Tuesday 30 June 2009

Ingmar Bellafaloose @ Sodium Prospects Gallery


Indignant and effective.
Nervousness of the capability of expression consumes these words.
A certain consciousness for typos labors progression.
Consciousness of awareness.
Has it read enough to write enough?
Can it be enough of itself to ever completely be?

(sidenote from a traveling salesman
of emotions in a briefcase for the
unfocused. What to do when unfocused
and empty? The times have lost their
flavor and they blur,making an artist
feel like not even creating. A person
that is even less than that. Wasted it
on what? Sadness fattens and leaves an
ever fattening stack of unread books.
Let's get honest here.Is there any real
confidence and sense of commitment when
it really comes down to it? Lonely and
not alone,the finances were supposed to
not be of any major consequence but now
the looming threat. Sleep will only bring
tomorrow around too soon. I hardly ever
take the garbage out and I leave bits of
hair from shaving in the sink. Bugs and
small rodents infest the night. The truck
driven to art openings has too many miles
on it to make up for my mood swings,lack
of genuine maturity or interest in those
things that make a person money. It wont be
long before i am pushed into my final corner)

A stubborn and proud showing of art on the walls and floors of Sodium.
One that would never change,never need to be altered for the sake of any historical perspective.
It continues to invite participation.
There is no cleaning up after this act.
It is a mess that spreads in the head and in the mind.
Photographs will always fail.
Words in their own floating way might come their closest when deliberately reduced to guttural sounds simulating sex.
The core before even cave paintings or cultural in all caps.
It would remain and represent itself for all time.
It took a boring kind of honesty and grafted it with blunt trauma force to complacency.
Then together,the two utilzed a kind of dynamics,made subtle by only artful margins,but enough-it drove home a point that layed low on certain levels, while hammering itself and the experience and those experiencing it- with an offensive kind of directness.
If it had teeth,they would be rotted into black jagged edges,held into bleeding gums with sharp rusty screws.
The putridness of some uncooked flesh dangling like a mock price tag.
The shapes of words smeared by greasy fingers.
Footsteps remain of those before you.
Some even leave parts of their wardrobe inadvertantly.
Personal items stuck in ambiguous filth that grow over and consume.
This building will be condemned and torn down for certain.
But rest assured,it will not be cleaned out.
Meaning,the show will remain and it will spread,perhaps containing all of Atlanta befor eit is over. Phsyically,electrically,emotionally, and hungrily.

Photographs.
Performance on the opening night.
POETRY.
Sculpture.
Music.
Film.
Painting.
It was all included.
It all coalesced in a cultural statement that knew of only one vehicle it could travel in.
An ugly honesty blindly drove it through the wall of the gallery and parked it sideways .
Of course elegance had its place as well,but what Sodium's patrons had to sift through to get there-it left few standing.
Literally.
This was a first of any kind.
It happened in Atlanta,Ga. one summer night in 2009.

In its atrocious assaults on all manners of the senses, Ingmar Bellafaloose unleashed a dichordant,infectious,unctuous,and even soporific multi-media installation.
Two weekends ago at Sodium Prospects Gallery the perspective was changed globally and locally.
Ingmar began his install on a Thursday.
The air around the building in this East Atlanta pocket took on a vague sickly green hue.

Not since Maxwell Sebastian's last opening had the city's art patrons found themselves so desperately wishing for larger and more muscled hands.
Resilient hands, big and strong enough to hold back the unrelenting, deeply aching visceral gut wrenching reaction to such a beastly scale of abberations to humanity. Contents of stomachs filled the sidewalk outside of Sodium.
Police sirens could be heard all night.
This level of a result at once reduced - and considering the perspective - elevated initial reviews to being written only by OSHA employees.

Reporting from her hospitable bed, Gallery owner Louise Mcackestuary,had these words to say:
"Ingmar seemed like a normal enough fellow. I did find the slides a bit unique. I had joked with my gallery assistant that they seemed like the tip of a mysterious brown iceberg- and her response had been "Yes...it looks like (explitive) in a (explitive) (explitive) rat's rotting (explitive)."

The show opened 6 months later and the rest is now going down in a history that the city of Atlanta will never forget. For better or worse. One local artist and graffiti franchise owner remarked saying, "Well,at least we're on the map for something."

Ingmar had been given a Thursday and Friday to himself in the gallery. Louise had dropped the keys to the gallery in his hands,feeling a quiet sense of trepidation. She'd never done such a thing before and didn't know why she did now. She later recalled his shirt. It was smeared with organic peanut butter and depicted a horrific altered image of Joseph Beuys simulating a sex act on a large piece of cheese. She had left Ingmar to his own devices. Two days later he emerged and locked the gallery doors and stood right there in the sun. He had waited. Time of the opening came,and, like "a bride on her wedding day" was the analogy he used to those complicit with his wishes,he revealed the show to everyone in one go.

The title of the show was, "Kraken Poptarts & Concrete Saliva". Hundreds of used lunch bags,stained and molding since his childhood had been thumbtacked to the walls. Scratch n Sniff stickers decorated most of these bags.

The show was about openings and in opening it was an offal experience for triumph had disease and the guests anticipated themselves in their outfits.
Outrigged with text and black drapes of ink,the bond between them flipped and marked its place.
Traces of kisses and fallen asleep drool from late reading,crammed stanzas and reread and reread misnomers,throw-ups and major pieces covered up by amateurs. References to commoners and people with shoes that strippers would not check out
Stuck in the blood on the floor was a strip of masking tape from the back of a canvas.
The image itself was dissolving in the toluene leeching from the soluble surface.
People could not look,they fannd ice on each other.
Waiting,they themselves melted.
They themselves ere like an old man's walker,disrupted and conjunctive with anticipation the strain of tomorrows long day in a hot warehouse.
The film rolled by was it recorded on a five minute delay.
Interpolating the previous three minutes...often making assumptions about what would happen next.
A constant dialogue pieced together an audio that mish mashed nonsense that was often oracle-like in its predictions.
The guests were performing in the gritty waste that slithered across the floor. Horse bones painted and a live rock band played.
Oblivious to the scene.

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