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<\/p>\n\u201cDad\u2019s most meaningful gamble in his lifetime was buying a 130 acre dairy farm, in Gotham, Maine,\u201d writes Melonie Bennett (born 1969) in her arresting debut, Holy Cow!. Drawn from two decades\u2019 of work taken between 1990 and 2011, Bennett captures the dramas, dancing, dogs and drunken exploits of a family in full flow, a madcap album documenting everything from Christmases and pregnancies to bike crashes and bee stings. \u201cI sometimes wonder how we all get through this soap opera that is our life,\u201d wrote the poet Frank O\u2019Hara, a line suggesting something of the routine chaos of the Bennett farm, the stresses and the celebrations, the losses and the laughter.<\/p>\n
The looming threat of health concerns and economic hardship are never far from Bennett\u2019s world<\/p>\n
\u201cI was always looking for what could be described as the absurd and the unexpected,\u201d notes Bennett, who worked as an assistant to photographer Judy Glickman for more than 30 years. \u201cI love to point things out that I can\u2019t believe are happening in front of me and share them. Look at this! Can you believe that? What were they thinking?\u201d The photographs in Holy Cow! are stuffed with such absurdity, each scene hazy with the buzz of a few beers, whether reliving Mechanical Bull Night at the Memory Lane Music Hall or one brother removing stitches from the eyebrow of another with a pair of toenail clippers.<\/p>\n
\u2018Laughing and bewildered\u2019<\/p>\n
While there is plenty of horsing around in these pictures\u2014not least at \u201cChrissy\u2019s X-rated Bachelorette\u201d and \u201cMary\u2019s Naughty Toy Party\u201d\u2014the looming threat of punch-ups, health concerns and economic hardship are never far from Bennett\u2019s world. One picture shows a freshly KO\u2019d friend sprawled flat out on the asphalt. Another sees her father in the hospital recovering from an operation to replace both of his knees, the inevitable consequence of \u201crepetitive work on the farm\u201d.<\/p>\n
Bennett\u2019s photographs are interspersed with anecdotes related by her brother, Merritt, outlandish tales of house fires and outrunning the cops that would never fail to leave the family both \u201claughing and bewildered\u201d.<\/p>\n
These contradictory strains of laughter and bewilderment are clear within the photographs. Bennett\u2019s pictures fizz with moments of hilarity, documenting endless pranks and slapstick: kids setting off fireworks and spraying relatives with hosepipes; beer bellies placed proudly either side of a young woman, nine months pregnant. What is more, the characters in Bennett\u2019s photographs are frequently in costume\u2014Batman outfits, KISS make-up, a rescue dog in cowboy boots\u2014a sense of non-stop, delirious theatricality where no gag is off-limits. One picture shows Bennett\u2019s nephews playing cards wearing their auntie\u2019s bras, just one of several instances of cross-dressing and dressing up that gesture to the photographs of Diane Arbus.<\/p>\n
An ode to Bennett\u2019s father<\/p>\n
\u201cHumour and irony were commodities worth more than anything in my household,\u201d writes Bennett, \u201ca reprieve from the daunting heaviness\u201d of the family\u2019s financial troubles and her father\u2019s alcoholism, to say nothing of his \u201csevere thyroid condition, which\u2026 frankly, caused him to behave crazy\u201d. While Holy Cow! is dedicated to her mother\u2014conspicuously absent from the work itself\u2014the publication steadily unfolds into an ode to Bennett\u2019s father, Fred. His eccentricity and playfulness are obvious, whether brandishing the torch taped to his air rifle to help fend off invading skunks, or pictured crossing foam swords with his grandson in the kitchen; readying himself to thwack a dangling pi\u00f1ata or, in one image, appearing topless in the false nose, fake moustache and glasses of a plastic Groucho Marx disguise. Nevertheless, despite his comedy credentials, Holy Cow! hints at a story of both physical and cognitive decline, transforming Bennett\u2019s photographs into a moving elegy not only to her father but to the period the work depicts, a sober celebration of \u201cthe ordinary improbability that occurs \/ over and over,\u201d writes poet Hayden Carruth, \u201cthe stupendousness \/ of life\u201d.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Monique Instigating the First Water Fight of the Season (1993) \u00a9 the artist<\/p>\n
Holy Cow! reveals what feels like an essential truth, that choosing to take photographs is an act of serious devotion, to family and friends and objects, to places and homes, to pets, a favourite car or jacket, to small moments of beauty, even gentleness and love. Bennett ends her book with a quotation from Marilyn Monroe, serving as both the summary of and mantra for a well-lived life: \u201cImperfection is beauty, madness is genius, and it\u2019s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.\u201d<\/p>\n
Melonie Bennett, Holy Cow!, GOST Books, 176pp, 66 b\/w illus., \u00a340 (hb), published UK\/EU 14 May and US JuneRowland Bagnall is a writer and poet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cDad\u2019s most meaningful gamble in his lifetime was buying a 130 acre dairy farm, in Gotham, Maine,\u201d writes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":592075,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,288,308,93,61,60,266,115],"class_list":["post-592074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-books","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-photography","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/592075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}