FAITH PALERMO (she/her) is a writer from Eastern Massachusetts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The Offing, Puerto del Sol, and others. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @faith_palermo and on her website: faithpalermo.com.

Where does the work stop, where does the framework of the institution take over, and what role is
intended for the viewer: spectator or participant?

The public denounces Nørgaard. They write letters to the editor, editorials. They call his art animal abuse. They lodge threats, threaten protests. Red Flag makes headlines, pushing news from Vietnam further into the slush of newspapers. This violence, the artist’s animal violence, was unacceptable, inhumane. Nørgaard’s thesis is ignored, irrelevant. Red Flag would only signal its own bloodshed. 

dead horses everywhere          dead horse you can't walk anymore               I'm
dragging you along me               I cut into your soft flesh                        dead dead horse          and
when you rot          and become quite soft and fall apart.               I pour you into jam jars          I stir
around I stir around you          and spread you on bread big          slices of bread          dead horse on
bread big slices of bread          dead horse I sink my teeth into you my dear               dead horse               
dead horse          over in me in me you are my dead horse          long dead horse

A shot of the head, impaled on the stake, removes the ritual from the body. A beam of light glows from a jam jar. It spins, the camera gaining traction. The smooth white of the snout, broken off under the upper jaw. The brain, soft and pink with the ridges of memory. Teeth, the metric of time, sink to the bottom. The body becomes disconnected, defamiliarized. Samples beget samples beget samples. Bone and muscle and tendon. Clots of cartilage.

Abruptly, the film ends. 

When the state practices violence and when science dissects, they both do so on the basis of
rational reasoning and objective methods. My sacrifice and dissection were irrationally founded,
the method was my action.

The music shifts, a bleating, technical whirring. Nørgaard manipulates organs. Gravity pulls them out. The conscience, scrambled, is fleeting. Christiansen’s refrain returns, slow, measured. Nørgaard folds himself into the horse, hands pulling through innards. Intestines balanced between arms and chest, face resting against liver. The stomach a cavity. Warm flesh touches cold air and runs to steam. The white figure exposes her hair, the brown of her head, the brown of the horse’s coat. A reflection.  

big body big dead body big dead horse body               I crawl in your dead body          inside your dead body         lies in the darkness in your intestines oh only the whole world was a dead horse
 dead horse dead horse                         I wish the world was full of dead horses
 dead horses everywhere

From three paces behind the body, Red Flag watches, its wet eyes directed towards the camera.

In Nordic folklore, a níðstöng is an instrument of revenge. A horse is decapitated, the head impaled on a wooden pole embossed with runes. Dead eyes pointed towards the victim to be cursed, the head aimed in the direction of its attack.

The níðstöng could only be a response to an affront: a murder, a theft, a violence. The níðstöng was staked into the ground by houses, just out of the property line’s reach. The níðstöng was carried into battle, soldiers holding their poles with both hands. In this way, a curse is stronger than a blade. In this way, image is wielded as protest.

Which is another way of saying that an outline for the construction of situations must be the
game, the serious game, of the revolutionary avant-garde, and cannot exist for those who resign
themselves on certain points to political passivity, metaphysical despair, or even the pure and
experienced absence of artistic creativity.

Nørgaard bought the horse, aged 12, at auction. He named it Red Flag. 

Advancements in technology made Vietnam the “first television war.” Houses burned, structures enveloped in smoke. An American soldier turns handwoven baskets to kindling, fire and ash concealing bodies of proof. Women and children, figures deflated, hunched in the echoes of prayer, bleed from gunshots bored into their foreheads. Dozens of civilians are thrown into ditches and shot, bodies layered against the earth in the order they fell. Faces grayed, dirt and mud masking features. Women plead in English, shielding their children with their arms, their torsos. After they fall, screaming, their babies will emerge, toddling out from them. They too will be shot. Limp baby bodies show scale, show magnitude through their negative space, their ungrown potential. Five-hundred and four civilians killed at Mỹ Lai, countless others brutalized, raped, starved, poisoned. For some, death will not be protection enough.

For nearly a year and a half, the massacre would be concealed by the U.S. government, with the event becoming international news in November of 1969. Photographs and testimonies became witness. The massacre’s initial horrors would be brought to light. 

In a brown tunic, Nørgaard stands over the body. He anoints the skin with liquid, paints the withers in broad strokes. Vocals and violin melody over tinny recordings of horses braying. The emotion of noise. Sharp, mournful pain. Nørgaard begins with the head, segments horse head from horse neck. Three minutes of hacking, weight down, into bone. Nørgaard carries it feet away, placing his hand inside the neck, the corpse a puppet. A minute of sliding it onto a stake. It watches as Nørgaard carefully slices into stomach, peels back skin, a roll of orange fat. The white figure stands in the head’s shadow. Unblinking.

Song for the Dead Horse: dead horse dead horse          sweet dead horse                    I only think of you
my dead horse               dead horse sweet dead horse sweet dead horse               your big open
wound          the clotted blood dear dead horse               your burst eyes dead horse dead horse
dead dead horse          

Of course, Nørgaard continues. His situation will be set at Kirke Hyllinge, Denmark, 33 miles west of Copenhagen. The dissection will be performed by the artist. His partner, fellow Danish artist Lene Alder Petersen, will be shrouded in a white hooded robe, singing poetry, with violin accompaniment provided by Henning Christiansen. The ritualization of death would create meaning. Meaning creates art. 

Still, art is a thing to be consumed. A shadow witnesses through camera, grainy footage tracing the ritual. A journalist and photographer from Ekstra Bladet, the most widely read Danish publication, exhale unseen. Even from afar, a situation is designed to be watched. 

Those who participated in Tabernakle accepted that modernity, informed by avant-garde situations, was inherently political. 

A figure cloaked in white drags a crucifix through the snow, creates an impression that will melt in heat, harden in cold, again and again, until the track gives way to ground and disappears. The horse, numbed, is struck in the aorta. The legs twitch. Blood, thicker than water, pools in the puddle of the snow’s negative. The horse ekes out. Slowly, the music begins.   

Over the course of the Vietnam War, it’s estimated that over 2 million civilians were killed.

As avant-garde developed, it bled into “situations.” The genre had already been defined through its experimentations, through its deviations from the norm to criticize a contemporary bourgeois state. The 1960s pushed further. Situations, often performance art, muddled the line between art and life. Outside the boundaries of frame, of sculpture, art existed, had room to breathe. A situation is conducted in the medium of flesh. A situation uses the body to critique the body.

In 1970, Danish artist Bjørn Nørgaard purchased a horse to slaughter it. This act, he believed, could become art. Between altars to avant-garde, the creature would be penned in by a stable of 400 empty jam jars. On the last day, the horse was to be killed. Slowly, the jam jars would be filled with pieces: eyes, ears, lungs, hooves. The practice, the preservation, would transform the horse into art.

The museum housing the exhibit, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, disagreed. Nørgaard had been invited to collaborate on their Tabernakel exhibit, a showing intended to redefine a growing sense of modernity. Barbarism, they determined, was regressive. The Ministry of Justice and the chief of police banned live animals from the space. The Louisiana banned the slaughter. Nørgaard gathered his things, his jam jars and horse, and left. The public cheered, satisfied. Their work was done. The horse had been rescued.

A horse stumbles through snow, red flag draped over back. The lens falters, fades to white. A horse is felled, side resting against the ground, flag spilling below as blood. The snow does not melt. Figures in white cloaks tie the feet, wrap the horse into itself. They move as the ground. They move, and the earth moves with them. 

A horse’s head is cradled, angled between two hands, resting against chest. The left hand, bloodied. The right hand, clean.

Red Flag is drawn and quartered. Intestines encased in Aarhus, ears entombed in Copenhagen. In a new century, Nørgaard is praised. Petersen’s white robe, still stained with blood, hangs as object, not as relic, outside the confines of clear plexiglass. At the Danish National Gallery (SMK), the signage mocks the public’s reaction, criticizes their lack of humanity. The outrage, the signage leaks, was singular, disproportionate.¹ They had held the soul of Red Flag in one hand and those of 2 million Vietnamese civilians in the other, had weighed them against each other. The horse, impossibly, was heavier.