Swedish artist Lars Vilks spent years hiding from death squads

He was attacked, shot at, his house set alight, and there was a $140,000 bounty on his head, but artist Lasr Vilks has died in a car crash.

Swedish artist Lars Vilks who lived under police protection after his 2007 depiction of the Prophet Mohammed prompted death threats, died October 3, 2021 in a car accident. Picture: AFP

OBITUARY
Lars Vilks, artist
Born: June 20, 1946, Helsingborg, Sweden; died: aged 75, October 3, Stockholm

Fluxus was the art movement that wasn’t. If you considered yourself a free-ranging contributor to Fluxus, you also spurned the discipline of being described as member of a movement – it sounded too organised. Yoko Ono was part of this casserole of the uncharacterisable and its most famous exponent. Fluxus recruited musicians, performers, cinematographers and many others bound only by the idea that the process was the point and the finished product … well, it might even be a rotting apple on a plinth. In Ono’s case, it was.

Lars Vilks’ odd artistic trajectory grazed the Fluxus landscape from time to time, and, like them, his work saw him also as an activist. One of his pieces is perhaps the most famous, and controversial, in Sweden. Another became one of the most infamous and controversial in the world.

Vilks studied to become a ­doctor in art history at Lund University, in Sweden’s south. It is one of Europe’s oldest, among whose ­famous alumni was the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a long-serving justice of the United States Supreme Court and an outstanding champion of the free speech protections of America’s First Amendment.

Vilks liked free thought and free speech. It was a Fluxus thing.

He worked at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and later was a professor of art in Bergen. A self-taught painter and sculptor, in 1980 he started work on a sculpture on rarely trodden land at the southernmost point of Sweden in the Kullaberg Nature Reserve. He called it Nimis.

Collecting driftwood from local beaches, Vilks slowly constructed a labyrinth of interconnected 25m towers. Vilks estimated he hammered in 150,000 nails for the project and that it involved 7000 journeys to the beach to collect the wood and take it up the hill. It took two years for the local council to become aware of it and an absurdly complex series of legal actions ensued.

Authorities demanded Vilks remove Nimis. He refused, and Sweden’s art community swung in behind their eccentric brother. At first, locals were in two minds, but as the case moved to higher courts they embraced it. Well, not all of them; in 1985 someone set fire to Nimis and two-thirds was lost, but 40,000 people a year still set out on foot to see it.

Vilks was convicted and penalised several times. He would turn these fines into artworks, sell them and pay the penalty. He then started work on another illegal installation nearby – a “stone book” called Arx, made from reinforced concrete. Eventually, Vilks declared the area to be the micro­nation of Ladonia. Some 1000 people signed up to become citizens, and in 1996 its first elections were held as the artist looked on with amusement.

Vilks found his next brush with notoriety less amusing. In 2005, the northern Denmark newspaper Jyllands-Posten published what became known as Danish cartoons – an editorial project examining self-censorship that included images depicting Muhammad. Other newspapers followed suit, sparking outrage in Muslim countries, including demonstrations and riots in which it is estimated 200 were killed. Western embassies were attacked, and plans were uncovered to murder the editor and cartoonist Kurt Westergaard who had drawn Muhammad wearing a bomb as a turban.

He remained under police guard until he died in July.

So Vilks’ decision in 2007 to draw Muhammad on the body of a dog was courting danger. Originally to have been shown at a Swedish art show, nervous organisers cancelled Vilks’ invitation to exhibit, but the illustration was published in a newspaper as yet another example of self-censorship. Again, Muslim nations excitedly condemned the newspaper and the Swedish government, al-Qa’ida put a $140,000 bounty on Vilks’ head, he was attacked in the street, his house was set alight, a gunman targeted him at a public meeting, killing film director Finn Norgaard (the shooter also executed a man at a synagogue while fleeing), and two elaborate plots to murder the artist were uncovered in their latter stages.

“Now your children, daughters and sisters shall die,” wrote Iraqi-born Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly – who had been infuriated by the cartoon – before setting off for Stockholm in December 2010 with plans for car bombs and to blow himself up among Christmas shoppers. It appears his suicide vest went off accidentally and no one else was killed.

By then, Vilks was in hiding with police protection. On October 3, travelling home after dinner with a friend in Stockholm, Vilks and two police guards, travelling in an unmarked police car, crashed into a truck. The car caught fire and all three were killed. The truck driver survived. Authorities believe it was an accident, but have also established a murder inquiry.