Introduction || Klaus Biesenbach Receives the Order of the Falcon, awarded by the President of Iceland Receives the Q Inspiration Award from Robert Wyatt Named Best International Female at the BRITs for a third time Receives Qwartz honor at the Qwartz Electronic Music Awards Wins Best Female at the MTV Music Awards Sugarcubes sign to ex-Flux of Pink Indians Derek Birkett’s independent label, One Little Indian Awarded the Polar Music Prize Wins BRITs Best International Female for the second time Receives two Golden Globe nominations: Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, and Best Original Song for “I’ve Seen It All” MTV O Music Awards presents Björk with the Digital Genius Award Receives six MTV Music Award nominations; “It’s Oh So Quiet” wins Best Choreography in a Video Kukl join Chumbawamba and Flux of Pink Indians on a miners’ strike benefit tour in the UK Surrounded: all albums re-mastered for Dolby Digital and surround sound Releases Surrounded: Wins Webby Artist of the Year “Wanderlust” video, directed by Encyclopedia Pictura, receives three awards at the UK Music Video Awards: “Bachelorette” receives award for Best Art Direction at the MTV Video Music Awards Best Art Direction in a Video, Best Indie/Alternative Video, and Video of the Year Wins Best International Female and Best International Newcomer at the BRIT Awards and performs at the ceremony with PJ Harvey “All is Full of Love” video, directed by Chris Cunningham, wins Breakthrough Video and Best Special Effects in a Video at the VMAs The Academy of AIM (Association of Independent Music) honors Björk with Outstanding Contribution to Music Award Receives Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival; the film also wins the Palme d’Or Releases Voltaic,, a double CD and DVD encompassing the best of the tours’ live performances Releases Receives the National Order of Merit awarded by the President of the French Republic and a recorded live session at Olympic Studios, London Contributes exclusive instrumental soundtrack to Nick Knight and Alexander McQueen’s installation Angel for “La Beauté en Avignon” exhibition Björk moves to London “I’ve Seen It All” is nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars First single, “Human Behaviour,” is accompanied by a Michel Gondry video Releases Releases Includes a studio album, apps, new website, educational workshops for children to learn First single is “Hidden Place,” with a video directed by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin and M/M (Paris) about music, nature, and science, and live shows (three-year world tour of month-long residencies in eight cities) Releases Selmasongs Selmasongs, soundtrack to the film Dancer in the Dark Joins Kukl (meaning “sorcery”) with friends Einar Örn Benediktsson, Sigtryggur Baldursson, Einar Melax, Birgir Mogensen, and Guðlaugur Óttarsson Releases with Björk using apps to play custom-built musical instruments Vespertine tour launches at the Grand Rex in Paris with the Novecento Orchestra conducted by Simon Lee, the group Matmos, Zeena Parkins, and an Inuit women’s choir Releases remix album, Telegram Björk and John Tavener’s collaboration “A Prayer of the Heart” premieres as an accompaniment to Nan Goldin’s Heartbeat photo exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, Paris First single, “Army of Me,” is accompanied by a Michel Gondry video Björk attends Oscars in “Swan” dress by Marjan Pejoski, and later performs Biophilia receives a Grammy for Best Recording Package sleeve, designed by Björk and M/M (Paris) Releases Releases preceded by a mini-tour of European clubs produced by Björk, Mark Bell, Timbaland, and Danja Björk, Peter Strickland, and Nick Fenton First single is “Jóga,” and Michel Gondry directs the video “Earth Intruders” is the first single, with a video directed by Michel Ocelot present Biophilia Live concert film at Tribeca Film Festival Releases Drawing Restraint soundtrack to the Drawing Restraint 9 film directed by Matthew Barney 9,, directed by Matthew Barney Interviews composer Arvo Pärt for the BBC program Modern Minimalists Release of Drawing Restraint 9 Releases “Comet Song,” recorded for the soundtrack of the animated film Moomins and the Comet Chase Tappi Tíkarrass release their first 5-song EP Sings “Gloomy Sunday” at Alexander McQueen’s memorial in London; later releases “Trance” as the backing track to a short film made by Nick Knight, titled “To Lee, with Love,” as a tribute to McQueen Releases Performs a duet, “Flétta,” with Antony and the Johnsons on the release Swanlights an a cappella album featuring only voices Sugarcubes release their first album, Life’s Too Good,, to critical acclaim in UK and US Björk vocals appear on Death Grips release “The Powers That B” Releases Greatest Hits and Family Tree Tree,, with sleeve artwork by artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir Releases the Biophilia Remix Series 1–7 Launches Greatest Hits tour at London Hammersmith Apollo Aged twelve, releases a self-titled album, Björk Kukl release The Eye on British anarchist record label, Crass Sugarcubes release second album, Here Today, Tomorrow Next Week! Announces new commission and accompanying retrospective Releases Live Box set, featuring four CDs, one from each album, and a DVD of live performances of the past ten years at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by Klaus Biesenbach Joins punk band Tappi Tíkarrass, whose name translates as “Cork the Bitch’s Ass” Sugarcubes tour the US for the first time and appear on Saturday Night Live Releases Bastards,, a compilation of remixes from Biophilia Biophilia Live presented as the Sonic Gala at the 58th BFI London Film Festival Charity compilation of twenty remixes of “Army of Me” released in aid of UNICEF Björk records jazz album Gling-Gló with Trio Guðmundar Ingólfssonar in one day; it goes platinum in Iceland Tetralogia soundtrack composed in collaboration with Gabríela Friðriksdóttir for the latter’s work at the Venice Biennale Nordic Council funds Biophilia Educational Program initiative Performs at Live8 Tokyo to bring the curriculum to Nordic countries’ schools. Records two tracks with 808 State, which are released on the group’s Ex:El album First single is “Crystalline” and has a Michel Gondry video Biophilia app acquired by Museum of Modern Art, New York, Performs live at the Royal Opera House in London, the first ever contemporary pop artist to do so the first app in the museum’s collection Accompanied by the Brodsky Quartet in a filmed a cappella performance at the Union Chapel, London Performs with Dirty Projectors at the Housing Work Bookstore, New York, to raise money for homeless New Yorkers with HIV/AIDS Dark,, directed by Lars von Trier Cast alongside Catherine Deneuve in Dancer in the Dark Sugarcubes re-form for a one-off concert in their hometown of Reykjavík Joins Darren Aronofsky and Patti Smith for “Stopp – Let’s Protect the Park” charity concert in Iceland Performs Schöenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with conductor Kent Nagano, the Opera Orchestra of Lyon, and musical director Murray Hipkin “Náttúra” featuring vocals from Thom Yorke is released as a stand-alone single with all proceeds going towards the Náttúra Foundation Björk writes, illustrates, and publishes a short fairytale titled Um Úrnat Meets and interviews Karlheinz Stockhausen for Dazed & Confused magazine Performs alongside Sigur Rós at Náttúra concert to raise awareness of the destruction of Iceland’s landscape through increased aluminum smelting Records Live at Shepherds Bush Empire Empire;; tickets are distributed for free to fan club Performs at the inaugural Fashion Rocks, pairing with Alexander McQueen Sugarcubes’ Stick Around for Joy is released; the band play their final show before splitting on November 17 at the Limelight, New York Mount Wittenberg Orca is released—a collaboration between the Dirty Projectors and Björk Performs “Oceania” at the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics in Greece with all digital sales proceeds donated to the National Geographic Society Oceans Initiatives Release of “When Björk Met Attenborough” documentary Enrols in a local children’s music school, where she studies musicology, flute, and recorder Speaks with Jefferson Hack at WIRED conference, London Performs songs from Debut on MTV Unplugged Björk lends her voice to Anna in the animated film Anna and the Moods Björk lends her vocals to “Surrender,” a track on Ólöf Arnald’s album Innundir Skinni Bad Taste Records is formed; Björk, Sigtryggur Baldursson, Einar Melax, Þor Eldon, Einar Örn Benediktsson, and Bragi Ólafsson start The Sugarcubes
Björk gives birth to her first child, son Sindri Eldon Björk Guðmundsdóttir is born on November 21, in Reykjavík, Iceland, to parents Hildur Hauksdóttir and Guðmundur Gunnarsson
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Björk gives birth to her second child, daughter Isadora Bjarkardóttir Barney
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Klaus Biesenbach
Introduction
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY
in 2015, The Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a large-scale retrospective to Björk, and commissioned a new work by her, considering her to be one of the defining artistic practitioners of our times. At the heart of Björk’s work as a seminal composer, singer, and writer is the ongoing creation of relevant new content, expressed not solely as music, but also as innovative forms that cross all channels of our media-driven society.
Björk, aged one month.
Artists work with the images, sounds, and forms that surround them in daily life. Younger generations, in particular, are not only inspired and shaped by work that fits into a frame or onto a pedestal. Music, images, film, video, words, and sounds are experienced in real-life social settings such as museums, galleries, concert halls, and theatres, but also online and in the media. Björk is a groundbreaking pioneer in connecting many different creative practices in and around her work. An uncompromisingly original and highly accomplished auteur and solo artist in her composing, singing, and music, she is notably open to collaboration and interpretation of her output, extending even into education and audience participation. Over the decades she has developed a highly collaborative practice in order to visualize her music and lyrics. Working with photographers, film- and video-makers, designers, architects, craftsmen, and inventors, she crosses over into all categories of high and low culture, digital and analog, in most creative fields. With her music itself she bridges the classical and the experimental, the folkloric and the popular, the rural and the metropolitan, the visceral and the technological, the pagan and ancient with the futuristic and new; she even bridges the gaps between man and machine, living beings and dead material. Björk herself seems to be composed of binaries: aggressively vulnerable, bold and fragile, wild and sensitive, little girl and femme fatale, innocent creature of nature and romantic mountain hiker on the one hand and urban highflyer and metropolitan nightlife animal on the other. Driven by instinct and intuition, but at the same time methodical and almost scientific in her ways of exploring new form and content, she creates work that is highly personal as well as poetic, and often political and activist. She is the melancholic, suffering dancer in the dark, and at the same time the “violently happy” character singing “all is full of love.” As an era-defining artist, she has also been a catalyst and inspiration for a wider culture. As a woman from a geographically peripheral country—Iceland, with its mere 320,000 inhabitants—she can simultaneously be eccentric and take center-stage, be experimental and open the Olympic games, be alternative and nominated for an Academy Award (and shock at the Oscar ceremonies with her radical sense of sartorial expression). Over the last 22 years Björk has created an exemplary body of work that is grounded in seven seminal albums. For each album she has created a complex, multifaceted character, creating striking visual images that express and embody her music. These characters form the heart of this exploration.
Roots in 1944, after six hundred years of Danish rule, Iceland declared independence, establishing a new and sovereign republic. Björk’s parents were born shortly after the founding of the republic, and both grew into strong activists and civil leaders. Björk’s generation, born twenty years later, were the children of the first free-born Icelanders. This generation were naturally connected to native Icelandic tradition, but also had an openness to international exchange and opportunities to travel. Culturally, for native Icelanders, pagan tradition, folkloristic storytelling, and the universal mass-media society collided at an accelerated pace. After her parents separated when she was a year old, Björk was raised in a bohemian environment of creative people on her mother’s side and responsible craftsmen and later union activists on her father’s. Her mother was, as Björk describes her, a “dreamer,” who took her out of traditional patriarchy to live in a commune of musicians and artists on the outskirts of Reykjavík, a setting which Björk now describes as “a fairy tale.” Her paternal grandmother was an abstract painter, who took the young Björk to museums. Björk was inspired very early on to be both the wild, liberal spirit in the more traditional/ conservative/bourgeois paternal family, while at the same time acting as the responsible “wake-up call” for her mother’s more liberal way of life. For the first five years of her life she lived in the commune as an only child, but then acquired one halfbrother on her mother’s side and three half-brothers and three half-sisters on her father’s. Björk’s musical talent and open nature were evident from a young age. When she was still at school, she would ride the bus and sing in front of anybody who happened to be on it. She would also sing and improvise while walking to and from school. She liked to help the teachers distribute food and snacks to the other schoolchildren, rather than being part of the group being cared for. From the ages of five to fifteen, in addition to regular school, she attended a specialized music school. Several days a week she studied the theory and practice of music, and received a classical music education on the flute and recorder. While in music school, it was clear to Björk that she was fascinated by the study of musicology—the structure and composition of songs—which in many ways was one of the important educational principles of her album Biophilia, released in 2011. In early 1977, when Björk was eleven, she recorded her first album, and it made her a national celebrity. Bearing in mind Iceland’s small population—with most living in her home town of Reykjavík—she was not yet comfortable becoming a recognized public figure. Having lost her anonymity, she refrained from composing and releasing a second solo album. Instead, she dived into the group dynamics of an art collective and several different bands. In so doing, she was working collaboratively on her creative process, but much less visibly than if acting as a solo artist. It took her until she turned twenty-seven to appear on the cover of a solo album again.
During her teens, from 1980 to 1984, Björk was involved with a surrealist poetry, painting, and photography collective in Reykjavík which went by the name of Medúsa. The group members have remained important friends and collaborators, including Sjón, Matthías Magnússon, Ólafur Engilbertsson, Einar Melax, and þór Eldon, to whom Björk was married for five years and who is the father of her son Sindri. The collective opened Björk up to new ideas, and she began reading Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille and The Demon Flower by Jo Imog, which, she says, “basically became part of my DNA.” 1 Björk was also in the bands Spit and Snot, Exodus, Tappi Tíkarrass, and most notably the punk and orchestral group Kukl (1982–1984) and The Sugarcubes (1986–1992), meeting several important musicians and collaborators, among them Eldon, Einar Örn Benediktsson, Sigtryggur Baldursson, Einar Melax, Birgir Mogensen, Guðlaugur Óttarsson, and Bragi Ólafsson. Ásmundur Jónsson and Einar Örn Benediktsson were in addition members of a group called Gramm, who owned an Icelandic indie shop from 1979 to 1985, dealing with music, poetry, and literature, and functioning as a meeting place. Gramm, Kukl and Medúsa came together to create an indie label called Bad Taste in 1986, which went on to represent The Sugarcubes. While Björk was with the band she met Derek Birkett, who at the time was the bass guitar player in a British punk band, Flux of Pink Indians, and who has been a collaborator, co-conspirator, and close friend ever since. Musically, Björk broke with the traditions of Beethoven and Mozart and with the history of guitar rock while still in music school. She wanted to do something more organic and embraced Messiaen and Mahler, as well as the chord structures of Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell as female role models. When Björk was sixteen, she traveled to London for the first time and purchased with saved-up money several albums at a Virgin record store. Of the ten to twelve albums she recalls buying, she notes Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s Evening Star, Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a Kate Bush album, and an album by a band named Hybrid Kids. Björk’s time with Kukl, The Sugarcubes, and other bands provided her with the opportunity to work on covers, videos, and other visualizations within the protection of the group environment. She often took on the task of communicating and working with art directors, video directors, and photographers. At the age of twenty, while pregnant with her first child, she posed with three bananas hanging around her neck for the cover of an Icelandic women’s magazine, and considers this to be the first mature visualization she worked on. In 1992, Björk moved to London, and she released her solo album, Debut, the following year. By the mid-1990s, she had become a world-famous pop icon. She had lost her anonymity again and experienced the commitment of a large fan base that were in the overwhelming majority dedicated and knowledgeable music lovers, though there were exceptions.
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 1 Author interview with the artist, May 2014.
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Klaus Biesenbach
Introduction
There were two incidents at airports in Thailand and New Zealand, in which photographers harassed her and her young son until she was forced to intervene. Then in 1996, a disturbed fan sent her a letter bomb and tragically committed suicide, which he documented and videotaped. Public visibility had become a double-edged sword.
When the internet became popular in the 1990s, people created fictitious email addresses, such as spiderman@hotmail. It didn’t occur to users in the ’90s that it was a direct address, like a phone number; a name recorded in a passport, like a traceable identity—one to one. In the pre-Google internet era one would create a character that would not be immediately identifiable.
Early on Björk developed strong visual identities; recognizable personas that she adopted without hiding herself behind them. She developed various creative strategies, among them outfitting her characters with sets of signs, traits, and exterior skeletons, and she worked with numerous designers to create “masks” that would give her characters a distinctive look.
Parallel Worlds
Masks the symbol of the mask has been thematized throughout the ages. In the plays of antiquity, actors went on stage with a mask, thus simultaneously embodying a person and a persona, a living and a dead body. By the sixteenth century, the mask had disappeared, as actors felt the need to express the individual emotions behind their roles. The face as mask became the actor’s instrument. The voice, the accent, the diction were also part of the role. In engaging with readable signs—in adopting different masks—the actor could convey different characters. As an artist, Björk has adopted many visually compelling personas. She has worn some of the most experimental headcoverings, including wigs, veils, diamond-studded surfaces, feather ear-pieces, and extreme sculptural dandelion-like head-dresses designed by Maiko Takeda. But the mask is only one palpable, tangible embodiment of the idea of a character. Björk also created distinct, semi-fictitious characters to evoke and perform the author/actor/singer/protagonist/heroine/role of each album, channeling the creative energies of a musical period and galvanizing a mask to reflect the art and artist simultaneously. She made each character a highly detailed, stylized, accomplished, almost sculpted visual construct, being one with the music and acting as its imago. Visual artists have long been preoccupied with masks, characters, and signifiers. In portrait painting, artifacts of personal existence became symbolic objects, often reflecting the subject’s place in life. In recent times, Hiroshi Sugimoto made photographs of historical figures by photographing their Madame Tussaud wax figures, thereby creating the uncanny illusion that people who had been dead for centuries were “undead.” The American artist Cindy Sherman has used her own face, make-up, wigs, and costumes to echo the presence of historical figures for her work. The creation and display of an outward identity is a pronounced characteristic of contemporary life. As 3D scanning and printing become more commonplace, people will have the ability to access their own 3D portraits with ease. In the meantime, the idea of the selfie has produced millions of self-portraits that have found an audience on the internet. With social media such as Facebook and Instagram, the online person and persona are easily blended: document with fiction. Or users can adopt avatars and completely falsify their identity.
björk—globally popular and recognizable, yet at the same time artistically uncompromised and incredibly precise in her practice of finding form—has continued to experiment with identity, simultaneously and often in parallel with the visual arts of her time. In the following thoughts, parallel practices and strategies are exemplified that contextualize her in a productive dialogue with popular culture and the visual arts of her generation. The title of the Buggles’ 1979 hit song “Video Killed the Radio Star” implied that in the future all music would have to be visual, as it would be perceived through television. It took a while for video to become the common “golden” frame of both visual arts and popular music, but it is now one of the most prominent contemporary artistic practices, merging film-making, music, popular culture, fashion, and lifestyle. Music television was one of the identifying mediums for new generations, and there were huge production budgets that made this one of the most fertile art sites and laboratories of the 1990s. Long before iTunes, downloading, and Napster changed the music industry, music television was a dominant force in the cultural landscape. It was also a catalyst in crossing the boundaries of the museum and the pop world. Visual artists were quick to seize upon the territory of the music video, both anticipating it and appropriating it, while musicians and film directors readily embraced the aesthetics of experimental video art and filmmaking. In 1996, Pipilotti Rist, who performed as a member of the feminist punk band Les Reines Prochaines, created her seminal work “Sip My Ocean,” an immersive video and sound installation, which involved the viewer walking into a room filled with colored light and music, and diving into an ocean being projected while listening to a karaoke version of Chris Isaak’s love hymn “Wicked Games,” sung by Rist herself. Claiming the male pop star’s voice and appropriating one of the most romantic tunes of the decade, Rist created a polymorphous whole-body experience in her installation. In her work “Mutaflor,” also from 1996, Rist hungrily looks at the camera then swallows an endoscopic camera, which, after a passage through her body, pops out of her anus, only to be swallowed again. The action is endlessly looped, like playing a single track on auto-repeat. In the 1990s, music audiences were able to hear and see Björk’s work on the hardware that was current at the time of each album’s release, whether that meant watching her on a box TV set or listening to a CD playing on a Discman while jogging or in the bath. The tension between the wet and the dry, the living body and the increasingly mobile prosthetic electronic devices created danger. The panic of electronics potentially falling in the bathtub, harming the body or the electronics, was reflected in Marilouise and Arthur Kroker’s discussion of the phenomenon of male hysteria and angst of bodily liquids in the era when everything seemed to become electric.
In Björk’s work, this motif is perhaps most prominently featured in the video for “All is Full of Love,” in which robots, despite being electrical machines, are having sensual wet intercourse, with bodily liquids flowing voluptuously without causing any visible shortcircuits. The video, a collaboration with director Chris Cunningham, was presented in many art exhibitions of the 1990s, projected and on an auto-repeat loop. The repetitive playing of video art in galleries and listening to a song on a CD in a Discman became like theme songs for certain moments. “All is Full of Love” was widely exhibited in the contemporary art context in the same time period as Doug Aitken’s multi-channel installation “Electric Earth.” While Cunningham and Björk found a sculptural creation in the electronic robot as the point of departure for their video, Aitken searched for sounds and rhythms of nocturnal urban life as music to visualize our world as “electric.” If the music video is the link between the visual arts gallery, music television, and YouTube, there has also been an ongoing use and placement of sound as a sculptural element in contemporary artistic practice. Both space and time can be defined by a sound and by the audience’s perception. For example, in Janet Cardiff’s looped “Forty Piece Motet,” there is a three-minute break between performances of an elevenminute piece of music, sung by a forty-person choir, played on forty speakers installed in the exact spatial configuration of the singers of the choir when the piece was recorded. The singers seem not to know that they are being recorded before and after their singing. They can be heard coughing, clearing their throats, whispering, and so on before they focus on their artistry. They mutate from being individual, private members of the choir carrying out worldly profane actions to embodying perfect artificial singing voices when they each become a persona of the forty-voiced choir singing the motet. Björk’s personal, visceral, and non-artificial singing style also relates to intimacy and a break between the natural voice and the highly trained voice. Her singing goes from intimate whisper into the listener’s ear, as if she were almost touching the recording microphone with her lips, to loud screaming that competes with wind and other forces of nature. Interference of organic human and inorganic technology has been a marker of the times. Standing in a club or at a concert next to the speakers, the body can feel a vibration that resonates, either through sound waves or through direct contact if one is leaning against the box. Even if one steps away, the resonance remains in the body. As a physical phenomenon, this induced the body to dance. The 1990s saw an emerging electro and techno scene in clubs all over the world, as well as nightlife-like levels of sound and dance at daytime raves. The Love Parade was the Woodstock of the ’90s generation. Clubs proved to be an experimental site for music, popular culture, performance, fashion, photography, and moving images to intersect and inspire club kids, the artists themselves, and a wider audience. Sometimes they were simply the location for people to meet and talk and expand horizons and states of mind; at other times they were the occasion for presentation and performance, collaboration, provocation and pioneering creations that couldn’t be ignored, even in the mainstream.
Photo shoot for Volta, 2007, by Bernhard Kristinn.
Björk wearing a wig by Eugene Souleiman and a dress by Iris van Herpen, performing on the Biophilia live tour, 2011.
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 4
Klaus Biesenbach
Introduction
Many of Björk’s contemporaries either “met” her on music television or experienced her work as the sound of music that you would dance to, that would be sampled and played over and over again in the ’90s club scene. In parallel to music television, the club scene was a porous membrane and interfaced with popular culture into the visual arts and other practices. Leigh Bowery was a strong presence and fixture on the London scene when Björk moved to the city in the early 1990s. He was one of the most prominent artists of the 1980s and early ’90s whose practice was truly collaborative. Blurring the boundaries between author and muse, fashion designer and model, club kid and performance artist, provocateur and seminal innovator, he became famous for creating costumes that covered his monumental body, including his feet, hands, and most importantly face. He disguised and disfigured himself with Scotch tape, safety pins, experimental make-up, and masks, and he made himself even taller by wearing platform shoes. He turned himself from a recognizable person, a human being, into a sign, an object like a state of being, which would be alienating and disturbing in an everyday environment. During this time he posed for the painter Lucian Freud. He also collaborated with Charles Atlas and Michael Clark on videos and choreography. In a city which—ever since the “Freeze” exhibition of 1988, organized by Damien Hirst—had been at the forefront of the new Young British Artist scene, Leigh Bowery had a potent effect on popular culture and left a highly influential oeuvre.
While the face mask in Wolfson’s kinetic sculpture gives away the view of artificial glass eyes with cameras, in Pierre Huyghe’s recent film work Human Mask (2014), based on a reallife situation, a monkey was trained as a waitress and wore a human mask over its face. The viewer can see the animal’s eyes through the slits in the dead object of the human mask. A wig covers the monkey’s head, but the small dress it is wearing does not cover its hairy body. The lines between the living and the dead body, animal and human, object and subject are blurred in a highly disorienting, disturbing way. The works by Wolfson and Huyghe further the dialogue with Björk’s recognizable robot face mask in “All is Full of Love.” Watching the video allows viewers to see Björk’s own eyes, behind or through the opening of the robot’s mask portrait—a portrait of Björk of herself.
In the 1990s Paris scene, relational aesthetics and post-conceptual approaches gave Björk a different context. In 1999, Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe bought the rights to a Japanese anime character, which they named “Annlee” (a.k.a. Ann Lee). They invited other artists, including Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Björk’s longtime collaborators M/M, to devise artworks based around the figure. Videos, works on paper, and even performance pieces were created within this framework. Ann Lee was a fictitious character born out of collaborative imagination; artist Jordan Wolfson’s female figure, on the other hand, was modeled after a real person, Lady Gaga. Wolfson created a cyborg robot wearing a mask, simultaneously portraying and disguising a famous pop star. The robot appears to interact with one person at a time, claiming itself to be not an object but a subject, seducing, and blurring the lines between human being and machine, technology and emotion. Wolfson’s female figure is also an important continuation of Björk’s robots in her “All is Full of Love” video. But here it is not a question of two robots interacting with each other in front of a large TV audience; it is more the embodiment of a live character interacting with an audience. The jump from the 1990s perception of performance as recorded video has materialized into a one-on-one encounter, reflecting the paradigm shift that, today, participation is the proof of performativity.
For the 2015 exhibition at MoMA, Björk created the work “Black Lake,” which was filmed on location in Iceland during the summer of 2014. She conceived the song’s visualization with director Andrew Thomas Huang, with whom she had previously worked on the video for “Mutual Core.” “Black Lake” is an eleven-minute-long looped composition that deals with the expression of the pain that Björk went through during her separation from artist Matthew Barney; a cathartic acknowledgment of this pain, as if only dying to be reborn. For the video she worked with choreographer Erna Ómarsdóttir on expressive, dance-like movements, through which she palpably exorcised her pain, resonating with viewers and listeners, but also making the growth, reincarnation, and rebirth of her character a necessary and natural outcome of the process.
Stills from “Black Lake,” commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, 2015.
Marina Abramović and Ulay pioneered new ideas of autobiography as part of an artist’s work. They called their living together in a truck, driving around Europe from performance to performance, “art vital,” claiming that life was art and art was life. The pair merged their personal and love lives with their artistic practice. Until the 1980s and early ’90s many pop stars had a personal life that was completely at odds with their public persona (George Michael, for example, singing heterosexual love songs with a playboy image). Björk, meanwhile, was always very authentic both on and off the stage. While her work contains elements of fiction and poetry, it seems nonetheless— like Abramović’s work—to be essentially true to her real life.
I sat in the prep trailer during the filming of “Black Lake” in the Icelandic landscape. All of a sudden I found myself listening to some music that sounded otherworldly; visceral and at the same time ephemeral; very real and rooted, but nonetheless ethereal. “What’s that?” I asked. “Do you all hear that?” James Merry, Björk’s personal assistant and close collaborator, who was instrumental in the visual identity of the video, answered, “That’s the artist Fatima al Qadiri. She included a Chinese singer interpreting Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ on her new album.”
Was hearing the famous song translated into Chinese such a displacement that it caught my full attention? No, that was not all I was hearing. In the background, behind a curtain, Björk was tuning her voice, exercising the width and capacity of her vocal spectrum, before leaving the trailer clad in a dress made out of a woven copper wire fabric to sing in a freezing, water-dripping cave. The camera crew and director were covered in layers of coats, but Björk was doing take after take, standing in her bare feet on cold wet sand. For each take there was no lip-synching; she sang live, loud, and real. Outside the cave, the prep trailer, the set, walking through the lava fields of Iceland, you are as a human being by far the tallest living object. There are no trees, no large animals, just moss and very low-growing vegetation. Coming across rocks feels like the only encounter of an equal volume, another object standing across from you, the human being. All of a sudden it becomes clear that for all of her career Björk has created a body of work that could be described within the theory of Object-Oriented Ontology, in which the landscape around her, she herself, and the landscape inside of her—her blood, her organs, the sounds made by her and perceived by her—are all one universe of objects and subjects, subjects and objects, robots and humans, plants and animals, stone and volcanoes and oceans at the same time. According to Nicola Dibben’s 2009 book Björk, the singer’s music “naturalizes technology rather than technologizes nature.” 2 Dibben further notes that “Björk’s music imitates physical sounds of nature…as a unification of the human and the natural.” 3 Yet it is not only about the humanization of technology; it is also its feminization. Björk’s voice sounds at the same time like that of a child and that of a seductive woman: visceral and guttural, a highly personal, easily recognizable voice, with rolling r’s and a heavy accent—practically the opposite of the cleaned-up artifice of a classically trained singer. Often her singing includes inhalations and exhalations and other sounds made by the respiratory tract. She often shouts and screams out into nature or the city, as if she were speaking with and fighting and loving it. In Björk’s world, entities such as rocks and mountains, technology such as factory machinery and running trains, and living beings such as plants, animals, and humans are all objects in the same realm. They are equal to each other, having a duration of existence and a rhythm, and often making sounds. They breathe, pulse, tick, oscillate, hum; she might even include the sound of a compact disk skipping at its final loop. Dibben notes that “the rhythmic regularities of machines and everyday sounds are a means of transition into musical numbers and thereby into a fantasy world.” For the album Medúlla, Björk created the sounds of different instruments purely by using the human voice, thus highlighting the instrumental quality of the voice and its ability to mimic sounds.
2 Nicola Dibben, Björk (Indiana University Press), 2009, p. 98.
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 3 Ibid. p. 99.
6
Klaus Biesenbach
Introduction
Her singing juxtaposes the pagan and folkloric storytelling and traditional music of her native Iceland with her classical music training. Her music seems to come from an authentic and intimate inner place. It might erupt as a spontaneous urge to sing and express emotions out loud while riding in a friend’s pick-up truck, or while hiking in Iceland near her cottage. It speaks of a primal, unquestioned directness of creating while doing; composing by singing. In Björk’s music, and in her lyrics and videos, there is curiosity and surprise; a sense of wonderment and mystery, both in everyday life and in extreme situations. This sense of immediacy—a touching, a looking, a listening—seems to be present in whatever she encounters, be it the ocean or a landscape, a machine or another human being. All the encounters seem to be equal, whether with a stranger or lover, an animal or mountain, a cloud or the flashing lights of the big city. And everything leads to music: motors run, clocks tick, lungs breathe, a train provides a rhythm, the tide or a waterfall sets the pace. Björk’s attitude to life could perhaps be described as an “oceanic feeling”: the need to get out of the house, to go towards the sea, hike up a mountain, and feel the romantic, unthreatening, pre-religious ecstasy of being at one with the world, in love with the world, part of the world. “Jóga,” “All is Full of Love,” and “Wanderlust” are all odes to the joy of loving the world. “Jóga” is a declaration of love for the wild natural landscape of Björk’s home country. The video opens with her lying on black sand on the seashore and ends with her standing on a peak overlooking everything beneath her. She opens her body and her interior is full of rocks like a cave. The Chilean film-maker and writer Alejandro Jodorowsky notes that all humans are equal on the inside: you cut the human body open and we are all liquid and red, all full of blood. In a way the planet earth is like this, and it is most tangible in a country like Iceland, where the earth’s surface is often heated by the volcanic activity underground. Wherever you cut into the surface, you will end up with a red, liquid bath of lava. Tectonic rifts are like wounds in the body of the planet, where the hot liquid inside can get to the surface. However, the metropolitan city also offers a polymorphous environment that can stimulate. There are city lights, moving traffic, and urban heartbeats. In many videos, Björk is either moving vertically or horizontally through the canyons of the city or the canyons of the countryside. For her, both the city and nature are backgrounds and foregrounds, protagonists and extras, objects and subjects, as part of an artistic practice that tries to touch it all, breathing it in, breathing it out, shouting and screaming and laughing at it, until it screams and laughs back. Certain motifs reappear throughout the work. The embrace of urban life shown by dancing on a moving truck in “Big Time Sensuality” is juxtaposed with the dancing on a train moving through the countryside in “I’ve Seen it All” from Dancer in the Dark. Both “Big Time Sensuality” and “Hyperballad” are welcome songs of the artist greeting the big city.
In Björk’s work, being at one with an expanded, endless world means identifying with the smallest and the biggest objects in existence; with being inverted and catapulted into a weightless universe. In her visualization of her music, the camera, the gaze, becomes an optical instrument—a tool with which to examine the world. It can either be macroscopic or microscopic. It could be a telescope from a satellite from somewhere in the universe that is zooming in and zooming out from the smallest atomic, molecular, cellular structure, to humansized entities, to planetary-sized entities, to the biggest universal order. Sometimes her characters are seen under water or above water, and this draws attention to the scale of objects: sometimes Planet Earth is tiny, sometimes there might be a gigantic worm behind her. In her video “It’s in Our Hands,” she wanders in dark environments as a night-view camera captures images of gigantic flowers, grasshoppers, stingrays, and ferns, and with wide eyes Björk sees what otherwise is hidden at night. Videos are often set in an environment like a doll’s house or a stage set—a little too small or a little too big; somehow displaced, like caricatures or exaggerations of houses. In the video to “Triumph of a Heart,” Björk’s partner is a cat, and their home is a little house in the vast, remote, rural landscape. The matryoshka-like structure of “Bachelorette,” filmed in 1997, could be regarded as a metaphor for, or premonition of, Björk’s further artistic life to come; in a way, as an anticipation of her show at MoMA—a retrospective that unfolded in her work through a script that was a self-fulfilling vision in its artifice and in its character of a vision of a memory in a vision of a memory in a vision of a memory.
The video “Alarm Call,” directed by Alexander McQueen, is also about surfaces, the underwater surface, the forest, the meadow. It is like having sex with the world as a polymorphous perverted character that is stimulated by being in touch with all the surfaces of her body and everything she encounters (interestingly, independent from his collaborations with Björk, McQueen’s work was so much about surfaces that his celebrated exhibition, “Savage Beauty,” had a different surface in each of the exhibition rooms; and it was an almost fetishistic look at the detail that allowed the visitor to get close to his practice). In another motif, drawings on Björk’s face become a veil, and this mask adds a layer of content to her face, making it a work of art. Similarly, her clothing often functions like body armature, like architecture fitted exactly around the body, like a perfectly molded shell; a sometimes porous, sometimes solid membrane between her and the world. In the video “Who Is It?” she wears Alexander McQueen’s bell dress, the bells looking like barnacles; she becomes the bell, while Iceland appears like a moonscape. On the cover of Volta Björk wore a piece by Bernhard Willhelm, which resembled a carved-out empty shell of a cartoon figure, and the dresses designed by Iris van Herpen for Biophilia created a body armor-like shield around the artist. The white coat in “Jóga” almost becomes an astronaut’s moon suit before the vast, tectonic, volcanic, black landscapes of Iceland, and in her first music video, “Human Behaviour,” Björk literally wears a space suit with a clear helmet on her interplanetary journey. Collaborations
In her videos and when photographed, Björk is often depicted as non-human. She can appear like a drawing, or a cartoon, or a manga character, or a wax figure, turning into a sign or symbol. She appears geisha-like on the cover of Homogenic. Her constant morphing between her own shaved head and a digital animation of a polar bear in “Hunter” is a predecessor of her embodying an object, like the robot in “All is Full of Love.” In “The Dull Flame of Desire,” Antony Hegarty and Björk morph into one face: both strong, vulnerable feminists who are superimposed into a single person. In “All is Full of Love” and “Wanderlust,” Björk is doubled: she is her own counterpart robot in “All is Full of Love,” and in “Wanderlust” she carries a clay body double in her backpack. In the video for “Hidden Place,” a small Björk can be seen in her mouth when she opens it. Often there is a fluid transition between two- and three-dimensional images, drawings, photographs, and objects.
when i was first in regular contact with Björk, from the year 2000 on, popular culture and the art world were more disconnected than they are now. In the early 2000s, it would have been almost impossible to create an exhibition that was authentic to her work in the context of an art museum. However, projects such as 1999’s “All is Full of Love” and 2011’s Biophilia have paved the way for a synthetic presentation of Björk’s work.
With differing degrees of obsession, Björk plays with her own being. In “Hidden Place,” there is an extremely magnified shot of her hair, in which every strand can be seen moving, and then every pore in the skin of her face: this is as close as it gets to staying on the surface. In “Pagan Poetry,” there is a shift from an abstract graphic and abstract image to a close-up view of her face, then to parts of her skin and nipples being pierced and bleeding. In the video for “Cocoon,” she wears an asexual white body suit, and red strings squirt from her breasts.
Ideas were further concretized at a workshop meeting between myself, Björk, James Merry, and Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak of M/M. Ongoing work was inspired by Björk’s interest in Timothy Morton’s ideas about Object-Oriented Ontology, which broadly speaking proposes the abandonment of differentiation between objects and subjects, taking humans out of an anthropocentric world and equalizing them with animals, plants, dead material, poems, songs, magnetic forces, telepathy, energies, and images. In an email conversation between Morton and Björk included later in this publication, they playfully come up with expressions to describe the fact that, in Björk’s work and Morton’s philosophy, sometimes the relationships between objects are more important than the objects themselves.
From the album cover shoot for Volta, 2007, photographed by Nick Knight, with a costume inspired by Luigi Ontani and designed by Bernhard Willhelm.
As the idea of a collaboration progressed, it became clear that Björk likes to work organically, with ideas being discussed, revisited, and researched on a daily basis, in a very exploratory way, incorporating life and work, reading, writing, talking, and listening. When we began seriously to discuss an exhibition proposal, one of the first things she did was send me short descriptions of the defining character traits of the seven characters of the seven albums that she had produced.
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 8
Klaus Biesenbach
Introduction
Artwork painted by Isaiah Saxon for the production of the video to “Wanderlust,” 2008.
Still from the video for “Isobel,” directed by Michel Gondry, 1995.
Still from “Army of Me,” 1995, a song co-written by Graham Massey.
The finished exhibition sought to highlight the groundbreaking importance and innovation of Björk’s music. At the same time the focus was on the unique collaborative nature of her body of work. The exhibition also aimed to broaden the canon of what contemporary museums exhibit and collect, while also raising questions about the longevity of pop music, a genre that is evolving and has not proven its classic timelessness. Can a work of popular culture achieve “eternal truth and beauty” when it is independent and removed from its broader cultural context? How relevant will the concept of multiple and collaborative authorship be, especially after relational aesthetics in the 1990s? When it comes to her music, Björk is very much a solo artist. She even considers herself to be “like a tyrant” at times, and only involves collaborators to add to, vary and on occasion work with her to write lyrics for her own existing compositions. She works by herself until she has something refined enough to share and to be given context, colors, images and shapes. On the other hand, she is extremely collaborative when it comes to visualizing the characters that inhabit her albums and singles. Through her thoughtful, coherent, tightly woven concepts and experimental forms, she motivates those around her. Her openness with collaborators, in terms of personality and dialogue, helps push co-creators to go further and further into a direction that she has envisioned but which they might not have come up with by themselves. She is a muse, but also a midwife; a co-artist/catalyst who is clear in her vision and yet invitingly vague as to the exact visual form it will take. While the music carries her signature alone, collaborations with designers, photographers, and film-makers are signed by multiple co-authors, a notion that Björk embraced early on. Her music videos have become some of the most creative ways for her to visualize each album’s characters, and have also been the site for some of her most notable collaborations. For each video she works closely with the director on the concept and execution, and over the course of her career she has often worked with the same collaborators on multiple projects. Though Björk’s music is much more a solo act than her visual manifestations of each album, she also works with musicians, composers, writers, and artists to explore and expand the scope of her music. Many of these musical collaborations have resulted in long-term partnerships over several albums. When Björk moved to London in 1992, during the early stages of Debut, she teamed up with composer and producer Nellee Hooper whose lifestyle, social and work spheres were a definitive force in the Bristol and London scenes of that time, centered around Tricky and Massive Attack and bands like Rip Rig + Panic. He nurtured and brought confidence to the artists he worked with. Hooper went on to produce nine songs on the album and worked with Björk on Post. Björk notes that he “mirrored back to me what I was at the time and what you could become.” 4
Graham Massey was another early musical partner, remixing “Violently Happy” from Debut, and co-writing “Army of Me” and “Modern Things” on Post. The musician Talvin Singh contributed to Debut, playing the tabla and directing the string compositions on the album. The Iranian-born recording artist, producer, and DJ Leila Arab and Björk started their close collaboration in 1993, when Arab worked on the Debut tour as keyboard player. Arab recounts that she wanted to learn live mixing and Björk hired her for the Post tour in 1995 to do just that on stage. Arab, Aphex Twin, Björk, and Chris Cunningham were at the heart of a circle of friends in London in the mid- to late ’90s that created some of their generation’s most inspiring music and video work. In order to visualize her characters, Björk has worked with many different photographers throughout her career, creating portraits that appear on album covers and liners, as well as other images that appear in magazines, books, and promotional materials. Juergen Teller, who was starting out in London at the same time as Björk, was an important early collaborator. Together they worked on the image for the cover of the single “Big Time Sensuality.” The video for the single was directed by Stéphane Sédnaoui, who at the time worked very closely with Björk, and also on later videos and photo shoots, including the image that appears on the cover of her second album, Post. During her years in London, Björk also worked with Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, who photographed her for the cover and inner sleeve of her 1997 remix album, Telegram. Since the early 1990s Björk has had an ongoing dialogue with Jefferson Hack. He asked Björk to interview Karlheinz Stockhausen, and she was featured in Hack’s publication Dazed & Confused. He introduced her to many contacts from his sphere, including Alexander McQueen, Katy England, and Marjan Pejoski. In Hack’s own words, Björk is like a “live wire” and an open source who absorbs, connects and provides “leaps of thoughts to bring forward new ideas.” 5 Since her time in London, Björk has embraced fashion as a manifestation of her expressions. She has worked closely with designers and stylists on each of her albums and for magazine shoots and public appearances. On the cover of Post, she wore a jacket made by Hussein Chalayan, one of her first close fashion friends, who, like her, had come to London as an immigrant. Together the pair would brainstorm. Post’s “Airmail” jacket, made of washable, malleable synthetic paper, reflected her character’s embrace of a cosmopolitan urbanity. Jeremy Scott would later create outfits for Björk’s Homogenic tour in 1997–98, and has created other garments she has worn at events and in public.
One of Björk’s first video collaborators was film director Michel Gondry. He has directed more videos with Björk than any other director, and their important and prolific collaborations have been both popular and critically successful. His video for “Human Behaviour” (1993), the first single and video from Debut, along with “Isobel” (1995) and “Bachelorette” (1997), comprise a trilogy of related videos that Björk and Gondry created, telling the story of the character Isobel and her journey from the forest to the city and back. The figure of “Isobel” is Björk’s way of introducing herself as the singer/ songwriter character telling her tale. As Timothy Morton points out in his conversation with Björk, making herself into this character is her way of making herself a third person, an object among other equally important objects. Björk had long wanted to do a video or project that took on the idea of a classic musical, a genre she had loved as a child. In her first collaboration with director Spike Jonze, they took inspiration from musicals of the 1960s for the hugely successful video for “It’s Oh So Quiet” (1995). Jonze went on to direct two other music videos, “It’s in our Hands” (2002) and “Triumph of a Heart” (2005). While their original idea of working on a feature-length musical was later realized by another director, Lars von Trier, Jonze and Björk continue a very vivid, productive discussion and exchange ideas on an ongoing basis. Björk has collaborated with producer and mixing engineer Mike “Spike” Stent since his work on Post’s “Army of Me” in 1995. They worked together on several albums, and Stent did the mix for both the 2000 album Selmasongs and 2007’s Medúlla. Electronic musician Matthew Herbert has been an important collaborator with Björk since he began working on songs for Vespertine in 2001. Matmos, the electronic duo of M. C. (Martin) Schmidt and Drew Daniel have done official remixes of several singles; they also worked closely on Vespertine. Guy Sigsworth, a keyboard player, has worked with Björk since Post. He played the clavichord and organ on several songs and has also done remixes of “Venus as a Boy” and “All is Full of Love.” The Icelandic String Octet that Björk began working with on Homogenic continued to work with the artist in live performances and on tours. In 2001, Björk began working with Zeena Parkins, a harp and accordion player. Parkins contributed to both the Vespertine album and tour, and to Biophilia. Björk and pianist Jónas Sen have worked together since 2007, when he joined her world tour to play keyboard; for Biophilia he also played the pipe organ and gameleste. Founder of the pioneering electronic group LFO, Mark Bell was another longtime music producer, writer, and close friend working with Björk from Homogenic on. He contributed to Selmasongs, Medúlla, Volta, and Biophilia, and was part of the tours for both Homogenic and Volta.
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY Björk performing with music producer Mark Bell on the Volta tour, 2007.
10
Klaus Biesenbach
4 Author interview with the artist, May, 2014.
Introduction
5 Author interview with Jefferson Hack, October, 2014.
Alexander McQueen was one of Björk’s most important collaborators. Starting with his art direction for the cover of Homogenic, he went on to work with Björk on numerous pieces. He directed the video for “Alarm Call,” in which Björk wore a dress custom-designed by him. They were more than just collaborators: like many others who work with Björk repeatedly, they were also close friends, and Björk performed at his memorial service in London in 2011, wearing an angelwinged dress by the late designer. The music video for “All is Full of Love” was directed by Björk’s dear friend Chris Cunningham in 1999 and is their only music video collaboration to date, although it was a landmark in her practice and marked an important shift in her work. The video shows the naturalization of technology: the robots in the video are both machine-like and highly emotional beings. The video’s sci-fi setting reflects Cunningham’s past work in the genre, as well as his ongoing interest in robotics and computer graphics. New technology, software, and special effects are also featured in the video, seen in the seamless projection of Björk’s facial features onto the robots—another example of her identification with objects, machines, and all manner of non-humans. One of the most important, innovative and influential collaborations in Björk’s artistic practice has been her longstanding relationship with M/M, the Paris-based art and design partnership founded by Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag, renowned for their use of signs and images. M/M started working with Björk in 1999 and have continued their collaboration to the present day. Their first collaboration, for Björk’s compilation of videos, Volumen, was composed of a cover for pictures, black and white characters, good and evil, creating characters that were in between album characters. According to M/M, the conversation was like “reading tarot cards together,” while creating a set of their signature multifaceted signifiers. Their next collaborative project was working with Björk on her first comprehensive artist book. This was released in 2001, at the same time as her album Vespertine. M/M have gone on to create, visualize, and help form the characters in Björk’s subsequent albums. M/M have also worked on videos with Björk, notably “Hidden Place,” for which they collaborated with the Dutch fashion photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Their work on “Hidden Place” was influenced by a conversation the designers had with artist François Curlet, who described a kind of sexual trick from nineteenth-century French brothels called “Poisson Nageur,” in which a woman enjoys oral sex and remits the man’s bodily fluids through her nose. This was the inspiration for the substance flowing into and out of Björk’s body, creating an incredible sense of intimacy; the untouchable icon getting wet and dirty, while remaining beautiful.
Working with Björk, M/M would spend a lot of time getting to know her moodboards and compositions, and would then externalize her visions on a more conceptual and poetrybased level. For the cover of Vespertine, for example, Björk brought Marjan Pejoski’s infamous “Swan” dress to the shoot, and as a result the cover of the album was inspired by a drawing of Sigmund Freud’s, in which a swan was portrayed on top of a Madonna. One of M/M’s images for Vespertine was plastered all over the streets of Paris. Whenever she toured, Björk’s poster campaigns made her face a sign in the urban fabric. Since the release of Vespertine, Björk has continued to work closely with Van Lamsweerde and Matadin. They have helped to create some of the most recognizable visualizations of her characters, collaborating on album artwork for Vespertine, Medúlla, Volta, and Biophilia, as well as editorials and books. “Pagan Poetry” (2001), from Vespertine, was the first music video collaboration between Björk and photographer Nick Knight, although the two had previously worked together on photo shoots, notably for the cover image of Homogenic, and also for the cover of the Vespertine Live album and for the Volta image of Björk wearing the large Bernhard Willhelm costume. The video, which was controversial at the time of its release, embraces themes of the physical body, union, and sexuality. It incorporates three different sections: a video of piercings, a private video shot on a handheld camera by Björk, and a film shoot of Björk performing the song. Björk collaborated with Japanese artist, art director, and costume and graphic designer Eiko Ishioka on the music video for “Cocoon” (2002), a work which, like “Pagan Poetry” before it, was met with some controversy for its evocative imagery. Wearing a nude body suit, Björk performs the song as red threads emit from her breasts, slowly enveloping her entire body, from foot to face, until she is completely cocooned. For Dancer in the Dark (released in 2000), director Lars von Trier approached Björk about acting in and composing music for the film—a story he had written with her in mind. She initially resisted composing and in addition taking on the lead role. However, she eventually agreed to compose, and afterwards to play the main character, Selma. She fought for artistic control, so that her part and her music could not be cut or changed without her agreement. Through her compositions Björk made the story of Selma a true portrayal and the film more of a true collaboration. Björk’s song from the film, “I’ve Seen it All,” was nominated for the 2001 Academy Award for Best Original Song. That year she famously wore the “Swan” dress to the Oscar award ceremony, walking down the runway dropping “eggs” as she went. The swan motif was an important element of Vespertine, and Björk wore the dress again on the cover of the album. During the Vespertine tour, she wore at least two other versions of the dress, both made with crystals. Although her appearance at the Oscars was widely publicized, the swan motif is something that permeated other parts of her work during this time.
Matthew Barney and Björk are two artists who have, in a highly detailed and sophisticated way, created characters in their respective bodies of work. With Barney, those characters seem to be more fictitious and literature-based, whereas the characters Björk expresses are at the same time fictitious and autobiographical. Björk and Barney lived together for thirteen years. In 2002, their daughter Isadora was born, and until 2013 they commuted between Iceland and New York, besides other shorter-term residencies. At times their two artistic practices merged, most notably in the major work Drawing Restraint 9 (2005), a cinematic piece by Barney, for which Björk composed the soundtrack and acted. The film ended with a symbolic mutilation of the two lovers, morphing into sea mammals. For Björk, an important inspiration and friend has been Antony Hegarty. In addition to collaborating vocally, the singer and composer and Björk share concerns about ecological challenges, and they have an ongoing interest in feminism. They first worked together on the 2007 duet “The Dull Flame of Desire,” and Hegarty is prominently featured in the song’s music video. The friends have performed together in London, Iceland, and New York.
Bernhard Willhelm and Björk in Iceland, 2006.
During Björk’s New York years, ASFOUR, who later became ThreeASFOUR, also had an inspiring artistic friendship with her that led to numerous mutual inspirations, as did the ongoing dialogue with her Icelandic friend Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, also known as Shoplifter, who created the hairpiece featured on the cover of Medúlla. In 2005, Björk collaborated with Icelandic artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir on her Venice Biennale pavilion work; Friðriksdóttir also directed Björk’s video for “Where is the Line” and designed the album cover art for her Greatest Hits release in 2002. The multitalented German-born designer Bernhard Willhelm worked closely with Björk on designs for Volta. He created the large sculptural costume for the cover of the album—a small-scale piece of architecture like an exterior skeleton that Björk inhabits—based on a work by the Italian artist Luigi Ontani. Willhelm also created other costumes worn by Björk during the Volta tour, many of which were made of brightly colored fabrics. These were complimented by DIY crocheted and knitted activist masks by the Icelandic Love Corporation.
The cover to Selmasongs, released in 2000 as the soundtrack to the film Dancer in the Dark, in which Björk starred.
One of Björk’s more prominent collaborations from Volta was with Encyclopedia Pictura. Their video for “Wanderlust” was shot in stereoscopic 3D, and used a mix of live action, computergenerated graphics, miniatures, and large-scale puppets such as the 3D yak and river god, all crafted by the video directors.
Björk with her friend and collaborator Antony Hegarty on Marina Abramović’s 60th birthday, 2006.
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 12
Klaus Biesenbach
Introduction
Björk photographed for Biophilia by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, 2011.
The multidisciplinary nature of 2011’s Biophilia led Björk to fresh collaborators, embracing science and technology in innovative ways. Björk worked with the television presenter David Attenborough on the Biophilia education programs, and with James Merry and Scott Snibbe on the development of the Biophilia app. This was worked on by several programmers and designers, including Max Weisel, who was then in his teens. The app was released just after the iPad came out. Björk’s integration of music, design, and digital technology was a landmark, and the app was subsequently acquired by MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, the first in the museum’s permanent collection. Importantly, the app channels the album’s music and the custom instruments that helped to create the songs. Björk worked with DIY scientists and creatives on the instruments, including gravity harps made by Andy Cavatorta; the gameleste made by Björgvin Tómasson and Matt Nolan; the pipe organ, also made by Tómasson; and the Sharpsichord, made by Henry Dagg. This was not the first time that Björk had utilized new instrument technology. The reactable, an electronic musical instrument, was featured on Volta. Its flat table top is activated with different objects or tangibles which create sounds and music that can be manipulated by the instrument’s player. An Icelandic female choir and their conductor Jon Stefansson joined Björk on her Biophilia tour at this time.
“Black Lake,” which premiered at MoMA, focused above all on the sound and projection of visuals, positioning the work as the basis of the whole exhibition. Definitive traits are the freezes between the verses, which resonate in the body of the listener. The finished work includes motifs from the Icelandic landscape, its flora, and the changes of states of matter from liquid to solid, as well as the ideas of pain, perishing, rebirth, and regenerating new energies. For this groundbreaking piece, filmed in a cave and a ravine during an especially cold period of summer, Icelandic rain is captured in the video’s imagery, illustrating the narrative of going through pain and arriving at a clearing.
For Biophilia, Björk collaborated with Iris van Herpen, who designed the dress she wore on the cover of the album and several pieces that she wore during the tour. These dresses, for which Van Herpen uses plastic, metal, and 3D printing, seem almost impenetrable, a kind of colorful body armor. The collaboration has continued into Björk’s next character, with Van Herpen designing dresses worn in the “Black Lake” installation (a version of the song appears on Björk’s eighth solo studio album). The MoMA exhibition design embraced the ambition to make Björk’s music the Museum visitor’s central experience, while also presenting the broad spectrum of her collaborative and educational work. The final detailed conceptual and practical realization in the physical spaces of the Museum was another collaborative endeavor between Björk, her consultant the producer Sam Gainsbury, myself and an incredible team at MoMA.
Björk was born during the four-year volcanic eruption that caused the formation of the Icelandic island Surtsey. Red-hot flowing lava formed a rocky island that was soon colonized by seeds that were washed ashore. These seeds brought the dead island into the cycles of life. At the end of filming “Black Lake,” the Icelandic volcano Bárðarbunga erupted under a glacier, again bringing together scorching liquid with centuries-old glacier ice and generating new rocks out of the cooling magma.
A still from “Black Lake,” 2015, featuring a dress designed by Iris van Herpen.
This publication and exhibition cement Björk’s singular place in contemporary practice and celebrate her highly original and significant music, compositions, performances and visual presentations. As an artist whose work has been felt across many disciplines, Björk will undoubtedly continue to expand the boundaries of music, art, and our understanding of the world—connecting, influencing, and inspiring. || Details of the groundbreaking Biophilia app, released in 2011 and subsequently acquired by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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Klaus Biesenbach
Introduction
Klaus Biesenbach is Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art and Director of MoMA PS1, New York. He co-founded Kunst-Werke (KW) Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 1991, as well as the Berlin Biennale in 1996. In 2006, he was named founding Chief Curator of MoMA’s newly formed Department of Media, and in 2009 founding Chief of the Department of Media and Performance Art. In 2010, he became Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large at MoMA, where he organized the Björk exhibition.
Page 2 — Photo courtesy of Hildur Hauksdóttir. Page 5, above — Photo courtesy of Bernhard Kristinn. Page 5, below — Photo courtesy of Julieta Cervantes. Page 6 — Video stills courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian. Page 9, above — Photo courtesy of Nick Knight. Page 9, below — Painting courtesy of Isaiah Saxon of Encyclopedia Pictura. Page 10, above and center — Video stills courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian. Page 10, below — Photo courtesy of Mathias Augustyniak and M/M (Paris). Page 13, above — Photo courtesy of Carmen Freudenthal & Elle Verhagen. Page 13, center — Image courtesy of Paul White / Me Company. Page 13, below — Photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan. Page 14, above — Photo courtesy of Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin. Page 14, below — App images courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian; app creative directors Björk and James Merry; software engineer, creative director, and technical director Max Weisel. Page 15 — Video still courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian.
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Page 19, above — Photo courtesy of Stephan Flad. Page 19, below — Photo courtesy of Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin. Page 21, left — Photo courtesy of Benni Valsson. Page 21, above right — Photo courtesy of Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin. Page 21, below right — Photo courtesy of Juergen Teller. Page 23, above and below — Photos courtesy of Hildur Hauksdóttir. Page 25, left — Photo courtesy of Stephanie Pfriender Stylander. Page 25, right — Photo courtesy of Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones. Page 27, above — Photo courtesy of Petter Oftedal. Page 27, below — Photo courtesy of Mick Hutson. Page 29, above left — Photo courtesy of Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones. Page 29, top right and centre right — Photos courtesy of Carsten Windhorst. Page 29, below — Photo courtesy of Jói Kjartans. Page 31, above — Photo courtesy of Jói Kjartans. Page 31, centre and below — Photos courtesy of Carsten Windhorst.
PAGAN POETRY || Words & music by Björk || for harpsichord
Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Björk || Alex Ross
Alex Ross is the music critic of The New Yorker and the author of the books The Rest Is Noise and Listen to This.
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Alex Ross
Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Björk
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Prelude: on Genre and Fusion a few years ago, for a feature on a music blog, I asked Björk to make a selection of her favorite records. Her list included Mahler’s Tenth Symphony; Alban Berg’s Lulu; Steve Reich’s Tehillim; a collection of Thai pop, entitled Siamese Soul, Volume 2; Alim Qasimov’s Azerbaijan: The Art of the Mugham; Joni Mitchell’s Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter; Kate Bush’s The Dreaming; Nico’s Desertshore; Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back; Aphex Twin’s Drukqs; the Panasonic EP; Black Dog Productions’ Bytes; and James Blake’s debut album, James Blake. 1 What’s striking about the list is not just the breadth of Björk’s taste—this is no surprise, given her chronic curiosity about every corner of the musical world—but also the animated map of genres that materializes in the background. It is as though, in a reversal of tectonic drift, isolated land-masses of taste were reforming as a supercontinent. A grandiose howl of late Romantic agony; a juggernaut of twelve-tone modernism; a cool minimalist dance through Hebrew psalms; off-kilter pop from South Asia; a virtuoso survey of Azerbaijani mugham; three defiantly idiosyncratic albums by female singer-songwriters; three pathbreaking electronic records; a raging tour-de-force of political hip-hop; a collection of dubstep ballads: Björk’s list circumnavigates the globe, and, at the same time, it overruns the boundaries separating art from pop, mainstream from underground, primeval past from high-tech present. The partition of music into distinct genres, each with its own history, philosophy, and body of technique, is a relatively recent development. Before a global marketplace emerged, with the advent of recording technology in the late nineteenth century, there was little talk of the classical, the popular, and subdivisions thereof, although the language of music was seen to vary widely from nation to nation and from city to city. Shakespeare employed the word “music” with blissful vagueness: “If music be the food of love, play on.” He apparently felt no need to specify what kind of music might feed a lusty ear. When Mozart, in The Magic Flute, enacted what we might now describe as a radical fusion of genres, combining high operatic tradition with the popular art of the Singspiel, few seemed to find anything untoward in the gesture; Antonio Salieri simply commented that it was an entertainment worthy of being presented to the greatest monarch. Rousseau, in his Dictionary of Music, noted that tastes varied widely—“One is most touched by pathetic pieces, another other prefers gay Tunes”—but nonetheless spoke of a “general Taste upon which all well-constituted people are agreed.” 2
The possibility of such a consensus now seems remote. The musical landscape teems with genres: classical, jazz, folk, blues, gospel, country, Latin, R&B, funk, soul, hip-hop, rock, metal, punk, pop, and dozens of national and regional varieties. Recording technology has surely fueled this explosion of typologies: once a piece of music becomes a circulating commodity, it requires classification, so that one can know what section of the record store to put it in, or, in latter-day terms, what tag to place in its metadata. Furthermore, each genre has its own subgenres and ideological schisms. Popular music is regularly riven by debates between acolytes of classic guitar rock and devotees of latter-day pop genres that make sophisticated use of digital manipulation. Contemporary classical music exhibits a long-running conflict between tonally oriented composers and those who still pursue Schoenberg’s high-modernist “emancipation of the dissonance.” Music is very far from being a “universal language,” as Arthur Schopenhauer once defined it; to the contrary, no art stirs more heated debate. Over the past century, we have seen valiant attempts to restore a holistic understanding of genre. In 1923, at Aeolian Hall in New York, the singer Eva Gauthier organized a concert entitled “Ancient and Modern Music for the Voice,” with a repertory ranging from Purcell’s “Hark! Hark! The Echoing Air” to the latest songs of George Gershwin. A decade later, the High-Low Concerts, at the St. Regis Hotel, put Duke Ellington and Count Basie together with Aaron Copland and Charles Ives. After the Second World War, Gunther Schuller, under the banner of the Third Stream, sought common ground between bebop jazz and atonal composition. In the 1960s, Miles Davis, in the name of “fusion,” blended jazz and rock, while psychedelic rock bands studied recordings by Cage and Stockhausen: the latter’s face was famously featured on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. More recently, there have been intense exchanges between younger post-minimalist composers and figures from indie rock and indie pop.
1 “My Favorite Records: Björk,” http://www.therestisnoise.com/2011/11/ my-favorite-records-bj%C3%B6rk.html. 2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionary of Music, in Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, trans. and ed. John T. Scott (University Press of New England), 1998, p. 407.
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Alex Ross
Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Björk
One of the many faces of Björk. Photographed in Berlin on the Biophilia live tour, 2013, wearing a sea-urchin mask created by Maiko Takeda.
Photographed by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin for Interview magazine, 2009.
Shortly before his death, in 1992, John Cage said, “We live in a time I think not of mainstream, but of many streams, or even, if you insist upon a river of time, that we have come to delta, maybe even beyond delta to an ocean which is going back to the skies.” 3 Stream, delta, border, boundary: we keep reaching for geographical metaphors as we speak of genres, and we sense that the real landscape of musical activity ultimately has little to do with our tidy delineations, or indeed with the dismantling of them. Fluid and shifting, music is spread out like populations around urban centers, and certain communities could plausibly be assigned to one city’s suburbs or to another’s. Genre may be a kind of gerrymandering practiced by musical politicians. Indeed, composers routinely complain when they are described as busters of genre or crossers of boundaries; they tend to view themselves simply as artists working with various kinds of material. The jazz composer Michael Gibbs may have summed it up best when he said, “There is a fusion going on every time somebody writes music.” 4 The idea of fusion keeps materializing and disappearing before our ears, a mirage generated by the limited ability of language to account for what we hear.
3 David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, eds., Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art (University of Chicago Press), 2001, p. 1. 4 Julie Coryell and Laura Friedman, eds., Jazz-Rock Fusion: The People, The Music (Hal Leonard), 2000, p. 84.
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Alex Ross
Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Björk
Björk photographed by Benni Valsson, 1998.
The bearded lady. Photographed by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin for Time magazine, 2009.
A previously unpublished photograph by Juergen Teller for The Face magazine, 1993.
The Education of Björk in the intersecting tributaries of Björk’s work, there is a glimpse of the delta that Cage described at the end of his life —whether or not Cage himself would have been able to wrap his mind around her music. He died in September, 1993; three months before, Björk released her first solo album, Debut, in which she began in earnest her fierce dance across the continents of genre. You hear first a bouncing riff sampled from an Antônio Carlos Jobim–Quincy Jones soundtrack, its syncopated beat consigned to a venerable orchestral instrument, the timpani. Over this pattern, Björk sings a gloriously odd opening line: “If you ever get close to a human and human behavior, be ready to get confused.” The voice exists somewhere on the continuum from the folkish to the operatic; less by calculation by default, it lands in the middle ground of pop. Björk’s Icelandic origins almost certainly contributed to her quizzical, questing approach to musical identity. She belonged to a geographically isolated society in which centuries-old folk traditions remained strong, and in which young people passed the time singing in choral groups, as generations before them had done. “Somehow, we missed out on the industrial revolution and modernism and postmodernism,” Björk recently told me. “We are jumping straight from colonialism—we got our independence only in 1944—into the twenty-first century. We could enjoy a still almost untouched natural landscape, and draw upon it as we head-butted our way into a green, techno, Internet age.” All the latest products of Western culture were readily available to Björk’s generation, and to those who came after. Yet these shiny commodities could be assembled in eccentric formations. The up-to-date mingled with the obsolescent and the ancient. Despite Björk’s enthusiasm for the latest developments in the digital arena and her painstaking attention to the minutiae of studio production, there is much in her music that feels rough-hewn, homemade, pre-technological.
Classical music loomed large in her early years. From the age of five, she attended the Barnamúsikskóli in Reykjavík (a children’s music school now called the Tónmenntaskóli), where she studied theory and history, sang in school choirs, and played the flute. (The box set collection Family Tree contains a fragment of Björk’s flute playing: a sinuous little piece from 1980, called “Glora.”) The focus on a canonical repertory of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven frustrated her. “I remember being almost the fighter in the school, the odd kid out,” she once said. 5 But a teacher named Snorri Sigfús Birgisson excited her imagination by introducing her to major twentiethcentury composers: Schoenberg, Messiaen, Stockhausen, Cage. Early on, she made her own attempts at avant-garde composition, creating pieces from sonic found objects such as a tape of her grandfather snoring. Björk remains strongly invested in the modern end of the classical repertory, regularly attending new-music concerts and performances of twentieth-century composers whom she admires. In recent years, during her periods in New York, she has seen Metropolitan Opera performances of Berg’s two operatic masterpieces, Wozzeck and Lulu; she has also heard, among many others, Messiaen’s monumental ensemble piece Des Canyons aux étoiles (From the Canyons to the Stars) and, at the Park Avenue Armory, Stockhausen’s final electronic composition, Cosmic Pulses. She has been more reserved in her response to American minimalism—“Minimalism is my abyss,” she told me, in 2004—but she cherishes Steve Reich’s Tehillim, as her Favorite Records list attests, and also admires the work of Arvo Pärt, Vladimir Martynov, and the late John Tavener, all of whom lie on the outskirts of the minimalist movement, often joining repetitive processes to pure, spare sonorities suggestive of old church traditions.
5 “Björk Meets Karlheinz Stockhausen: Compose Yourself,” Dazed & Confused 23 (August, 1996).
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Alex Ross
Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Björk
Björk as a child. She attended the Barnamúsikskóli in Reykjavík from the age of five.
Cover artwork for the self-titled album Björk released in 1977 at the age of twelve, art directed by her mother, Hildur Hauksdóttir.
Many of Björk’s favorite classical pieces involve a bracing collision of opposites. In Berg’s Lulu, passages of melancholy lyricism in the manner of Mahler are overpowered by thunderous dissonances. Likewise, in Messiaen, pure major triads are frequently juxtaposed with cluster-like masses of tones. Björk’s own work is tilted strongly toward the tonal end of the spectrum, yet there are moments of crisis at which the familiar markers of Western tradition fall away and we are confronted with a darker, stranger sound world: the abrasive, metallic timbres of “Pluto,” on Homogenic; the distant, dreamlike choral cluster that inaugurates “An Echo a Stain,” on Vespertine; the spastically revolving tone-row that drives “Declare Independence,” on Volta; the low, groaning organ discords of “Dark Matter,” on Biophilia. Almost all of Björk’s albums contain at least one tense stretch where the spell of beauty is broken, perhaps so that beauty will matter all the more. Björk’s relationship with Stockhausen has special significance in light of her longtime preoccupation with the merging of music and technology. A pioneer of electronic music in the postwar years, Stockhausen offered a utopian vision in which technology could serve human and even spiritual ends; Gesang der Jünglinge, or Song of the Youths, his electronic masterpiece of 1956, features a boy soprano singing phrases from the Biblical tale of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. In later years, as Stockhausen adopted the profile of a guru and dabbled in mystical arcana, he lost credibility in modernmusic circles, but Björk kept faith with him. Now that more of Stockhausen’s later output has come into view, her faith is vindicated; recent stagings of parts of his grand operatic cycle Licht have generated more awe than derision. After Stockhausen’s death, in 2007, Björk wrote, “When Karlheinz harnessed electricity into sound and showed the rest of us, he sparked off a sun that is still burning and will glow for a long time… I remember sitting in his studio in Cologne, surrounded by twelve speakers, him creating a current traveling up and down, swirling around us like the force of nature that electricity is, my insides pulsating to his noise—primordial, modern and futuristic.” 6 The same adjectives apply to Björk herself.
6 Björk, “Why I Love Stockhausen,” The Guardian, October 29, 2008.
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Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Björk
“Primordial, modern and futuristic:” Björk photographed by Stephanie Pfriender Stylander, 1999.
Photo from the Medúlla era by Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones, 2004.
The Singer as Composer there were many other influences on the young Björk. Indeed, the sway of classical music can be felt more in the spiritual background of her music than on the surface. At the age of eleven, she recorded an album of pop covers, including songs by the Beatles and Stevie Wonder. A few years later, she dived into punk and hardcore, becoming the lead singer of an abrasive anarcho-punk outfit called Kukl. In the late 1980s, she acquired international fame as the lead singer of The Sugarcubes, a free-spirited, mildly surrealist New Wave group. And, in 1990, she recorded a remarkable album of jazz standards, called Gling-Gló—an inviting path not taken. The art of singing often consists in hiding the physicality of the voice—the noise of the breath, the click of the tongue, the croak of the throat, the innumerable nuances that fall between the twelve chromatic tones. Björk, by contrast, has never tried to disguise that visceral aspect: her voice has a raw, abrupt, outdoor character, even at its airiest and most unearthly. While you can hear intimations of that sound in her earliest recordings, she labored for many years to refine the vocal presence that so often elicits such adjectives as “organic,” “natural,” “authentic.” The development of the voice went hand in hand with her emergence as a songwriter and as a producer of complex electronic and instrumental textures. While artists as various as Maria Callas and Joni Mitchell shaped her sense of the capabilities of the voice, perhaps the most enduring influence on Björk’s career, from Debut to Biophilia and beyond, has come from the American composer, singer, dancer, and theatre artist Meredith Monk, who shares with Björk a fundamental unclassifiability, a tendency to invade the interstices of institutionalized culture. Monk belongs to the great vanguard of artists and musicians who thrived in the unheated lofts and makeshift galleries of downtown Manhattan in the 1960s and ’70s. Where so many of her contemporaries, including Reich and Philip Glass, adopted a cool, impassive mien, Monk brought a touch of ritual mysticism to the New York avant-garde, cultivating an otherworldly yet piercingly immediate vocal style that suggested some lost, nameless folk culture. She aimed for a “voice as flexible as the spine,” and connected it to a self-invented dance vocabulary and a mobile theatre of gesture and image. The resulting work caused a certain panic in critical circles: the New York Times once sent a trio of music, dance, and theatre writers to assess her.
Monk provided a clear precedent for Björk, even if the two artists seem to inhabit fundamentally different worlds. Having admired each other from a distance and exchanged letters over the years, Björk and Monk finally met in 2005, in a conversation mediated by the pianist Sarah Cahill. 7 Björk described her early encounter, at around age sixteen, with Monk’s 1981 album Dolmen Music, which gives perhaps the purest demonstration of her invented-folk style. Björk recalled that up until that point she hadn’t been greatly interested in vocal music, preferring the buzzing complexity of instruments and electronics. But Monk showed what could be achieved when the voice alone, divorced or distanced from language, is treated as the most malleable of instruments. Speaking together, the two artists found other common ground: a family tradition of collective singing; an early love for Cage; a tendency to compose while walking outdoors; an abiding interest in how the voice is linked to the body. In traditional realms of classical music, the voice is prized as a medium through which a musical or dramatic idea is expressed. In pop, a similar expectation applies, even if the medium is entirely different: the voice conveys a personality, a style, an energy, a brand. In the cases of Monk and Björk, the voice itself becomes the center of gravity of the composition, the fount of the creative idea. To sing is to compose. We may be aware of the biography behind the voice, but we care most of all for the grain of the singing itself—of the fictive landscape that forms around the voice as it moves. Wallace Stevens seemed to anticipate the phenomenon in “The Idea of Order at Key West”: “She was the single artificer of the world / In which she sang.”
7 “Radical Connections: Meredith Monk and Björk,” Counterstream Radio, http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/ radical-connections-meredith-monk-and-bjork.
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Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Björk
Singing live with a choir on the Vespertine tour at Le Grand Rex, Paris, 2001.
Photographed during a live performance, 1994.
Composition as Collaboration björk resists being called a composer, even if she has drawn extensively on the notational classical tradition. The cult of the solitary genius is alien to her. Instead, she sees her work as an essentially collaborative enterprise, one that calls for an entire community of musicians, studio technicians, instrument-makers, producers, programmers, videographers, fashion designers, and other creative individuals. She is not the kind of pop star who makes a game of donning masks and disguises; her vocal identity has changed remarkably little over two decades as a solo artist. But almost everything else has changed: the instrumentation, the arrangements, the production techniques. Her albums tend to react against one another, with extroverted moods giving way to intimacies, dense textures followed by transparent ones. To a great extent, Björk’s career can be narrated in terms of her collaborations. In the early and mid-1990s, she was living in London, keeping close tabs on the city’s club scene and maintaining a hectic nocturnal schedule. Debut and Post were, in a way, portraits of a multiculturally swinging city, with purring trip-hop beats layered beneath the sinuous strings of Talvin Singh and more opulent parts that Björk co-arranged with Eumir Deodato. Synthesized sounds met up with the tootling and plucking of a community band or orchestra: flute, harp, accordion, harmonium. The tone of these first albums is caught by the title of a song toward the end of Debut: “Violently Happy.” Homogenic, from 1997, marked the end of Björk’s London phase; she moved back to Reykjavík the following year. The producer Mark Bell became a crucial member of Björk’s team, injecting cooler, more brittle timbres. The Icelandic landscape can be sensed in the volcanic spasms of songs like “Pluto,” or in the pummeling rhythms of “Hunter,” which suggest a terrain being trampled by hooves. At the same time, the record suggests a turning inward. In the song “Jóga,” Björk sings of “emotional landscapes,” of a “state of emergency.” This exploration of a sometimes inviting, sometimes forbidding inner geography goes even deeper in Vespertine, which appeared in 2001. Here, Björk’s collaborators, apart from Bell, included the producer-songwriter Guy Sigsworth, the electronic musician Matthew Herbert, the avant-garde harpist Zeena Parkins, and Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt, of the electronic duo Matmos. Yet the glistening, twitchily sensual musical fabric of the album, which includes parts for glockenspiel, celesta, and music boxes, was largely Björk’s creation, with most of the beats created on her laptop and musical parts written in the Sibelius composition program.
In 2004, I had the opportunity to watch the making of Björk’s fifth solo record, Medúlla, and could see first hand how her music gestates in a matrix of creative exchanges. 8 The recording process took Björk from the Canary Islands to Iceland and on to Salvador, Brazil, and London, where the final mix was done. Partly in homage to Meredith Monk, Björk set out to demonstrate the myriad textures, from the ethereal to the percussive, that can emanate from the human voice: solitary folkish song, choral swells, breathy feminine whispers, raw heavy-metal shouts, beatboxing, and various other techniques. The avant-garde rock vocalist Mike Patton, the Inuit throat-singer Tagaq, and the “human beatboxes” Dokaka and Rahzel joined the ever-expanding, ever-changing Björk community; unfortunately, plans to add the R&B superstar Beyoncé to the mix ran up against logistical difficulties. Given the meandering itinerary of the creative process, it was striking how cohesive the album turned out to be: working in conjunction with the recording engineer Valgeir Sigurðsson and the mixing engineer Spike Stent, Björk shaped disparate material into a potent whole. Three years later, with Volta, Björk again reversed course and reclaimed the extroverted mood of her early albums, although she kept hold of the more adventurous resources that she had been deploying since Homogenic. This party tended toward the darkly chaotic. The hip-hop producer Timbaland added tribalistic beats that happened to resemble Afro-Brazilian drumming tracks that Björk had recorded for Medúlla and then set aside, sensing that they didn’t fit that album’s tone. An all-female, ten-piece brass ensemble provided glowering brass sonorities. The indie soul singer Antony Hegarty sang duets with Björk on several tracks, establishing a contrasting mood of sensuous otherwordliness. If the record lacked the thematic unity of Vespertine and Medúlla, it again demonstrated Björk’s knack for disrupting the pop consensus. Biophilia, from 2011, is perhaps Björk’s most ambitious project to date. Part album, part stage spectacle, part iPad app emporium, part new-instrument laboratory, and part gradeschool curriculum, it is almost Stockhausenlike in its joyous disregard for the constraints of genre. As often before, Björk set about mapping the intersection of art, nature, and technology, presenting analogies between scientific and musical elements. “Crystalline” compares crystal structures to the efflorescence of songs from small motifs; “Solstice” likens swinging pendulums to overlapping contrapuntal lines; and “Virus,” whose folklike melody seems to come from the depths of the centuries, has an unstable, ever-shifting accompaniment that suggests cells subdividing and multiplying. The battery of bespoke instruments includes the gameleste, a MIDI-controlled device that incorporates gamelan-like bronze bars in a celeste housing; and the Sharpsichord, a forty-six-string automatic harp controlled by a pin cylinder.
8 See Alex Ross, Listen to This (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2010, pp. 238–58.
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Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Björk
Björk in the studio during a Medúlla session, 2004.
Björk performing on the Biophilia tour, 2011, with a specially commissioned gravity harp that she designed together with Andy Cavatorta.
Pendulums for the gravity harp, built by Andy Cavatorta.
Björk rehearsing for Biophilia with her Icelandic choir, 2011.
The circle of colleagues now included the organ craftsman Björgvin Tómasson, the sound sculptor Henry Dagg, the percussionists Matt Nolan and Manu Delago, the engineer and programmer Damian Taylor, and the sound-artist and educator Curver. They joined such longtime confederates as Zeena Parkins, Matthew Herbert, Mark Bell, the Icelandic poet Sjón, and the Iranian producer Leila Arab. Grown-up audiences thrilled to the high-tech spectacle that Björk unleashed in live performance—plasma bolts zapping inside a Tesla coil, producing organlike blasts of sound—but most of all she wished to serve the starved imaginations of schoolchildren, many of whom now enter adulthood without having studied music in school. “I want the kids to feel like they’re superheroes of sound,” she told me, before a series of performances at the New York Hall of Science, in Queens, in 2012. One afternoon, I watched as a group of kids from Queens middle schools raced around playing with the instruments and the attendant software, their eyes glittering with unsuspected possibilities. 9 In the wake of the cosmic effort of Biophilia, another change of course seems inevitable. Lately, with an eye toward a new album, Björk has been recording more intimate, confessional songs with strings. There is no doubt that these records not only document an intellectual journey but also a personal, psychological one. How the work matches up with the life is a subject on which only the artist herself can speak, and the biographical details are, in any case, somewhat immaterial; what counts is the sense that each song is an attempt to transmit honestly and unabashedly an inward state, rather than to concoct a calculated, knowing image for the outside world. As in Schubert’s final string quartet or Berg’s Lyric Suite, the music has a seismographic action, recording shocks and sensations that we may not see first hand.
9 See Alex Ross, “Björk Ed,” The New Yorker, February 27, 2012.
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Björgvin Tómasson designed two instruments with Björk, a gameleste (shown here) and a pipe organ, both MIDI-controlled.
Inventor and sound sculptor Henry Dagg with his Sharpsichord, complete with amplification horns, 2011.
The organs and the gameleste at a rehearsal for the Biophilia tour, 2011.
Postlude: Declaring Independence the great musical event of the past hundred years has been the rise of pop and the concomitant marginalization of a formerly dominant classical tradition. Walter Benjamin, in his famous 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility,” observed that technologies of reproduction had brought about the decay of the “aura” attaching to bourgeois works of art; modern forms such as photography and film had eroded the uniqueness of the sacred artistic object. The same dynamic could be seen in music, as Theodor W. Adorno noted. Yet, as Adorno pointed out in his correspondence with Benjamin, it is not the case that the phenomenon of “aura” has disappeared altogether; rather, it has migrated from the older tradition to the newer one, so that pop is now sacralized in turn. 10 It is a naïve fiction of contemporary American culture to believe that bourgeois art is an affair of the élites while pop culture is a celebration of democratic virtues. There is, in fact, a straight line from the bourgeois cult of the solitary genius to the mass cult of the stadium celebrity. In both venues, a musical object radiates ritual power within a radically unequal capitalist society. It would be too much to claim that Björk breaks that cycle of sacralization and domination. No artist who participates in the give-and-take of the music business can escape it. But something in her work rejects a cultic function. As a performer, she does not strive to dominate; even when her voice acquires a ferocious edge, she remains a figure within a landscape, a voice within a collective. This is not to say that she fails to attract fanatical admirers or elicit adulation; rather, that she undermines the machinery of celebrity by playing against type. The fact that she is routinely described as idiosyncratic, eccentric, “weird,” or even “crazy”—adjectives seldom employed by those who know her well—testifies to her oblique strategy in the public sphere. In this respect, her in-between status in genre terms, her liminal position between classical, popular, and folk worlds, has subversive power, and not just in aesthetic terms. By refusing to be classified, Björk also resists being commodified.
10 Adorno wrote to Benjamin on March 18, 1936: “…if anything can be said to possess an auratic character now, it is precisely the film which does so, and to an extreme and highly suspect degree.” Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Harvard University Press), 1999, p. 130.
The singer who composes, the composer who sings; the pop figure who embraces classical music, the classical student who has branched out into pop; the solitary creator who thrives on collaboration, the Nordic woman who meanders through global cultures—Björk presents us with a complex mass of dualities and contradictions. What is most impressive about the overall trajectory of her work is that each swerve or seeming detour contributes to a steadily ascending arc. Despite constant changes of style and rotations of personnel, her music-making displays long-term continuities, not only in the fabric of her voice but in the melodic and harmonic contour of the songs. The integration of a distinct composerly sensibility into an open-ended, communally evolving output is perhaps Björk’s signal achievement. It overrides a false opposition that has confined music in predictable social functions. “Make your own flag! Raise your flag!” Björk cries on “Declare Independence.” We don’t usually think of Björk as a political artist, and yet her music can acquire an insurgent edge, as became clear when, singing those lines in Shanghai in 2008, she added a shout of “Free Tibet!” The idea of raising one’s own flag, of drawing one’s own borders, runs all the way through Björk’s career. It transcends the marketing cliché of “Think different” and espouses a philosophy of aesthetic anarchy, whereby the redrawn map of the musical world becomes the image of a future society. In this way, too, Björk is a faithful follower of Cage, whose vision of utopia consisted, simply and majestically, of a “multiplicity of individuals who have the habit of respecting one another.” 11 ||
11 Joan Retallack, ed., Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music (Wesleyan University Press), 1996, p. 293.
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Alex Ross
Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Björk
Nicola Dibben is a professor of musicology at the University of Sheffield. She researches and teaches in the science and psychology of music and in popular music studies. Her publications include the books Björk and Music and Mind in Everyday Life.
ALL IS FULL OF LOVE || Words & music by Björk || for celeste
Björk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation || Nicola Dibben
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Nicola Dibben
Björk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation
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Creator || Producer stories of björk’s creative process abound in interviews and critical reception of her music: from accounts of composing by singing outdoors, through working at digital audio workstations, to jamming with other musicians. Yet, the discourse and ideology of creativity—who and what we consider “creative” and why— remains relatively opaque. In this essay I briefly outline some of Björk’s working process, before showing how her work itself has something to say about the nature of creativity which challenges deeply embedded notions of creation. Björk’s solo work can be thought of in terms of “projects,” which are realized as albums, associated singles and remixes, promotional images, music videos, documentaries, performances, and in the case of Biophilia (2011), a pop-up music school and an app for tablet computer. Music is at the core of these projects. For example, in the case of Biophilia, which I worked on as musicological consultant, 1 Björk spent at least two years researching and composing with assistance from a recording engineer, personal assistant, and management. By the time I met Björk in September 2010 she had already created working versions of the tracks that would form the album, at least one of which was awaiting lyrics (the track “Melody,” which was later titled “Cosmogony”). At this stage she had identified most collaborators, and was communicating her idea for each aspect of the project to the relevant people, working with the individuals concerned to achieve it. Hence, design, art work, costume, videos, and apps emerged during that process and were executed to the music, with some changes to the music in response to those interventions and the needs of the different types of artefacts. The reason this sequence is important is that it points to a distinctive feature of Björk’s work—the way in which she uses all media at her disposal to communicate consistently a central idea particular to each project, which is first manifested musically.
In terms of music-making, some musical collaborators such as engineers and producers are akin to performers brought in to play music that she has written. One example of this relationship, according to Björk, was her work with Markus Dravs, credited with production of Homogenic, whom she asked to make “big, distorted rock beats.” She gave him reference samples and asked him to create beats that she listened to and corrected, and by the end of the Post tour they had created a library of beats that she could use in Homogenic. Another example is Matmos, who she brought in to provide a textural and percussive layer of beats to tracks she had already created. 2 Significantly, Björk’s account of these working relationships used procreational metaphors, such as her description of studio engineers she worked with as the “midwives” to her creative projects. 3 Such a description runs counter to the idea of the studio as the preserve of the male engineer and producer, and of the patriarchal model of creation and creativity as “divine inspiration” which derives from sacred or phallocentric models of the father/god. 4 It is in this context of patriarchal ideologies of creativity, and difference politics, that interpretation of Björk’s work from a feminist perspective is particularly interesting. I argue that her work challenges the stereotype of the patriarchal God-like creator, and replaces it with a matriarchal alternative premised on procreation. The most obvious place to look for this matriarchal creator is in the visual and lyrical dimension of her work, but, as I will show, they are just as apparent in the sound of her music.
2 Matmos, “When Matmos met Björk,” Red Bull Music Academy Magazine, http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/magazine/ when-matmos-met-bjork, June 26, 2013.
1 In this case, “musicological consultant” is a grand title for a variety of tasks, from writing liner notes to identifying key centers of songs for a package of tuning forks!
3 Homogenic (1997) CD liner notes; and personal communication, February, 2013. 4 Rob Pope, Creativity: Theory, History, Practice (Psychology Press), 2005.
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Björk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation
Live performances for Biophilia, Manchester International Festival, UK, 2011.
A screenshot of “Solstice,” from the interactive Biophilia digital app, first released in 2011.
The “Cosmogony” homescreen from the Biophilia app.
Procreator || Mother || Nature
Procreator || Mother || Nature
björk’s performances of femininity are notable for avoiding the sexualized objectification of women’s bodies that permeates mainstream popular culture. Her costumes are often thematically connected to the particular project she’s engaged in and flout conventions of acceptability, catwalk fashion trends, or bodyconscious dressing. 5 Citing Björk as a “feminist icon” one blogger wrote: “… her clothes are never about being pretty or sexy, which I love. They’re clothes as art and as something to play with and explore.” 6 Her movements in performance similarly avoid clichéd sexualization: the choreography eschews coy looks, or simulated sex typical of female pop icons and instead is characterized by child-like cavorting, by movements that express and visualize sonic structures, or reflect almost absent-minded absorption in the act of singing. Nonetheless, some of her work has been erotically explicit: the music video “Pagan Poetry” (dir. Nick Knight, 2001) shows Björk semi-naked with beads sewn into her skin. In sum, Björk’s visual technique avoids sexual objectification by disavowing, to some extent, the conventional representational style of heteronormative sexual attractiveness, fetishized body parts, and patriarchal modes of looking. Instead, the visual becomes an outlet for the expression of a different kind of female experience and identity.
björk’s work makes an unusual alliance between a woman’s sexual identity and motherhood. In a culture where motherhood is often deemed de-sexualized, Björk’s focus on sensual experience in Medúlla is striking. Björk attributed this thematic aspect of the album project to her experience of pregnancy, birth, and mothering, describing the album as “blood, bones and meat.” 7 In this context, the song “The Pleasure is All Mine” can be understood as a celebration of the sensual and emotional experience of mothering, and “Mouth’s Cradle” as a rumination on breastfeeding. The voice is one place where gender is “performed,” 8 so places where the voice does not comply with the codification of sexual categories and roles disrupt identity categories. 9 The panting and groaning performed by Björk and Canadian throat-singer Tanya Tagaq break conventions of vocal femininity because they can be heard as eliding both a maternal and erotic identity. In interviews contemporary with Medúlla, Björk described the project as an attempt to return to a time “prior to civilization,” and to hark back to a mythologized past in the wake of 9/11. In musical terms this is manifest in the “primitivist” and body-centric vocal album. The very personal, family-centered focus, and emphasis on the voice, can be understood as a form of “embodied protest” which voices the physical and emotional experience of motherhood in opposition to the (male) oriented contemporary political scene. 10 This celebration of sensual experiences of breastfeeding and mothering is an articulation of peace politics which is arguably congruent with tenets of third-wave feminism and its valorization of the feminine. From a feminist perspective Björk’s work can be understood as affirming female sexual autonomy and identity by avoiding sexual objectification, and concomitant ideologies of male sexual entitlement, and by celebrating identities of motherhood. This is extremely important in so far as it counters a situation in which women’s sexuality is defined by men. However, one problem with this projected female identity is that it affirms constructions of the female subject as natural and pre-technological, which can be seen as problematically essentialist. One place this is apparent is in the construct of “Nature” which appears throughout her work.
7 The Inner Part of an Animal or Plant Structure, dir. Ragnheiður Gestsdóttir, 2004.
5 Edwin F. Faulhaber III, Communicator Between Worlds: Björk Reaches Beyond the Binaries. Diss. Bowling Green State University, 2008. 6 Franca, “Fashionable Feminist Icon: Björk,” March 2, 2011. Oranges and Apples: http://www.oranges-and-apples.com/2011/ 03/fashionable-feminist-icon-bjork.html.
8 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Routledge), 1999. 9 Freya Jarman-Ivens, Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities, and the Musical Flaw (Palgrave Macmillan), 2011. 10 Björk has described some of the songs as being about family members. The lyrics of “Mouth’s Cradle” refer to “building an altar away from all Osamas and Bushes.”
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Stills from the erotically charged video for “Pagan Poetry” (directed by Nick Knight, 2001), Björk wearing a dress by Alexander McQueen.
Photographed for the Volumen VHS/DVD by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, 1998.
Björk and her son Sindri, photographed in Iceland by Juergen Teller, 1993.
Procreator || Mother || Nature the natural world is one of the most common tropes in Björk’s work, whether as the self-proclaimed source of her creativity, the thematic subject of her work, or dominant interpretive mode of critical reception. This perspective is typified by the way she understands her voice as her primary compositional tool, which she describes as shaped by and a reaction to the natural world, untutored and hence “preserving” something otherwise changed or destroyed. 11 Björk’s work articulates a celebration of and continuity of humans with the natural world. 12 Imagery of the physical and animal natural world abounds in the music videos and lyrics of her solo career: volcanic and winter landscapes, the sea, and animals. Notably, whereas in her early solo career (Debut and Post) she was usually the lyrical and visual second-person observer of nature, in later work she was more often the firstperson embodiment of nature: for example, as cyber-polar-bear in the video of “Hunter” from Homogenic, as the now infamous swan at the Oscars for Dancer in the Dark, or as the sea in “Oceania” from Medúlla. By personifying nature Björk performs the continuity between human and animal, human and physical, self and other. Björk’s performance of “Oceania” at the Opening Ceremony of the Athens Olympic Games (2004) is a good example of this aesthetic practice of embodying nature. In this work, written for the Olympic Games, Björk takes on the persona of the “Ocean-Mother” who watches over humanity (thereby disavowing differences of religion and nationality). The main visual cue to this embodiment in performance was the blue, billowing, and encrusted dress by designer Sophia Kokosalaki which unfurled across the stadium, while the lyrics (co-written by longtime collaborator, Icelandic poet Sjón) speak from first-person perspective. Musically, the scalic passages and choral flourishes can be heard as mimetic of waves, while the fermatas (the long held notes disrupting the regular beat) manifest the sea-goddess’s power and control in musical form by halting the temporal flow. Björk’s identification of Woman with the natural world in much of her work could be seen as problematically essentialist in so far as it seems to reinscribe binaries that ultimately preserve male power. Yet this interpretation would ignore the extent to which her work engages with the idea of technology and, by doing so, the extent to which it challenges these very categories. So it is to the “technological” that I turn next.
11 Inside Björk, dir. Christopher Walker, 2003.
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 12 Nicola Dibben, Björk (Equinox), 2009, pp. 53–71.
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A portrait by Stéphane Sédnaoui, 1994.
Björk personifying the sea in her performance of “Oceania” at the Olympic Games, Athens, 2004, in a dress designed by Sophia Kokosalaki.
Feminizing Techno björk’s treatment of the technological has to be seen in its wider cultural context. The construct “Technology” is associated with a worldview of scientific progress, objectivity and rationality, and of domination over the natural world. In the West this is a legacy of nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury reaction to industrialization and mechanization and associated fears of routinized human labor that would then be replaced by the work of machines. In popular music the “technological” came to be associated with electronic instruments and sound sources, epitomized by the synthesized timbres and repeating beat patterns of electronic dance music— this, despite the fact that a guitar is just as much a technology as the Digital Audio Workstation. 13 This association between the sounds of electronic dance music and the concept of the “technological” is manifest in Björk’s artistic output, statements in interviews, and critical reception. This is significant because it means that if we look closely at her use of beats we can better understand the idea of technology in her music. One innovation of Björk’s compositional style was the unusual combination of vocal, instrumental, and electronic sources, which integrated sounds culturally coded as “natural” with other sound sources and compositional practices conceived as “technological.” 14 One place this can be heard is in the relationship between her voice and the sonic background. The sound of Björk’s first solo albums was innovative in the context of 1990s electronic dance music for its combination of vocals and beat-based electronic dance music. Her voice works with the “technological,” represented by the beats, but is not subservient to it, as can be heard in the expressive timing of her relatively unprocessed vocals around the quantized beat (a relationship described by British musician and co-writer Guy Sigsworth as “the unforgiving pulse of the machine and the human resisting it”). 15
13 Simon Frith, “Art versus technology: The strange case of popular music,” Media, Culture & Society 8.3 (1986), pp. 263–79.
A second feature of Björk’s sound that presents this integration of the natural and technological is the mimetic character of her beats. For example, the timbre of her beats deliberately mimics aspects of the natural world such as seismic movement of the earth (Homogenic), and winter landscapes (Vespertine), associations that are primed for the listener by contextual information such as Björk’s statements on her work and accompanying videos. In “Nature is Ancient,” for example, the industrial-sounding beats coincide with shots of a foetus-like creature, and the filtered frequency spectrum evokes a sound heard through some other substance or device, and can be interpreted as a uterine soundscape. In some cases, beats and other materials are directly sampled from everyday sound (cracking ice and footsteps in snow on Vespertine), and in Medúlla beats are made from the ultimate sonic signifier of human subjectivity—the voice. A third example of the way Björk inscribed the beats of electronic music with alternative meanings was through the use of microbeats on Vespertine. Microbeats are high-pitched, short-duration, percussive rhythms that derived from avant-garde and experimental “glitch” music of the 1990s which used the clicks of a CD skipping as musical material. One way microbeats subvert traditional beat-based composition is by “miniaturizing” the sonic experience. The term “micro” refers to the idea of working with a “smallest particle” or “grain” of sound, and Björk used this within a broader aesthetic of miniaturization particular to Vespertine. The design intention was to create the impression of something small that had been magnified. 16 Miniaturization of objects opens up the everyday world to the imagination and is a sonic manifestation of Vespertine’s utopian delight in the domestic. 17 This was achieved by using high-frequency sounds of short duration and in rapid rhythmic patterns (sounds emitted by small objects/events in the real-world), and positioning them around the virtual space of the recording so that they become more akin to something organic and mobile (insects, perhaps) rather than the fixed-location, loud, low-frequency beats characteristic of some electronic dance music. By virtue of this treatment, technology was made human-scale, and brought into the private, domestic realm.
16 This is also evident in the title sequence and credits to Björk’s documentary Minuscule (2004), in which the camera’s gaze travels through a miniature world.
15 Guy Sigsworth, personal communication, 2006.
17 Björk explained her use of microsound at this time as a compositional strategy that emerged from working with a laptop computer, and a state of domesticity and retreat in response to the concurrent filming of the Lars von Trier-directed film Dancer in the Dark, in which she took the leading role (Inside Björk, dir. Christopher Walker, 2003).
Nicola Dibben
Björk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation
14 Nicola Dibben, Björk (Equinox), 2009.
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Björk performing at the Brit Awards, London, 1994.
Microbeats also make technological mediation audible. With digitalization at the end of the twentieth century came the apparent absence of a physical artefact, 18 and this was accompanied by aesthetic practices that made the digital visible and audible. This “opaque mediation” 19 is evident in some of Björk’s videos at the time (for example, her transformation from human to animated bear in “Hunter”). The sonic “glitches” of a CD skipping are the sound of the perfect workings of CD technology interrupted, making audible the otherwise inaudible digital artefact itself. In this sense microbeats acknowledge and embrace the technological realm, rather than using it to create a fantasy of (unmediated) audio perfection. As this indicates, microbeats are premised on the failures and unpredictabilities of technology, and in this sense Glitch music can be understood as a critique of digital technology. Talking of Vespertine, Björk remarked: “… it’s sort of conquering the fact that most people think that technology is cold because it has no mystery, and it’s very calculated… So when you take technology and use the areas where it breaks, where it’s faulty, you’re entering a mystery zone where you can’t control it. It’s reacting more like an animal or person to you, and you have to react with it.” 20 Mechanical technology is also explored by Björk in this way: for example, while the digital is sonically present in the use of CD glitches on Vespertine, that album in addition includes the sounds of a mechanical music box whose idiosyncratic timing variations present a more imperfect version of the technological. It is possible to see this set of Björk’s compositional practices as a critical response to the binary opposition between human and machine, the natural and the technological. The construct of technology as systematic, predictable, and invulnerable is not played out in Björk’s treatment of sonic signifiers of the technological; instead, technology, as represented through her sound, is unsystematic, unpredictable, vulnerable— and ultimately rather life-like. From a feminist perspective, she loosens the binary constructs and opens the way for an alternative relationship with and between nature and technology.
18 The absence of physical artefacts with digital technology is “apparent” rather than “real” because digital artefacts such as MP3s still need physical playback technologies. 19 Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen, Music in Bits and Bits of Music: Signatures of Digital Mediation in Popular Music Recordings. Diss. PhD thesis, University of Oslo, 2013. 20 Björk interviewed in CDNow, August, 2001, “Cocoon Special,” 2001: http://www.bjork.fr/Cocoon,114.
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Björk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation
Video stills from “Hunter” (directed by Paul White, 1998), showing Björk’s transformation from human to animated polar bear.
The Creator-Procreator i have suggested that Björk’s artistic practices present a version of “technology” that does not fit the cultural stereotypes. As Charity Marsh and Melissa West pointed out over a decade ago, 21 Björk blurs the distinction between technology and nature, and in doing so she dissolves the polarization of masculinity and femininity. Elsewhere I argue that the music video “All is Full of Love” 22 epitomizes this idea of the human-technology relationship. 23 In that video Björk embodies a human-machine hybrid 24—a cyborg modeled on her facial features, lovingly tended to by robotic arms in a sci-fi futuristic setting, who then appears in sexual union with another. The close-up shots of cylindrical protuberances, milky substances flowing over cyborgian body parts, the tangled cables linking cyborgs to robotic arms suggestive of bondage, and the moment of sexual union inferred from the few seconds blackout at the track’s Golden Section are an explicitly sexual and sensual visual representation of a non-heteronormative and cyborgian subjectivity. This feminization of technology is also accomplished sonically: the cyborgs lip-synch to Björk’s singing voice, and musical materials culturally coded as feminine and magical (for example, short, scalic clavichord passages) are aligned with visual shots of the robotic arms tending to the cyborg. The “noisy” filtered timbre of the slow looped beat pattern that runs throughout the track has a mechanical character and starts with the movement of the robotic arms, as if the track itself is a piece of machinery (0:19). This is in stark contrast to the moments of human subjectivity associated with the cyborgs: the chorus in which the cyborgs duet accompanied by sonic signifiers of emotion and altered states of consciousness (vocalize, crescendo of the high-frequency wash on the upbeat to the chorus, harp-like glissandi, vocal reverberation). It is possible to understand Björk’s treatment as presenting a new hybrid entity which confounds dualist categories of masculine-feminine and technology-nature.
Whereas “All is Full of Love” presents a cyborgian embodiment of a feminized technology—the human-machine hybrid—elsewhere Björk’s work conceives of humans as part of a bigger system in which the hybridity is more explicitly between organic and inorganic matter. An early exemplar of this is the music video “Jóga,” at the end of which the camera enters Björk’s chest to reveal she is made of rock identical to the land she stands on. Whereas this music video can be understood as a nationalist identification by Björk with the Icelandic landscape, 25 her more recent work encourages less place-bound interpretations, pointing instead to a conception of nature in terms of planet rather than place. This difference in scope is illustrated by comparing “All is Full of Love” with “Mutual Core” 26—a music video made thirteen years after the former, yet which shares structural and thematic similarities with it, and has been described as “a feminist treatise against patriarchy in creation theory.” 27 “Mutual Core” depicts the emergence and sexual union of two hybrid creatures in a creation myth narrative. Rock-like creatures emerge and submerge in aquatic movements in sand, in which Björk stands rooted up to her midriff. They rise up and display anthropomorphic features: rock strata meet and caress like tongues, the “rockface” takes on human features. At each of the two choruses the hybrid creatures come together in a violent eruption—a visual realization of the lyrical reference to tectonic plates colliding. The audio-visual climax is the union of the creatures in the final chorus as the rock and lava thrust upward, creating two androgynous Buddha-like figures. Here the categories of organic and inorganic are as inadequate as those of female and male.
21 Charity Marsh and Melissa West, “The Nature/Technology Binary Opposition Dismantled in the Music of Madonna and Björk,” Music and Technoculture (2003), pp. 182–203.
25 Nicola Dibben (in press), “Affecting landscapes: popular music and environmentalism in a Nordic context,” Popular Music in the Nordic Countries, eds. Antti-Ville Kärjä and Fabian Holt.
22 “All is Full of Love,” dir. Chris Cunningham, 1999.
26 “Mutual Core,” dir. Andrew Thomas Huang, 2012.
23 Nicola Dibben, Björk (Equinox), 2009. 24 Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, eds., Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment (Sage), 1996.
27 Cacy Forgenie, “Björk’s ‘Mutual Core’ video is fantastic, feminist & repeat play worthy,” berBice [MRKT], November 15, 2012: http://berbicemarket.com/sports-music-film-art-books /bjorks-mutual-core-video-is-fantasticfeminist-repeat-play-worthy-video/
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Björk revealing that, inside her chest, her heart is Iceland. Stills from “Jóga,” directed by Michel Gondry, 1997.
A still showing human-machine hybrids in the video to “All is Full of Love,” directed by Chris Cunningham, 1999.
Similarities between the two videos encourage comparison: they share a narrative of creation, organic-inorganic hybridity, the falling ash/sparks during the creation process, the flowing liquids and unification evocative of sexual union, moments of visual symmetry of entwined hybrid creatures surrounded by and linked to other smaller creatures, and significant visual events at the Golden Section of each track (sexual union when the lights flicker off in “All is Full of Love” and the touching of hands in “Mutual Core”). Both celebrate non-heteronormative sexuality, and both challenge our perceptions of the categories of organic and inorganic (human/machine in one case; human/mineral in another). But whereas “All is Full of Love” emphasizes peace, love and sex, “Mutual Core” represents a more violent unification. This focus on hybridity disturbs familiar conceptual categories: organic and inorganic are combined rather than representing a duality. This questioning of dualist categories is particularly significant in the context of Björk’s ecopolitical activities, hinting at the human relationship with, rather than domination over, the natural world. 28
28 Nicola Dibben (in press), “Affecting landscapes: popular music and environmentalism in a Nordic context,” Popular Music in the Nordic Countries, eds. Antti-Ville Kärjä and Fabian Holt.
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Stills from the videos to “All is Full of Love” (Chris Cunningham, 1999) and “Mutual Core” (Andrew Thomas Huang, 2012), showing powerful unions of inorganic/organic hybridity.
Conclusion: Disturbing the Categories i have argued that Björk’s artistic output is characterized by themes and narratives of creation and unification that problematize familiar gendered dualist categories. I focused on sonic examples and compositional practices, but the same themes are evident in more obviously representational aspects of visuals and lyrics: her videos feature androgynous characters, non-heteronormative representations of sexual union, avoidance of sexual objectification of Björk’s own image, and the presentation of Woman as simultaneously sexual and nurturing. Perhaps surprisingly, given the feminist reading of her work that I have presented, Björk herself had until recently been reluctant to identify herself as a feminist. Subsequent to her increased politicization after 9/11, and the birth of her daughter, she became more outspoken about gender inequalities, 29 contrasting her own perspective with that of her mother’s generation of second-wave feminists. It would be easy to read Björk’s work in terms of difference feminism in which women are aligned with nature and its associated attributes. Indeed, such a reading is supported by a track such as “Sacrifice” from Biophilia, which ponders on how nature positions women to care for others first. Björk’s author-image prioritizes her emotional authenticity and her voice as signifier of the “natural” and “pre-technological” congruent with dominant constructions of the female subject in Euro-American culture. Moreover, her embodiment of nature is redolent of an ecofeminism reliant on a mystical connection between women and nature. This amounts to an espousal of third-wave “difference feminism”—the idea that there are real differences between the sexes and a reclaiming of the “traditional” female roles which some believed to have been jettisoned by second-wave feminism.
29 “It’s interesting for me to bring up a girl. You go to the toy store and the female characters there—Cinderella, the lady in Beauty and the Beast— their major task is to find Prince Charming. And I’m like, wait a minute—it’s 2005! We’ve fought so hard to have a say, and not just live through our partners, and yet you’re still seeing two-year-old girls with this message pushed at them that the only important thing is to find this amazing dress so that the guy will want you. It’s something my mum pointed out to me when I was little—so much that I almost threw up— but she’s right.” Björk interviewed by Liz Hoggard, “Maybe I’ll be a feminist in my old age,” The Observer, March 13, 2005.
The problem with such an approach, or interpretation of her approach, is two-fold. If we understand her work as showing that constructs normally thought of as binary opposites are in fact compatible with one another, then this simply reinscribes the opposition—constituting the dualities in the very process of unifying them. 30 In fact, I find this interpretation unpersuasive because it ignores the way her work destabilizes gendered categories. As I have argued above, the human-machine binary is challenged by the entity of the cyborg; the organicinorganic distinction is disturbed by creating hybrid entities; and the differentiation of science and myth (Big Bang creation theory and Mother Nature mythology in “Cosmogony”) is made indistinct. There are no clear categories. Instead, we are presented with a non-gendered, non-heteronormative subjectivity in which creation and procreation are one. Hence, I suggest an alternative perspective on her work: namely, that Björk challenges the binaries from the outset. None of the categories comprising the apparent dualities we might find there are inscribed in her work; rather they are shown to be there only in our own realization of their inadequacy as systems of thought to make sense of the material at hand. And so for the duration of a song, a performance, we can experience an alternative way the world might be. ||
30 Andrew Robbie, “Sampling Haraway, Hunting Björk: Locating a Cyborg Subjectivity,” Repercussions, 2007, 10: 1.
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Nicola Dibben
Björk Creating: Myths of Creativity and Creation
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University (Houston, USA). He is the author of Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality; Causality; Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World; World; The Ecological Thought; ought; Ecology Without Nature, Nature, nine other books and 120 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, design, and food. Morton is a proponent of object-oriented ontology (OOO), a new philosophy that shows how nonhuman things—a fox, a pencil, the biosphere, a song, a quasar, a mixing desk—are as rich and alive and special as we think humans are, and how they influence each other in a sensual, molten ether.
Page 61, above — Photo courtesy of Timothy Morton. Page 61, below — Home video courtesy of Björk Guðmundsdóttir.
AURORA || Words and music by Björk || for harpsichord
This Huge Sunlit Abyss from the Future Right There Next to You… Emails between Björk Guðmundsdóttir and Timothy Morton || October, 2014 || Edited by James Merry
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14/11/2014 13:46
hi timothy i wanted to write this letter for a long time i have been reading your books for a while and i like them a lot next year there will be a MoMA exhibition on my work including a book . i was wondering if you’d be interested in taking part in it ? warmth , björk
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Dear Björk, It was very kind of you to write to me, and I’m very touched by your kind words. I am always quite surprised anyone reads my stuff! I would be thrilled to be part of the MoMA catalogue. Your work has been a very deep influence on my way of thinking and life in general. I like to be given homework in terms of what to write (perpetual student!), so do tell me more about what specifications you might like. It truly seems to me that there is some kind of shift happening towards ecological awareness--not just in terms of PR for the science. I have heard this in your work since I started to listen to it. Yours, Tim
thank you so much for writing ... im thrilled youre interested and sorry , i went offline , was hiking in iceland and filming a video . so i have been doing a little reading and trying to find folks who could help me define what “ism” i am ... i guess i managed to avoid being analyzed for all these years but now since i am a little older and supposedly “wiser” i would like to offer up a collaborative hand and wave hi to theory . well , if i dont do it , the art critics will and that seems destined for misunderstandings . i ended up reading several books on posthumanism . it is not exactly what i was looking for but closest yet ... most interesting is that it is the first “ism” where the human is not at the centre of the world , and the stuff about anthropocene is also spicy !! not only to define it for me , but also for all my friends , and a generation actually . i feel in many ways we icelandic people are a bit different from usa and england . somehow we missed out on the industrial revolution and modernism and postmodernism and are now coming straight from colonialism , getting our independence 1944 and going straight into 21st century ! we have a chance to enjoy our still almost untouched nature and combine it and headbutt our way into green techno internet age . so somehow there is way less apocalyptic feeling over here ... we dont have an army , havent been burned by wars or by the guilt that comes with it ... somehow we are still continuing the romantic age of the 19th century but it is not back to nature , it is forwards !! i feel this has been a little misunderstood so far as naive and cute ( a la grizzly man werner herzog or even worse dolphins and shit !! ) and i havent seen much written stuff in the western media where this “ism” is given a mature voice . then i guess there is also the woman matriarch factor . would be incredible to somehow address that in a fertile non patriarch rocknroll way ? without dissing a single male !!!
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Oh gosh, it’s my pleasure, and thank you in turn for replying with such richness. I think I’ve had your music and words in me for decades--I mean this word i use, “hyperobject” for instance, it sounds like one of your words. You have so many nonhuman beings in your work, both obviously alive and not so obviously. I tend to see things in an animistic way. I try to argue that everything is alive (or undead--almost as good!). Your sentence made me smile. “Help me define what ism I am” is kind of its own ism in a way, and a very lyrical phrase (I don’t really know how to write poems but I can read them...) I have no idea what ism you are really of course (he said sincerely and truthfully), and my own ism doesn’t seem to have made itself very obvious! That is part of the whole ism dynamic, of course, which we humans have been in for about two hundred years... I argue that art comes from the future (and I can prove it?!) so I think art of whatever kind is always ahead of thinking. It’s my job to sort of channel it into the present in words. As your art is obviously very clearly open to the future (and from the future) I thought I’d like to tell you, with helping you on the 2015 projects in mind. I think art is a way to talk about the way things are in general: an umbrella, Sagittarius A, coral, breadcrumbs, photons. I believe art is a way to attune to what reality is, which is a weird reality.
By “weird” I mean the Icelandic and Old Norse roots of that word, “urth.” What things are is inextricably looped, twisted or entwined with how they appear, yet different--so things are weird and also fragile, even black holes. I will now not take up five hours of your time proving it! All my stuff right now is explicitly about this word urth, which for me is a strange coincidence since you wrote me. I could find a million examples in your work. The description of the snow in “Aurora” leaves the snow to be exactly what it is, yet at the same time there is this tantalizing sensual appearance, yet one can’t quite grasp it, which is why it’s beautiful (“The way it melts...”). Kant says something very similar about raindrops. In his funny old clunky way. An artist attunes to what things are, which means sort of listening to the future, which is just how things are--I think time is a sort of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trains, salt crystals. So a work of art is also listening to itself, because what it is never quite coincides with how it appears, too. “You have to play a long time to sound like yourself” (Miles Davis). This is where I think maybe your work is mysteriously realist. Each work is very unique, quite startlingly so when you compare it to how others proceed. So in a way the works are also these nonhumans I keep banging on about. And this is why it doesn’t quite fit into an “ism” because so far isms have been historically about ignoring reality, in other words nonhuman beings. You did say you’d read my books. Me being a bit daft I suddenly connected with the fact you read “Realist Magic”, and am even more touched. I care about all my stuff but that is the one I wrote from my core. I’m so delighted you are into it. The sentences in that book are really just a fuzzy photocopy of what you do. So glad to hear someone has been hiking and not online.
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Hope the filming goes excellently! “Magic” is a very positive word for me. Being a newborn baby’s dad was one of the most psychedelic things that ever happened to me. The corny phrase is “children are the future” but it’s quite true in another way. This huge sunlit abyss from the future right there next to you...
magic : am filming : will reply properly soon, but in the meantime i thought i’d send you this around 10 to 15 years ago i read an interview with an architect where he talked about the difference between people who invent things and people who collect things : he said he was a collector of ideas , he travelled often to india and other places for this . and that he felt really threatened by people who just wake up and they have thought of something original . he called it “the tyranny of the oblivious” . i found this incredibly interesting . at the time i had just moved to new york and was breastfeeding a newborn baby at home writing music . 9/11 had just happened and i was following the news of the michael jackson trial : a public execution happening . it seemed extraordinary that something so sweet and generous could be such a threat ...
That Michael Jackson trial, it was like that, wasn’t it? I found out about Michael Jackson’s death in the middle of a class I was teaching and the first words out of my mouth were, “Of course we are all responsible for this” (by putting him up on a pedestal to be the perfect pop puppet, etc.). One of the most conservative students even snorted derisively but I guess he was just reacting to his own heavily shielded vulnerability... Creation comes out of vulnerability, doesn’t it? Some kind of attunement to something that isn’t you. Susceptibility. You seem to allow your voice to be vulnerable, which is very powerful in fact: threatening vulnerability. Sometimes it seems to be in between crying and laughing. Or roaring, growling, ululating. Allowing it to be itself, which is a physical, visceral entity. In this your voice seems to be staying in a place of creativity, which for me means being close to things. This is a reason why I really like your song “Virus.” Being alive means being susceptible to viruses and so on. And far more generally, viruses, patterns, appearance, flowers, art--these are all far from useless, they are intrinsic parts of being a thing at all. Causality itself is something to do with magical seduction. (Five-hour argument compression!) How that amounts to “tyranny” just beats me. To me, reality is literally an anarchy. Artists just aren’t tyrants. They can’t be. In a way art is the opposite of collecting, because it must be more like listening to something one can’t quite hear--it’s an old idea of channeling, sort of nonviolently allowing things to beam themselves down.
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For instance, the work on Biophilia--it’s just brilliantly about how life can’t be contained to prefabricated concepts of life, that it contains things like crystallization and viruses and moons. And also, of course, this is a basic thing I find everywhere in your work: you become the thunder and lightning (for instance), and yet you don’t, just as the voice entwines around the instrument; or how an instrument can be an agent all by itself, not just telling a (human) story. There is this playful both-and that I think is a basic quality of what a thing is at all. What is original does not come from absolute blank nothing (“oblivion”), but from an electromagnetic tenderness--from remembering, not forgetting. You allow the songs on the Biophilia app to be remade, which is very courageous, but also realistic, because I think entities never exhaust their possibilities by being used or interpreted by anything. You also seem very open about having songs remixed, and I wonder whether it’s for the same reason. The song as entity is a physical being in its own right and creating it means letting it be, which is absolutely the opposite of collecting, where there is a frame into which things fit already. It is itself precisely because it can be changed, remixed, re-heard. It is mysterious. Earth needs this tenderness--I think there is some kind of fusion between tenderness and sadness, joy, yearning, longing, horror (tricky one), laughter, melancholy and weirdness. This fusion is the feeling of ecological awareness.
you might find it funny but i was trying to explain OOO to a friend last night in an email after a few whiskeys , ha ha thought id share it with you : “ i have been reading some OOO stuff , the guy i once sent you a link about , timothy morton i guess he is SWERVING the apocalyptic angle into hope , or at least there is an attempt his thing is that the apocalypse has already happened and we have to get out of our paralysed state and react . he has a lot of humour too , which is incredible . i guess i relate most to the more sonic angle of OOO , about string theory and how in the core of the atom all vibrates and resonates and the 20th century was the century of cause and effect and the element table . but now it is more about the magnetic force of the sun , how we are discovering that now : both on a subatomic level and also on a large scale : how the magnetism of our solar system is way more effective than the pathways of our stars . sorry , crazy farfetched , but if you think of it as a sound it is super exciting how we are finally opening up to resonance ... hmm ... perhaps too ambitious to explain in a short email ( i blame the whiskey ) ” ha ha ha and to take it even further : my favorite favorite favorite thing is how it connects to animism , that in each object there is soul . and therefore asks for different reaction to ecology ? each laptop , each bird , each building
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you got me! i can’t tell you how nice you can feel these entities coming out the it is to be got. gotten? gotted? rocks up here in the north of england, the pools and fountains. whether you like i am indeed trying to find ways to hope it or not, or believe or not. irish woman and not be totally caught in the headlights i heard once: “sure i don’t believe in them, but they’re there all the same.” bang on... of all this stuff. also--that’s an “OOO” sort of list there: somehow the further north you go the laptop, bird, building. i love to make more vivid it becomes. i expect it’s super in iceland? such lists. spoon, quasar, frost on an iron vivid r a i l i n g . bohemians, punks, everyone who ever the humour--thanks!! i find so much allows and responds to some kind humour in your work too. there’s a whole of dream that sprays out of things even mixture of different kinds, sometimes if it’s totally mundane like a hammer or s u p e r i m p o s e d . a bottle of coke--all are in fact shamans who don’t quite know it. the resonance: yes x 10. i can’t help writing about sound. and the kind of connection i think this is the story of art in the last of everything. i think things are telepathic, two hundred years that art scholarship really. frogs, balls of string, auroras and is blocking, mostly out of fear. flight attendants. causality is telepathy. our mission maybe is to allow people your art is like trying to hook up all these to feel this and think this with full crystal telepathic wires between everything. clarity, not departing from reason for one second, yet allowing the inner space to my friend and i were just talking about sparkle madly. nor succumbing to someone poetry and how almost-now eco society else’s old bad belief juju but allowing is actually about rediscovering things to be magic, rather than totally enchantment yet with full on science--not inert? that’s my mission anyway haha fighting it, but revealing it. fearless needs more magicians exploration of phenomena. earth there is this part of me that just wants to talk about elves and sprites yet i disguise it because others might think it was believing in something solid. or probably just laugh at me if they are cool kid a c a d e m i c s . . .
scientists, stop trying to persuade wrong people that you are right! just blow them away with some magic... you and i should do the news conferences together about global warming people would soon submit hahahaha
what an inspired post to receive !!! gracefulll all over ... im in the mountains in iceland now herding sheep : one has to run and pull horns and receive polka dot bruises on ones thighs : smashing !!!! it was magic today . it was so sunny and crisp and no wind at all , kinda miraculous but in slomo , without the boom . smell of wool and jarm and the volcanic mist from the eruption had finally arrived here in the west so all was in soft focus but not lazy hazy style , but metallic w/definition ! during dinner i shuffled my latest sound discoveries : irish house with punk sounds ( the fresh young are doing this apparently ) btw , talking of this fresh young generation, i adore them . and i agree : “rediscovering enchantment through science” and “allowing the inner space to sparkle madly” something so so so MAGIC is finally happening !! i saw an article saying that majority of hollywood movies last year were about the apocalypse and i was like : sort your hope out , usa ! im so bored with that only possible ending . soooo limited . i love how you write in your book about that : “nihilism wants to empty its pockets of everything including the space in the pockets--as if one could pull the nothingness out of the pocket itself to rid oneself of the inconsistency of the thing . “believing in” nothing is a defense against nothingness , a metaphysics of presence disguised as a sophisticated undermining of all presence.” obvious bankruptcy ? helllo ? ha ha ha ha we might have to discuss the north later : so much to say . but overall i feel its underrated how much space is here . plant / people / sound / animals .
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i’m so bored of that apocalypse stuff too! i had no idea it was so dominant but yes it is very “cool” and often goes to number 1. it is a way to block the tender subtle alive reality...
this is my philosophy slogan: thinking should know how to laugh, and cry.
for some reason in 2008 i started to talk about death, for real. instead of the usual academic game: “i am so clever and i am like, yes--pain destruction agony. yes. now, so beyond emotion and full of cynicism scrape yourself up off the floor. let’s figure and despair, therefore i am right.” out how to love. i get a vanishing number of 20-something boys who want to do some kind of “i’m smarter than you because my horror is bigger than yours” ****-measuring... they think i am stupid because i can’t see how hopeless everything is lol
yess !!
maybe the dark boys are obsessed because they sense something already there that’s missing in their sense of who they are and of reality? we are spokespeople for the realm of physical otherness? the scary land of cause and effect? aka the sonic ocean...aka the sensual ocean... hegel has this really good idea. which is that ideas and philosophies come with attitudes coded into them. they select for attitudes like viruses select for certain susceptible lifeforms. when you sort of “own” the attitude rather than letting it rule you, it dissolves and you are on to the next one. so ideas are always on the move.
he has this great thing about this attitude nice one!!! I just knew you’d dig it. he calls the beautiful soul. i still can’t get over the fact that you the beautiful soul (i call it bs for short!!!) quoted the two most important things have ever said sees the world (everything else) as evil. i me, “pure” over here, world “evil” over there. all is corrupt. it’s the dark boys in anyway, look at this beautiful tiny sparkling a nutshell really. “i am pure in my total void, it isn’t nothing at all, it’s beautiful. horror at the state of things” wordsworth made it, as a way to channel the wetness to his home... [picture file] so...this is the really really amazing bit: hegel argues that this very attitude IS THE EVIL . like the way you see the world as evil IS the evil the “logical” solution: kill yourself or kill the world or do nothing, frozen in the h e a d l i g h t s it’s like a super super addictive attitude to the ecological panic, right? so, one “owns” this--one accepts that one’s very gaze directly is the evil that one thinks one is seeing “over there”. realizing that the way you see the world is the evil you see in it. it’s awesomely loopy and not p r e a c h y it
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THATS SO SPOT ON !!!!!!
goth
 very OOO , here’s a waterfall in my land that opted for a subterranean life : the river that isnt. [video file]
twisty think??
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 the river that isn’t!!! this unseeing is so vivid. a mountain’s haiku about a waterfall. we’re carving out new hope spaces. sadness, longing, hope, susceptibility, laughter. good ecological recipes.
i just created headspace to go back read all of our emails so far and all these words are so internal now !!!
then how about this: between music and words you are allowing the unspeakable to manifest
i guess i have a habit of physically absorbing things which comes in handy when i sing . so i guess my only clumsy way to do this is in a round about way , around theory
i
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it feels ego-puncturing yet beautiful yet weird yet fascinating yet spooky yet physical nonhuman yet human. like bataille’s idea of spirituality when one feels prana it is like that. the rushing quality and the tendrils climbing up quality and the hairs on one’s body waving like coral quality.
and that might become the subtheme of our little quest : slippery-hand-reaches-even-slippery-tail i feel also there is a reason why i havent embroidered elaborate phrases so far about my stance in this world . probably because it doesnt sing well ! yes you’re right about the “unspeakable” ... my lyrics are more like signposts on musicmoods to kinda shortcut to the feeling
ha ha in your message, theory and art as my isobel was perhaps partly overcoming the slippery hand chasing the slippery tail the ridicule of the singer/songwriter mission , why this possessed need p e r f e c t to tell your tale ? so most of my lyrics i have written myself , but roughly one lyric per album i’ve sat down you know i’m arguing all the time now that with my oldest mate and author sjón reality is like jörmungandr, and everything and we’ve documented together in it is also a tail-biting loop, because of this separate mythological character , u r t h . . . isobel ... but im not sure how much it travels to the listeners that it is sort or in your language everything is an isobel of taking the piss a little , i find ??? much better than “object” i do declare it hilarious !!! her name is a little magic realist drama , kinda sensationalism , over-romantic , ha ha . and she has an urban/rural dilemma she is constantly trying to solve , ha ha . as if !!! you could.
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hahaha
yes
yes
well of course! a line that says “my name isobel” might be pretending somehow there is always a gap between the one who is narrating and one who is narrated also the gothic-ness is a giveaway--i love that mode as it’s like pure fiction plus seriousness and you can’t tell exactly where the two join or separate...like robert smith’s hairdo. “objects” are comical like that: they are totally what they are yet never quite what they seem...they are always doing slapstick this isn’t just silly. i think that there is a deep connection in your work between self-care and care for other beings, which is ecology. think about “all is full of love” and its video, or the line from “unison”: “one hand loves the other so much on me.” this is really significant for me as sensual relations with the “self” or the body are missing in much of western ideology, and i think it’s very destructive. nietzsche: “love your neighbor as yourselves, but first be such as love yourselves.” isobel had a point. only the wounded narcissist accuses the other of narcissism, like when a bully goes “i don’t like bullies” just before they bully you. the human relation to nature is a massive narcissistic wound we need to heal it--not to sound too superego, like filthy-look-from-the-perfecthippie kind of way. to care for one’s “self” as another: being in a loop. there are always at least two things, never just one. narcissism has a bad rap. it’s not solipsism.
yes it is sssoooo important “not to sound too superego, like filthy-look-from-the-perfect-hippie” ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha that could be our downfall , the pit we should avoid i love this “caring for yourself = caring for another entity = the beginnings of ecological care”
indulge me while i try to go a bit hi def with this very same concept
“sophisticated” modernity culture seems to want to laugh at protectiveness or fear for other lifeforms. yet in an ecological age, even if you have indifference, that’s a form of caring. your skin cares about being burned by the too strong sunlight, even if you think you don’t care about global warming. paneroticism would be care turned up to 11 haha. i’m so familiar with depression and i know it’s a trap, like an allergic reaction of the intellect to its poor host being. trying to kill desire is the modern sport, including looping it through plastic “sexualized” (actually the opposite) w h a t e v e r s .
first, i really do want to put you outside the ism world as currently defined. you do have a whole style that burns through your work, so that’s not what i’m saying-- “narcissism” is the favourite accusation of the one who is wounded--especially hang on! when it’s a deliberate, self-inflicted wound in your art, it seems these non-you entities of coolness. take the lead and you merge. not the same think about the overture of wagner’s as being passive at all. more like making “tristan and isolde”, the aching chord love with them. allowing them to exist of doomed love. tragedy. from their own side. leaning into them. everyone dies when they melt together, just like listening comes before language e t c . or music ???? kind of a scared boy attitude to the eroticism. there is no ism to describe this! i’m not sure there can be because like i say ism i put that wagner against your “unison” implies there is a mapped out grid for how in class yesterday. powerful, remorseless to approach beings. gentleness. merging but not to death. disappearing into the music but not how about erased. merging, which is not one and not two. [compliment warning] joyful, funny, o r g e o u s P A N E R O T I C I S M g
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY even that isn’t it. i can’t stand putting you the final score: wagner 0 björk 10. forgiveness please] in a box. can’t stand it! [compliment
!!!!! a miracle of a post !!!!! sorry i didnt get to read it until now all my stuff: you can never truly exit the s w e l l . . .
what a pleasure to read !!! and the tone of it , that tilt between humour and awe and humility and yet slightly cocky : i absolutely adore it !!!!!! such a precise mood .......... yes : we can merge and survive 1 + 1 is three i know it my author/philosopher friend oddny eir ævarsdóttir pointed out a website to me once, with a theory : that if you could put religions on opposite ends of a certain homemade scale , where one could measure the amount of “feminine emotive” values and then other pole “ masculine abstract” ( which we all have both of ) zen buddhism would be furthest to the abstract point , where one takes oneself outside the swell and looks at feeling and stuff from afar and empties oneself , empties , empties and if one empties enough one merges with all and nirvana ! and on the other opposite end is sufi , where you fall in love with your day and your pomegranate and your teacup and your lover and the song you are turning in circles to : aim is to merge merge merge and if you merge well enough you “empty” and become one with all . so whatever suits your character , go this way ... eventually it leads to the same place . was thinking about when you wrote : “ this is my philosophy slogan: thinking should know how to laugh, and cry.” how you seem determined to include feelings in philosophy . no prizes for guessing i feel i belong to the latter group . soooo sufi . ( but maybe some dark beats are buddhist , and melodies sufi ? ) and it made me think perhaps it is even simpler : you told me you were surrounded by music as a child , the music in my household was like loud like all the time . so this became the ocean i lived in . like physics . sonic liquid . and all else like life and such were berries on top . and i get so lost without it , like literally a fish out of water . i didnt really take this thought that much further , but it somehow went with the river that isnt and wordsworth dam and and perhaps your dark boys and my euphoric matriarchs ? hmm .... throw in a span ner in the water
some anonymous someone said in the house scene in 1988: “just dance until your ego splatters all over the floor. then dance on that.” because in the inner space, you find escape routes for people don’t it might be like this: there is never ego, you? i know i can find them for others but there is just this dancing fire. quivering, sometimes hard to find for myself. t r e m b l i n g . devotion. you know it’s not necessarily to a teacher or a human but could be to the teacup, lover, song, dance. not to mention the pomegranate bleeding all over one’s fingers deliciously.
so the point is to make things that cause the inner space to sparkle or quake. to make some kind of subject-quake. it’s nice in german: einschütterung. inner s h u d d e r i n g . . .
it’s like enlightened lust. like passion is the impossible to describe--“like a mute tasting basic fundamental force of this universe sugar”. how can the river that isn’t speak merging into the rock. and you shouldn’t delete that, unless you its want to go crazy or start world war 3. just love this lifeform. you will soon find or is it 4 already?! yourself in a dance. in this dance, your intellectual buddhists think it’s about total partner and you are not one and yet not abstraction. you never need to handle two. there is a pomegranate, it’s not just a pomegranate or even meditate. you can an illusion. but it’s a faerie pomegranate with [unspeakable]” get there by understanding. zen can tend bursting to look at feeling from afar and so they have some kind of hangover from that, oh björk that is so good, empty empty empty >> merge vs merge merge merge >> very masculine and careful. empty. that second one is the right way but for me “understanding” = standing for me. emptiness is a kinda abstract word under surface of the river that isn’t. for kind of a sensation, in fact, i reckon.
oh wow yes “one takes oneself outside the without the idea that philosophy can cry swell and looks at feeling and stuff from and laugh, the game becomes pure cold afar and empties oneself , empties , empties “wisdom” rather than philo-sophy, the and if one empties enough one merges love of wisdom. just being totally right, with all and nirvana !” which is totally wrong.
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“you find escape routes for people don’t you ?” im clumsy at a lot of things but youre right , so far ive been kinda ok at emotional strategy : perhaps see all as emotional chronology somehow . that is the continuity i connect to , swallow that pulse and hike trancelike onwards on that emo dna ... the spine of time , ha ha ha ha ha , i’m not having it any other way ! and often i can explain to my friends like a sport commentator what is happening to them ... but then last year and a half , all that I knew so far : wasnt . isnt and gone . so i tried to dervish me out of it , wringer ranger rotator in that magma before it coagulated but non of the old tricks worked anymore ... so i have been casting me a new set of spanners . i guess i got like fired from the patriarchs but hired by herds of matriarchs surrounding me offering ecstatic beats and djing ... and i’ve been thinking a lot about that dark beats are buddhist and melodies sufi ... your comment cracked me up “look at feeling from a far so they have some sort of hangover from that , very masculine and careful” ha ha ha ah ha , careful hangover from too much distance ... ha ha ha ha ha ha anyway here comes one of my favorite discoveries of last few years ... it is by a russian minimalist , vladimir martynov . but instead of some of the usa minimalists : being post modern , often ironic and distant , this is full full full passion ! he decided to take favorite pieces his parents played him when he was a child : small sections and loop them . ( talking about the ocean of our parents ! ) so it could have been a pretentious concept job but what is so marvelous is that it is kinda the opposite . in this piece he takes a 10 minute section from mahler’s der abschied and with spirally looping it over and over extends it into 40 minutes . so he sort of took one of the most overdramatic moments in recent classical music and magnified it up like 138457 !! for me somehow the looping serves as a truthful tunnel into his childhood so it doesnt feel like stealing at all . the telescope is obvious . not hidden . and then of course the amount of rearranging and craftsmanship and work he puts into it adds to the refinement and quality of it ... it is extremely dramatic so be careful but there is light at the end of the tunnel : if you get through it it ends super prettily ... [mp3 file] Vladimir Martynov || Der Abschied
anyway : this made me think of that a lot of the minimalists are actually buddhists ... my favorite of theirs are the exceptions : where they have passion . like steve reichs tehillim. ( ha ha ha does remind me though of one of my favorite venezuelan matriarchs getting uncontrollable laughing fits over the wooden classical wrist of the maracas shaker in that one , ha ha ha ha , passion but some lack of merge in his bones ) i love so much when you mentioned in them rave years everyone was djing some kind of truth “just dance until your ego splatters all over the floor” i remember so well from that period when like ALL music like ever made got divided into if you could dance to it or not . ha ha ha ha ha , just too much thinking had entered music ... so even classical shit or world music or whatever genre was like erased if it didnt swing ... and the further reach the better : ARTIST like drones , buildings or them buddhist things ? looped and gridded GAPS streamlined and abstract swirling sufi style all around you PHILOSOPHER’S we must unite the two , tim MIND in the music now--oh thanks for sending! i love it so much already and i’m only at 7:06. all the overdrama sucked out and my soul can breathe. indeed martynov has found the really hurty bit. well, by isolating that small part martynov seems to let all the human ego drama narrative melt away until you are left with this non-ego emotion. that is just total [swear word swear word] genius. you can “study” it as it rotates and be in it at the very same time mahler minus ego. it is after all the song of the earth not the song of mahler’s strangulation of tim or even better: just pure pain, no suffering ??? thank you martynov, the ego-stripper, you have contributed to world peace
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i loved the zoom and the wonderful map. “we were getting on a good elevated airy whirl” -- still there!
i adore this email !!! when you talk about he sucked the ego out of him !!! and only pain no suffering ... no flamboyance in this drama , ha ha ha ha ha , no feathers .... hopefully not too boring the polarizing of the sufi merge and the zen abstract. sorry i zoomed out , once we were getting on a good elevated airy whirl , i needed a map ... i needed to northsouth me somehow ... and you have helped me so much !! to NAME my original coordinates on this map . how to rediscover the natural merger . this time im not exiting the swell ...
if there is any money made from this i would like mine to go to lifeforms, coral perhaps? i love coral and it’s dying and bleaching, and it’s such a total world down there. i think of OOO as the discovery of a gigantic sparkling coral reef too deep for most philosophy to notice. sharks floating about, anemones with tendrils. things that could be alive, could be dead. could be plant, could be animal. could be a whole entity yet made of all kinds of things that don’t add up to it. we are sewn into this reef, with clown fish cleaning our nostrils while looking up at illusion reflections of us looking down with underwater scopes from the scientific surface... as i read through our emails, i’m finding something wonderful. if you strip away the “you” and “me” lines you get two very very clear things. first there are really crystal statements about art and politics and ecology and objects and on and on and on, all integrated and very meaningful !!! and then you get these incredible things: sheep horns, dams, jarm, foss, voices, antlers, norns, magnetic shields, sun, atoms...it goes on and on... !!! i can see these two “channels” mixed together yet separated, like in a paradox: our “human” statements about art, from which emerges a manifesto; and nonhuman beings, crowding in, laughing, crying and supporting and undermining and shadowing the human we really did something, and continue to do so really really like a lot
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i just arrived in iceland !!!!! what a miraculous letter !!!!!! so so so sensual and connected , every constellation included on tip-toes !!!! !!! yessss , lets give it to corals !!!
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COVER ME || Words & music by Björk || for organ
The Triumphs of a Heart: A Psychographic Journey Through the First Seven Albums of Björk || Sjón
Sjón is a novelist and poet, and the lyricist of many of Björk’s best known songs, including Isobel, Bachelorette, Oceania, and Cosmogony. His novels The Blue Fox, The Whispering Muse and From the Mouth of the Whale have won numerous awards and have been published in more than thirty languages.
The Triumphs of a Heart: A Psychographic Journey Through the First Seven Albums of Björk || Sjón V
5 moma_sjon poem_cover.indd All Pages
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14/11/2014 13:45
Sjón
The
Triumphs
of
a
Heart:
A Psychographic Journey Through the First Seven Albums of
Björk
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(Based on first-hand witnessing of all the events described — with confirmation of the testimony’s accuracy by its main subject, Björk, and truthful quotations from her own works — acquired by the author in situ in New York City, April, 2014.)
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I
debut || 1993
once
upon a time
there was a girl
who sang and danced on the platform of a flatbed truck …
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I
once … once there was a girl … a girl … who lived alone … in a lava field … in a forest … by the ocean … in a small hut made of earthly materials … a hut that was as open to the natural elements as it was sheltering … from the wind … the sun … the rain … the snow … it was a hut that stood in the middle of a field of dark lava formations … in the clearing of a forest … on the black sands of a northern beach …
and a girl lived in it …
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I
and once … once there was a heart … a human heart that lived inside a girl …
was sheltered inside a girl’s
breast …
embraced by her rib cage …
a beating blood-warm heart …
living inside the body of a girl … a girl who was the girl who lived in a hut … in the lava field … in the forest … by the ocean …
in the comfort of her own company …
her isolation …
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I
at all hours nature staged its spectacle for the girl and found its existence confirmed in her senses … she was there … in the wee hours of the morning when the birds in the emerald foliage twittered their multitude of melodies … throughout the days and nights when the ocean took on all the colours of the sky … at dusk when the black lava formations became beasts of wonder … she was there as nature’s participating audience …
its witness …
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I
still …
the girl was not truly alone …
the heart she sheltered in her breast
was her companion …
when the girl was happy the heart beat faster … when she was sad the heart slowed down to a lull …
as her eyes reflected the full moon …
as her ears welcomed the cry of seagulls … as her body moved with trees on a windy day … as she sang back at the echoing rocks … the heart tuned itself to her every experience … every night was the night of the hunter … every day saw the birth of a new living being … and she noted it all down … in her notebooks …
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I
but then there were the thoughts and feelings the girl didn’t know were stirring within her and could only be heard by could only be witnessed inside
the heart …
by someone her body …
heard even louder than the things that knowingly rushed through her mind …
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I
one night the heart listened as the girl dreamt a new dream …
in the dream
she opened a door to a long narrow room without walls and without a roof … as she stepped into the room the floor started to move under her feet … to keep her balance she had to stretch out her hands … to float like a bird steadying itself in the air … the floor turned into the platform of a flatbed truck … taking her away … bringing her close to a human … to human behaviour …
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I
the morning after the girl was confused … at the end of the dream she had seen another being like herself … but different … was she maybe one half of a whole? … she paced back and forth as she tried to make sense of it …
did she need another one to feel complete? …
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I
the girl’s pacing back and forth made a path in the ground …
and her heart started beating with curiosity
about where it would take the two of them …
go! the heart said …
look for the other …
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II
post || 1995
the path of trodden earth under the girl’s naked soles gave way to a narrow lane strewn with gravel … the narrow lane became a road paved with stones … the road became a street covered with asphalt … and she walked the path … she walked the narrow lane … walked the road … the street … until she found herself on a circular patch of hardened cement … she was surrounded by rocks higher than any she had seen at home …
it was in the moment
when there is neither full light
nor
fading
light …
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II
and then
the electric lights came on … the girl stood in the middle of what she was to learn is called ‘a square’ … she saw that she was surrounded by tall buildings with lights in the windows … with people moving in bright rooms behind the window panes … with blinking words and images on their outside walls … people rushed from one building to another … in cars … on motorcycles … by the underground trains … and those who went walking came to the square … for rest … to demonstrate … to hold hands … to fight … to dance … yes … the girl had come to a place called ‘city’ …
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II
in ‘city’ the man-made lights made it possible to live at night as easily as day … night and day were no longer sharply divided … instead of the sky reflecting in the ocean here ‘city’ reflected in itself … in glass walls … in wet raincoats … in shiny hubcaps … at night darkness could be made … by turning off the lights … during the day it was possible to take a break from the daylight in the artificial light of cellars and back rooms …
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II
here the basic elements of the girl’s former existence had been taken apart … particle by particle … and put together anew in ways unthinkable back home in the lava field … the forest … by the ocean … liquids were transformed into fabrics … sand was made transparent … gases burned in colourful glass tubes … electric currents were harnessed in sound …
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II
the girl felt like she was inside
a vast and welcoming body … that she pulsated like a heart embraced by a giant ribcage and the sounds of the world reached her from the outside … and just like the heart inside her breast reacted with her now she picked up on everything ‘city’ was experiencing … she listened to the hum of its undercurrents … listened to the sounds that were native to ‘city’ …
as well as the new ones others like her had brought to it …
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II
it was synthetic …
it was scintillating …
it was mercurial …
it was mesmerising …
it was electrifying …
it was exhilarating … and for the first time in her life she felt the power of the colour pink … pink … the colour of innocence that responds to the colours black and violet by turning sensual and erotic …
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II
and every hour of the day and night
the heart was
one
with the girl
in her celebrations … in her brassand breakbeat-fuelled urban enthusiasm … beating
faster than ever before …
only slowing down
to revel in new pleasures …
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II
‘city’
was the place to go hunting for mysteries … to prove the impossible did exist …
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III
homogenic || 1997
one day the girl woke up to a new feeling … she wasn’t whole
anymore … or rather …
she realised she wasn’t made of one thing
but many … in the mirror she saw a girl who had become a collection of all the diverse influences she had embraced … rhythms shaped like obscure half-gods … fragrances that exploded like fireworks once they reached the brain … words used to describe moods belonging to southern latitudes … fabrics
that spoke of eastern flora …
melodies that twirled like smoke from incense …
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III
yes …
just as ‘city’ was the ever-changing sum of its history
the girl had become an evolving hybrid of her encounters with its inhabitants … the culture of ‘city’ had put its mark
on her …
her posture spoke of pavements and dance floors … her six senses had adjusted to the navigation
of urban geographies …
a song could be shaped like a coconut with purple fur …
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III
but the girl was as fragmented on the inside as the outside …
love had also put its mark on her …
instead of being a two-way street the heart in her breast had become a crossroads … and she herself had become a tree that grew a heart on every branch … her smile came quicker and disappeared quicker … her anger rose
faster and declined faster …
her sense of human relationships was informed by the puzzling emotional landscapes she had explored …
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III
the girl responded to her new state of being by matching the energies she had grown up with with the energies of ‘city’ … she matched ‘city’ with nature … she analysed its building materials … it all came from the same source as herself … the glittering streets reminded her of the tiny droplets shining on the moss-covered stones in the lava field back where she came from … all that
sparkled …
all that
glowed …
it was also nature’s work …
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III
and suddenly ‘city’ didn’t seem so big after all … compared with the size of the natural forces she knew from her childhood … the erupting volcanoes … the hissing of water boiling in a hot spring …
the shaking
of the ground …
the lashing of giant cliffs
by tidal waves …
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III
with the electric equipment in her bedroom laboratory the girl brought to life the forces that had shaped her …
that had sent her forward into the world …
she wrote a hunting song …
if
and home
travel
i’m
not
is
searching
what’s been found stopping
i’m going hunting i’m the hunter
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III
the girl’s ears picked up on the timbre of strings vibrating under bows … their resonance in the wooden bodies of the instruments that supported them … they sang of her old country …
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III
nothing was forgotten … she was
and all
the hunter …
was full of
love …
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IV
vespertine || 2001
the heart became transparent … its four-chambered body took on the glassy whiteness of those underwater medusas known as
jelly-fish
…
it slowed down
…
its movements became as graceful as those of a snowflake drifting down to earth from up high … every beat of became as distinct as a shiny pearl
the
over the
ocean
to
heart
spit from a girl’s mouth
a
boy …
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IV
the messages reaching the heart from the girl’s mind were about calm and contemplation … discovery through delaying desire … recovery through relaying response in pagan metaphors … the plucking of silvery strings … the touch of fingertips on clear glass …
pedalling through /
the dark currents /
i find an accurate copy /
a
blueprint /
of the pleasure
in me
swirling / black lilies /
totally ripe
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IV
outside
the girl’s warm body
the world had begun its wintering …
snow covered ‘city’ and its squares,
cultured gardens and streets …
the man-made landscape lost
its hard edges
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IV
sheltering inside their buildings
and looking out at ‘city’ in its white and frosty uniform but
the people were reminded that they themselves were nothing advanced cave-dwellers …
the flickering fire that yesterday had inspired the minds of their singing storytellers had been replaced
by the moving
images of their lit-up
home-screens …
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IV
security was to be found in stillness …
human breath was temporarily halted … halted like the swing of the handle on a music box …
and when it returned
breath had become
visible …
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IV
with steam on her breath the girl took to the city limits … she came to a place where it wasn’t possible to see where nature took over from ‘city’ …
where ‘city’ from afar
looked like a natural phenomenon …
a panorama of man-hills built
by the human animal …
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IV
the heart swam in the girl’s breast …
it had gone dark inside …
the light from the winter sun was reflected off her white parka … the time between morning and evening
had never been shorter …
she travelled from twilight to twilight … treading the glacier head … looking hard for moments of shine …
calling upon the goddess aurora
by melting snow in her mouth …
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IV
and once again
it was proven
that travel
is searching …
all along the girl had been hunting …
in a mountain shade
she was approached
by a boy … possessed
of magical sensitivity …
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IV
the girl knew she was ready to say: I do … and the heart echoed a young bride’s emotions: spark the sun off! spark the sun off!
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V
medúlla || 2004
the girl returned
to ‘city’
…
but this time ‘city’ was also an island … an island with a forest in its middle … a man-made forest surrounded by buildings higher than any in ‘old city’ on the other side of the ocean …
like gigantic needles crowding a sun dial sticking high into the sky the buildings threw their magnificent shadows on the two rivers surrounding the island … and as the sparkling sun circled ‘city’ the rectangular shadows crossed the tumultuous waters like bridges on the run … ‘new city’ was bigger …
louder …
busier …
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V
but while the metropolis and mother sun played ‘light and shadow’ the girl played ‘cave’ with her magical boy … his embrace was her fortress … it placed a skeleton of trust beneath them … bone by bone … stone by stone … and she asked herself patiently and carefully: who is it? who is it that never lets you down? who is it that gave you back your crown?
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V
on the left …
she carried her joy
for such is life’s balance …
her pain
on the right …
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V
one day the girl’s heart noticed the faint sound of another heart
nearby …
so vague it almost wasn’t there … to create the moment’s silence needed to confirm its discovery it skipped its next beat … and …
yes … it really was there … a beating weak in volume but strong in rhythm … a rhythm much faster than the girl’s heart could remember ever having performed … even when the girl was at her most excited …
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V
and it was not the heartbeat of the girl’s boy of magical sensitivity … his beat was a beat the girl’s heart sometimes felt penetrating her body … when the two were pressed up close to one another … a beat which sometimes could be heard through the flesh and bone separating the girl heart from the boy heart … and when it happened they found each other’s rhythm and beat as one …
in unison …
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V
no …
this time around the heart beat was closer …
much closer … and … oh! … the joy! … the joy when the heart realised that the beat was really on the inside … the girl’s body had become a home to a new heart … a quick and tiny one … a tiny baby girl’s growing heart …
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V
as she was to become a mother
the girl braided her
long dark hair …
and her long dark braids twisted and turned like an umbilical cord … twisted like a helix … and in her mind she saw herself standing on endless black sands with her long dark braids braided into the dark and not so dark braids of the child’s grandmothers … and their dark and not so dark braids were braided into the dark and not so dark braids of the child’s great-grandmothers …
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V
it was
a triumph
that could only be celebrated
with many voices …
harmonious breathing …
lullabies from the mouth’s cradle …
a mother’s joy and pain
craving a world in balance …
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VI
volta || 2007
with her newborn baby in her arms the girl paced back and forth … rocking her little girl … sharing with her tiny one some of the sweet nothings that are as soothing for the grown-up soul as the young one … but she was a mother-girl now … a girl-mother …
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VI
and from within her girl-mother’s skull she could clearly see with her two green eyes that on earth there were things to do …
yes …
from a mother-girl’s perspective it was obvious that certain things had to be set right …
the girl felt the urge to rearrange things into new and just forms … patterns that would make the strong accept the weak as equals …
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VI
since the girl left her hut
in the middle of the lava field … in the middle of the forest … by the ocean … she had encountered many kinds of human behaviour … they ranged from the peaceful to the corrupt … from the gentle to the nasty … from the arrogant to the meek … she had endured
its darker sides …
but did it have to be like this? … forever? …
also for her little one? …
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VI
a primitive urge to protect set in …
primitive
primal
original
as in primal …
as in original …
as in primordial …
and the thought of protection through action stirred her movements … her right hand acquired the shape of a word …
the word ‘justice’ …
her mother-girl fingers outstretched and quivering from the excitement of rebellion …
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VI
and all the while the tiny girl was suckling at her mother’s breast …
for a mother-girl can do many things at the same time … feeding a child and challenging the world’s order at the same time was the most natural thing to her …
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VI
the mother-girl armoured herself
with colours …
colours applied directly to the body …
colours sprayed on her full body-armour …
her pacing became a stomp … her rocking became a dance … the sweet nothings became an anthem …
she set forth into the world …
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VI
declare independence don’t let them do that to you declare independence don’t let them do that to you
‘independence’ is a synonym of ‘freedom’ … ‘action’ is a synonym of ‘resistance’ … ‘urge’ is a synonym of ‘wanderlust’ …
the mother-girl started fires … people gathered around the fires … the tribal fires burned … they moved on to start new fires … the journey took them from island to island … continent to continent … they were united in movement … they let off the steam that had been filling them for months … for years …
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VI
the heart in the mother-girl’s breast beat faster …
faster than ever before … one heart hearts
it rejoiced in being of many hearts … beating in unison …
and for a little while there was balance on earth …
innocence was still possible …
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VII
biophilia || 2011
the heart … like the earth in space … slopes in its seat … inside the girl … inside the woman’s torso … the heart … in its house of flesh and bones … bathed in red light … a visceral cosmic body … pulsing … pulsing …
it pumps
the oxygen-rich
blood
through the veins of her body …
the rib
she breathes in … cage expands … she breathes out …
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VII
the girl …
the woman …
one morning …
she stands on the edge of a cliff looking out to the ocean … the tide is coming in … the vast expanse of salt water rushes towards land as if it were exhaled from the lungs of a magnanimous beast … the frothing waves spread out on the black sands like warm breath hitting a cool window pane … as she returns to the shore …
it is evening …
the vast body of water is being sucked back towards the horizon … the beast inhales … it is only matter of size … of speed … of volume … for if air moves like water … the waves of the sea are repeated in the sand dunes of deserts …
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VII
i shuffle around / the tectonic plates in my chest you know i gave it all i try to match our continents / to change seasonal shift to form a mutual core as fast as your fingernail grows the atlantic ridge drifts
to counteract distance
you know
can you hear the effort of the magnetic strife?
the shuffling of columns
to form
i gave
a mutual
it all
core …
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VII
in the distance … across the water … the lights of ‘city’ …
a cluster of lights … bodies … above her … across space … the lights of ‘cosmos’ … a cluster of lights … bodies … dancing to the silent rhythms of gravity … matter …
majestically sprinkled
into the void … the music-box of the spheres … the girl … the woman …
she sets out to recreate it on earth … with technology and poetry … with her notebooks and new instruments …
with love …
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VII
there is only matter … only movement … only matter and movement … matter in movement … and all that is made thereof … energy … heat … sound …
the unheard sounds
as well as those pleasant to the human ear … the high frequencies and the low … the harsh and the soft … the crackle of the lightning and the whistle of wind …
songs in
the name
of
biophilia …
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VII
move the
‘h’
to the back of the word
HEART
and it becomes a new one: EARTH …
move it
to the front again:
HEART …
move it back: EARTH …
EARTH-HEART …
Earth-Heart …
earth-heart … earth … heart … oh … yes … the heart … the heart keeps beating … beating triumphantly … beating with the earth … the earth …
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debut || 1993 Page 77 — Björk wearing a mohair sweater by Maison Martin Margiela for the cover of “Violently Happy,” 1993. Photography by Jean-Baptiste Mondino. Page 79 — 1995. Photography by Alain Duplantier. Page 81 — Photo taken for the cover of “Human Behaviour,” 1993. Photography by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.
homogenic || 1997
medúlla || 2004
Page 111 — Cover for Homogenic, 1997, featuring a kimono, sash, and necklace designed by Alexander McQueen. Photography by Nick Knight.
Page 145 — Björk photographed for the cover of Medúlla, 2004, wearing a hairpiece by Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir (a.k.a. Shoplifter) and a necklace designed by M/M (Paris). Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.
Page 113 — Video stills from “Bachelorette,” co-written by Björk and Sjón; video directed by Michel Gondry, 1997. Page 115 — Björk wearing a white leather dress with chiffon “wings,” designed by Jeremy Scott, for her Homogenic tour, 1998. Photography by F. Albert.
Page 147 — Video stills from “Triumph of a Heart,” directed by Spike Jonze, 2005. Page 149 — 2004. Photography by Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones. Page 151 — Video stills from “Nature is Ancient,” directed by Lynn Fox, 2002.
biophilia || 2011 Page 177 — Cover photo for Biophilia, 2011, featuring a red nebula-style wig by Eugene Souleiman, a dress by Iris van Herpen, and a “harp-belt” in cherry wood and bronze by threeASFOUR. Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin. Constellation by M/M (Paris).
Page 83 — Video stills from “Human Behaviour,” directed by Michel Gondry, 1993.
Page 117 — 1997. Photography by Craig McDean.
Page 85 — Cover photo for “Big Time Sensuality,” 1993. Photography by Juergen Teller.
Page 119 — Cover image for “Bachelorette,” 1997. Photography by Paul White.
Page 87 — 1993. Photography by Glen Luchford.
Page 121 — Michel Gondry and Björk, photographed on location, 1999. Photography by Benni Valsson.
Page 155 — Video stills from “Who Is It,” shot on location in Iceland by Dawn Shadforth, 2004, Björk wearing a dress of silk and metal bells designed by Alexander McQueen.
Page 89 — 1994. Photography by Rankin.
Page 123 — 1997. Photography by Phil Poynter.
Page 157 — Björk wearing the Medúlla hairpiece, 2004. Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.
Page 91 — Video stills from “Venus as a Boy,” directed by Sophie Muller, 1993.
Page 125 — Video stills from “All is Full of Love,” with software and special effects utilized to impose Björk’s facial features onto a pair of robots, directed by Chris Cunningham, 1999.
Page 159 — 2000. Photography by Mert & Marcus.
Page 183 — Photo taken for the cover of the 200th edition of Dazed & Confused magazine, guest-edited by Björk, 2011. Art and photography by Sam Falls.
volta || 2007
Page 185 — Video stills from “Mutual Core,” directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, 2012.
Page 93 — Cover photo for “Venus as a Boy,” 1993. Photography by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.
post || 1995 Page 95 — Björk wearing an “Airmail” jacket made of envelope paper, designed by Hussein Chalayan, for the cover of Post, 1995. Art directed by Paul White. Photography by Stéphane Sédnaoui. Page 97 — Video stills from “It’s Oh So Quiet,” directed by Spike Jonze, 1995. Page 99 — 1996. Photography by Nobuyoshi Araki. Page 101 — Stills from the video to “Hyperballad,” 1996, filmed by Michel Gondry at Telecine Cell in London using a motion-control system. Page 103 — 1995. Photography by Juergen Teller. Page 105 — 1996. Photography by Gavin Evans. Page 107 — 1995. Photography by Glen Luchford. Page 109 — 1995. Photography by Snorri Brothers.
vespertine || 2001 Page 127 — Cover photo for Vespertine, 2001, featuring the “Swan” dress of tulle and feathers designed by Marjan Pejoski. Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin. Drawing by M/M (Paris). Page 129 — 2001. Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin. Page 131 — Vespertine shoot, 2001, featuring a costume design by threeASFOUR. Photography by Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones. Page 133 — Video stills from “Hidden Place,” directed by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin and M/M (Paris), 2001. Page 135 — Björk wearing a dress by Alexander McQueen, 2001. Music box and shoes by Matthew Barney. Photography by Nick Knight. Page 137 — 2000. Photography by Mert & Marcus. Page 139 — 2000. Photography by Nan Goldin. Page 141 — Björk wearing an Alexander McQueen dress in the “Pagan Poetry” video, 2001. Photography by Nick Knight. Page 143 — 2000. Photography by David Sims.
Page 153 — Medúlla shoot, 2004. Photography by Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones.
Pages 179 and 181 — 2012. Photography by Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones.
Pages 161 and 163 — Volta cover shoot, with crochet costume by The Icelandic Love Corporation and make-up by Andrea Helgadóttir, 2007. Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin.
Page 187 — Strata portrait developed for the “Mutual Core” video, later used as a cover for the remix album Bastards, 2012. Image by Andrew Thomas Huang.
Page 165 — Björk wearing a dress by Kokon To Zai, 2008. Photography by Vera Palsdóttir.
black lake || 2015
Page 167 — Concept art from “Wanderlust” video made in stereoscopic 3D, with large-scale puppeteering, live-action acrobatics, miniatures, and computer graphics. Image by Encyclopedia Pictura, 2007. Page 169 — 2007. Photography by Bernhard Kristinn. Page 171 — Björk wearing a yarn mask designed by The Icelandic Love Corporation, 2007. Photography by Bernhard Kristinn.
Pages 190–91 — Still from the “Black Lake” audio-visual installation specially commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, introducing a new character into the Björk universe; a version of the song was released on her eighth solo studio album.
All video stills: Courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian. All photographs: Courtesy the photographers. All art: Courtesy the artists.
Page 173 — Video stills from “Declare Independence,” directed by Michel Gondry, 2007. The flags of Greenland and the Faroe Islands are featured on the shoulders of the characters’ jumpsuits: Björk dedicated her lyrics to both territories—ruled by Denmark, just as Iceland once was. Page 175 — The cover of Volta, 2007, featuring a Styrofoam and lacquer spray paint costume inspired by Luigi Ontani and designed by Bernhard Willhelm. Photography by Nick Knight.
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 189
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 191
COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY
