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God Bless the Children of the Beast |
Johan Zetterquist is an artist with a thing for heavy metal. |
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Teenager and a heavy metal fan in Värmland, Sweden. This is not difficult scene to imagine for those who have ever been in a small town especially on a Sunday when everything is closed. The whirring sound from the highway, the generic department store restaurant, the orderly homes in the residential district. The forest in the background; vast, silent, and insignificant for a teenager who just "wanna rock". Johan Zetterquist lived in Arvika, Sweden, and Marc Swanson lived in New Hampshire USA. Neither became heavy metal stars but they both did become artists. At Tensta Konsthall they built a world that magnified the phenomenon heavy metal and visualized their experiences of being teenagers in places other than Los Angeles, the mecca of this genre. |
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All images are from the exhibition "God Bless the Children of the Beast" at Tensta Konsthall , Stockholm 1998 |
It was the eighties and heavy metal had been successfully exported from Great Britain to the USA. Headbanging, long-haired men in skin-tight snakeskin pants were the idols of thousands of Swedish teens. The music was an adhesive. Its influence reached rural Sweden where its strongest hold was among teenage boys who dreamed of an existence shaped out of sharp-tempered guitars, mega-amplifiers, and the on tour experience surrounded by admiration and plenty women. Johan Zetterquist, living in Värmland, was a teenager trying to make the best of the situation. Dressed in down-home-heavy metal-attire: Tennies, jeans, jeans jacket and, at best, a T-shirt from a heavy metal concert. Marc Swanson lived in New Hampshire and handled his existance in very much the same way. Posters of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Mötley Crue and a handful of other bands, were tacked up on the walls of their boyhood bedrooms. Guitars built in woodshop class, practice spaces filled with instruments and vague notions about Satan coupled with a strong yearning to get out of town, fast. Many years later these two meet at a toy factory in San Francisco where many artists moonlight. They started talking about their teenage years as fans of heavy metal and were surprised at the similarities between their experiences. This resulted in the exhibition "God Bless the Children of the Beast" at Tensta konsthall in the fall of '98. Here heavy metal was presented from an anthropological perspective with an ironic twist. The species Heavy Metal Fan is described as a singularly exotic people whose culture must be explained and accounted for scientifically. This practice of selection and classification is by tradition the method of the museum. The role model for this particular exhibition was Naturhistoriska museet in Stockholm from which a salt pile was conceptually transported to the exhibition in Tensta and, of course, took on a completely different meaning in light of heavy metal's flirt with drugs. "God Bless the Children of the Beast" also includes another theme that has more to do with being a teenager on the countryside than with the heavy metal culture itself. This aspect of the exhibition seems to examine the quest for the substance that nurtures the dream of freedom, leaving that small town existence far behind - about longing for something "heavier". Maybe this energy was channeled through the pains and persistence it took to make cool covers for heavy metal cassettes, or turn the volume up on that amplifier, to learn all the texts by heart, or know all the names of all the band members and all the minute details of their personal lives? At any rate, in "God Bless the Children of the Beast" Johan Zetterquist and Marc Swanson not only visualize what seems characteristic for every fan of heavy metal but that which is fundamental for every teen; to belong to a group, a community, to have a navigation map. The heavy metal phenomenon lives up to all these criteria and more; music, lifestyle, fashion, geographic places, and to top it off there is even a relationship to satanic powers. And if none of this exists in Värmland, New Hampshire or some other remote corner of the world, well, then you just have to make sure you make it happen yourself. Rock on. |
