Time Out New York,
April 10-17, 2003
Get real
Two contemporary Israeli artists subvert the
documentary tradition
By David Deitcher
Thanks to the ubiquity of digital manipulation and the success of
postmodernist critiques, nobody seems to take photography’s ability to inspire
belief seriously anymore. During the 1980s, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince
were among the many emerging postmodernists who developed deconstructionist
strategies to undermine photography’s ostensible veracity that have since become
de rigeur in vanguard art. At stake was the way that photography’s power to
convince makes prevailing (and frequently unjust) social and political
conditions seem natural and thus immutable. But now something else may be at
stake: photography’s capacity to bear witness to actual events. These thoughts
come to mind after seeing the work of two Israeli-born artists at neighboring
Chelsea galleries.
Omer Fast’s show at Postmasters includes two video installations. A
Tank Translated (2002) is a quartet of video monitors, each showing an interview
with one of the four young crew members of an Israeli army tank, shot in medium
close-up and conducted in Hebrew. The combination of overlapping voices and low
volume makes it hard even for Hebrew speakers to understand what’s being said.
Speed readers can catch the interviewee’s words on English subtitles at the
bottom of each screen – or some of their words, anyway. Fast “disrupts” the
flow of language by causing some words suddenly to vanish and others just as
suddenly to be replaced with words the speaker never spoke, in order to
emphasize the artificial nature of the interview – its status as a kind of
cinematic genre. The logic behind this tactic, which renders the content of
what was said largely incomprehensible, is consistent with the critique of
documentary film that paralleled postmodern art’s assault on photographic
“truth.”
Fast continues his reflexive ways in the gallery’s second room, where
two wall-mounted monitors show evocative footage of a desolate Eastern European
city and interviews in which Polish men and women expound on their
understanding of the racial characteristics that led them to be “selected.”
Given the context, one initially assumes that they mean being selected for
concentration camp. But the work’s title – Spielberg’s List (2003) –
along with the youthfulness of some interview subjects and occasional
references to their destinies as either Jews of Germans, eventually lead one to
realize that these Poles were chosen not for internment in a nearby historic
death camp but for roles as “extras” in the Auschwitz segment of Schindler’s
List. From Fast’s installation we learn that Spielberg staged his mass
deportation of the Jews to his faux death camp in the wrong direction because
anachronistic-looking postwar urban development lay in the historically
accurate direction, and that tourists on Schindler’s List bus tours now
visit the abandoned site of Spielberg’s “concentration camp.” Whoever said that
irony is dead must be staying away from Chelsea.
If this work is objectionable – and I think that it is – it’s not
because it trivializes the Holocaust. It’s because it smugly suggests an
equivalence between the theater of war and the theatricality of a Hollywood
movie in a way that (presumably) unintentionally, yet still heedlessly,
participates in the nullification of historical memory.
This vaudeville of historical memory assumes a different form in Adi Nes’s
seductive color photographs of hot Israeli youths now showing at Jack Shainman.
A group of dreamy guys in olive drab doze tenderly in each other’s arms in one
of the show’s many paeans to homosocial eroticism. One hardly needs to be told
that Nes’s photographs are elaborately staged mise-en-scènes. Tintoretto’s Death
of Adonis informs his image of women mourning over a dead youth whose body
lies in a dusty street, while a photograph of muscular soldiers up to their
chests in water refers to an iconic 1967 Life magazine picture of
Israeli soldiers bathing in the Suez Canal. But it is contemporary exemplars
like Collier Schorr and Jeff Wall who really haunt Nes’s work, underscoring its
predictability in an art world that, given the present geopolitical crisis,
needs to rethink some cherished assumptions about how art and photography can
best address the mess that we’re in.