Continuing its dedication to the youngest artists, the Whitney Museum presents the first solo exhibition of Banks Violette (Ithaca, New York, 1973). Responding to the commission of a specific project for the museum, where his work excelled in the 2004 Biennial, Violette created Untitled, an installation composed of an oversized sculpture cast in salt recreating the ruins of a burned church along a musical composition made for the work by the Norwegian musician Snorre Rauch, placed in a black-painted room with dim light.
Untitled is the grandiose, museum-scale culmination of the usual narrative that appears in Violette´s art: an aesthetic of horror, death, fascism, Satanism, juvenile subcultures and extreme music. In this ambitious project, Violette recreates actual events that took place in the underground- churches being burnt by Black Metal musicians in Norway around 1992- in an installation with multiple visions.
The reflection on beastly acts occurring when the individual, normally an adolescent, realizes his obsessive identification with certain images and ideas of the extreme metal cult is a constant in Violette’s work. In this sense, Banks Violette´s burnt church is a triumph of the apocalyptic music subculture inside the elitist museum environment and a certain understanding between high and low.
Macabre and gloomy, but also attractive, Untitled is a minimal sculpture or a romantic ruin, as well as the famous and controversial cover of a Black Metal album. The implication of the viewer is part of the artist’s intention: if we grasp the beauty of the work, we will be participating of the violence that inspired it, part of the complicity between a dark artist, a murderer musician and a spectator that sympathizes with the devil, even momentarily and in the safe surroundings of the museum.
(Originally published in Lapiz, July 2005)
