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

[desant012.livejournal.com]

blehh, MFAs. The creative-world equivilant of the MBA.

[framework.livejournal.com]

Tami used to waitress with me at Pianos!

[bricology.livejournal.com]

Good ol' Hitler--the all-purpose content-provider when one needs to generate a buzz.

[queersolitude.livejournal.com]

its a small world. i love seeing comments like this.

[ex-newironsh15.livejournal.com]

but where would anal cunt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Just_Gets_Worse) be without it?

[desant012.livejournal.com]

Seriously. It's the same thing every time, isn't it?

That's it, I officially resign. All this pretentious, boring-life justifying art crap is getting sooooo lame. Where's the fun when everybody's too busy sniffing each other's ass? and rattling off the-most-obscure-thus-cool theorists/theories? Uhhhrrrr

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know about you but, i am gushing with envy. To rise to that level where one can distinguish oneself and mingle with similair entities... sigh. I'll be there someday.

this is retarded

[(Anonymous)]

c'mon momus you can do better than that. How exciting is this? Really.

[cityramica.livejournal.com]

well i'm plumb knackered.
i'm taking my crayons to bed.

[tassellrealm.livejournal.com]

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

Conasse.

[cityramica.livejournal.com]

'mid-period momus', eh?

[dayofthelocust.livejournal.com]

Finally, a Jewish liberal who isn't afraid to make funny business out of Hitler.

yawn again

[(Anonymous)]

so very 80's cable t.v.

[freesurfboards.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is a pretty negative reaction.
Still - given a certain way of thinking, if you push it far enough then all ways of living become ridiculous. By saying things are ridiculous then you get to be "above" the others by deconstructing them.
But it doesn't seem like she's about that pretension. It's important to examine these ways of living.

[(Anonymous)]

"They are all trying to communicate a certain truth, but are isolated in a domain of idiocy. The psychological state of people who try to grasp on to a truth, some sort of identity or ideology, which may be expressed simply in the subtlest form of 'being themselves' interests me."

Ok, so you've got a point there buddy.

[(Anonymous)]

Scoreboard:

Ben-tor = 1
Id-iot = 0

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, I can certainly see why a man who reports, on his blog, "For St. Patricks Day today I didn't have to wear green; I just walked around naked, my body covered in a mold that's slowly consuming me" would find the rest of us rather dull.

[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.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

Is it really a compliment for people who pride themselves on originality to be compared to a dozen others with the same schtick? It reminds me of hip hop, where people like Kanye West are thought to be masters of all music because they can talk (and not even SING!) over a looped sample from someone else's original composition. Even Lupe Fiasco's new songs (which are hailed as fresh and new) sound like the sample was ripped from a TV show theme song.


Does being derivative truly satisfy an artist's need for originality or is it just mandatory to do what has been done before in order to be accepted by other artists? I'm asking because I'm a scientist...and I don't "get" art.

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

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

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

COME TO SCIENCE. BE ENVELOPED BY THE WARM SYRUP OF TRUE DISCOVERY AND PEER-REVIEWED RESEARCH!

[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]

There are far too many variables for me to give an educated answer in Ms. Ben-Tor's case, but consider the following vectors:

--> An art world/art market that rewards artists for referencing successful and/or controversial past works

--> An academic art climate that encourages coat-tailing onto other artists (so long as they've been dead for at least 20 years)

--> An increasingly blurred border between art *referencing* consumerism and art *as* consumerism

--> A philosophical climate that encourages a retreat from potential progress into various cul-de-sacs of deconstruction and recontextualization

--> A contemporary Western tendency towards exhibitionism and neo-catharsis (hail, fellow bloggers!)

--> A greater comfort with experiences that are pre-processed, artificial or virtual

--> A fundamentally poor success-to-failure ratio of artistic ideas and their execution

Certainly, there are other factors that I haven't mentioned, but you can see that once you throw all of these things together, the odds of any new work of art being both original and successful are minuscule. Likewise, there are a good many successful artists who haven't produced anything original in years; they just keep pooping out the same old Merda d'Artista.

[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.

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

"To Be Or Not To Be" (1942), "The Producers" (1968) - just two, of many, examples of Jewish liberals unafraid to make funny business out of Hitler.

[(Anonymous)]

From Momus's description, although Ben-Tor might seem wildly wacky and transgressive to Middle America, she's deeply conservative for her chosen audience, in that her schtick fits so perfectly into a certain art performance genre of the past 30 years. She could easily be a character in some B-grade comic novel knocked off by a mediocre features journalist. Her targets couldn't really be any more clichéd than they are.

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

With you all the way on all your comments above.

One of the current trends in 'art' production does seem to feed, not off the rawness of life, but off other art (of course Picasso said that mediocre artists borrow whereas geniuses steal - but he was wrong, rubbish artists steal too) but also off other activities.

You are right, Tamy Ben-Tor is a (bad) stand-up comedy routine from a few years ago. Other artists are producing slogan based work based on the principles of advertising. Others bad cable TV programmes. There are bad authors working in text. There is work indistinguishable from landscape gardening or ecology. Of course the rewards are often greater if you badge things as 'art' - it's value add.

It's the unquestioning acceptance of stereotypes, conformity and the status quo that disturbs me the most, for instance many English artists don't subvert/question the celebrity lifestyle, they celebrate it and retail it back to flatter their numbskull subjects in the manner of society portraitists (see http://arts.guardian.co.uk/critic/feature/0,,1753819,00.html).

[dzima.livejournal.com]

I agree with the No Nein Non choir here; this post was just off the mark. I can't believe that being compared to Cindy Sherman these days could be taken as a compliment.

To illustrate what has been already mentioned upthread: a person who I have family bonds with, his wife and fellow group of artists/university lecturers all got their degree, Masters and PhD at a famous French university, happened to all marry each other within their group and went back to their country to lecture at an Art School/College of Fine Arts. Their approach is quite different to Miss Ben-Tor dans leur recherche, their aesthetics is a lot cooler, and whenever they hold solo or group exhibitions, that group of artists would pretty much be their only audience (reason why I didn't want to follow that path).

I wonder if this post is to Momus something akin to what Hairstyle of the Devil was for him back in the 80's: his aiming for the charts (but this time around the art world charts) by "bigging up" a cultural product that might bring him some positive reverberation later on.

I'm not saying that this is necessarily good or bad, I'm just trying to figure out what the game is.

[dzima.livejournal.com]

And Miss Ben-Tor looks like Anne Laplantine.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Tamy Ben-Tor is a (bad) stand-up comedy routine from a few years ago. Other artists are producing slogan based work based on the principles of advertising. Others bad cable TV programmes. There are bad authors working in text. There is work indistinguishable from landscape gardening or ecology. Of course the rewards are often greater if you badge things as 'art' - it's value add... It's the unquestioning acceptance of stereotypes, conformity and the status quo that disturbs me the most

But it's precisely this "bad" which is interesting. The prestige afforded this work by its categorisation and endorsement as "art", combined with its "wrongness" (and I'm not just talking about political incorrectness, but that's part of it), makes for something interesting. "Badness" here is a transgression against slick professional standards, and I've argued (http://www.imomus.com/mistakers.html) often that it's more interesting to get things wrong than get them right. Being bad and getting things wrong is, precisely, questioning the acceptance of stereotypes, questioning conformity and the status quo.

It seems to me that Tamy Ben-Tor's work does that by shifting us into the reception mode of cabaret and comedy and cable TV as much as the reception mode of the art world. And even if we decide to receive it purely in the art world's frames of reference, and cite Cindy Sherman et al, I still think this work is valid and interesting. (I like Sherman.) Compared with all the insipid painting and sculpture and installation work going on (and God knows someone like Jerry Saltz must see endless amounts of dross, which is one reason he's so refreshed by Tamy's work), there's still relatively little work dealing with role playing, comedy, theatre, personae.

What Tamy Ben-Tor is doing very much relates to the things I was saying in my Wired article (http://www.wired.com/news/columns/1,70494-0.html) about mask-play being a powerful way of brainstorming new ideas.

If you say to me "Hitler is not a new idea", I'd have to point to Tamy's Israeli nationality and say that Hitler is, in a sense, the architect of Israel, and still a tremendously important symbol for racial hatred, an extremely topical issue, perhaps the biggest and most disturbing issue of our time. Is it a bad thing that an artist is engaging with that? Is it a bad thing that people are coming into the art world with a background in experimental theatre, and thinking about big subjects by means of role-playing?

[tassellrealm.livejournal.com]

I didn't get any of that. All I got was a lot of squirming and wriggling.

[dayofthelocust.livejournal.com]

No kidding. I'll have to check those out some time.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

Surely the "bad" can only be interesting if other factors are present, and one that seems to me to be lacking in Ms. Ben-Tor's work is originality. Regardless, you say her work is "...questioning the acceptance of stereotypes, questioning conformity and the status quo". We who haven't seen her performance can't say for certain, but from the description of her work above (and from Slate's write-up) it doesn't seem that Ms. Ben-Tor does anything but *reinforce* the status quo. The status quo is that Hitler was a murderous tyrant. No news there to anyone in the Western world, and certainly not to anyone in her audience.

You wrote "...there's still relatively little work dealing with role playing, comedy, theatre, personae." Really? That's not been my impression, and I've been involved in the art world to some degree since I first worked as a curator's assistant in 1981; certainly since I first saw Karen Finley shove canned yams up her ya in 1987. (Not to mention the huge variety of stuff in the '70s with Fluxus, Beuys, etc.) Perhaps one thing that's changed--and I think it's subtle--is that a greater percentage of the art audience at-large is willing to accept performance as "art", rather than just calling it "performance art". It's a personal peeve of mine, and I don't expect others to share it, but I find the encroachment does nothing to improve the state of object-oriented art, and everything to improve the luster of performance artists.

Finally, I have to entirely disagree with the notion that Hitler was the "architect of Israel". There were four large waves of Jewish immigrants to Palestine before Hitler came to power, which brought about 200,000 Jews to an area with a previous total population of less than double that amount. Herzl published Zionism's seminal document calling for the formation of Israel in 1896, when Hitler was 7 years old.

But more to the point, you wrote "Hitler is...still a tremendously important symbol for racial hatred, an extremely topical issue, perhaps the biggest and most disturbing issue of our time." This is PRECISELY where Ms. Ben-Tor is limiting her preaching to the choir. I've no doubt that Hitler is "an important symbol for racial hatred", and one that is near and dear to Israel. And we all know how valuable such figures are to victims; where would Christianity be without Judas?

But--like Godwin's Law--it is too pat, too predictable and too dated to have any impact upon others. First, because there is no nation on earth who has done more to make amends for their crimes in WWII than Germany. When a people have redeemed themselves, where is the potency in using their former dictator as a symbol of wrong? I'd be far more impressed if a performance artist explored the rather more obscure fact that the Japanese army killed 3 to 5 times the number of Chinese civilians during WWII that the Nazis did Jews, or the fact that our Allied partners--the Russian army--raped somewhere around 2 million German women, when they marched into Germany. It sometimes seems that there are Jews who would like us to continue to believe that Hitler was the only tyrant, and the Jews the only victims of crimes against humanity, during WWII.

And second, because there are far more valid targets for racial hatred today who Ms. Ben-Tor (and other who incessantly invoke Hitler) praise with too faint damning. Why not attack those more recently--or still in--power? Pol Pot killed 2 million Cambodian civilians and General Suharto killed about the same number of innocent Indonesians, during our lifetime. Where is the performance art that castigates General Abacha or General Montt or King Fahd? In short, I have little respect for artists that seem content to reference predictable, older crimes that have already been atoned for rather than crimes that are still being committed. THOSE are the topical issues. THOSE are where role-playing and brainstorming are needed.

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

That line from Hannah & Her Sisters where Max Von Sydow talks about the Holocaust. "The surprise is not that it happened, but that it doesn't happen more often." It happens all the time. As you imply it is the ubiquity and currency of mass slaughter that is worth challenging, not crimes that are safely enshrined in history.

I do have a great deal of sympathy with the idea that the modern world is shaped by the impact of the Nazis: from social attitudes to nation states. But what Ms Ben-Tor is doing doesn't teach me anything about this.

I think that my original point still stands - expanded here - that much of current artistic practice simply provides an etiolated version of other forms. Performance art as a much degraded form of theatre or stand-up etc. I'm not dismissing it out of hand. I'm no luddite. But I resent the lack of rigour in much of the activity.

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

I'm part of the way with you on some of this, particularly when you privilege the 'bad' as a way of making things more interesting. I'm still not convinced in this case however.

The line where you say 'The prestige afforded this work by its categorisation and endorsement as "art"' disturbs me the most. But surely being safely labelled by a conformist art market, being guaranteed as 'art' by curators, art critics, collectors destroys any possibility of it having transgressive impact? A problem for all avant-gardes I'll admit, but the way that the current art market is so in concordance with and dependent on the values of international capital and markets means that its imprimatur is more deadening than anything we've experienced before.

[rwillmsen.livejournal.com]

Sounds fabulous! Is there any chance of her coming to London any time soon??

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

If it isn't comparing Bush to Hitler, then it won't fly on the stage.

A bedtime story from Uncle Jacques Barzun

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

"After a time, estimated at a little over a century, the western mind was set upon by a blight: it was Boredom. The attack was so severe that the over-entertained people, led by a handful of restless men and women from the upper orders, demanded Reform and finally imposed it in the usual way, by repeating one idea. These radicals had begun to study the old neglected literary and photographic texts and maintained that they were the record of a fuller life. They urged looking with a fresh eye at the monuments still standing about; they reopened the collections of works or art that had long seemed so uniformly dull that nobody went near them. They distinguished styles and the different ages of their emergence—in short, they found a past and used it to create a new present. Fortunately, they were bad imitators (except for a few pedants), and their twisted view of their sources laid the foundation of a nascent—or perhaps one might say renascent—culture. It has resurrected enthusiasm in the young and talentaed, who keep exclaiming what a joy it is to be alive."

Re: A bedtime story from Uncle Jacques Barzun

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

Interesting and optimistic.

You know, sometimes the source material doesn't matter at all. It's the misreading of texts that often generates more interest. Perhaps this could be subsumed into Momus's definition of 'bad'? I have seen arguments, for instance, that core ideas in the work of Sartre and Derrida come out of a misreading of Heidegger. I would say that, in both cases, what is happening is a creative misreading rather than a literal misreading.

The problem, to go back to Ms Ben-Tor, is that a superficial reading of texts, and subsequent partial regurgitation of influences, generates nothing very much.