Exhibitions

 Ben Roosevelt: The Blue Flame

March 17- May 12, 2012








The Blue Flame is Ben Roosevelt’s 2nd solo show with Get This! Gallery, this time using an immersive installation to turn his practice on its head, looking at the same time in to the past and in to the future to ask where things can go from here. Connecting the radical impulse of the origins of punk music to the urges of the Romantics and the trials of Dante as he wrote his medieval epic poem The Divine Comedy, Roosevelt places us in a seedy roadside bar known as The Blue Flame. The Flame exits in myth, somewhere between the stories of legendary performances at the Rock and Roll Farm of Wayne, Michigan and Twin Peaks’ Bang Bang Bar. Using drawing and sculpture to draw us in to the world of the Flame, Roosevelt asks if this is the place youthful dreams go to die, or where new dreams are born?

LAST ORDERS

For the past hour, all that’s been put on the juke is Iggy, over and over he keeps
screaming

I got nothing
I got nothing to say.

The next guy at the bar is going on about Iggy’s ‘Get a Life!’ ad campaign with the insurers Swiftcover.com. Apparently a few years ago, some British paper asked him about it. “This is so embarrassing. I was afraid you’d ask me that. This is so fucking embarrassing.” That didn’t stop him signing up for another round going on all the busses in London at the moment, this time featuring him arguing with a miniature puppet version of himself.

The stage is empty, its front lined with chicken wire and bits of brown glass, but someone left the lights on, hot pink and purple. On the way to the toilets, there’s two photocopied pieces of paper taped next to each other on the wall, the edges curled and browned like a serious smoker’s moustache. One’s got ‘M. Kelly, Detournement, 1970’ scrawled across the top, one paragraph circled: “A throwback to when rock and roll was entertainment for fraternity boys, not an
instrument for social change. It was a slap in the face to the audience. But they politely suffered through it, even hoopin’ and hollerin’ a bit.” In Kelley’s version they play ‘Louie, Louie’ three times in a row, to spite the audience. Iggy “played the audience like a fish.”

The other’s marked ‘L. Bangs, Blowtorch in Bondage, 77.’ In this version of the same gig, they give in to incessant audience calls for ‘Louie, Louie,’ playing a 45 minutes rendition, and making up varying insults of the crowd as improvised lyrics.

Everyone’s heard the one about the end of the road, but where does the road begin? It’s like everyone stumbled on this cul-de-sac and just assumed it was a full stop, not a launching pad or a slingshot. I got nothing to say, but I still come here to talk. The celebration of emptiness and being bored, it’s a scene itself over sixty years old, and here we are still trying to dream up new words, new excitement over everything that pops up. The guy on the other side of the bar’s bawling, saying Kelley’s suicide was him saying, admitting that maybe the screams, howls and jagged cuts of amp feedback were hollow. We all got stuck somewhere, but that’s where you stay when things are happening. But in here, it’s like something’s always happening, even if it is the shredding of a dream. As the regulars say. You never step in the same flame twice.—Chris Fite-Wassilak