| |
|
|
| |
| Bettina Allamoda |
| |
|
|
|
|
Bettina Allamoda
In 2004, while watching William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), a US Army captain realized that the opening sequence – in which a small stone head is excavated and an evil demon named Pazuzu is set free – was filmed at the ancient ruins of Hatra, Iraq, where he was on duty. He had the idea of turning the site into an Exorcist Theme Park. Though the project never got off the ground, Bettina Allamoda treated this bit of news like an excavated demon head itself: a small item with large resonances in the connections between war and entertainment, fantasies of control and being controlled.
Rather than didactically illustrating these connections, Allamoda formalized them into a sensory, spatial and sculptural experience. Her piece The Exorcist (2009) – a large still from the eponymous film in which the demon-possessed girl levitates above her bed, the heavy Victorian posts padded like Louise Bourgeois fetish pieces – hung across from some of her ‘Bed Bondage Sculptures’ (2009–ongoing), which consist of the kind of metal rods used for bicycle stands clasped with stretchy synthetic fabric. In Bed Bondage sculpture #2 (2009/10), a freestanding rod is kept from falling over by a long piece of salmon-coloured Lycra wrapped around the bar, its two ends fixed to wall and ceiling – a precarious balance as reminiscent of post-Minimalism as of a makeshift repair at a 1990s outdoor rave.
Allamoda’s combination of steel and synthetic fabric recalls both crowd control and staging devices, some examples of which can be seen in her pop-up collages (involving images protruding from the white support). In NYC / Times Square (2010), two boys behold a soldier in an advertisement on a screen above the US Army recruitment centre in Times Square, next to pedestrian barriers around what looks like a PA system, half-covered with blue tarpaulin. In Deathblow/Pazuzu Shrine (2008), the comic-book character Deathblow – an ex-Navy Seal turned steely, muscular war machine – is combined with a comic-version Pazuzu sculpture, and the lines: ‘I was raised a patriot. Trained as a soldier. And became a killer.’
Allamoda’s sculptures and collages make tangible the torsions and inversions (and not just repetitions or appropriations) that the military-entertainment complex produces. She arrived at Bed Bondage Sculpture #3 (2010) by wringing a piece of black synthetic leather around a bar stool and fixing it to the wall so that it sticks out from it. The result looks like a leaping Batman, the physical effect on the material reminiscent of Giovanni Anselmo’s seminal Torsion (1968), which similarly involves leather wrung around a piece of wood, or Steven Parrino’s canvases pulled and contorted around the stretcher. But while Anselmo and Parrino covered their tracks and reduced everything to the physical interaction and its result, Allamoda opens the can of worms. References are crawling everywhere, but the sculptures hold up.
©Jörg Heiser, Frieze 133, September 2010
Far from sealing off her art in a hermetic, private theme-park against reports from the outside, Bettina Allamoda pursues charging her work with inner- and trans-societal issues. Fashion, being one focus of her work, takes on forms of sculpture, performance, posters, window displays, or museum showcases: Fashion, not as a commodity of promised glamour, but as a mirror of societal roles and a most early indicator of its changes.
In “ready-to-wear/colonial”, a body of work started 2001, Allamoda examines how architectures – the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris designed by Jean Nouvel and the Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, also in Paris – were discovered and occupied by the fashion industry as locations for fashion presentations. A staged contrast, appearing similar, yet more abstract, in the installation “Streetwear” (2008), where Allamoda fastens shiny blue organza fabric to a metal pole supported by a galvanized barrier.
The barrier as a demarcation of spectacle, perhaps a political demonstration or pop concert, appears a highly improbable host for fabric draped to allude to the silhouette of a veiled woman. (In)Sights like these, immediately prompting the viewer to envision a scene and lead to speculations regarding political motives, are consistantly challenged in Allamoda’s work.
Her current project is also based on retracing forms and news reports in an archaeologically precise manner: doing research on the 2004 report of a US Army captain, who incidentally discovered the ruins in the Iraqi city of Hatra, were originally used by William Friedkin as a backdrop for the opening sequence of his famous 1973 film “The Exorcist”. Now, financially backed by the Pentagon, an “Exorcist Theme Park” is to be developed in the area.
As the case with the Institut du Monde Arabe fashion show, here too, ‘the Orient’ is instrumentalized as a backdrop promising cultural thrill – as tourist attraction, as exotistic wallpaper. Allamoda not only reflects the mediatisation of cultural clichés, but simultaneously how they also always convey notions of economic and above all cultural superiority. Yet Allamoda does not address these dynamic instances with a didactic and educational gesture, quite the contrary: Her art consists in tracing them by deliberately creating complex frictions between form, material and connotations.
©Jan Kedves, 2009
|
|
|
|
|
|
