Alina Bliumis, THE CAMOUFLAGE OF LAUGHTER Curated by Cash (Melissa) Ragona SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC, 2021 / HEARSAY:HERESY

Alina Bliumis’ The Camouflage of Laughter (2020-2021, tapestry, series of 4 panels, overall dimension 29" X 432” ) uses the grotesque, power-switching apparatuses of Medieval festivals and pageants as its starting point, but pushes this paradigm up against contemporary forms of contested political representation. Her Jacquard loom-woven tapestry forms a continuous frieze, confronting viewers with the tensions and ecstasies of social bodies.

At first, we were tempted to call this project, Feast of the Ass—pointing back to the Medieval, Christian festival/ceremony that worshipped biblical donkeys, but especially the particular “ass” that was thought to have carried Mary, pregnant with Jesus, into Egypt (fleeing from the campaign to murder young boys led by the despot, Herod the Great). As Mikhail Bakhtin describes it, along with its sister pageant, Feast of Fools—Feast of the Ass exhibited many of the central tenets of what he terms, the carnivalesque: ritual spectacles were staged, often comic, even raucous, in nature, i.e., the priest, situated next to the celebrated donkey on the altar, would often “bray” his sermon and the congregation would “hee haw” back their replies. Or, on the way to the church, a pregnant girl, holding a faux baby (doubling/confusing real and fictional instances of fertility) would ride the donkey, while bystanders sang bawdy songs of praise to the ass. These religious feasts were often accompanied by fairs that included amusements of all sorts, including a motley crew of entertainers “with the participation of giants, dwarfs, monsters, and trained animals” (Bakhtin 1968). Clowns and fools would make appearances, play-acting as kings, queens, bishops, dukes, or exotic animals—laughter abounded. Grotesque displays of eating and normally repressed bodily functions (sneezing, farting, guffawing, snorting) took central stage. Laughter, in other words, acted as a radical camouflage for social and economic critique — allowing everyone, but especially peasants, to suspend, even if for a moment the hierarchies and seriousness of ecclesiastical, feudal, and political forms. 

Alina Bliumis’s work takes Bakhtinian laughter, with its focus on the grotesque, power-switching apparatuses of Medieval festivals and pageants as its starting point, but pushes this paradigm up against contemporary forms of political representation that embrace conspiracy theories and violence at the center of their operations. Her frieze-like tapestry links together scenes of power relations upended (woman-identified figures usurping masculine-occupied positions of power, animals directing humans, buffoons commanding authority), but also displays the dangers of the carnivalistic and its propensity to harness unbridled antinomian energy for racist, misogynistic, and, even, murderous ends. The latter is displayed by one panel in which she depicts one of the mobs that led the deadly siege on the US Capitol (January 2021). Tucked in among them, one can identify a less ostentatious version of Jacob Anthony Chansley, the QAnon-supporting “shaman” who wielded a spear, wore a fur hat decorated with buffalo horns, and threatened the lives of several elected officials (claiming he was an alien, being directed to do this as a “higher being” soon to ascend Earth to another reality). Besides the shared iconography of ritual, comic displays of mixed social signifiers, Bakhtin also points to the carnival’s drive to mess with language, to drag curses, obscenities, crude fictions into “learned talk,” into civic discussions. However, what happens—Bliumis asks in her current work—when carnival becomes a camouflage for conspiracy? For paranoia? For the conflating of common sense and moral hallucination? 

Bliumis’s tapestry — with a nod to actual Medieval tapestries that were dedicated to both the Feast of the Ass, as well as the Feast of Fools, will stretch around the perimeter of the room as an analog, time-based work that commits several instances of heresy. Not only will it question the “carnival symbolic” that Bakhtin so fully believed in as a way of aggrandizing the collective body as a transformative force, but it will also commit an act of anti-craft by reproducing the complexity (and labor) of handwoven Medieval tapestry via digital textiles—mirroring the viral circulation of mediated images featured. Moreover, Bliumis does not offer a conventional narrative structure of any social or moral rite of passage in this work, but rather a disjunctive, work that explores the repeating forms of gestures of resignation that have been transformed, via both on-the-ground protests, as well as the viral engines of media, into signatures of resistance. 

For example, one panel depicts the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” meme which has become a central symbol of protests—against the escalation of police violence against black bodies—that emerged out of the Black Lives Movement. However, her approach is genealogical, rather than chronological. Simultaneously, she reaches back in time to Francisco Goya’s use of this gesture in The Third of May 1808 (1814) (depicting the Spanish resistance to Napoleon’s invading armies) and forward to a 2008 newsprint/internet image of protestors in Kenya, with their hands-up (under military police attack), opposing what they saw as the corrupt government of then elected, President Mwai Kibaki. In another panel, Bliumis depicts a young woman being arrested on the front lines of the recent female-led protests against an autocratic government in her native Belarus. 

Bliumis purposefully removes the details of context throughout the tapestry — so that viewers are left with open, albeit, loaded signifiers that could be read in multiple ways. This kind of embedded tension or complex camouflage drives this urgent work.

Alina Bliumis, MASSES Curated by Elizabeth M. Grady SPRING/BREAK Art Show March 3-9, 2020

The series Masses (2019-2020), by Alina Bliumis is an exploration into the tipping point, where analysis becomes obsession and participation becomes dissolution, as the individual relinquishes a sense of self in the face of phenomenological overwhelm. At 58 x 83” the cotton panels that comprise the series depict crowds of over-life-size figures representing internal and external encroachment on the psyche. To pass between and among the mono-chrome gossamer hangings, which combine digital print and watercolor, is to revisit each time you’ve experienced that transcendent moment of fear or ecstasy where the only certainty is that you’ve given up your personal agency to the mob.

Masses #1 is perhaps the most anomalous of the series, focusing as it does on an internal struggle. Evoking the howling forces of worry and self-doubt that visit in the blackness of the small hours of the morning, the work suggests a descent into a demon-plagued hell of our own device. Monstrously twisted and disembodied limbs vie with attenuated spectral faces for command of the poor soul, bent over at the base of the composition, and gazing apprehensively over its shoulder at the reigning chaos. As riveting as it is disturbing, it is Fuseli’s Nightmare for our troubled times.

On a lighter note, Bliumis turns to mass celebrations of Dionysian excess in the rock concert depicted in Masses #2. The main figure is blissed-out and spread-eagled in mid-stage-dive. The darker side of the experience is intimated by the blackened eye sockets and inverted pose of the figure, however, and we are left to question whether the stage divers act is a celebration of music and communal experience or a kind of temporary martyrdom, where consciousness is sacrificed through the use of drugs for release from the pressures of this mortal coil. The veiled reference to St. Peter, who as legend has it asked to be crucified head-down so as not to risk dilution of the memory of Christ’s torture, cannot be lost on anyone familiar with the Western tradition.

Front-page news often records crowd hysteria, and the palette of Bliumis’ series reinforces the newspaper reference in works like #7-8 and #5 which depict a Protest and Soldiers respectively. In the former, there are as many emotions as faces, showing the rage, fervor, anxiety, devotion, and hope that can forge a compelling collective identity at mass demonstrations. Yet one is left to wonder, given the multiplicity of expressions, if these protestors will ever achieve unity of communal purpose. The soldiers, in their uniformity, are a stark reminder that in rigid discipline and conformity comes another kind of excess that can be wielded as a blunt and unforgiving weapon against a mass of individuals.

Abandonment of reason is a theme that carries through several of these panels, not least in the Masses #3 (Lovers). Here, bodies entwine in the abandonment of an orgy, with the ebb and flow of momentary sensations evoked by shifts in scale, as in the couple at center right; or the union of body parts, like the heads at the bottom center, whose mouths unite when the tongue of the head on the right becomes the lips of the head on the left, in a perceptual twist that would have made Cezanne proud.

The installation of the works, as large fabric panels dividing the space, will create a disorienting experience for viewers, ideally, a psychological state that hints at if not approximates the loss of self-experienced when one becomes part of a crowd or mass, whether for good or for ill, ecstasy or violence. Bliumis depicts scenes where mass experience tips over into mass hysteria, where the intellect is overcome by emotional input. What differentiates a rally from a revolution? A riot from a rock concert? Whether attending a military exercise, a religious rite, or an orgy, overload provides release through collective identification with a larger purpose.