Last night was my introduction to the Jerusalem art community and it was quite an experience. There was a night of performance art at the Anna Ticho House - a kind of mansion converted into a museum and restaurant. Lesson of the day was: performance art is really weird, but can also be interesting.
In the entrance hall, a stilted bride stood, heavily breathing into a piece of tubing which was inflating her swollen belly. She was creepy and sort of frightening.
Upstairs, two young women discussed opposites (e.g. - Q:"what's the opposite of my mother?"... A:"a blue sky") while the famed trouser-less zebra circled and contorted itself.
One of my favorites was a video which showed the artist (mysteriously accompanied by an Arab man with a head-covering) reciting the names of what sounded like all of the people she'd ever met, sometimes indicating the nature of their relationship, such as: "Adi Koren hugged me through the car window", or "I know something about Adit Steinberg that she thinks I don't know." This went on for about twelve minutes and I thought it was a very interesting way of getting at who a person is. After a while, you start to think of the artist as being defined by all the people she knows, and their interactions. (I'm not quite sure why the last few minutes consisted of her and her Arab accompanier passionately making out, but hey, I guess you can't understand it all)
I also liked the two men, sitting back-to-back in a cage-like structure. They were in the process of sketching what they saw at every angle on small scraps of paper, which were then pasted to the cage - blotting out their actual vision and replacing it with the sketched representation.
I liked the idea, although the performance may have taken it a bit too literally for my tastes.
The other exhibits included a group of blind-folded girls slowly dancing around with each other and a video in which the artist played a number of different characters, which included a Russian girl dancing to a folk-tune which was actually a quote from Primo Levy - it was very funny, but I think you had to be there.
Perhaps the best 'performance' of the evening, however, was not actually part of the show. During the video presentation, a religious looking man, who I supposed had just eaten dinner there passed us sitting on the stairs and called out, "It's amazing what people will watch. All this vile trash is typical of the Chiloni (secular Israeli) culture." Now I guess you can't totally blame him - at that point, we were watching as the person on screen bit off the tips of fruit roll-up wrapped fingers or slowly ingested a number of pearls while pasted-on cartoon-eyes danced to the music. Certainly a style of art that is...well, I'll be generous...inaccessible to many people, especially those used to pretty paintings of the old-city or floral designs around quotes from psalms. But the timing of his performance was flawless and sent my friends and I into fits of laughter. Oh well, I guess performance art isn't for everyone. But at least everyone can participate.
1 comment:
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