Lars Nilsson: Galleri Andreas Brandstrom.

There seems to be no limit to the unpleasant surprises Lars Nilsson offers his viewers. After making numerous video pieces that included scenes of explicit and often violent pornography, he has moved on to straight gore. Nilsson's recent installation Only Words, 1996, consisted of a brutally mutilated male body hanging in midair; the head, one arm, and both legs had been cut off, leaving only the torso covered in awful flesh wounds. On the floor there were large pools of what seemed to be fresh blood, and the walls were splatterd in red as if this massacre had been performed with a chain saw. In a corner of the room lay the body's decapitated head, the eyes wide open.

This abhorrent mutilation was staged with the help of artisans who work for Madame Tussaud's, and the result was at once shockingly real and fantastical, as if one had entered a horror movie. This work is linked most specifically to an earlier piece, Go to Prison, 1996, in which Nilsson constructed, at the Rooseum in Malmo, a container modeled after a typical Swedish prison cell and proceeded to spend more than two months living there. Viewers could come as near as they pleased, and the artist was always in full view, usually resting on a bed or watching television. As a result, Nilsson became a rather well-known figure in the Swedish art world. This is significant in assessing the impact of Only Words: it was quite clear to most viewers that the lanky body so brutally slaughtered was the artist's own, and that the appalling head lying in the corner was none other than his as well. The realism of the whole was, in fact, quite uncanny - a portrait of the artist as a murdered man.

The point of this shocking scene, however, was much less apparent. What, if anything, did Nilsson aim to communicate? The text that covered the walls, a vehement antipornographic essay by American feminist and legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon, also titled "Only Words," offered few clues to answering this question. In this text, MacKinnon posits that pornographic images should not be regarded merely as representations of degrading actions, but, rather, as a direct cause of real violence against women. Thus one could view the work as an attempt to criticize MacKinnon's thesis along the following lines: here was a work that made sensationalistic use of extreme violence, without anyone getting hurt, so there is a difference between representation and reality after all. But the work made little sense as a critique of MacKinnon's position, since it relied on the very sensationalism that such a critique would call into question. Conceptually the installation seemed far from clear, but Nilsson's hope was probably to confuse the viewer, rather than to provide simple answers, and if such was his desire, he certainly succeeded.

The lasting value of the piece lies, it seems to me, in the perfection of its execution. There certainly are predecessors, but Nilsson's work makes most other attempts in the gore genre - say, the works of the Chapman brothers - look pathetically homemade. Having taken the horror genre to its disgusting extreme, it's time for Nilsson to move on to something new, and probably no less dubious or less thrilling.

- Daniel Birnbaum