Bjarne Melgaard
Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin, Germany
Bjarne Melgaard’s installation Kidwhore in Manhattan – A Novel (2008) approaches the novel in the same way that Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s 1978 movie Hitler – A Film From Germany treated the Hitler-phenomenon as if it were somehow itself a film. For his sophomore solo show at Galerie Guido W. Baudach, the Norwegian enfant terrible (ageing) has produced a sprawling installation that incorporates video work, photographs, paintings, neon slogans and furniture. The sum effect is to spatialize a rhetorical theory of surfaces, just as Syberberg once deployed Hitler to argue for a spiritual theory of cinema.
Syberberg’s thematic focus was the aesthetics of power, his stylistic approach operatic and portentous. Melgaard, by contrast, is more interested in sexual violence and pederasty – all scored in the key of Grand Guignol. The narrative thread of Kidwhore… swirls round the adventures of an unnamed Manhattan rent-boy, presented through a series of fragmentary statements and scenes. The lurid impasto of the deliberately hideous paintings charts a series of vividly experienced tricks, the new media work (a short clip of a man in a blue shirt sexually embracing a lion through the bars of a cage) arrives on a different level, and seems to initially imply something about non-standard partners. A group of three Modernist tables originally designed by Paola Piva (two covered with press cuttings from the now-defunct NAMBLA-rag Made in the USA, one covered with crudely drawn, child-like sketches, all three pinned down to the tabletops with a thicket of scalpels) meanwhile pose points about character against cultural backdrops.
Melgaard has never been known for his aversion to shock tactics and this show is unlikely to change that perception. Even laying the sleaziness of his theme to one side, taken individually a couple of pieces here are strikingly and dumbly provocative. One of two neon poems, for example, broadcasts the slogan: ‘The world is full of rich corrupted cunts.’ This is beyond cliché at this point: it is all very well shocking the bourgeoisie, but if the bourgeois in question simply nods and signs cheque, the gesture becomes hollow and prick-kicking.
But is Melgaard’s gesture simply hollow, or instead a signifier of hollowness in the service of a wider point? The quiet suspicion that there are subtler concepts at play here, detectable beneath the initial sensationalist bombast of the rhetoric, is driven home by the cleverest pieces presented, a series of furniture works by the architect Frederick John Kiesler, upholstered by Melgaard with further Kidwhore… scenes. The medium drains the imagery of its sensational power, thus ladling a large measure of irony onto the show as a whole
When transgressive clichés become literally part of the furniture – as they have done in our post-Genet times – the deeper value of this show begins to become apparent. There is tactical logic in the selection of particular mediums, and their crashing-together here exposes this hidden dimension. Hung by themselves, the paintings would seem raw and authentic, but their jostling blocks off such a reading. Similarly, in their flat presentation of cuttings, the tables in some way recall Wolfgang Tillmans’ Truth Study Centre (2007) but here their sincerity is shown to be calculated.
This critical sense extends downwards into the rhetoric of the theme itself. From fictional novelist J.T. Leroy to the more studied biographical excesses of the young New York artists, the conceit of the drug-addled Manhattan rent-boy today appears as authenticity’s highly marketable final stand. In Kidwhore in Manhattan Melgaard embraces the figure, like the man in his video embracing the lion, and thereby succeeds in driving home its ridiculousness.
Daniel Miller
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