Industrial Carnival was weird, but it sure was art
By SANDRA THOMPSON
Published May 8, 2004
It was an otherworldly thing to see a pale horse standing outside the Bustillo Cigar Factory in west Tampa last Friday night, but there it was. A real live horse, and people all over the place, and cars parked everywhere on the grounds of the big building.
Across the street, a family had come outside in their fenced yard with their poodle, the missus already ready for bed. There goes the neighborhood, these residents might have been thinking. Let the artists in and you never know when you might see a horse on your block.
But it was only for one night.
It was called Industrial Carnival in its promo postcard, "A Spectacle of Enigmatic Kenetics and Shocking Sensations of Alarming Absurdity." I had picked up the postcard - a photo montage of a factory, weird machines, guys in haz-mat suits and an elephant - last week at Covivant Gallery on N Florida Avenue. I had absolutely no idea what an industrial carnival might be, but cigar factories have a certain karma, and things that happen inside them tend to be interesting.
My husband maneuvered our car into a space in the mud and we walked past the horse. Inside on the second floor, among some eight-foot marionettes, I signed us in and asked how many people where there. "About 400," was the answer.
The large room was packed with people, of course, but also with a lot of machines that were very weird indeed. They had moving parts and did various things, none of which were actually useful, but gave a Jules Verne kind of feel to the room.
There was a sideshow with photos of freaks of nature, especially genitalia, though they were not necessarily in the right body locations, and a barker selling plastic bottles of snake oil that were actually apple martinis. The mostly young people were dressed in some strange outfits, some of them clearly costumes, others just the ordinary clothes worn by art students. A very small woman wore black platform boots that weighed more than she did.
There was a long line for beer, no line for hot dogs sizzling on a revolving grill. My husband threw a couple of rings at the poles on the top hat worn by a young woman on stilts. He missed but got a prize anyway. Everyone was in a good mood. It was a carnival, after all.
There were bands, Chaotic Formula and Dialect.
In the middle of it all, a guy was up on a ladder with a power drill, and we wondered if he was part of the show. As it turned out, he was behind the show.
His name is Jeff Stover, I found out when I called a few days later, and this was his senior project as a 3-D art major at USF. Oh, I had no idea.
He had help from "a lot of people," he said, especially sculpture professor Richard Beckman and his intermediate sculpture class as well as other artists from USF and beyond. Jeff made three of the machines. Experimental Skeleton, a group of avant-garde artists, did the sideshow.
It was still early. The crowd may have swelled to 700 later, though they weren't all there at the same time, but surely informed persons (unlike us) wouldn't have left before Wrestlwomania, a performance that involved women, wrestling, chocolate and a band called Chocolate Chariot.
Not everything worked out quite as planned. Machines kept breaking down, he said, and a New York artist who'd come couldn't do her performance, because it was a) too intimate for the carny-like atmosphere and b) involved a very, very long train (as in gown) and on this rainy night with several hundred people in out of the mud, the floor was too dirty.
And the horse?
Actually the horse wasn't part of the carnival at all. It belonged to another USF art project, on the third floor, by Lynne Williams. Like the wrestling, we didn't know it was there.
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Not all architects are the same. You probably knew that and so do I, but it didn't look that way in last week's column. So, to clear things up: The architect responsible for the renovation of the Arlington Hotel is Stephanie Ferrell. Her office is around the corner at 1110 N Florida Ave. The offices of Atelier Architects, who did the Sanctuary Lofts, are at 1607 N Franklin St.
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- Sandra Thompson, a Tampa writer, can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com City Life appears on Saturday.
