Traitors
by Louise Steiwer
cand.mag. in art history, critic and writer about art
And it is in honor of their crimes that I am writing my book.
Jean Genet's 1943 novel, Notre-Dame des Fleurs [English-language title: Our Lady of the Flowers], opens with a death. The novel's protagonist, the drag queen, Divine, is lying on her deathbed, suffering an onslaught of tuberculosis. From here, she tells of her journey through the Parisian underworld, a landscape permeated with poverty and crime, inhabited by homosexual men, murderers, and pimps who stream through her tiny garret in Montmartre.
Genet penned his novel while he was doing time in jail, and his lyrical, free-flowing narrative is fragmented and partly autobiographical. He is Divine, who is coming to grips with the underworld’s depraved sexuality and taking it upon his shoulders. He is also the murderer who comes to be arrested and eventually executed for his crime. And he is an exponent for a renegotiation of the day’s moral denunciation of both of them: in Genet’s world, both the treacherous betrayal and the murder are sexy.
Genet and his alter ego occupy a central place in Jóhan Martin Christiansen’s exhibition, Traitors, currently being presented in Trykkeriet, where a distorted black-and-white photograph of Divine, as she was portrayed by John Waters in the cult film, Pink Flamingos, from 1972, operates as a key to the exhibition’s graphic works. In Waters’s classic camp-film, the criminal Divine and her bizarre family are described as the filthiest people alive, a designation that they fight for throughout the whole film and wear like a piece jewelry.
With Traitors, Jóhan Martin Christiansen is examining cultural, religious and art historical aspects of the traitor’s role, with Divine as prism and Genet’s conversion of society's moral values as the point of rotation. We meet Judas, who denounces Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, and who becomes a catalyst, through his treacherous betrayal, for death, resurrection and forgiveness. And we meet the bandit, Barabbas, whom the people chose to pardon, in spite of his crimes, in order to let the savior to perish on the cross. And along with them, we meet the guilt, the sin and the doubt, the religious turncoat’s attendant companions through the life that they are compelled undergo in the wake of their offenses.
Christiansen's copper etching takes its point of departure in Michelangelo's sculptural works depicting thieves and debtors, from the religious sphere, and makes use of these as a reflection of general myths in our present-day culture. Christiansen twists and distorts Michelangelo’s muscular adolescents, allowing their bodies to be depicted from angles that imbue them with a different kind of expression, compressing their limbs so that they appear as caricatures of the bodily ideal. They become androgynous, monstrous and appear, in some places, to be almost in a state of dissolution, as if they were in the midst of a process of transformation. They become polysemantic: both men and women, both the ideal and its antithesis.
The copper etching is, in itself, a caricature, an imprint and a relief of the line, albeit in mirrored form. Ergo, the traitor in Christiansen’s work is also a counter-image: a resistance figure who exists out of sheer bravado, and whose struggle against established morals impels the world forward. The traitor is a drag-figure: the homosexual person in disguise, and undergoing metamorphosis; a misunderstood misfit, who is taking society's condescending designations upon his/her shoulders and wearing them as an emblem.
Visually, the works in Traitors take their point of departure in Christiansen’s earlier graphic projects, among these being a series of motifs depicting the Catholic saint, Saint Sebastian, who was tied to a tree and shot through by arrows as punishment for his (speciously attributed) treason against the Roman Empire. He is considered the patron saint for those who were affected by the plague, and in the 1980s, Saint Sebastian came to be a cultural reference for the victims of the AIDS epidemic.
In the project, Jeppe Sleeping (2024), we meet Jeppe, who, through sleeping, disappears into another world, to which the viewer has no access. A kind of symbolic death, and perhaps the mark that the AIDS epidemic has left on a generation of homosexual men who have grown up in its shadow. However, through the line's scrutinizing gaze of Jeppe’s sleeping body, this absence is being transformed into an insistent presence.
In Traitors, Christiansen explores homosexuality as a break from established standards and examines the body as a betraying traitor. He zooms in on how desire is always linked up with guilt and death, and also in on how the role of traitor offers a homosexual man, like Jean Genet and Divine, an opportunity to act out his traitorous nature, to take society's condemnation on his shoulders and make use of this as part and parcel of his resistance.
Christiansen is investigating the desertion, the fact that the beloved slips away from him into sleep, or gets swept away in death, and he is probing the transformation: the fact that death also contains the possibility for a resurrection. Through the ultimate desertion– to die from something or to let others die in his place – one can allow himself to be resurrected as a new figure, in drag or as a counter-image. As a betraying traitor who, through his crime, atones for the whole society’s guilt and winds up transmuting its morals.
— Oct. 2025
Translated by Dan A. Marmorstein
