Girls Against God

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