First Takes
PERHAPS THE ONLY THING that
exceeds the hysteria within Tamy Ben-Tor’s performances and videos is the
degree of hysteria about them.
Although she has lived in New York City only for a year and half, having moved
here to attend Columbia University’s MFA program, Ben-Tor has already enchanted
the city’s art audiences with a series of short performances and
performance-based videos that exude a distinctive, meaningful lunacy and
reflect a sensibility located somewhere between art-world touchstone Cindy
Sherman and the distant shoals of Ali G.
The foundation for the
artist’s live and recorded work alike is an ever-expanding catalogue of
eccentric characters who rant about a world plagued by xenophobia, bigotry,
violence, self-absorption, and greed—characteristics they often paradoxically
both criticize and embody. Throughout, the thirty-year-old artist morphs
effortlessly from one sharply drawn persona to the next with the simplest
changes of clothing, accessories, and impeccably realized accents, revealing
the finely honed theatrical skills she developed at the School of Visual
Theater in her hometown of
In a related vein, Ben-Tor’s
latest work, Girls Beware, 2005,
presents a quintet of new portraits. The video begins with a gyrating woman
singing in Arabic in front of a simulated Times Square-like streetscape while
an English translation of the lyrics flashes on the screen, warning young girls
to beware of Arab men who might try to seduce them. In the next scene a Russian
prostitute listlessly recites in Hebrew every Arab slur she can conjure. Next,
an “academic” offers her theory about “the penetration of the foreign man’’ and
“the white man’s obsession with the darker man.” From there,
we jump-cut to a bearded guy in dark sunglasses rattling off lascivious sweet
nothings, as if to charm a young girl. Right on cue, a young girl
(albeit one in a pig-face mask) appears, dancing insanely in front of the
camera.
As these descriptions
suggest, Ben-Tor’s characters are grotesque amalgamations culled from her
incisive observations of people she encounters. Emerging out of extracted
snippets of cultural difference distended to bizarre extremes, her humorous
portrayals skewer conservatives and liberals alike by uprooting familiar moral
anchors of right and wrong, good and evil, with illogical explanations and
nonsensical commentaries. These seething medleys recall, in certain respects,
the one-woman shows of such performance artists as Dael Orlandersmith, Sarah
Jones, or even early Lily Tomlin—all known for work featuring their swift, intricate
character transformations. However, Ben-Tor has thus far chosen to refute
extended character treatments and does not develop analogous, rewarding
theatrical journeys. Instead, she favors fragments and interruptions more familiar to television skit comedies designed
for an aware but also aloof ADD generation. Her mixing and matching of art,
television, and theatrical styles is perhaps not coincidental. In one breath,
Ben-Tor cites as influences Woody Allen, Paul McCarthy, and the playwright
Richard Maxwell. Her cavalcade
continues in her live performances, such as Exotica,
the Rat, and the Liberal, 2005. This continually evolving piece begins with
the appearance of a grand dame who, decked out in a fur-trimmed gold lame coat,
rhapsodizes pompously in English and German about India, Marrakech, and other “exotic”
locales. Next up is “the Rat,” a crazed Nazi-youth type, who beats a pair of
tambourines while issuing a tirade about the loathsomeness of
cappuccino-swilling American liberals. Then, in comes the liberal, who in
various versions of the piece has taken different forms, but who is always wan and
passive, and often prone to wishy-washy statements like “Let’s agree to
disagree.”
Throughout her work,
Ben-Tor destroys, parodies, and distorts conventional speech, intermixing
Arabic, Yiddish, German, Hebrew, and English, ensuring that, for most viewers,
significant sections come off as highly charged gobbledygook. Nevertheless, her
work is as much about what you hear
as what you see.
Language
becomes an unreliable tool that fails to communicate, causing tension and
misunderstanding. For Ben-Tor, both identity and difference have linguistic
origins, whereby language is the primary marker against which we perceive
something to be foreign, alien, or exotic. In this respect her work recalls the
mid-twentieth-century Theater of the Absurd and its startling attack a on rational thought and conventional dramatic structure,
which reflected a profound distrust of language’s ability to convey meaning. In
Ben-Tor’s art, similar subversive attacks and futile efforts are at play as she
tries, in her words, “to embody the position of saying the wrong thing in order
to communicate a certain truth.” Her Sisyphean characters, however, perpetually
fail, stranded as they are in the “domain of idiocy,’’ as she calls it. But it
is in precisely this domain that the universe expands in exhilarating ways.
Liberated from logic, it turns out, nonsense offers us
new possibilities for comprehension.
DEBRA SINGER IS EXECUTIVE
DIRECTOR AND CHIEF CURATOR OF THE KITCHEN IN