Lars Vilks

Biography

The sculpture Nimis was sold in 1984 to the German artist Joseph Beuys, and the sale served a purpose: it was Vilks’s way of getting around the Swedish building regulations, under which the structure counted as unauthorised. After Beuys’s death the work passed to Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The document recording the sale, with a piece of bark and a splinter from the sculpture itself, is on display at the Swedish Museum of Sketches.

He began differently. He was born on 20 June 1946 in Helsingborg; his father came from Estonia (by other accounts, from a family of Estonian and Latvian descent), his mother was Swedish. As an artist Vilks was self-taught, but as a theorist he was academically trained: in 1987 he took a doctorate in art history at Lund University. In the 1970s he painted, but rated his own craft as modest. Toward the end of the decade he moved to conceptual projects: the “One-Time University” (1978), and in 1979, together with Leif Eriksson, he organised the exhibition Time Fuse Attitudes at Kullaberg, with works by well-known conceptual artists. In the 1980s postmodernism was coming into fashion in Sweden, and Vilks found himself among the conceptual artists who rejected the aesthetics of modernism. He submitted himself as a work of art to the spring salon in Helsingborg, and at the autumn exhibition of the Skåne Art Association he showed his own car. He taught at the state art academy in Oslo from 1988 (until 1993 according to some sources, until 1997 according to others), and from 1997 to 2003 he was professor of art theory at the art academy in Bergen. In theory he defended the institutional theory of art, largely through his blog.

He started Nimis in 1980 in a hard-to-reach spot in the Kullaberg reserve, in Höganäs municipality, out of driftwood and offcuts. The authorities learned of the structure only in 1982 and decided to have it demolished. A long legal battle began, which Vilks made part of his artistic practice: the process became part of the work. Within a few years the structure was more than a hundred metres long, and some of its towers rose 25 metres. Later there were attempts to set it on fire and to cut it with chainsaws.

Arx, as its Latin name suggests, means “fortress”: about 150 tonnes of stone and concrete, built from 1991. The stones are marked with page numbers and form a book, “Arx: A Book About the Unspeakable”, published in 1993 with its own ISBN, with 352 “pages”. In 1994 a court of first instance sentenced Vilks to a fine of 100 day-fines of 100 kronor each for building in the reserve without permission. The sculpture was repeatedly attacked with sledgehammers.

On 2 June 1996 Vilks proclaimed an area of about one square kilometre an independent state, Ladonia. The territory became a tourist destination.

Few of his works are in museum collections, because much of what he did is tied to a place and built on an idea. One is the concrete sculpture Omphalos, 1.6 metres high and weighing a tonne: the artist Ernst Billgren bought it for 10,000 kronor, and since 2003 it has been in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In 2004 the museum devoted a solo exhibition to it. Vilks commented on his own artistic activity in the third person, and I think this was a deliberate move: the works, he himself, the actions of officials and the press excitement came together for him as a single whole.

In the summer of 2007 he drew the Prophet Muhammad as a “roundabout dog” (dog sculptures were being put up at traffic roundabouts in Sweden). The drawings were meant for an exhibition in Tällerud in Värmland, but the organisers refused to show them, citing security. Other galleries gave the same answer. On 18 August the newspaper Nerikes Allehanda in Örebro printed one of the drawings with an editorial on self-censorship and freedom of religion. Protests followed from Muslim organisations in Sweden, condemnation from Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt and Jordan, and a demand from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation that “punitive actions” be taken against Vilks. He received death threats, among them an announcement by the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq of a reward of up to $150,000, and began living under police protection. In March 2010 the American Colleen LaRose was indicted for trying to recruit people to kill Vilks, and on the same day seven people were arrested in Ireland. On 11 May 2010, at his lecture on free speech at Uppsala University, part of the audience demanded that a film by the Iranian artist Sooreh Hera be stopped, a scuffle broke out, and Vilks’s glasses were broken. Four days later, on 15 May, an attempt was made to set his house in southern Sweden on fire; he was not at home. In 2013 his name appeared on a list in Inspire magazine. On 14 February 2015, at a meeting he had organised, “Art, Blasphemy and the Freedom of Expression”, at the Krudttønden café in Copenhagen, an attacker shot dead the film director Finn Nørgaard and wounded three police officers. Vilks went into hiding, and in March received the Sappho Award from the Danish Free Press Society.

He died on 3 October 2021 in a car crash on the E4 highway near Markaryd: the police car in which he was travelling with two bodyguards collided with a lorry. The bodyguards died as well.