eye ed thing

Friday, February 5, 2010

AYED HALLIM and other stories

Charged spiritual particles so subtle. Imagine elaborate narratives sung by a choir of albino castrato,the metal gristle dangles and jingles in some alien history book. They wear these items one might imagine. Masks and silver louvres for trapping gasoline fumes. Gills and tails wiggle,made of aluminum and bone. A culture vulgar and pure and ridiculous. These objects are actually from our own. Made real and quietly asking nothing now. It is here on earth, like a rotting spore-ridden black and white archive, spread sheet-thin over a tattooed sacrificial alter-it is wrapped in itself and its history. Brought to now for display.
Using randomly chosen symbols or gifts of chance, letters chosen by higher powers, they are designed and found together by a channel. A body with an openness to bringing both new meaning and revitalizing a golem's wish for the old. Old meanings are often reinforced by realizations, usually circling back to a fear of death. Bound to this earth through sarcasm and wisdom,research becomes a weakness. Just listening to the self is the path. Intuition deadheads an auto mechanic's morphed perversions, and curves fluid feelings through their abandoned usefulness. Made new and rediscovered. They never left us, only took on new faces. New ways of becoming. New ways of being worshipped.
Made of rusty flesh, the evening's kiss is delicious and ripe with found and lost moments. To the lecherous underworld and its pantheon of textual flavors,they (being Ayed's ingredients) couldn't and don't try to hold the waning candle's maudlin subtext. They hold their own. They blindly grab seven letter words (like quixotic)-thats 8-okay- in one go. They smile and live.
The deliberation of this man's perambulations and fingered gravel gatherings is washed up with beautiful everyday ossification's-Ayed Hallim-his exacting tendencies examine the spiritual and the new truth in metals exposed to elements. Structures razed and nurtured at once, they deteriorate and become parts for analysis. Parts of a pattern. Parts of man-made engineering, freed and undead from a fertile disease related to the act of breathing and praying. A healthy rejuvenation serves as a beacon to specify reason.
This almost is not art. It is more of a museum of relics. Stories fabricated to mimic either lies that soldify or completely make gooey and edible an honest connection to why we're here and where we go after we die. It is about the charade and the persona,the gestalt or the thermodynamics of sharing creation.
Scattered fragments of charged energy are collected at Eyedrum in the small gallery. Remnants of another's past, imbibed with lilting and flowering memories, layered by a delicate and strange brain. Ayed Hallim is a menagerie. Within his kingdom is a reversal of organic milking wealth. A raised goblet or chalice (or book written by that discworld guy) overflowing with lightweight fonts, loaded with detached meaning. Recontextualized and silent, the parts have age and intrigue.
Under a glass case and scattered all about, thoughts and secrets are like disembodied puppy noses.
Danielle Roney observed (this isn't a quote) in conversation one time, on a night as un-rainy as this one, "flat readings" of art have a certain i dont know what. Research and conversation with artists are lodestones of ubiquitous tectonic layering(my words).
All consuming and more involved as conversations develop, going into history, the inclusion of the found object and the collage behaviour of awareness, it is set inside of intentions. It gives words to themselves and back to us. We piece them together. Singing metal gives everybody from Hephaestus to the Rougarou a lesson in the origin of the tango. History supports certain thoughts. Washed up brake pads vaguely connected by the softer semi-circular recyclable and generative bone developing crumb trail. Red plastic chokers,mothers of new iron teats to trod upon and ponder.
We keep digging into artists' skulls and into local art blogs for boredom and for pleasure. We find ourselves caught in an unproductive cycle of having to nod to what is wrong. The fundamental approach sees direct paths to honesty and denies it as a medium for either being art or reporting art. Or both. We compartmentalize and age and replace dysfunction with gestures. The coils that once carried oils,the gears that once operated like bumble bee wings in another ecology, they scatter and become lost and singular entities. Hallim's pieces have meaning that expand if held or isolated. with consideration-not closed off minds. Interact with its history, its forgotten community. Imagine how it functioned as a mark within a bigger piece.
Often meaning reflects against nothing and wilts. Meetings form to examine the parts with smiles, manufacturing ridiculous frankengetrudestein-ian dolls- that fall apart as they perform perfectly. The system can only continue, as it means well..and in being so avoids the criticism it needs. The new vantage made real by an artist's hands.
Fear is in how far back in intent one must go to examine and start over. Parts placed together, reassembled and crying out, they show their experience with their textured amber patina. The search for signs of ourselves in relation to others only stares at itself.
For meaning, the shortest distance between two points is in honesty, regardless of its wisdom. Unaware and taken and made perfect in an awkward dynamics that grows with time. Keep working under deadlines until yr dead and have bypassed meaning in places where it was offered. Parts rust and fall off to be found by another. Perhaps a month from now or twenty years-it would be just as refreshed and throbbing. The ends do not justify the means.
The hope is in what freak finds the parts and if he can get past that dorky watchful eye of the machine.
The Gods of Ayed Hallim's world: Note the sound reverberating within. Release an individual moment and approach with a specific vision.Tiresias bleeds mercury as the caution attended to this rebuilt orchestra. The markings sing,sometimes in a rough guttural voice. It plays when you are not looking and serves as a conduit for the act of assemblage and examination. However time shifts and regurgitates,we come back. In some cases by the deliberate will of one of our own. Ayed Halim isn't legion. He is not a shaman. A mystery of an idea, a front made of realisms for connection between the man behind it and those before him.

Ayed Hallim's Instrumentalities is on display at Eyedrum through February 21st