Girls Against God

my American keyboard), I can be part of something, I can be less myself and feel less trapped and dying and tucked away in my own body. My body can expand, search for others, be a part of them, become something else together, something that can live on after all the I’s are dead. When I die, I want to be part of a bond, get rolled into the bond, as though dying were stage-diving off the ledge and sensing someone there to catch you.
The magic of community, of the defeat of death and loneliness. Å, I’ve missed you.
Venke, Terese and I are a band from the moment we meet at the exhibition opening at the Munch museum and get talking. The tone of the conversation changes abruptly from polite and introductory to witty and dynamic. We realise we can talk about the same stuff, totally relaxed and therefore at terrifying speed, without breaks; we’ve jumped into a jet stream that’s so powerful, we don’t notice that the event is over until the museum is empty and we are pushed through the doors out into the darkness.
In the days that follow the opening we continue the conversation on all the applications of the internet. We leave a chain of invisible but glittering email threads, Instagram group messages, and iMessage bubbles behind us. Even when we don’t get back to each other for a while, I can feel the stream, the energy; imagine the speech bubbles being produced. Venke calls it the phantom conversation. I call it songs.
I call it songs because we can speak openly and without fear. Our conversations always flow continuously, safe and at the same time elastic, steady like the beat of a bass drum and fleeting like cymbals and gentle percussion. Most of all, there’s a harmony, a flow of compassion that opens our currents to each other, bringing us closer together. We write and talk ourselves into each other. We become songs, together.
The first thing we talk about, right away when we meet at the exhibition, is Munch. After a while the conversation touches on one of his paintings not featured in the show, Puberty (1894– 1895). In this painting, a very young girl sits naked on a bed, with her arms loosely crossed over her crotch. Her body casts a big, dark shadow that hits the wall behind her. The shadow looks unnatural, as if it’s not coming from her but from something separate from her, something hanging over her.
It’s summer and peak season when I visit the National Gallery and look at this painting. There’s such a crush of people between me and the girl as I move toward her that I can only see her head, and she looks as if she were dressed. When I finally reach her, it hurts to see her naked body surrounded by the tourists’ incessant clicking and yapping – tourists with their waterproof trainers, windbreakers and sensible backpacks crowding her bed, her shadow and her skin. It turns the painting into pornography, an illustration of the commercial exploitation and determined conservation of paintings with naked young women as motifs, or what we call ‘art’.
But maybe the girl from Puberty, and all naked young women in all paintings, are actually sitting there hating. Hating the painter, hating their boring gloomy life, hating the king and the president and the bishop and the prime minister and the authors and society and their own place in it. Maybe it’s not a shadow climbing the wall behind her, but smoke from the spontaneously ignited occult fire of hatred.
I’m struck by the naïve notion of taking the girl home, painting clothes on her, black clothes maybe, painting her into a new framework, as the Canadian writer Aritha van Herk does to Anna Karenina in Places far from Ellesmere. In this book, van Herk wants to save Anna from being another woman character in literary history who’s crushed by a train, and she plucks Anna from Tolstoy’s novel and gives her a new frame, a new text. She demonstrates how literature and art can tamper with their own past, create new bonds. As far as I know, no one has tried this witchcraft on Munch and his Puberty (she doesn’t even have a name), but now I want to paint or rewrite the girl in the painting, save her, save us. Because it’s definitely just as much about me, about saving myself from the position of a contemporary subject passively accepting the narratives offered it by past art, past stories about gender, expression, hierarchy. I want to save myself from nodding in acknowledgement to Munch, to 1890, from the outside, with insight, and accepting that Puberty is the mirror art has installed for me.
Aritha van Herk refused to accept the idea that artworks are static and complete and that stories can’t be edited. She brought Anna with her, out of Anna Karenina, when she left her home in Alberta for Ellesmere, an island up north in Canada. Up there, far away from Tolstoy’s hands, in the white icescape, the geographically blank map, she could write a new story. Facing Puberty and her flickering shadow, I think about my studies in New England, about how I, too, wanted to re-create myself, to save myself from the South. But I was alone, without an Anna or Puberty; I had no art, no more ingredients. I couldn’t form any bonds, had no ability to resist new authorities or the traditions in the American university system. Here at the National Gallery in Oslo, with Venke and Terese and our electric conversation at the back of my mind, it isn’t just about getting away from our homes. It’s about finding bonds strong enough to tamper with both art history and our own history. It’s about no longer being the match girl, the one standing outside looking in at society, with insight, in the light from the little flickering flame. I’d rather use that match to ignite the