Girls Against God

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