Janet Silk
  • News
  • Statement
  • Art
    • Si-si Dance & Performance Art Project
    • Action in the Stacks: Drawing out the Muse—Cecilia is Wondering (program notes)
    • birdbrain shuffle (performance statement)
    • Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace? (drawings)
    • Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace? (performance statement)
    • Open a Vein (installation)
    • A Baroque Failure (sculpture & poem)
    • From Life-Art to Hijab (drawings)
  • Writing
    • Heresy Becomes Habit (review)
    • Ease on Down the Runway (essay)
    • WA(i)STED (curatorial statement)
    • Pussy Willow Sighs (essay)
    • Open a Vein: Suicidal Black Metal and Enlightenment (essay) >
      • Legion of Steel Metal Conference text
      • Legion of Steel Conference Presentation Images
    • Brancusi's Wet Dream (image/text)
    • From Life-Art to Hijab (essay)
    • Pedagogy of Failure in the Global Art Market (essay)
    • Self-Appointed Victory: An imaginary conversation with Camille Paglia on February 26, 2009 (essay/performance)
  • Etc.
    • Munkey in the City
    • Art282a: Contemporary art theory and criticism (blog)
  • CV

Open a Vein: Suicidal Black Metal and Enlightenment

Picture
Black Metal was born in suicide. The image of Per Yngve Ohlin (aka Dead) on the 1995 album cover of Mayhem’s Dawn of the Black Hearts, his blown out brains oozing out of his shattered skull, is an icon that foreshadowed the emergence of Suicidal Black Metal (SBM) bands who skirt the edge between ideation and action.  For bands such as Shining, Make a Change...Kill Yourself, and I Shalt Become, suicide and self-harm are cathexes; death is the ultimate life lesson—we must reflect on it, embrace it...and do it.  Albert Camus articulates in The Myth of Sisyphus, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”

   While Black Metal represents a broad spectrum of philosophical positions such as nihilism, existentialism, satanism, and abjection, within that spectrum is SBM’s celebration of self-destruction. What might be the function of this celebration?




​I invite you to read the full essay which is available at Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory.
© 2013 The Author, Janet Silk.
Image credit: Silk, promotional flyer, paper collage, 8 1/2" x 11"

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