A Holy Order
Ben Fain
(U.S 2012, 19:34 mins)
Locations: a family-oriented parade in Chicago; Facebook; an ambulance and a car wash. An absurdist collage of bizarre interventions against the much loved, determintav structures of faith, conservatism and capitalism in the USA.
BIO: Ben Fain is best known for his controversial public-performances, parades, and allegorical parade videos, often sited amidst a lush, pastoral Americana. Fain’s work foregrounds the float as an atavistic site for sculpture erupting out of the slow, ritual time of parade, recognized as a living, cultural moment. Floats function as ghostly characters, stand-ins for an absent, often abject and fecal body traveling as a fleeting image through the narrative space of the parade event. Fain’s floats become fetish containers for cultural beliefs; infinitely adaptive platforms populated by stickmen and doppelgängers charged with mysterious energies, documented in his videos. The absent body, reduced to its simplest symbols, is manipulated through the narrative transfer enacted by the parade, proliferating outwards and creating micro narratives powered by conjecture, confusion and rumour. For Fain, public parade culture is a return to the vital, the bodily, and the organic with the float as talisman, emerging with purpose from Limbo.