Thorkild Bjørnvig - Chris Korda

Other August 23, 2002

By Ejvind Larsen

About Johannesburg, the arts, journalism - and the lifestyle

Free words

IT HAPPENS that a journalistic piece of reportage in today's newspaper not only seems upsetting to the feeling, which reports do not so rarely do, but because the thought comes to seem like a fully-fledged work of art: It renders any comment superfluous in the first moment, because everything is said and done with the work itself. The rest is silence, left to the tacit knowledge. But here, for a change, this summer it is not Hamlet that is being discussed, but a report in Tuesday's Information by Lotte Folke Kaarsholm about the musician and computer programmer Chris Korda.

"We believe that life has a purpose, and this purpose is life itself - to create conditions for life. Tragically, life's purpose does not seem to have the least to do with people. Everything suggests that diversity creates fertile ground for life. And that man's urge to place himself at the center of the universe and dominate his environment is fatal to this diversity. Unlike previous natural disasters, man is a constant, structurally functioning disaster that shows no signs of going away, but on the contrary seem to be able to adapt like weeds to the inhospitable, lifeless environment we are turning the globe into," says the American artist Chris Korda in Lotte Folke Kaarsholm's report.

It is reminiscent of the somewhat older Danish artist Thorkild Bjørnvig, who more than a quarter of a century ago began his poem My neighbor? with the observation: How painful and strange to see one's kind/ lay bitterly superfluous waste/ so much one loves and delights in. -Does not the resting oak stand, the circling buzzard,/ when they are threatened - do not stand the swallow, the seal and the eider,/ which can still be seen, and the elephant and the whale/ behind the horizon one nearer/ than one's own kind, when it baseless killer,/a blunt enemy/ of all that one loves: Is the killer - / not of ancient necessity, but of restless desire,/ desire and profit - more your neighbor/ than all the growing running swimming floating/ he lays waste? Now finally witnessed by the latest UN and WWF reports for the coming weeks' Johannesburg summit on the constitution of nature: Well, it was already bad when Bjørnvig wrote his poem, but since then a third of the remaining birds, mammals, reptiles and fish further laid waste. While at the same time our own species has increased its own numbers by over two thirds from the then 3.5 billion to now provisionally 6 billion - in a quarter of a century with, on top of that, strongly increasing nature consumption for each individual - especially in our richest and already most nature-consuming part of the world.

Certainly, Thorkild Bjørnvig has never drawn the consequence that Chris Korda did, to establish a personal church The Church of Euthanasia (mercy killing) with "you must not procreate" as the only commandment and otherwise calls for "suicide, abortion, cannibalism and sodomy", and I to tell the truth, have never seen Bjørnvig perform as a woman either, as our reporter reports about Korda, but I remember how he, Bjørnvig, in a lecture at an assembly at Ry Højskole in January 1989, urgently advocated a showdown with humanity's notion that it is at the center of the universe, so that everything ultimately had to exist, yes, perhaps even was created, for our sake. Why we multiply without limit and use the available nature as it now serves us. But this self-expression and self-adoration - anthropocentrism - is precisely what we do not benefit from, not only because of pollution, greenhouse effects, water shortages, diseases and other ecological consequences to the detriment of our own and our children's survival, but also because we enjoy and dwell on it and those that are in their own - intrinsic - right and in their own forms. It is this sustainable joy that we are putting out of control, and that is why in Bjørnvig's writing there are also many passages that strongly correspond to Korda's outburst: "The technology that we all admire and believe in copies the escapism of the great religions. They dreaming of escaping earth to a better place, of escaping their bodies to something that doesn't smell, doesn't have sex, doesn't mess." Like Korda, Bjørnvig also invites the dance, sweat and tears of direct corporeality against the destruction: The figurations of energy/ in us - protest tirelessly, wish it could extinguish/ the fire and radiation of destruction with corporeally salty tears,/ know that always more will feel this way and find an act,/ know, the joy of organic energy is the only counter-fire.

However, the MEMORIES of Bjørnvig did not in themselves make the report on Chris Korda seem like a work of art. So did the rejection of any form of self-righteousness: "I am as trapped by human society as anyone else. My generation hungers for authenticity and throws itself into nightclubs with blinding floodlights, unbearably loud music, toxic smoke and lots of drugs to experience the intensity. The thought fills me with horror, but I also stand there and put on the music. I call the floor in front of the DJ desk, but I also dance along." ... "We are an entire generation on Prozac, which we take to be able to fulfill our function as members of what they even call 'the creative class'." ... "In the ten years we've been in existence, we've actually also changed from an activist, action-oriented movement to a more pessimistic orientation toward at least documenting that while this disaster was unfolding, there were some who protested." ... "It's a battle we can't win. So the church is about finding together with others who have the same experience of living in the middle of a nightmare, the main characteristic of which is that most people around them act like nothing's wrong."

I don't know if Chris Korda's art and efforts of his own body seem stronger than the Johannesburg reports mentioned above. But without his - and Bjørnvig's - painful presentation of the nightmare and its exclusion from conscious awareness, I would hardly have the energy to sift through the reports and write about them.

The preceding is a translation. The original language is here.