Wings flapping, blood spurting: Nine music videos by the performance group Værst

In the autumn of 1991, the Danish performance group Værst recorded nine performance videos, one for each of the nine tracks on the album Flow My Firetear by the punk rock band Sort Sol, released that same year. The punchy videos were all made as single scenes, fixed camera, no editing, and mostly with the group members – and some very recently decapitated chickens – as performers.

My talk will center on the hybrid nature of these works, situated at the intersection of performance, video art, music, and scenography. Drawing on my current research into a sound archive at SMK, National Gallery of Denmark – a body of material that has remained largely invisible within Danish art history – I will open up a wider discussion of how institutional boundaries and medium-specific categories tend to disfavor these kinds of unruly works.

My current research project on the SMK sound archive testifies – as the Værst performance videos do – that the Danish visual arts scene has had a soundtrack since at least the late 1940s. What remains is the institutional work of making those art histories audible.