Stealing the Words

Belinda Blignaut
Stealing the Words, 2010. Installation .

Sitting somewhere between childhood innocence and trashy teen sexuality, bubblegum is at once a chewy and surprisingly sticky medium. It is malleable and associatively feminine, but also has a rather gross chewed up interiority. It is this continual play between the clean and dirty which makes it an intrinsically subversive medium.

Belinda Blignaut’s ‘Stealing the Words’ at YOUNGBLACKMAN, a comeback show of sorts, uses bubblegum to good effect in an immersive exhibition. The inside of the front window of the gallery is covered with popped bubbles, frozen explosions, with half-chewed mouthpieces hanging off them.

It is visually relatively simple, but it made good use of the three distinct viewing spaces of the gallery. From the bar across the street, the window resembled an action painting. Random and blobby, it had the aggressive painterliness of a Pollock crossed with the irony of a Damien Hirst spot painting.

From the pavement, outside the window, the broad painterliness gave way to a more intimate observation. Looking at things squashed on a window, gives a curious sense of observation, of something intimate and traumatic. The feeling is somewhere between looking at an ant farm and the pictures from the Hillsborough stadium stampede. There’s a certain grossness in the details, that you can get close up to but are still screened off from. At the same time there is a pinkish glow from the interior lights.

Inside the gallery the experience becomes wholly more visceral. Looking a lot like 70s artist Hannah Wilke’s bubblegum vulvas, there is a sense of bodyness. Teethmarks frame little distended anuses, while the cheap scent of Chappies fills the air. There is an implied performance, one can imagine the teeth chomping, lips blowing the (apparently) 10 000 pieces of gum. An intensive exhausting labour. With this is the implication of factory. This isn’t material bought at the corner store, but at an industrial outlet. It’s a pile, a stack, a bale of gum, mechanically kneaded and extruded and cut.

However, ‘Stealing the Words’ is quiet and immobile. There is silence and failure, the bubbles are deflated and popped, no longer sweet or functional. Removed from the mouth they become limp and functionless.  While bubblegum has multiple layers of meaning, this show conveys a sense of loss.