Two confrontative icons. Two artists willing to go where those icons point. Jesus is one of the most extreme and conceptually charged releases in the Von catalogue - a double LP that documents and extends a collaboration between Prurient and Nico Vascellari built around the figures of GG Allin and Klaus Kinski: two men who treated the stage as a site of absolute exposure, who understood performance as a form of self-destruction, and who attached to the name of Jesus a weight that had nothing to do with devotion.
Vascellari, born in Vittorio Veneto in 1976, is one of the most significant figures in Italian contemporary art - a practitioner of performance, sculpture, installation, and sound whose work has been shown at the 52nd Venice Biennale, Manifesta 7, Haus der Kunst, ZKM, and Museo MAXXI. His practice moves through an anthropological approach to ritual, folklore, and the relationship between the human body and its environment, consistently refusing the boundary between visual art and underground music. In 2005 he founded Codalunga, a project space in Vittorio Veneto that hosted artists including Charlemagne Palestine, William Basinski, Black Dice, and John Duncan - a lineage that maps his commitments precisely. Dominick Fernow's Prurient project, rooted in Hospital Productions and a decade of power electronics, had by 2010 accumulated one of the most uncompromising bodies of work in the American noise underground. Their meeting was not a collision of opposites but a recognition of shared intensity.
The recordings collected here span two live performances from 2010 - San Francisco and Kiev - alongside studio material that takes GG Allin's "Lisa Suck Dog Denial" and Kinski's "Jesus Christ Erlöser" as its source material. The Kinski reference is precise: on November 20, 1971, in the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin, Kinski performed a thirty-page monologue on the life of Christ to an audience that spent the night heckling him, calling him a fascist, demanding their money back. He walked off stage three times. At 2am, before perhaps a hundred people who remained, he delivered the text quietly, in a hoarse voice, from beginning to end. The performance collapsed into chaos and was rescued only by that final, exhausted recitation. Prurient and Vascellari treat this not as a historical document but as a model: the performer who refuses to stop, who absorbs hostility as material, who equates artistic will with a capacity for endurance and abasement that borders on the sacred. GG Allin, whose performances were deliberately transgressive acts of bodily extremity, occupies the same territory from a different angle - the body as weapon, the stage as ritual space.
What results across three sides of audio is accordingly dense and unrelenting: digi-screech electronics, noise processed to the point of physical discomfort, field recordings from the live events folded into constructed studio pieces. Side D carries no audio at all - it is a silkscreened surface, an exclusive fanzine work by Vascellari pressed directly onto the vinyl, making the object itself a site of image rather than sound. Issued by Von as VON 017 in a gatefold sleeve with insert, in an edition of 500 copies - the first 100 with a special colour silkscreen.
