Voice Over Jordi Valls The Dog's Bollocks by Simon Friel

Jordi Valls is an artist and musician from Barcelona who has recently returned to the city of his birth after living and working in London for 30 years. His body of work defies conventional pigeonholing, and if the nihilistic point from which it departs can be defined by any abstract word, it would be surrealism, with surrealists such as Breton and, particularly, Dali playing an important role in Valls’ early education and the construction of his worldview. His main body of work has appeared under the guise of Vagina Dentata Organ, the art and sound project which, for the last 30 years, has been successfully shocking and alienating audiences all over the world. Vagina Dentata Organ’s recordings are bleak events that deal with subject matter such as sex, death and violence on primal, naturalistic levels. His disturbing seminal video short, Catalan, made with Derek Jarman and Psychic TV, is a cult classic and a You- Tube must see. I (gingerly) ventured out to Gracia to meet him for coffee this week...

SF: How would you define VDO for the uninitiated?

JV: We see VDO as a massive cosmic metaphysical cunt with teeth ready to castrate this greyish and boring society. It’s our way to say with a smile: ‘Fuck you! Can‘t you see you are already dead?’ For us destruction becomes total creativity. We should leave no stone unturned. Make total war until we get Tabula Rasa. But at the same time I think we also have a good sense of humour.

SF: You are particularly infamous in Spain for a VDO performance in the early 80’s on the show La Edad de Oro. Could you give us a brief summary of what that performance entailed and the repercussions that followed its emission?

JV: I performed Music for Hashishins with the help of a musical emulator that played pure screams and noises from dogs in the sexual act in the company of 16 nervous German Shepherds that cried in the corner of the stage while I destroyed three large paintings by Casademont, a very famous Catalan artist, valued at more than 6,000 pounds each. I stabbed and slashed the paintings with two long iron scimitars and with great results because behind each of the paintings several bags of blood had been hidden, which splashed all over the stage. The chaos was unleashed. That was the end of that television programme. The next day, we were the targets of the Spanish press. We were accused of violence and obscenity. Conservative politicians applied enormous pressure on the Spanish state to make TVE disappear. But the only thing that disappeared forever was La Edad de Oro.

SF: La Edad de Oro performance, the recordings of Jim Jones’ final statements from Jonestown as his followers injected themselves with cyanide, the supermodel portraits done in your own blood, the destruction of 666 bottles with your Cristall Music performance; there is a thread here that is geared toward complete alienation and a conscious effort on your part to discomfort the audience. Despite this, VDO has maintained a loyal audience for almost 30 years and continues to be well received today. Reading up on you I saw reference to a successful show you did in Grenoble where you were exhibiting the Top Model Blood Portraits. In the midst of the blood, destruction and pessimism, the students and professors you involved in the show got involved in a way that made me, just reading about it, feel uplifted and optimistic. How do you explain that? How does the light shine through the dark you produce?

JV: I believe in this case that what the art students and teachers really enjoyed on that night was the freedom and the impunity to spray graffiti on the inside walls of the school, especially after I asked them the night before to paint porno pictures all over the place. Later, one of the students came to me and to my brother, Marc, who was filming the opening. The student was emotionally lost for words. He just said he was very happy and left. It‘s the power of freedom. The Marquis de Sade understood this phenomenon very well.

SF: So, you‘ve recently decided to move back to Barcelona after your self-imposed exile in London. What does the future hold for Jordi Valls and VDO now that you’re back in Barcelona? More than 25 years after La Edad de Oro, is Spain ready for you?

JV: Of course, at street level, Barcelona is now more interesting than before. Because of its history and anarchy it attracts many foreign people. This is good. We all need new blood to kill off the norm. But as soon as you reach “officialdom” in this city you are fucked up. At this stage people are ultra conservative and bloody putrefacts – terrified of everything. That includes all museums, art galleries, and the rest of day-to-day bureaucracy. I spit on them.

SF: Earlier in your career you worked with Derek Jarman, an outsider who in the later stages of his own career began to work in a more commercial environment. Do you see your own future following a similar trajectory?

JV: Derek Jarman was a good film director, but he loved his art too much. Once we were in a coffee bar in Soho, Jarman, Genesis P-Orridge and myself. Then, Derek started crying because nobody wanted to give him money to produce his future masterpiece ‘Caravaggio’. This film is a live painting of great quality, a classic masterwork.

SF: And Jarman was able to produce that work when he was given the money. Would you, too, like to receive the same kind of critical and commercial success as you move into the later stages of your own career?

JV: I have no scruples in becoming a mercenary myself, fully knowing that my work will always be 100% a Vagina Dentata Organ product.