THIS DELICATE MONSTER

THIS DELICATE MONSTER
10:00-STEREO-2004 BY MICHELLE HANDELMAN

'This Delicate Monster' is part of a multi-media pop fable inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s 19th century collection of poems, Flowers of Evil. I’ve transposed the Flowers of Evil into a contemporary pop landscape, creating a haunting and hallucinatory fragmented narrative that lies somewhere between conceptual art piece and pure visceral experience. Collaborating with couture fetish designer Garo Sparo, Italian noise band Larsen, and a cast of performers, I’m trying to seduce the viewer into the abyss of fear and desire, while breathing life into Baudelaire’s text such as, “No abyss compares with your bed”, “condemned to an eternal laugh because I know not how to smile”, and “to swallow up existence with a yawn”. Like Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, this piece implicates the viewer into a mediated world of attraction and repulsion, with moments so loaded with the symbolic that they destroy meaning altogether. The exhibit becomes a sympathetic symphony of gasps, shrieks and repetitive actions that can best be described as a cross between a horror film and a fashion shoot gone terribly wrong.MH