, rubs, accentuates the shapes of our orifices like glowing rings. Behind us our shadows are long, moving in increasingly dark circles, like our own feedback loop. The dimensions open up, more rings slide up inside our bodies, through the uterus. We’re no longer Scandinavian reproduction blueprints. The rings twist around the bones in our spines, until we exhale them like smoke rings, respire them. Then they rise, across town, ring 1, ring 2, ring 3, ring on into the cosmos.

  Maybe we rise, too. Maybe we half carry each other, half float?

  Maybe we sit on the twigs and use them to float, like brooms.

  Or wait, maybe the twigs are brushes and we use them to paint the floor and the walls, or ourselves. Maybe the twigs are instruments, or microphones that we attach to ourselves.

  Being a witch doesn’t need to be more difficult than that. Just look: Venke lifts her hair with one hand, holding two twigs in the other. She uses the twigs to cut off a big lock of hair, as if they transformed into scissors on their way to her head, turning back into twigs afterwards. As Venke cuts, the clipped hairs are immediately transformed into spaghetti. Where the hair was cut it grows out again; the spaghetti dangles from her fist. I grab a strand, place one end on my lips and slurp it toward me.

  Above us we see glowing circles, overlapping to make a chain. Terese twirls a spaghetti string around her finger. It glows, too. As we speak we see the outline of our voices, or the shape of the tones, the ring of the frequencies, or, wait, we see our intestines circle above us, we see fragments up there, from our bodies. Our inner instruments have begun an unexpected band practice, ringing from the bedroom and outside the bedroom, from the plants in the backyard and in the botanical garden and from the shadow figures of the museum. Everything hums. All of Oslo’s components float like a deck of tarot cards, sprinkling and flaking fragments that we can reassemble like a mandala, a whole, flaming from our own brew.

  An episode:

  A group of experienced witches and one apprentice hike into a field in Austre Moland on the midsummer solstice. They mow a circle of the Southern grass short using a pole made out of holly, dig a hole in the ground right in the middle of the circle and murmur a few words from a tablet with a black metallic finish.

  A huge black ram appears. He has bloody horns and a wax candle strapped to his back.

  The ram commands them all to greet him by kissing his behind, below the tail. The kiss immediately sends them into a trance, and they begin to dance around in circles, back to back, as the ram pisses into the hole they have dug, filling it with bright yellow urine. This is the witches’ holy water.
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  The witches add herbs to the water, drink the holy water urine from little black goblets, and as they drink, the wax candle on the ram’s mane is lit and ‘Happy Birthday’ begins to play.

  The witches continue to dance until they pass out and slump to the ground. The ram stands quietly. Perhaps he will, in short spurts, change into a girl on all fours, dressed in black, with black hair.

  ‘Happy Birthday’ continues playing until the candle has burnt down.

  The Sabbath

  Let’s zoom out for a moment.

  The pleasant Southern cobblestone streets in the centres of Lillesand, Grimstad, Arendal, Tvedestrand and Risør lie deserted. They’re easily recognised; it’s not permitted to paint the listed wooden houses here any colour but white. It’s completely quiet, until you gradually hear the distant sound of an engine, and then another one, and then another one; now the entire crew of furious and disruptive car cruisers are approaching. Sunday school children peek out the window of the evangelist church and see the cruisers drive back and forth, back and forth, new variations all the time. Occasionally the gang skid across a patch of lawn, a little too close to a pavement edge or a walkway. Back and forth, engines hissing as loudly as possible, squeezing out as much sound as they can.

  I see them drive past, honking, from the room where I practice with my metal band in 1998. I’m standing by the window with the black microphone, in black clothes and with black hair, and for a moment I’m drawn to the cars, the drifting, rootlessness out there. The cruisers yank me out of the process I’m in, the process of creating a direction for my hatred. The music and the metal community can receive some of my hatred, and the rest has to glow undisturbed inside the music, far away from the world. But the moment the cruisers honk, we all feel, everyone in the band, that we’re not far from the world after all; we’re just another one of the street racers’ targets. Together, we’re just any other Southern congregation that can be disrupted.