the rest of Aarhus

The next day I took myself on an aimless walk around the Aarhus old town (charming!) and beyond it to the more modern parts of town where normal, less picturesque life unfolds. I cut the walk short to get to the museum, a vast, airy new box with a stark white interior and a Guggenheimesque spiral staircase. At the museum that afternoon I was supposed to sit on a panel to discuss the documentary "Orlan Carnal Art" about the French artist Orlan, who, with the help of various plastic surgeons, uses her body as her canvas and her clay. I had two hours to check out the museum's collection and spent half that time sitting in a comfortable armchair that was part of a Pippiloti Rist video installation, a terribly gemutlich room where the light and the imagery and even the furniture and space were all constantly changing. I dozed in that chair, heightening the already dreamlike quality of the experience. I also watched those crazy Bill Viola videos for a while, the ones where people are diving in and out of churning tinted pools in slow-motion explosions projected on every side of you.

The movie was revolting. And I mean that in the best possible way! I'm normally squeamish about blood and guts onscreen and it was so nice to have company. When Orlan is talking to the camera, describing and defending her art and her ideology while the surgeon is inserting a scalpel through the incision by her ear and tearing the skin loose from her skull, every single audience member (and because this was the Aarhus festival, we're talking about maybe a dozen people) had their hands in front of their eyes. I had two distinct sensations of horror, one having to do with the sight of a mad middle-aged French woman having parts of her face pulled free from her skull, and the other wondering: what the hell am I going to say about this? As it happened, I had a great deal to say about it, starting with the connection to gender reassignment surgery (a Danish-American invention thanks to Christine Jorgensen) and drag-based facial reconstrution (see Amanda Lepore, if you dare to) and moving on through the movie's use of frenetic 20th century 12-tone fright music (Varese, Stockhausen, Webern) and how that simultaneously accompanied and contradicted the artist's repeated disavowals of any intent to inflict pain upon herself or to exploit fear or shock....

The moderator could hardly shut me up, and that was before he started asking me specific questions about my movie, which nobody in the audience had actually seen. The moderator, Hilarius Hofstetter, a Dutch artist living in Aarhus, turned out to be the same guy who had sat in front of me at the conservatory screening, rifling his papers and appearing to ignore my movie. It turned out he'd seen it previously and had thought rather seriously about it. I'd been so put out by all the paper-rustling, and embittered by the Aarhus lack-of-audience disaster, that I'd been tempted to disregard the festival's request that I step in to sit on this panel and just blow it off, but it wound up being one of the most rewarding experiences of the trip. So it wasn't too late to benefit from that Hedwig example after all.

I spent the next several hours with Hilarius. We got a drink at a cafe on the canal, where hundreds of students and diners and loungers were basking in the first spell of spring sunshine. Then he took me to a fine sushi dinner in the old part of town.

The next day, in the morning, the festival newsletter came out with two paragraphs devoted to my participation in the Orlan panel discussion. Without knowing a word of Danish, I spotted three factual errors: My name was wrong, I was identified as German, and I was reported to have objected to Stanley Kubrick's use of the music of J.S. Bach in "Clockwork Orange." If there were more errors that I missed in those two paragraphs, thanks to my ignorance of Danish, I apologize.

That afternoon, my movie had its third and final screening at Ost For Paradis. For a long, gloomy ten minutes I sat in an empty theater, wondering if I was going to ace out the 2-person screening with a single-person screening. But then a couple came in, and then a quad (including the English filmmaker and composer, both of whom were *repeat viewers* from the conservatory symposium) and then a few more couples until we were safely in the double digits. My movie was preceded by a discursive, interminable doc that might have been about the cultural impact of globalization, though it might also have been about a dozen other things or about nothing. And then my movie played, and it was a great satisfaction to watch it in the company of an extremely warm audience a dozen strong, in a small dark theater with decent sound, and when it was all through to answer several probing and intelligent questions.