FOR THE PAST TWENTY YEARS, I have been haunted by an artwork I saw as a teenager: the skeletal form of a burned-out church, cast in salt and polyurethane by Banks Violette. Towering above a platform of shiny black epoxy, more stage than plinth, the untitled 2005 installation occupied the better part of a black-painted gallery at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which had commissioned the work on the heels of the artist’s star turn at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Against the black ground, its crystalline beams appeared at once physically overwhelming and insubstantial, conjuring a fossilized ruin, a spectral trace, an X-ray revealing a hidden wound.
I was drawn in then, as I am now, by the work’s doomy elegance: This was art for the end of the world, which is what it often felt like to be a teenage malcontent during the two-term death cult that was the presidency of George W. Bush. As I circled Violette’s installation, I became aware for the first time of looking at a work of contemporary art, in the sense of an artwork made by my contemporary (or at least someone closer in age to me than to my parents), one that emerged from my own present and articulated its particular character in an alluring language of provocation and disaffection.
A text panel spelled out the ghostly sculpture’s obscure backstory: It had been modeled on the charred remains of the twelfth-century Fantoft Stave Church in Bergen, Norway, the first casualty in a string of some sixty church fires set in the early 1990s by members of the Norwegian black metal scene, many of them self-proclaimed militant Satanists. More precisely, the work was based on a photograph of the destroyed church as it appeared on the cover of the 1993 album Aske (Ashes) by Burzum, the solo project of Varg Vikernes, a neo-Nazi who was among the scene’s ringleaders, and who was widely assumed to have set the fire himself. This wave of destruction culminated in Vikernes murdering a rival and former bandmate, stabbing him twenty-three times. Another musician, Snorre Ruch, of the band Thorns, served eight years in prison as an accessory to the crime. For the show, Violette invited this accomplice to become his own: Ruch composed the work’s ominous soundtrack of droning electronic noise mixed with thunderclaps, churning water, and howling wind, which Violette described in the catalogue as “a glue-sniffer’s apotheosis of Burke’s sublime.”
Some reviewers, including Artforum’s, were unimpressed with these layers of baroque exegesis, viewing them as a veneer—edgy but not embedded. For Violette, this was the point: Most visitors, unacquainted with extreme metal subcultures, would not immediately recognize what they were looking at. As a result, the work projected what he called an “amoral” position toward the event, presenting the artifacts of the crime without passing judgment, creating a putatively neutral frame in which the viewer could engage with the object as object—and only later, perhaps, contend with how their reaction aligned with their sense of ethics. The work ultimately was not about murder or church burning or Satanic panic, but about complicity, reflecting Ruch’s role as the accomplice back onto the viewer. “If you can find this compelling as an aesthetic experience,” Violette later said of the Whitney installation, “that’s one step down a queasy slope to putting yourself right next to the person who’s lighting the match.”
The Whitney commission cemented Violette’s reputation as the foremost representative of what critics, curators, and glossy magazines had taken to calling the “New Gothic,” a loose group of young artists who emerged around the start of the millennium with works that took up death, destruction, and decay, often filtered through the aesthetics of dark subcultures and adolescent rebellion. Violette’s breakout show “Arroyo Grande 7.22.95,” presented at New York’s Team Gallery in 2002, revolved around the gruesome 1995 killing of a teen girl in California by classmates obsessed with the band Slayer; they believed that the ritual sacrifice of a virgin would elevate the fortunes of their own metal band, Hatred. The exhibition was divided into two sections, one corresponding to the murder (a drum kit with twelve black stalactites, one for each stab wound), the other to its memorialization (a sculpture of a white unicorn with a melting face). The result was a striking, if heavy-handed, introduction to Violette’s enduring preoccupations: antagonistic social formations, fictional overidentification, the language and logic of cliché.