Exotic Muons in your Skin Respond to X-Ray Prayers During Trottelklown Krieg

Photos and text by Anthony A. Russell

A regular theme in Bonnie Banks' work is the imagining of things we can't see with the naked eye. As the elusive artist cannot be reached for comment, I can only discuss the contents of “Exotic Muons…” with the same speculative authority that you might apply to a precariously stacked mass of soggy furniture, home videos, and bundled ephemera abandoned on Capp Street by a forcibly evicted tenant that you never knew. How does one greet a large crustacean-primate wielding a ray gun loaded with cartoon paint spray? Teeth at the end of tubular protrusions may suggest mouths and throats, but you never really know what a beast can swallow without finding out the hard way, and not everything with wheels ought to roll. That is not to say that there aren’t tops and bottoms to some figures in Bonnie Banks’ inexhaustible cast of characters – I just don't trust anyone who would claim to be able to make heads or tails of it. That being said, I’ve studied everything in the show pretty closely, and despite the myriad of limbs, growths, and appendages twisted together in monstrous chaos, I can say with reasonable confidence that there isn’t a single “tail” in the whole exhibition.

Entering The Lab, one is met by a sight that ought to be familiar to anyone who has ever attended the Brutal Sound Effects Festival. Screwed directly into the steps are prop picket-signs in the shape of houses from a play about gentrification by some completely unrelated theater company. They seem to have fallen into Banks’ possession before being transformed into an assortment of painted figures that both greet and ward off attendees like heads on spikes. The house-shapes now function as arrows pointing upwards, beckoning-burbling-“show’s this way”... just in case you were wondering if you were in the right place. At the top of the stairs are a few banners crowded among other miscellaneous posters and xerox blowups of illustrations with motley splashes of reclaimed wash water from paint brushes.

Banners like this are how I first encountered the art of Bonnie Banks. Performers for Brutal Sound Effects Festival and its daywalker cousin, Godwaffle Noise Pancakes, will find themselves the recipients of custom signage made specifically for the event. Text strewn over assemblages of scrap materials, xerox scans and original drawings adorned with unspooled VHS and cassette tape like amber tinsel dress the set, pulling the diverse components of the stage into manic cohesion. Flyers before the show, signage during, and custom sleeves for DVDs after, all bear the distinctive and brutal hand of Bonnie Banks like a troubling green glow over a bubbling marsh of radioactive waste. This work is shared so freely and so copiously that it may be easy for some to overlook the frightening attention to detail.

I have wondered if it is at all appropriate to freeze them. All these things are meant to growl and quiver and flash and flop around.

Some forms were commissioned as slides or playing cards for role-playing video/board games. They serve to represent adversaries while also eerily connoting a fantastical terrain.  When we see them in situ our focus is on the rolling dice.

On stage, it’s the performers, forming a kook-garbage train under the Bonnie Banks umbrella embracing other cast members on a detritus-ridden lake shore.

Paper puppets come to life as videos and stage visuals for collaborative projects such as The Organ Spectacular, Commode Minstrels in Bullface, Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet, Spider Compass Good Crime Band, and Rubber (() Cement.

Even backdrops can’t be compelled to sit still. Stage contraptions for another festival series, “Electronic Puppenhorten” as well as live acts Rubber (() Cement and Scummerai, bring together friends, machines, and audience members to activate frantic caricatures of hulking, jittering machinery resembling primitive, cybernetic sputterings of confused and feverish sentience.

It never stops. A thing is never just what it is. No reliable narrator ever chimes in to explain why the joints bend the wrong way, or which appendages are vestigial. Trying to play a DVD of the Rubber (() Cement Butyl RNA World movie is like being swallowed into a mutated maze of an intestinal tract composed of animated menus and ambiguous buttons that sometimes lead to a strobing abstraction of a live performance where a mass of debris and anatomy from across the zoological spectrum springs flailing to life in an onslaught of noise and madness flung into the audience like so many rogue electrons.

So I have wondered if it makes sense to freeze these things. But even when paused, I feel that I can look at these costumes and puppets and illustrations and see them squirming- and ultimately I am grateful to have the opportunity to spend more time with the mud golems. While I’ve seen the live act several times, I never knew until now how many faces this thing had.