Replicas Of Burnt Norwegian Churches On Display At New York Museum

Elisabeth Kley of the New York Press has issued the following report:

Like a room-size Parthenon floating on a midnight pond, Banks Violette's untitled salt replica of a ruined church skeleton is poised atop a shiny black epoxy stage that almost fills the Whitney Museum's small lobby gallery. In a way, it's a sculpture of a sin, or many sins, acts of desecration performed by black-metal musicians and their followers in Norway. This destructive series of events began on June 6, 1992, with the torching of a 12th-century wooden church, an irreplaceable artifact of medieval architecture. By September of the same year, Varg Vikernes (aka Count Grisnackh),the only member of a black-metal band called BURZUM, had participated in two more church burnings. Since then, over 100 places of worship have been burned in Norway, a country whose state religion is Protestantism. Grisnackh's personal crime spree turned deadly on August 10, 1993, when he stabbed his colleague Oystein Aarseth (aka Euronymous),the guitarist for the band MAYHEM, 23 times: twice in the head, five times in the neck, and 16 more in the back. Unrepentant, he is now in jail answering fan mail, espousing his personal brand of heathen neo-Nazism.

Snorre Ruch, the leader of BLACKTHORN, another black metal band, drove with Count Grisnackh for six hours from Bergen to Euronymous' Oslo apartment, waited on the stairs while Euronymous was murdered, and watched Count Grisnackh wash Euronymous' blood from his hair, hands and face. Now released from jail, he and two musical collaborators, Jon Wesseltoft and Finn Olav Holthe, have provided Violette with a 98-minute synthesized score to accompany the sculpture. A quasi-science-fictional hum is emitted from several speakers, evoking muffled church bells, wind fanning flames, the buzz of a chain saw and the hissing of a grenade's fuse.

Fitting perfectly into its rectangular black-walled gallery, Violette's sculpture is a modern indoor folly, a faux ruin just a few steps away from the Whitney entrance, coat check, bookstore and elevators. It began with one wooden beam, chipped and burned with a blowtorch. A polyurethane mold was made from the beam and then a series of replicas, cast with over 200 pounds of table salt, was assembled into the framework of a church. The result is a vulnerable piece of architecture with the tactile material presence of a sturdy minimal sculpture by Donald Judd. Salty beams sparkle under harsh spotlights, their crystalline whiteness disturbed here and there by soot. They rest on a black epoxy foundation divided into 24 squares, outlined by light reflected in the grooves between them. The punctum of the piece is the grating contrast that appears where the bottoms of the salt-cast beams meet their gloomy reflections, uneasily resting on their frighteningly slippery base.

Read the rest of the article at NYPress.com.