Locations: 1) a family-oriented parade in Chicago 2) Facebook 3) Alexander Calder’s Flamingo sculpture in Chicago 4) an ambulance and a car wash 5) somewhere in between our mind and the on/off line public space. A Holy Orders deals with reality and representations and is shaped as an absurdist collage of bizarre interventions against the much loved, determinative structures of faith, conservatism and capitalism in the USA.

Eric Amling: 2012, you participated in a small Midwestern town’s annual parade with a controversial float which becomes the catalyst of your video, A Holy Order. In it, I noticed a sacrilegious, disgracing of Chicago’s iconography, to altering of regional cuisine, and the central figure, an executioner, traditionally shunned and damned by his neighbors, who seems to be on a berserk cleansing of himself.

Ben Fain: That idea of cleansing was important to me. People in the town were upset after the parade. There was even someone who lost their job. That’s where the idea to use the car wash came from. I imagined it as a kind of suburban guilt cleanser, to clean the pixel of suburban white skin, but also as a way to add some context to what felt like an otherwise out of control situation.

EA: How much ketchup did you have to buy?

BF: I was trying to match the weight of a typical adult male, that was the idea anyway. Most people who aren’t from the Midwest seem to miss the reference to the Ketchup. In Chicago there’s this cultural prohibition of putting ketchup on a hotdog. It’s like a sin. So, the ketchup for me is subversion. The ketchup is thought. It describes the reality I’m perceiving.

EA: Chicago public sculpture are really featured in it too. Can you talk about that?

BF: Those sculptures, Alexander Calder’s Flamingo, Pablo Picasso’s The Girl with the Ponytail and particularly Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, were really influential for me when I lived in Chicago as a graduate student in sculpture at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006-2008). I walked by them almost every day and was mesmerized by how people interacted with them, snapping photos of themselves, in the funny mirror of Kapoor’s bean, and posting them, shifting from an offline experience to an online one. They were moving away from what Hitler would call in Leni Reifenstahl’sTriumph of the Will called a “Total Image,” turning these physical icons into digital bric-a-brac, from a collective image to an individuated memory. Early on, Carl Jung defined this on a small scale early on with his idea of “chronic pathological narcissism,” a personality disorder that I think most of us at this point must suffer from.

EA: Right, when you keep recalling an image from memory it eventually degrades into something mixed with personal affiliations. In your film, it’s almost a hallucinatory flashback. In the scene where the ambulance is going through the carwash there are stroke-like symptoms culminating in a combination of corporate iconography and public art imagery. These art works are sponsored and cared for by the city. I’d like to commission one hundred drawings from locals putting these works down on paper from memory.

BF: I would love to see that.

EA: What are your thoughts on the parade-as-ceremony? They have been a crux in your work, such as in your new film, The Doors of Life. Your interpretations of the traditional parade float reinvent it as a mobile altar, though without the polished elements you’d see in say, a holiday parade. I’m aware you keep an archive of floats online that are great examples of the absurdity, versatility and potential they have as a medium.

BF: I adore the history of parades but they have also been a way for me to think about public life in general, to deal with it outside the confines of the art community. Lately my interest in parades has taken on a more of a pedagogical purpose. I recently taught the course "The Parade Float as Guerrilla Art" at Northwestern University as well as co-taught the course “Party as Form” with Shannon Stratton at Ox-bow School of Art. I do have paradoxical feelings for parades though. I participate in the ritual even though I know it’s inadequate. That’s the feeling I want to hold onto. It’s the same reason why I was so interested in the evolution of the Starbucks logo. Each iteration of it moves away from representation towards pure color, edging towards abstraction. Eventually it will just be green, a green that I will love and also be nauseated by.

EA: Like Pepsi and The Shell Corporation, Starbucks has chosen to jettison their company’s name and rely on iconography alone. Similar to your local detractors from the parade taking to social media to express distaste for your float’s participation, their faces become blurred, distorted, and as you see the post feed in the film I feel like it is less about the float and more about publicly showing others their displeasure about something. Their memory of the float by now is an evolved blur of color.

BF: Yes! Right, a blur. A place of no resistance. No conflict. No rage. No development. At the end of the video Dr. Schneider (my father-in-law and the actor who plays the surgeon) symbolically castrates himself by eating the hotdog with ketchup on it, ending the conflict.

Credits

Director: Ben Fain

Producer: Joe Jeffers

Videography: Yoni Goldstein (Director of Photography), Meredith Zielke, Carrie Schneider, Ben Fain, Ronen Goldstein (Assistant to DP)

Editing: Ben Fain, Meredith Zielke

Art Production: Ben Fain, Frank Van Duerm, Ian Ferguson

Cast:
Executioner/Doctor: Russ Schneider
Ambulance Driver: Lindsay
Rat Priest: Matt Dupont

Music:
Jerome Baez,“HOLLER”, “MIIORIII”, "VENTURE", "WHITE BIKE", (From the Summer Dust Record)
ALERT, "Scorpius", (From Demonicon Record)
Nathan Davis, "Bright and Hollow Sky", 2008, For ensemble (flute, clarinet, trumpet, guitar, percussion). With electronics commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble(ICE)

Special thanks to:

Carrie Schneider, Kira Flanzraich, Colleen and Richard Fain, Julie Fain and Jesse Sharkey, Clinton King, Reed Barrow, Julie Rodrigues, Monique Meloche