Fail Point from Collapse on Vimeo.
kelly broich
“HOMESTEAD” – The how-to performance video finale (Broich,Kaup,Elliott 45min.HD 2016)
Rounding out the trilogy of performance video featuring Kelly Broich, Eli Elliott, and Brad Kaup, is HOMESTEAD. The “how to” series started with MUSH, where the performance centered around a cooking demonstration on how you can have a high calorie diet for less than $20 a week by combining dollar store food items, then FASHION revealed how to take thrift store clothing and turn them into high dollar fashion items, concluding with a $40,000 created garment, and now HOMESTEAD reveals how one can live for free in style by simply finding some land, staking it, then creating cardboard homes which you can decorate to your liking.
The performance takes place in a striking outdoor location, where a river runs near and mountains serve as back drops for the pair of pilgrims, Pink Face and Roy, who stake their land and proceed to create cozy and decorative little homes for themselves.
The performance plays on a level that is somewhere between the trendy “tiny home movement” and the classic homeless/cardboard box scenario. This indeed is a murky area that rarely gets talked about as now those with money are purposely downsizing and creating very fashionable tiny homes on trailers, while declaring it to be a new fashionable trend and indeed a “movement.”
Meanwhile “tiny homes” have essentially been created for years by houseless individuals, in the form of tented encampments, wooded shacks, or inexpensive mobile RV’s and trailers. It has now become a trend to become “homeless”, as long as you build your dwelling on a trailer and make it look nice on the inside, and out.
Pink Face and Roy create their own little tiny homes, yet they do not exist in skid row, but won’t be making any of the trendy tiny house blogs either. It’s a gray area which seems to speak on the absence of in between individuals who can’t afford to play in the pretentious tiny home scene, yet don’t deal themselves the helpless/homeless card either.
In HOMESTEAD the relationship between the two characters remains a mystery, as do their choice of facial wear. Yet in this piece we see Roy engaging in more central action, rather than just serving as a sidekick for Pink Face. They both build their homes, create a kitchen area, empty their toilets (a nasty scene), and set up their individual play tents while squabbling over their choice of women’s clothing, “is this your skirt Roy or mine?”
MUSH, FASHION and HOMESTEAD are designed to be shown on 3 separate HD screens simultaneously in a gallery setting. For inquiries contact the artists HERE
HOMESTEAD (dir. Kelly Broich. Cinematography Brad Kaup. Featuring Eli Elliott. HD, 45min. 2016)
“FASHION” Video Performance by Broich/Elliott/Kaup
In the second installment of video performance directed by Kelly Broich with Eli Elliott and Brad Kaup, comes FASHION, a surreal absurdity focusing on Pink Face’s obsession with making money through the creating of high priced “designer” garments. The garments are taken through various techniques devised by Pink Face to provide “added value”. Pink Face cuts clothing, repairing them with neon duct tape (“rip and repair”) while assistant Roy applies sandpaper to shirt collars to “distress” the garment further. The result is clothing that goes from $10 retail to now being able to confidently place them at values in the several hundreds.
Where MUSH took rejected food that ends up in the dollar store and shows you how to create a goulash of caloric meal replacement to save you tons of money, FASHION takes rejected thrift clothing and adds necessary uniqueness and flare, showing you how to make massive amounts of money. The techniques fall in line with the real life fashion racket, implementing methods of “distressing”, while adding avant garde original uniqueness to items such as “boy shorts”.
The vibrantly dingy visuals colorfully pop equally to MUSH as the poster paints, glitters and fish hooks turn the clothing line into an absurd looking goulash of their own; the end products proudly hang by rafters in the inexplicable dirt floor shack the two “fashion designers” are operating out of.
Pink Face ultimately unveils the coup de gras of his spring collection. Roy proudly models the garment while a price tag is decided upon.
FASHION is the second in a three piece video performance series. Screening/Gallery inquires contact HERE.
FASHION (2016, HD, 31m. Directed Kelly Broich. Cinematography Brad Kaup. With Eli Elliott)
“RECOVERY HOUSE” Now Showing (Monday-24hours only)
Accepted to the STRAIGHTJACKET GUERRILLA FILM FESTIVAL, the never released cult film “Recovery House” which Kelly Broich from Collapse Productions directs, and Eli Elliott stars in, makes it’s debut today (MONDAY), and will screen ONLINE FOR FREE for a period of 24 hours. STRAIGHTJACKET is an online film festival created by Laura Grace Robles & Fabrizio Federico.
“The mood of the festival is that of a no-holds barred electric circus where the films chosen will represent the cream of the Les Enfants Terribles of Cinema.”
Recovery House was shelved for some years due to director dissatisfaction and overall frustrations over stolen copies being distributed.
Director Kelly Broich explains:
“We filmed “Recovery House” on the spur of the moment without any thought and I wrote it as we went along over the course of a few weeks. We spent a long time editing the mess of footage and I came to conclusion that while it had its moments, it was deeply flawed from poor structure, to inconsistent lighting — sort of everything is wrong minus the acting. After it was whittled down to 45 minutes from 90, I decided I hated it and would never release it.
Somehow a copy of it was leaked and DVDs made and it’s become popular in the ‘stoner community.’ I’ve even heard reports of a Los Angeles ‘heroin house’ where about 30 junkies get high every night and watch it.
I’ve been told Joaquin Phoenix is a fan of it and has given screenings at his house.
I still hate it. It’s a failure. And now somehow a UK-based film festival is screening it. if you ever come across a DVD of it, please throw it in the garbage where it belongs.”
Kelly Broich
Nevertheless Eli Elliott who stars in the film submitted it to STRAIGHTJACKET, a festival he surmised was the real deal (Broich begrudgingly agreed) and it was accepted.
Go to this link — STRAIGHTJACKET GUERRILLA FILM FESTIVAL — and click on the FILMS tab, then look for RECOVERY HOUSE.
Let us know what you make of it.
“Eat Your Vegetables” A short story by Kelly Broich
JOEY
Eat Your Vegetables
Joey heard Charles climb the creaky stairs, the opening of the bolted door and saw his daddy enter his room palming a head of wet lettuce. Charles was dressed in tan Dockers and a yellow golf shirt that read CromNet across his left breast. His blond hair was neatly trimmed and his face clean-shaven.
“You are going to eat this,” Charles said holding up the head of lettuce.
“I don’t like lettuce,” Joey replied.
“Get in your goddamned highchair!”
Scared, Joey scrambled off his red racecar bed and squeezed himself into the metal highchair.
“I work goddamn hard at the Internet company to get food to feed you and goddamn if you’re not going to eat your vegetables.”
Charles had removed Joey from school a year ago when he was thirteen. Thirteen was the age a student was legally allowed to halt their studies.
Joey had said it a million times before and he said it again now:
“If Mommy was here she wouldn’t make me eat my vegetables and if she was here, I probably would.”
Charles lifted an inquisitive brow. “Has mommy been trying to send you telepathic messages from heaven again? Did you rip the tinfoil?”
“Yes, and she said I didn’t have to eat my vegetables, but I didn’t rip the tinfoil.”
“I call bullshit, Joey,” Charles said, inspecting the floor-to-ceiling tinfoil. “Because I know for a fact that tinfoil keeps out all telepathic transmissions and I don’t see any holes or tears.”
Joey, wearing his silk pajamas with white trim, stared at Charles from his highchair with pert lips, his blue eyes offering nothing.
“You have an I.Q. of 80. You’re practically a retard staring at me with your dumb eyes. You know that?”
“Yes. I know, Daddy.”
Charles walked over and told Joey to open his mouth. Joey tightened his lips. Charles squished his mouth open and pressed the head of lettuce against it.
“Bite. I work hard at the Internet company to buy this food and I want you to eat your goddamned vegetables. Now take a bite. If you don’t, you’re going to die, Joey. You’re going to die of malnutrition.”
Joey batted the head of lettuce away. It came to rest near an empty glass container of chocolate milk next to his racecar bed.
“I need to go poopie,” Joey said.
Charles sighed. “Fine. Take your poopie and then you’re eating the lettuce.”
“Okay, Daddy,” Joey said.
Joey hopped off his highchair and entered his tiny bathroom. Charles had taken off the lock, but Joey shut the door, lowered his bottoms and sat down on a white urine-stained toilet.
He grunted and squeezed and heard a plop. He got up and looked at a nearly perfectly round ball of poop with a small crevice. Joey wished more would come. His stomach hurt, but he was glad to get some out. He had awful gas and pangs of constipation.
He flushed the toilet without wiping and opened the door.
“Did you wash your hands?” Charles asked.
“I forgot, Dad.”
“Goddamnit.” Charles grabbed him by the nap of his neck, twisted on the water, rubbed blue soap over his hands and put them under the stream and then toweled them off.
“You’re bad, Joey. Nothing but a tack in my ass. A dozen tacks in my ass.”
“I don’t mean to be tacks in your ass, Daddy.”
“Well, you are. Same routine every day.”
“Yesterday it was radishes and I had gone poopie earlier.”
“It doesn’t matter the type of vegetable, Joey. You won’t eat them is the point.”
It was true, he wouldn’t eat his vegetables and his daddy had kept him locked in his room as punishment until he would. After mommy died and the fat cops had taken the neighbor away, Joey couldn’t eat his vegetables. He once loved them, because his mommy had a garden teeming with all sorts of vegetables, and she loved them. Her garden was her passion and he associated eating vegetables with his love for his mommy. However, when the neighbor man ‘violated her love flower and put her to sleep in the garden’ as daddy put it, he couldn’t eat them. Never would he eat them. Vegetables equaled emotional pain.
“I will never eat my vegetables, Daddy.” Joey said with finality.
Charles eyes shrunk into a glare and he angrily chewed his bottom lip. He then lifted Joey off his feet and tossed him on the racecar bed. He quickly grabbed the head of lettuce, squeezed open Joey’s mouth, and twisted the ball of lettuce side to side. Joey’s face turned red as he began to wheeze and choke. Daddy then punched his left leg. Daddy had yelled every day and tried force feeding Joey, but this was the first time he had struck him. Joey reached back and tore away a section of tin foil which did nothing but enrage his father further.
“I told you never to mess with the tinfoil. Never!” He grated the head of lettuce deeper into his mouth and jabbed his ribs repeatedly. Joey finally slapped the lettuce away. He spit out remnants, regained his breath and said Mommy had just telepathically communicated that he didn’t have to eat his vegetables ever. Even though it had never been fully explained to him, Joey understood that telepathic communication were messages silently spoken from mind to mind. His daddy had always believed in some strange things Mommy used to tell him. It was harmless she had said. Silly distractions to keep him not so bitter about his underpaid and undervalued job at CromNet — the Internet company.
“Mommy also said you should let me leave my room.”
Charles stood up, hands on his hips and stared at Joey with fire. Joey was going to do more than leave his room, Charles thought. This had gone on nearly two months and this day, it would end. He no longer cared if Joey was only thirteen and it was his parental obligation to keep him until eighteen. He grabbed Joey’s ankles and pulled him from the bedroom, down the carpeted stairs, through the living room and down the concrete steps outside the house and into the yard.
Joey stood up, felt the back of his head and saw blood on his fingers.
“That hurt, Daddy!”
“You are no longer my son. Go!”
“But I don’t have any shoes.”
Without sitting, Charles pulled off his leather shoes and threw them at Joey who sat down on the grass in front of their two-story brick house and put them on. They were many sizes too big.
“You just go now,” Charles said.
Joey stood and shrugged. “Okay, Daddy. Can I keep in touch with you telepathically?”
“You can try whatever you want, but I’m going to tinfoil the entire house.”
“What happens if you’re at work?” Joey asked. “The Internet company won’t let you tinfoil your office.”
“You’re a smartass. The worst smartass I ever knew. Get off my property!”
“Okay. Bye, Dad,” Joey said.
Joey turned and walked away. He would walk the many miles to the river and swim in his underwear, he thought. Swimming was something he and his mommy once liked to do when he was much littler and she was alive; however, he promised himself as he walked down a sidewalk in his over-sized leather shoes, he would never eat another vegetable never, ever even if it meant he became malnourished and died.
Kelly Broich is the author of the novel PRECIOUS. He is also the author of the video below.
Eli E. and Kelly B. – Improvisation Collaborations 2012
Recently a collaboration took place between two Absurdist Video Artists, Kelly Broich the ringleader of COLLLAPSE productions, and Eli Elliott who’s been traveling around via greyhound bus . He recently made his second visit to Collapse Studios in Boise, Idaho. The last time, a few years ago, a number of shorts were shot, and a feature film was rumored to have been completed (yet never released).
This time around a series of improvisational pieces were performed, filmed and edited.
The “Eli E and Kelly B Sessions” proved to maintain, if not improve upon, the oddity, absurdity, and bizarro visual imagery of their cinematic collaboration history.
Here are the completed sessions:
“You Can’t But We Can” is a sequel of sorts to an earlier performance between Eli E and Kelly B called INCHWORM . This time around “the band” expands a bit while the sounds improve.
Kelly B brings back his character JIMMY for this brief trigger piece. Eli plays Jimmy’s pink colored seizure.
The two turn to brutally subjecting the viewer with an 11 minute aurora of audio “sound healing”. Theta Brain Wave Therapy.
Kelly B. performs a shop-vac solo:
Apparently, Eli E. underwent a “screen test” for an upcoming production slated for 2013.
Some avant garde penis enlargement commercials were also filmed, but were quickly banned from YouTube and 5 other video sharing websites.
PRECIOUS – A Novel by Collapse’s Kelly Broich
Kelly Broich is mainly known for being the front man for COLLAPSE, the video art/filmmaking/ex-theater group out of Boise, Idaho. But with a new release this week, he unveils another side not involving cameras or actors. Apparently, in between productions, Broich has been laboring away at a literary work of satire. A novel called PRECIOUS.
I say laboring because PRECIOUS is a book which after reading had me wondering if novel writing will be more of a full-time devotion for Broich. It’s a very well-written book. And if you didn’t know his other side you’d think his main craft was novel writing, rather than, directing, scriptwriting and performing in an avant-garde production company.
PRECIOUS starts somewhere in suburban America, with a classic suburbanite heavyset woman, a widow named DORIS, who just lost her cat. Tension mounts as Precious the cat fails to surface after the usual calling out and waiting time is employed. Then a grisly discovery is made.
Soon after, we are introduced to CALEB, Doris’s 42 year old live at home son, who works as an equipment manager for the local minor league hockey team. Caleb learns of his “sisters” fate, and is stung to the core at the loss for many of the usual reasons one loses a pet, but mainly for another reason: a fantasy-based, bordering on perverted, reason, which reveals the Caleb character more fully.
The loss of Precious requires drastic action to be taken. For reasons of closure and for reasons of revenge. Also, for reasons of a newfound cable television based religion.
From here the novel sends you on an absurdist fictional journey, which is based on very realistic ingrained human beliefs. The unimagined consequences spiral into a bizarre and chilling climax. An excellent last chapter wraps the story up, and you’re left with a slew of satirical yet true to life issues for the mind to gnaw on over the coming days.
PRECIOUS is both an American novel and a human novel.
Broich manages to cover a fair chunk of classic Americana in very short time. Suburbia, sports addiction, American huckster religion, mindless consumerism, and classic overbearing parenting, are all succinctly tackled to impressive depth. They are also dealt with in a unique descriptive and often hilarious style. Caleb’s absurd athletic failings are that which you wouldn’t think. Instead of relying on beauty, Broich goes with chubby. Sex is handled in a rare way; the way it actually is in real life, simple and sloppy.
The human aspect of the novel centers on a few different themes, one of which is the relationship we have with nature.
PRECIOUS puts into play the idea of how humans create parameters as to what they accept as worthy animals, to be cuddled and “owned”, and unworthy animals to be shun, and even exterminated. Yet both belong to the same club, with the same instincts; yet exist within these different parameters based on the living situation which humans have established.
It’s this mix of going from sanitized suburbia, directly into the complexities of nature, that really make Precious a strong, solid read, with deeper issues to explore. Intertwining these two in such a seamless satirical manner, had me questioning the absurdity of our living situation and the boundaries that we pretend exist, but in reality are invisible. Caleb physically crosses those boundaries as he takes a few steps out of a manufactured neighborhood and enters into “nature”. And then he invades nature. All because the reverse had happened, and humans believe that somehow both sides should be able to see and respect these imaginary boundaries which they created, which of course is illogical thinking.
Perhaps it is Caleb’s simpleton nature which summons up a natural sense of overwhelming guilt for realizing he fell for the lie. While ingrained in the life of a sugar eating, living with mommy adult, he hasn’t had the commitments that most adults have had, thus he never developed a sense of ownership into a way of life which rationalizes the above boundaries. There is still some natural animalistic instinct in Caleb, to which he connects with. As we see unfold in the pages of PRECIOUS, this connection with the animal can be a redeeming and reassuring positive. But mixed with the human ego, it can also be a devastating and diabolical negative.
The theme of the imaginary boundary is satirized in different situations throughout the novel. The idea of crossing over to the other side and being accepted, the divide of deceased father and the still trying to please son, the boundary crossing of calling your mom a cunt; all explored in gut hilarious fashion.
PRECIOUS will have you connecting with the characters, laughing at their situations, and questioning the motives behind the bizarre human connectivity we have with nature and with our own manufactured reality.
author Kelly Broich
PRECIOUS is now available on Amazon. Get it here.
More Absurd Bizarreness from COLLAPSE
AVA reviewer Brian Burks takes on the latest Absurdist endeavours from theater and video art troupe, COLLAPSE.
“Bear Killin’,” the short video piece directed by video artist Kelly Broich, featuring performance artist Anne McDonald, is one of the strangest clown videos I’ve seen this month. The film shows a female clown knifing and then ripping apart a stuffed Winnie the Poo holding a heart that says “I Love You.” It is tempting to apply meaning to this film, even if no real meaning exists. The symbolic imagery seems to suggest a sort of deconstruction of childhood motifs common to Western culture.
The stuffed toy bear, a source of bedtime comfort to so many children is dismembered by a clown, of all things, the traditional source of entertainment at birthday parties, fairs and circuses. This revolting clown then proceeds to try on Winnie the Poo’s head. After trying on the freshly butchered skin, we hit our dramatic finale when the heartless clown tears open Winnie’s heart.
The video is fascinating and disturbing, unnerving and thrilling; it is painful, yes, yet it can also be therapeutic if embraced with open legs.
Thankfully this video was short because it aggravates my coulrophobia, but a perverted, courageous side of me wanted to overcome my fear of this multicolored monster so I proceeded to watch the homicidal clown kill Winnie the Poo over and over, again and again and again.
Just look at this thing. Notice the mismatched gloves? One for killin’ and one for fashion? Who does it think it is?
The Collapse clowns don’t stop here…
Meet Boner Salad—part of Kollapse for Kidz.
“I’m your friend!”
This video is disturbing with the acidy pedophiliac basement feel, but easier to digest thematically… Boner Salad is revealing and demystifying the bitter truth of the world, and he’s doing it to our children: he’s waking them up to the realities they certainly won’t understand as toddlers and will probably never understand as adults.
”Life is meaningless, there is no God, and babies are bad,” says Boner Salad in a delightfully sardonic voice. Boner’s message to the “kidz,” and the moral of this video piece seems to be that the more babies we create the faster we eat the earth. We must accept the simple truth that life is ultimately meaningless, God’s laws are nothing short of arbitrary dogma, and His word amounts to nothing more than fairy tales with which we abuse our children. It is time to throw off the cultural and religious blinders that are directing us toward species suicide.
But maybe not. Maybe Boner Salad is just a dickhead who likes to scare little kids.
I fired off Facebook questions to both Broich and McDonald for more clarity as to the motives and inspirations behind these pieces. This is what I received in return:
“Many in the Collapse cult are undergoing a metamorphosis,” said McDonald. “These are no longer costumes. Clowns are who we are becoming, who we want to be, clowns are who we really are… inside.”
Broich sent back a clown painting made as a child with a simple “artistic statement”: “It is a 1989 self-portrait of my true inner-clown.”
From the above painting we can see that Broich’s genius was obvious even as a child, though nobody of significance noticed in time to save him from himself.
Brian Burks teaches ancient Esperanto at Carrington College and is a freelance art critic.
ABSURDIST VIDEO ART 