Her Body Knows*: Adina Bar-On's Art of Connection and Attention
Dr. Idit Suslik
Adina Bar-On (Kfar Blum, 1951), one of the leading pioneers of performance art in Israel, has been active in this field for about five decades, during which she has created solo performances and collaborations with other artists from different disciplines. Her performance language has changed throughout the years and opened up to various mediums, such as video and sound, but Bar-On remained determined "to preserve the vitality of her body language as a primary means of communication" (Porat, 2001: 174), while revealing themes and images associated with issues of identity and belonging, femininity and sexuality, language and materiality, place and society. Her insistence on the body and on addressing her Self through bodily expressions, even after the decline of the performance 'boom' in Israel during the 1970s, was and still is a testimony of her internal artistic motivation that has remained sharp and undisputed until today: "Yes, it keeps me alone – independent, not connected, not dependent. It keeps me uncompromising: devoted to the aim, clean, able to be precise!" (Bar-On, 2001: 136). The choice of title for this article – "Her Body Knows", as the name of David Grossmans's book (2002) – aims to illuminate Adina Bar-On as a body artist in the most profound sense of the concept: a creator who has formulated her body language into a unique inner grammar that has become over the years the most precise, even absolute, mode for understanding the changing logic of her works; and a female artist that perceives the body as a language that leads to "a connection and attention" (Porat, 173) and an involved spectator.
Changes in Language Habits: Adina on a Timeline
Adina Bar-On began her first artistic experiences in 1973, during her 3rd year of studies at Bezalel, and at a point in time that connected the personal (the death of her brother), social (the Yom Kipper War) and artistic (the exposure to artists that redefined the language of the medium in the fields of cinema, theatre and performance art). Bar-On describes a performance "which wasn't really a performance" (Bar-On, 2001:127) that she published with a poster displaying her face and the time and place of the event, which mostly her friends attended. In the performance, Bar-On moved between a series of physical-plastic and mental states of presence, and the directors of Bezalel invited the academy's psychologist in order to determine whether she was sane. It was later clarified to her that she is not allowed to continue this type of work and must "go back to engaging in the conventional mediums" (Porat, 2001: 154). Consequently, she returned to painting and a year later presented her final exhibition, which displayed black and white photos of her paintings hanging in her mother's house.
Later, Bar-On begins performing her works in various settings: she is invited by Itzhak Danziger to present 'Encounter-and Image" before architecture students at the Technion, she performs in the 'Open Workshop' curated by Yona Fischer at the Israel Museum, and regularly presents performances in different galleries in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa. Meanwhile, she also turns to venues outside the 'art scene' such as 'Bnei Brith' clubs, youth centers (matnasim), Kibbutzim and private homes, in order to introduce her art to broader audiences and create opportunities for herself to explore the potential relations between her works and 'the world', as evident in the following letter: "my performances take place in different settings […] Maoz club may be an additional challenge for me in performing my work" (Bar-On, 1977: no page, my translation). Her participation in the "Meitzag 76" and "Meitzag 79" events, curated by Gideon Ofrat at the Artists' House in Tel Aviv, stylistically locates Bar-On amongst artists already identified with the field of performance art such as Moshe Gershuni, Gideon Gechtman, Gabi Klasmer, Sharon Keren, Yocheved Weinfeld, Nurit Tolnai and others.
From the end of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Adina Bar-On enters a new phase in her work and experiments in expanding her performance language. Alongside 'small' works with a score built on "a sequence of movements, situations and images, that develop on location" as an improvisation that responds to the audience's reactions (Bar-On in Breitberg, 1976: 7; Shenhar, no year: 113), she develops large scale and meticulously organized scenic events that were influenced by theatre and dance, and included objects, props and designed 'environments'. This shift resonated with the artistic turn that shifted performance art from the "visual monasticism that coincided with the minimalist 70s" to the visual density that characterized the 80s and transformed this genre into "a theatre of images" (Ben-Nun, 1981: 18, my translation). This is evident in the description of Bar-On's work, Another Place? (1986):
This is theater in which each of the creative participants gives independent expression to the subject in his or her own particular medium [...] there is no attempt here to create a unifying experience for the audience as a group […] a theater-event in which each individual can construct his own personal set of responses to the aggregate of images presented" (Bar-On, 1986: no page).
Respectively, the geographic location and specific artistic context of each work began to serve as an organizing principle in the construction of the conceptual and choreographic outline, as Bar-On explains in her letter to the director of the Arad Museum about the intended project, Woman in a View: "[…] it will be a story about the difficulties of moving within the view, about the attempt to accommodate to the view, the Self within the view and finally about the creation within the view with all its metaphorical implications" (Bar-On, no date). This creative phase was characterized by collaborations with artists such as choreographer Ronit Land, poet Richard Flanz, musician Yossi Marchaim, sculptor Yehezkel Yardeni, and Bar-On's husband, pottery artist Daniel Davis. During these years her works are presented in the Tel Hai Contemporary Art Meetings curated by Amnon Barzel (1980, 1983) and Flor Bex (1990), the Acco Festival for Alternative Theatre (1982), the exhibition "80 Years of Israeli Sculpture" (the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1984) and Israel Festival Jerusalem (1986). (Porat, 2001: 152-153). At the same time, Bar-On realizes herself as a teacher and begins giving painting and performance classes in Tel Hai Collage.
From the 1990s, Adina Bar-On establishes an additional creative path that evolves out of her transition from designed environments and accentuated use of the physical and plastic image to the search for new channels of communication with the spectator (Porat, 2001: 151). She frequently works with video and sound and uses these elements to return to her early works in order to reframe and translate segments from them to other mediums. For example, the crying scene from Woman of the Pots (1990) becomes a short vocal performance entitled Sacrifice (1997) that Bar-On performs in various events, some of which are socially-politically protestive in nature. In the works she creates during this period there is an evident productive tension between the live and filmed body, the articulated and recorded sound, all of which offer different perspectives on the performed content and imagery, while simultaneously activating parallel reception channels within the spectator. Additionally, Bar-On deepens and develops her work with language and especially the voice into a wide range of gibberish fragments, mumblings, weeps and chattering. This way, she emphasizes the tonality and materiality that formulate out of the very primal and physical production of voices and the manner through which they transform into an element of communication that is "matter, physical, with the consistency of shape, of texture, of weight, of temperature […] I have recognized them as my inner nature and had thought that most everyone bares such sounds from within" (Bar-On, 2018: 30). These various exploratory and creative methods are passed on by Adina Bar-On in the classes she teaches from the early 1990s in institutions such as Bezalel, The School of Visual Theatre, Camera Obscura and The Holon Institute of Technology.
This tendency is evident in Adina Bar-On's artistic practices in the current millennium, which resonate globally as she is invited to present works in international performance festivals and teach in art schools around the world. At the same time, Bar-On returns to accentuating the presence of her body as the central channel of meaning and experience in works such as Home of Course (2002), Disposition (2010) or In-Between (2018), which she performs in intimate venues or public spaces. In them, she continues to strive for the realization of the unmediated connection between her and the spectator, who is an observer and at times a participant, but first and foremost – "someone who takes part, who converses with" (Bar-On, 2001: 136); who takes a stand and reveals empathy – towards the performance, and also him/her-self.
A Woman Defying Definition: Form, Material, Landscape, Adina
The question of genre definition has accompanied Adina Bar-On's artistic path from the very beginning. Impressions of her early works wondered "what does a Bezalel student have to do with theatre?" (Breitberg, 1976: 7, my translation) alongside attempts to understand a performance language that is "seemingly a Body art. But perhaps dance? And maybe pantomime?" (Fischer, 1976: 76). Even when Bar-On was already an established artist, her movement across the mediums received significant attention and was understood as a reflection of her conscious decision to locate herself outside the familiar and acceptable categories, but also as a feature that makes her works challenging for the spectator: "not acting / not discourse / not dance / and all three present in their absence […] a true avant-garde that transfigures differently every time […] Adina Bar-On, an artist that has created her unique language. Not yet understood to all, but true, honest" (Refaeli, 1987: no page, my translation).
In the beginning, it was clear that Bar-On herself is engaged in decoding the medium she had developed, as evident in her reply to Sarah Breitberg's question following the presentation of Bar-On's piece in the event "Works X 9 + A Performance" at Julie M. Gallery (1975). Bar-On said: "I have not found it a name. In the invitation I termed my art 'Visual Theater' but this is not accurate. Perhaps Theater-Situation-Image." (Bar-On in Breitberg, 1976: 7). However, her consistent tendency to be present between image and action, materiality and performativity, clearly resonated with the term 'meitzag', the Hebrew equivalent for 'performance art', coined by Gideon Ofrat as the definition for a genre that is based on "the assembling together of the term 'mutzag', which has plastic connotations that are linked to a visual artistic object […] and the term 'hatzaga', with all its action-based theatrical ramifications" (Ofrat, 1976: no page, my translation). Accordingly, as Bar-On's artistic language becomes more and more precise, her affinity to concepts from the developing theoretical-academic discourse of the performance field is pronounced more explicitly. For example, in the description of the project Walking on a Thin Line (1979), Bar-On defined the work as an 'autoperformance', and at the end of her text quoted the explanation provided by Michael Kirby in The Drama Review issue dedicated to this phenomenon: "a word we have coined to refer to presentations conceived and performed by the same person" (Kirby, 1979: 2).
Adina Bar-On's choice of her body as the central medium in her performances is the feature that definitively connects her to performance art, as a genre in which the body "of the self" of the performer acts from "the autobiographical experience as the source and purpose of the work" (Harari, 2007: 83, my translation). For Bar-On, "it would be superficial to think that a particular person's art does not belong to his biography" (Bar-On, 2001: 125), and her works over the years thus reflect a consistent engagement with the personal/private as form and content. As an artist that perceives herself as realizing communication through her body, Bar-On uses her emotional expressions (passions, needs, desires or embarrassments) as a substance and transforms them into something physical/concrete – facial expressions and breathing, voice and text, movements and postures – but also utilizes them as formal elements that structure the conceptual and dramaturgical outline of the live performance: space, time, energy, rhythm. Simultaneously, she found various forms to accentuate the presence of autobiographical elements in her works in a way that emphasizes the inability to disconnect her from her art. These include the self-referential title of the work MS. Davis (1983); the involvement of her husband, children and students in the live action and visual projections in Woman of the Pots (1990); the decision to begin the artistic process of Sacred (2011) right after ending the 'shiva' after her husband's passing; or the use of her art books as the dominant object in space in In-Between (2018).
An additional feature that has gradually refined itself in Adina Bar-On's work is the use of the artistic act as "a mechanism for blurring the gap between reality and art in order to intervene in the political-social aspect of life and effect it" (Harari, 2007: 83, my translation). Bar-On's works from the 80s and 90s display images characterized by local features, such as the white galabias and pots in View (1997) and the bed sheet covered with Israeli flags in Rest (1999). Other works outspokenly reacted to critical events in the Israeli reality or integrated in events of a distinct political orientation: Salute (1982) was created in light of the outbreak of the Lebanon War and presented in the Tel Hai 83' event; The Green Line Searches for a Stage (1988) was present at Shelter 209 in Tel Aviv to mark one year of the Intifada; and The Cry (1989) was present at "The Peace Frontier: International Symposium for Sculpture and Painting", initiated by the board of Israeli and Palestinian painters and sculptors. Even in this context it is evident that Bar-On is motivated by an approach that acknowledges the connection between the personal and the political, the artistic and the social, while understanding performance art not as an genre limited by a binding stylistic definition, but a form of creation that reflects the position of the artist towards himself/herself and the world:
the situations I choose to perform in, too, are environmental, social situations. And my message, too, touches upon society, upon society's values, human relation, social behavior […] I'm considered an artist of the 70s, a performance artist. I belong to a domain that engages in the boundaries of language, and this is a very elitist definition; but in my own eyes I'm definitely an artist of the 2000s, an artist who deals with the environment and with society. I don't deal with contents, with given metaphors, but with the individual; I don't deal with ritual – that belongs to the seventies – but with the relativity of things, with the private. The focus on myself is not from any self-glorification, but from a desire to transfer the attention to the viewer (Bar-On, 2001: 129, 126)
A Meeting with no End: A Chronicle of Claim and Containment
From the beginning, the driving force of Adina Bar-On's work stemmed from her perception of performance as an act of reciprocity: "I engage in communication by using my body. This is actually the most ancient language there is […] it's the language that was before language" (Bar-On, 2001: 135, 126). As a result, she never viewed the question of the medium in relation to genre or style but rather in her will to realize a dialogue with the spectator, whom she perceives as someone who comes to be present in – and not only see – the performance (see Bar-On, 136). In her first works it was already evident that she is not reluctant to claim a committed presence in the live occurrence from her audience, even if this situation triggers discomfort, and that she is "very aware of the emotional baggage of embarrassment the audience brings and makes use of it" (Breitberg, 1976: 7, my translation). In fact, she demanded that the spectator takes a stand – be it excitement, or rejection. This approach reflected Bar-On's rejection of the perception of art as an object of admiration and the alienated intellectual observation of the artistic occurrence, alongside an acknowledgment of her ability to create a performance space that grants a place for the spectator and invites his or hers response and involvement: "the visual image in my work exists only in the sense that you remember that there was an Adina there, who did these things, and yourself in connection with her" (Bar-On, 2001: 134).
Accordingly, Adina Bar-on formulated her unique performance language in such a way that the formal dimension always embodies the aspect of experience, which is the essence of everything. Within it lies her self-revelation before the audience, not as an 'external' action but a process of personal and human encounter that is realized by artistic means: "I would never want to faint during a performance, I would not want to draw blood, and I wouldn't want to walk naked. Such exposures, such loss of boundaries, are outside my lexicon. Why is it permitted to injure one's body as a metaphor for injury to the psyche, and not permitted to expose one's psyche?" (Bar-On, 132).
In this framework, Bar-On transformed her means and tools of expression (the body, hands, eyes and voice) and the theatrical/choreographic mechanisms she uses (identification and alienation, acceleration and stillness, reduction and expansion) into stimulators of effect on the spectator to assure he does not remain indifferent. Not coincidentally, the reactions to her works over the years reflect an understanding that the issue of form alone does not touch the heart of Adina Bar-On's performance language, because its qualities stem from emotional channels that exist outside the realm of intellectual commentary. At the beginning of her artistic path, Yona Fischer wrote that "it is almost a sin to describe a 'performance' by Adina Bar-On. The description enables reconstruction of solely visual aspects" (Fischer, 1976: 76, my translation), and this echoes in impressions of her works today, as evident in Ram Samocha's text on Home Of Course (2002), stating that "the attempt to describe the performance does not capture a significant part of the changes in meanings, associations, and contexts that were created" (Samocha, 2004: 82, my translation).
Adina Bar-On's position in front of the spectator, like her understanding of spectatorship, clearly resonate within her work as a teacher. Idit Porat explains that "teaching, to her, just like her choice of performance art as a medium, is a search for the way in which communication works" (Porat, 2008: no date), an approach that in many ways reacts to the intellectualization and rigidness Bar-On identified in the judgment of her teachers in Bezalel. In her opinion, art "whether a student's or not — cannot be assessed only by judgmental comparisons with art history; I had felt then, as I do now, that art should provoke in its audience an awareness of their own individual opinions and reactions, and reflection on their own private lives" (Bar-On, 2020: no page). Through this perspective, Adina Bar-On molded her methods in a way that enables her students to control the language she had developed – "to learn how to externalize and internalize this whole system that's called a body" (Bar-On, 2001: 125), while searching within what is supposedly 'only' technical or physical for the deepest layers of the crystallized emotion.
Adina Bar-On's commitment to that which is humane, close and unmediated in the communication she realizes in life and art, have transformed her work into what curator and art historian László Beke defines as an "art of addressing" (Beke, 2001: 169). Through it, Bar-On uncovers her truth, which enables us to reflect upon ourselves, and this way - despite her determined claim and "within the uncomfortable and unmasked humanity she offers, the only option that remains […] is recognition and compassion" (Bat-Ilan, 2019: no date, my translation).
Note: The translations to English of Hebrew sources that are not my own, as stated throughout this essay, were taken from Adina Bar On's website: http://adinabaron.com/.
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Bibliography
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The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
