Nothing But Balloons at the Park Avenue Armory

The underwater-themed hall at “Balloon Story.” Photo: Andrew Shelley

A two-month-long immersive experience at the Park Avenue Armory will close this Sunday with a “popping party,” when a throng of happy families who will have paid $60 for each child (and $65 for each adult) will burst more than half a million balloons. This ritualistic orgy of destruction will put an end to “Balloon Story” and its relatively successful run that’s seen upwards of 70,000 locals and tourists trek to the Upper East Side venue better known for its avant-garde art exhibitions and high-end book and furniture fairs.

Here, in this same drill hall, I’d seen Ai Weiwei unleash dozens of drones into the darkness to create a compelling meditation on the surveillance state; marveled at a 1962 Gio Ponti–designed hotel bed with a built-in headboard and a built-in radio — and once, at an antiquarian show, contemplated the exquisite, certainly poisonous green ink on a torn-out illuminated manuscript page. Now it had been transformed into a hallucinatory, latex-reeking wonderland of balloon landscapes, balloon landmarks, a balloon maze, and a balloon ball pit set to an ever-present soundscape of screaming, crying, laughing kids and their frazzled parents. The cavernous interior was divided into themed enclosures: a jungle with a stringy-looking lion peeping through bulbous foliage; a series of photo-op cubbies, each with a balloon-festooned backdrop; an underwater grotto topped by glowing jellyfish and a giant octopus; and what I can only infer was a nightclub, home to a few gruesome-looking musicians, one of whose instruments had evidently burst. It was an experiential frenzy without the projection mapping, without the Van Gogh or other name-brand artist, and it came with a specific provision: don’t touch, a tough mandate to enforce with a thousand small children tearing around.

A fraction of the massive ball pit “river” at Balloon Story. Photo: Sukjong Hong

Standing beside the ball pit — filled with plastic spheres, not balloons, and one of the only attractions that kids are invited to handle — one man looked on in wonder.

“They gotta power-wash ’em, right?” he said.

“They can’t clean all of ’em,” his companion replied, an opinion that seemed corroborated by the blue cotton-candy-coated faces of the children gleefully stepping in.

Photo: Andrew Shelley

The show’s art director, Kobi Kalimian, holds a certified balloon degree, which — and I would like to linger on this for a moment — can be obtained from a licensed trade group through an online course followed by an in-person practicum. You may wish to consider pursuing this line of work yourself, especially after you see what Kalimian and his team of collaborators are capable of: frothy milkshakes; the surface of the moon; a photo-op room with, for some reason, a non-balloon toilet in it. Much of this has been created by manipulating the balloons by hand, a process which sounds like palm-chafing hell and is. One balloon-gineer, manning a demonstration booth, confirmed to the crowd that all that squeezing and tying does get taxing, though he added that he also does carpentry, and “that hurts a lot more.” On a side note, if you decide on a career in the inflatable arts, it is important to remember (as per one industry website) to apply for insurance, in view that while “balloon injuries are uncommon, they’re not out of the question.”

Another comforting thought: The balloons at “Balloon Show” adhere to the stringent environmental standards of the Smart Balloon Practices Program, a sustainability initiative of the Coalition for Responsible Celebration. In an inspired public-relations maneuver, the exhibition’s contents will be recycled following Sunday’s mass implosion and turned into pet toys. This seems apt, since “Balloon Story” is teeming with bobbly animal life, including an eyeless French poodle who sits beside her chic-looking companion in front of the balloon Eiffel Tower. One day soon, perhaps, an actual poodle will chew on her reincarnation, and the cycle of life will continue.

A bald eagle composed of balloons greets everyone at the entrance to “Balloon Story.” Photo: Andrew Shelley

Alongside the ball pit, a menagerie of giant balloon animals. Photo: Andrew Shelley

The show has some surprising origins. Though the Park Armory show was created by an international group of artists, “Balloon Story” originated in Tel Aviv, where it had its first run last summer, and its production base remains there. That initial show apparently involved Muslim, Christian, and Jewish creators, according to Kalimian, or as he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “We were completely united. That was amazing to see, all sides of the political map, the religious map, together.” Whether there is a bigger message embedded in the pneumatics is hard to discern. Is the jazz band interfaith? Does that lion have thoughts on the war? Was Santa and his sleigh a concession to a more secular audience? One way or another, the political background makes the spectacle that much more surreal.

But then reality is also “Balloon Story”’s primary (and maybe its most commendable) asset. I’ve seen a couple of spectacles of the increasingly popular, digital variety, most recently in Tokyo, where the “Borderless” show from designers teamLab is at once an impressive feat of interactive technology and a grim preview of a dematerialized, desocialized future. Here at the Armory, even when throwing balls at video-game balloon targets on an oversize screen, kids must at least contend with gravity, see light bouncing off solid objects, and whiff the stale breath of strangers as air slowly escapes from the rubbery orbs all around them. “Balloon Story” may be a weird, politically ambiguous, and sensory-overloaded extravaganza. But at least it’s a real one.