Ran Kasmy - Ilan
(Translated by Naveh Frumer)
An age that has lost its gestures is, for this reason, obsessed by them. For human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny. And the more gestures lose their ease under the action of invisible powers, the more life becomes indecipherable. (Giorgio Agamben)[1]
The normal is the standard, that which is not irregular, the ordinary. We speak of normal height, normal temperature, and normal living conditions. The deviant is that which is off the beaten path, transgressive, overflowing, other, unaccepted. “Normal” comes from the Latin norma, a carpenter’s square. The normal is that which is at a right angle (normalis); that which is subject to a law. “Deviant” comes from the Latin de via, off the way, which the Hebrew word too indicates. In its spelling in ancient Mishnaic Hebrew the word “deviant” also echoes the word fool: he who is not in his right mind. Whoever deviates from the straight path is a fool, a madman, seduced to do so by the devil. The Hebrew word for “system” also has the same root: hence the system is the straight line, the regulated path, whereas the fool is he who is outside the system.
In psychological discourse, the normal is defined as having average qualities, suffering no disturbances, sane. In biology, the normal is that which is free of contamination, sickness, or deformation; that which has undergone no experimental treatment or manipulation. The epitome of the biological deviant is the mutation: an exceptional genetic makeup that could cause a change of qualities. Mutations are natural but rare. They could happen spontaneously or as a result of external interference. A spontaneous mutation allows for the adaptation of species to a changing environment, and hence at times can be regarded as an evolutionary advantage.
The artists exhibiting their works here deal in different manners with deviations and slight violations of the norm through extraordinary or inappropriate actions. These actions scratch the surface of normative existence: a scratch that allows our gaze to pierce through to the foundations of the system. The normal is hegemonic; it is felt only when it is violated. Normal conditions are never perceived as ideology, but as an indispensible part of life, as facts. When the normal is violated, hegemony is undermined; its underlying paradigm is exposed and turns vulnerable. Deviating from normal conditions means rebelling against the hegemonic discourse.
The power of language lies in its being normative, namely in its repetitive character. Thus, the extraordinary use of a norm amounts to sabotage. Everything can be said in a different manner: the very fact that a dictionary uses certain words to define others testifies to that. Moreover, language allows us to state something that does not exist. Hence knowing also means knowing how to hide and to lie.[2]
The meaning of a word is delimited by the use we put it to in a sentence. It is the context that constitutes meaning according to circumstances. Yet some contexts are latent, and are based not on intellect but on emotion. The speaker must be aware of the history of what is being said, of the social contexts that shape the meaning of the statement, and of the constellation of power mobilizes by it in order to produce meaning.
Humans have a build-in array of expectations that derives from the illusion produced by norms—an illusion that makes us experience events in a linear progression, even though at any given point things could have developed differently. Norms generate for us a surface of action that allows the illusion to go on, thereby constituting reality itself. In such a state of affairs, every violation of the norm generates a threat. The normal order is misleading, for a disaster might strike at any moment.
“Deviants” offers a reading of the exhibited collection through the activity of introducing doubt by means of a non-normative use of media. What is at stake is not breaking up the normative system in order to reveal what is hidden, but laying mines and creating diversions within that system. Every work of art is based on diverting the norm. Its gesture is the intersection between life and art, action and force. A disruption, small as it might be, makes the norm visible, forcing us to examine its meaning with respect to place and time.
The exhibited works consist of three categories: works of a documentary nature, works dealing with images and their dissemination, and works dealing with the fabrication of space.
Axis and Evil
On January 2002, some five months after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush delivered his annual State of the Union address in front of the US Congress and Senate, in which he coined the phrase “Axis of Evil.” Brainchild of David Frum, member of the president’s speechwriting team, the phrase combines two twentieth-century expressions.[3] “The Axis Powers,”—the name given by Mussolini to the alliance between Nazi Germany, the Japanese Empire, and Fascist Italy—and “evil empire”—used by President Reagan in his March 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, to refer to the Soviet Union (the term is attributed to Reagan’s speechwriter, Anthony Dolan).
“The Axis of Evil” thus serves as a code for an entire history of fear of the American nation in particular and the Western world in general. Lenka Clayton’s video art, Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet, rearranges the “Axis of Evil” speech alphabetically. Clayton removed the applause and dramatic pauses during the course of the speech, shortening it to a mere 18 minutes (instead of the original 50). Using very simple means, Clayton thereby provides us with an X-Ray of the kind of the rhetoric style that developed in the aftermath of 9/11. The indexical rearrangement of the speech generates a reading that undermines its original meaning, by neutralizing the order of words in a sentence, and hence also what is to be found between the words themselves.
The extraordinary use of language drives a wedge into its mechanisms of repetition. This has the potential for expropriating certain concepts (such as the Jewish Shoah or the Palestinian Nakba), shattering the image of uniformity produced by social norms. The failure to produce such uniformity brings to the fore silenced (excluded) voices, resulting in a condition of multiple standpoints and identities. The rebellion against the dominating voice exposes the various possibilities this voice excludes. The very same act could serve as a double-edged sword, however, when the expropriated concept or signifier turns into a commodity emptied of its content (such as, again, Shoah or Nakba).
’’Who needs enemies when there are Israelis like you?’’
The Nation’s Groves is the name of a Dor Guez project exhibited during 2011 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Like his other projects, this body of work dealt with the implications of the Israeli occupation on the development of both Israeli and Palestinian identity and ethos. The Nation’s Groves presented these topics by examining the social and cultural consequences of the Zionist forestation enterprise on the local landscape and inhabitants. This was the first time the Tel Aviv Museum presented the Palestinian Nakba—both as a term and as an expression of the Palestinian perspective on the 1948 war—as a basis for a solo exhibition. The audience was asked to respond to the exhibition using a standard format of notes bearing the title Response—from which derives the title of the current project. Visitors wrote hundreds of notes in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, occasionally decorated with Stars of David and Palestinian flags. The artist picked one hundred of these, scanned them, translated them, and turned them into a single block. Their content varies between supportive slogans— “an honest and necessary political soul-searching,” “moving and thought-provoking”—to violent outcries—“Anti-Zionist propaganda courtesy of the Islamic Movement,” “Who needs enemies when there are Israelis like you??” (to which another visitor responded: “ Who needs idiots when there is an Israeli like the one who wrote this?/”). Together, these reactions paint a tapestry of a stratified social array, which is more indicative of the blindness of the Israeli political discourse than of the “artistic” aspects of the original exhibition. In fact, one requires no former acquaintance with Guez’s projects in order to approach the workResponse, since most of the responses did not go beyond the terminological filter “Nakba,” stopping short of the proposal put forward by the artist to address the essence of that term. A meta-response of the artist to the audience addressing him, Response challenges the relations of power between the couple addressor-addressee, and the triangle audience-artist-institute.[4]
The tale of “The Ninety-Three,” as it became known, was based on the suicide note of Haya Feldman, a teacher in the Beit-Ya’acov girl seminary in the Krakow ghetto. The letter, published in 1943 in the New York Times, tells the story of the mass suicide of the seminary’s 93 students and teachers, who chose to take their lives rather than fall into the hands of Nazi soldiers. The original letter was a fake, and the girls’ heroic myth of sacrifice has long been disproved by researchers from the Yad Vashem Center for Holocaust Research. Nir Evron, creator of Cover Version, does not seek to shatter this tale that has already been shattered, but to add a new layer to its cultural archive, by inviting four additional letters from contemporary Israeli writers. The new texts, alongside the “original” one, are read by five actresses in a recording studio. On the other side of the screen, images of seven streets named after “The Ninety-Three” are displayed. Evron produces a document in which politics is not made of truth but rather produces it.
Amir Yaziv’s Hollywood Strings uses the format of the face-to-face interview under the classic documentary value of “testimony”—a form that bestows validity and “truth” regardless of its specific content. The witnesses are three Israeli producers who took part in Hollywood productions that were filmed in Israel during the 1980s. Israel reveals its charm as a cinematic site that offers desert (Biblical) landscapes and the cooperation of its army. The “testimony” delivered here recounts how the three producers managed to get the Israeli army to place soldiers, as well as captured Arab weapons from its various wars, at the disposal of Hollywood illusion-making. Yatziv dots these testimonies with still photographs, taken from online albums of war veterans, which were shot at the original locations depicted in the movies filmed in Israel: photos of Russian and Mujahidin troops in Afghanistan, and of American troops in Normandy. The illusory and “the real” come together in this narrative, within the sphere of image-construction.
Roy Menachem Markovich’s “And we worked…” also utilizes a form of testimony. Its first part shows an elderly Jewish woman trying to recount her memories of a concentration camp, constantly interrupted by the family members speaking nearby, the grandson coming for a visit, or the pizza delivery person. The camera continues filming during those moments, breaking the conventional lie of the documentary format—a lie founded upon the inherent distance between the documentary action and the order of reality prior to the arrival of the camera. This is a distance we ignore as viewers: the distance between the natural and the represented. The second part of the work exposes us to the way the apartment is being set up prior to the filming, as well as to the makeup artist’s concerns regarding travel reimbursement—in other words, to the mechanics of manufacturing documentary truth.
Different Resource Locator
The project Image Tracer by missdata stems out of an interest in the importance and presence of media images, moving around the internet ecosystem at an age in which the heart of representational economy is the mobile signifier. Image Tracer is a research tool that generates an archive out of images found through Google’s search engine, tracing their web address (URL), their appearance (or disappearance), and their ranking.
Today we are critically dependent upon digital memory, which has undermined our biological capacity to forget, turning remembrance into the default condition. Technological advances in digital storage capacities have resulted in a precision and efficiency that lead us to believe we can surpass our mortality. Google’s global server farm archives any query ever conducted through its search engine.[5] Google knows more about us than we ourselves can remember. Such a comprehensive memory makes us lost in details with no capacity to generalize and to develop, leaving us with the capacity to see a great many trees yet not the forest. Memory is our way of reconstructing the past. Faced with these storage capacities, human memory appears defective. And yet our physiological ability to forget allows us to get rid of excess memory: it lets bygones fade away, allowing us to appreciate as less important that which is irrelevant to the present. Under the new conditions of eternal memory, we cannot forget (nor forgive). Our dependence on digital memory also grants Google the capacity to change history. This, of course, is nothing new: control of information translates into control of individuals. This was the case during the centuries in which the Catholic Church controlled the sources of knowledge and the institutes of memory, up until the advent of print.
When a search for an image takes place through Google’s search engine, the Image Tracer runs a code that saves the results into a file, which is uploaded to a database and converted into a viewable page. These web pages serve as momentary snapshots. When another search is conducted, a new snapshot is added on top of the previous one, and so on, in a kind of archeological piling-up of information. The density of the image increases and decreases, reflecting its lifespan and ranking in any given format over time. An opaque image indicates constant presence and position across numerous searches, whereas a transparent and blurry image indicates changing ranks and a short internet-lifespan. The Image Tracer deviates from normal internet use by cataloguing and representing the information gathered in Google’s image search engine. Reviewing the changes an image undergoes across a time scale allows for a kind of analysis and thinking that let us “see the forest.”
Another shifting of the normative system of web images is offered by Mushon Zer-Aviv and Galia Offri’s Wikipedia Illustrated. The two document a process of creating 26 drawings for 26 Wikipedia articles (one for each letter of the ABC), starting with their early sketches all the way to uploading the final images to the shared encyclopedia. Visual art, for the most part, keeps away from the celebration of open source society, refusing to come to terms with the loss of its ritualistic, singular aura. Thus we have no models for cooperation between the visual arts and open source enterprises. Images accompanying Wikipedia entries aspire to be objective descriptions taken at a distance, so as to live up to the editorial agenda of the encyclopedia. The ongoing Wikipedia Illustrated project wishes to examine whether Wikipedia might indeed appeal to artists to contribute their works to the public; and whether the mode of operation of visual artists allows for such cooperation, or is visual art non-cooperative by nature. Zer-Aviv and Offri waive some of their rights for the drawings scattered around Wikipedia entries while retaining certain others. Choosing 26 entries out of some 4,000,000 existing ones reflects a personal, inquisitive, and critical journey, which simultaneously tries to find a unique place within the cooperative rules of the game.
The letter is the basic component of the word; a kind of chemical formula that formulates reality. The letter is often regarded as impartial, although it allows for the transmission of significant visual information that is prior to the meaning of the word. Guy Saggee uses the tools of his work as a designer in the artistic field by drawing inside the Latin alphabet. Each letter of the alphabet is spatially charged, turning into a scene, thereby transforming what is considered passive into active. Each is both typographical and narratival. The letter as a DNA helix, containing all necessary genetic information, a code or recipe containing a construction blueprint, becomes a personal space the viewer is invited to wander in. The gap between the meticulous technology of typography and personal illustration disrupts our gaze and makes it more sensitive, whether we like it or not. In Fight Flight Saggee produces a series of posters, each with a single letter (a single space), which come together to produce the words “fight” and “flight,” hinting at the survival mechanism that drives us to act in times of stress.
Forgery
Another way of bypassing the illusion of linear continuity and violating its regularity is by generating another illusion. The space of Orit Adar-Bechar’s video artwork Gateways is man-made, an architectonic space detached from nature. In contrast to the emptiness, which makes man manifest, the camera is dynamic, in constant motion, generating rhythm and life. The gap between space and motion generates an almost unbearable tension. In the background, a distorted voice comes out of a public sound system, constantly trying to deliver an emergency announcement.
This space is a lie: a giant, manipulative, and artificial miniature, which generates a historic memory devoid of any clear context. Our imagination quickly complements this phantasmagoria, turning into an essential part of it, despite it all being about a camera moving inside a miniature. Life is an ongoing process in which the subject attempts to reaffirm his spatial location, to deduce it from his relationship with the surrounding symbolic order, to adapt to it. We will never reach a full understanding of our place in the world, and our only option is an ongoing search, driven by anxiety.
Elisheva Levy’s guitars in Heavy Metal are empty shells, objects devoid of content, leaving behind only a thin, fragile shell. They appear simultaneously new and used, stunningly beautiful yet sloppy. They aspire to fulfill the fantasy of the perfect guitar imbued with iconic qualities, like the classic Fender and Gibson models, or those instruments personified by their owners, such as B. B. King’s “Lucille.” This aspiration crashes once the illusion breaks up, as soon as one sees the blemishes and the fragility of the cheap materials (paper, plastic) of which the guitars are made. We measure objects socially according to their visibility, which consists of their qualities and of our historic knowledge of them. During the first moments one spends in front of Levy’s manufactured stuff, one is overflown with a sensual glow, an exaggerated narcissistic temptation, the signifier of an object taken from the world of utility. These statues function as shiny wrapping paper, containing unfulfilled promises. They are empty of content and defiantly useless, objects of mere desire. They look like merchandise that begs you to consume it solely for its surface appearance. Tempting, paper-thin, and precarious, they suggest reality the way it will never be, and the way we shall forever yearn for it.
At first glance, everything seems natural about Alona Rodeh’s The Resurrection of Dead Masters. An aluminum and glass door is set into one of the walls. The kind of door we are used to seeing in storefronts, it appears surprising when placed at an exhibition hall. When we get close to it we realize it leads to a short, narrow corridor, at the end of which is another, iron door, kept shut with locks and chains. Thrash-metal music can be heard beyond this hybrid structure, suggesting that it is playing at an intense volume in the space the lies beyond the doors. Suddenly a strong knock comes from behind the inner door, shaking its chains as if someone (or something) is desperately trying to break out, crying for help. We realize that, more than we wish to see what is taking place inside, whatever is inside wishes to get out, threatening to break open the door, and flood the space in which we stand. Rodeh’s The Resurrection of Dead Masters continues her investigation of the interrelations between sculpting and the perception of space on the one hand, and music and sound on the other—at times complementing each other, at other times seeking to break each other apart.
Life is not separate from its form, which often presents itself as free and independent. And yet we live in a society supervised by a technology that is ingrained in our habitus. The tyranny of the normal is both all-encompassing and convenient: it anesthetizes us in a network of false mirrors, long based on a state of emergency, drawing our social limits and duties. Its power lies in its repetitiveness. Under such conditions, the only option for living is transgression: the only weapon we have against passivity and our insignificance. Actions, methods, and processes are not facts but living possibilities. What is at stake is thus vitality itself.
[1] Giorgio Agamben, Means without End, Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 53.[2] In addition, only man can lie by stating a truth while expecting it to be taken as a lie. As Groucho Marx puts it in Duck Soup, “[this man] may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you: he really is an idiot.”
[3] David Frum was forced to resign several weeks later, after his wife sent a mass email, bragging about how he was the one who came up with the term.
[4] Apropos Lacan’s statement that a letter always arrives at its destination, we should note that the addressor and the addressee here are one and the same. The responses carry a potential idea that is bound to explode and be activated. The symbolic order (Lacan’s “Big Other”) receives the letter the moment it is delivered. The symbolic order is the very language and law, changing from one person to another. This order, which is outside ourselves, provides our unconscious desire, which will never reach its satisfaction, even if it will endlessly search for the recognition of another person. The response notes are addressed neither to Dor Guez nor to the Tel Aviv Museum, but to the addressor himself. For more on why a letter always reaches its destination see Slavoj Žižek’s re-reading of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” in his Enjoy Your Symptom! (New York: Routledge 1992), pp. 1–30.
[5] Google’s global server system contains over one hundred thousand terabytes (one hundred million gigabytes) of data.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
