Electroyiddish

[imomus]

Artist: Tamy Ben-Tor.
Age: 30.
City: New York.
College: Columbia MFA program.
Background: Experimental theatre in Israel.
Current Style: Video cabaret.
Breakthrough video: "Women Talk About Adolf Hitler", shown at the Greater New York show at PS1, summer 2005.
First solo show: "Exploration in the domain of Idiocy" at Zach Feuer (also my gallery) New York, November 2005 - January 2006.
Jerry Saltz's take: "A hair-raising fusion of Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Alex Bag, Kafka, the Yiddish theater, and Greek tragedy."
Other apt comparisons: Vice magazine, The Onion, mid-period Momus, Serge Gainsbourg circa "Rock Around the Bunker", comedian Sarah Silverman.

Characters played by Tamy Ben-Tor (descriptions by Saltz):

Exotica: A bizarre Leni Riefenstahl–like grande dame in a gold gown. Entering with an ersatz Sufi dance, she rhapsodizes about loving herself and talks about helping the poor in Marrakech and India. She is "white mischief" personified, the pretentious seeker who "discovers herself" in faraway lands but who is perpetually unaware of the havoc she wreaks.

The Rat: A harrowing Nazi-youth type who madly beats tiny tambourines against her thighs and rants in gutter German about America, capitalism, and cappuccino. A noxious banshee and wounded animal, she yelps, "America, count your days. We, the intellectual, civilized, enlightened Europeans protest."

Scandinavian Academic: Babbles about "the white man's obsession with the threat of the darker man" and the supercilious American who links shopping with greatness.

Wild-Haired Suburban Rapper: Repeatedly intones, "How can you deny the Holocaust?" after which she mimics racial stereotypes.

Batty "gender studies" writer: Prattles about how Hitler "didn't like dentists" and was "ashamed of his knees"

Southern author of "Healing Hitler": Talks about "coming to terms with evil".

Distraught Eastern European: Fumes "Hitler makes me so ill I refuse to even talk about him".

Ditzy Mitzi: Giggles that she likes his little mustache.

Morose Girl: Laments "my parents never told me about Hitler."

Prim Wraith: Dons a Hitler mustache and caresses a portrait of the führer.

Russian Prostitute: Utters malicious slurs about Arabs.

Middle Eastern contractor: Bitterly complains about what he has to do to earn money.

Source of these cameos: The Jerry Saltz pieces here.

Media files: Slate offers a video clip of Ben-Tor as Alejandra, a woman who can't love other people unless she loves herself.

And here's a radio file of Electroyiddish, a cabaret performed as part of the PS1 Greater New York show.

Highlight quote from cabaret: "This performance is dedicated to peace. If Jews and Nazis lived together, what a world it could be."

Reminder: Momus performs four songs at PS1 this evening between 5pm and 6pm as part of cabaret-and-coloring event Coloring Book. Momus will be joined on stage by Mai Ueda.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Scoreboard:

Ben-tor = 1
Id-iot = 0

[bricology.livejournal.com]

I dunno...although I haven't seen her spiel, it seems to me that--from the voluminous exposition above--Ms. Ben-Tor is still batting zero. Rather like the wind-up and the punch lines being handed out to the audience ahead of time. We can imagine the wacky hijinks that would ensue, and thus not bother sitting through the performance.

Ms. Ben-Tor dares to mock Leni Riefenstahl, Scandinavian academics and American consumers?! Quel courage! I noticed that one character Ms. Ben-Tor is playing was omitted: that of the lefty Jewish performance artist who presumes that audiences find such drivel amusing. Perhaps she should add another character: the jaded gentile art-consumer who's seen this sort of thing in too many self-indulgent performances over the past 25 years.

I mean no knock on Nick for posting this. I presume he's actually seen it, and is thus qualified to write with more authority on it than any of us, even if I find her performance's premise stultifyingly tedious. And I'm grateful for him providing the venue for us to dissect and criticize, such as we do.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

With the heavy investment in their degrees and connections, ArtWorld artists now rarely seem interested in finding new ways to be wrong, which is probably why they fail.

Just a crackpot theory, mind you—but that's the way it looks from my porch.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

...but then, this begs the question: what exactly separates Tamy's work from, say, Matthew Barney's? Is it merely the heightened degree of spectacle, or is there more to it?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

...or is it that one body of work feels inspired, while the other feels forced? (shrug)

[bricology.livejournal.com]

I can't claim to be Matthew Barney's biggest fan, but for me, part of what justifies his work is that he is presenting us with visual metaphors. Ms. Ben-Tor, on the other hand, seems to merely be presenting stereotypes disguised as individuals, and propaganda tarted up as irony. I'd go a step further and suggest that what she's doing isn't "art" at all, but rather something more like stand-up comedy, with the usual suspects as targets.

Really: other than budget and scale, how much difference is there between what Ms. Ben-Tor is attempting and what Chaplin did with "The Great Dictator", or Jack Benny with "To Be or Not To Be"? Well, that was 60 years ago. If there was an artist today *cough*Wim*Delvoye*cough* who produced, packaged and sold excrement as a dig at art-as-commerce, shouldn't we feel justified in clearing our throats and mentioning that Piero Manzoni already did that 40 years earlier, and considerably more incisively?

Maybe Ms. Ben-Tor's shtick is the inevitable product of a jaded art world that finds some comfort in the tried-and-true, just as the consumers of Thomas Kinkade's treacly paintings are comforted to see images that remind them of a halcyon past that never really existed. Ben-Tor's stuff pushes the good ol' buttons of self-righteousness, self-doubt and self-loathing. And if the rubes in the audience complain, it's easy to say that "they just don't get it". No one likes to be left out of the joke, right?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Archetype vs. Cliche?

Tracey Ullman came to mind, but I thought I might get the "glass houses" clause invoked against me, and I have enough personal Iliads at the moment.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

I think that's another point in Barney's favor: if he's dealing with archetpes (and I think a case could be made that he is), they tend to be disguised or in multiple layers. This not only allows him the freedom to create something recognizably his own, it allows us to experience something new.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

You and me get along just fine, Bricology the Mexican Luchiadore.