Presented at Estampa Art Fair, Madrid, 2008 Tribal Fire (1)
Works in this selection offer a trek along an imaginary time-line that stretches between re-enacting and pre-enacting, between re-visiting and speculating. The artists allow us to visit past events through their re-enactments or speculate on future events by pre-enacting them. Jean Baudrillard’s metaphor for describing simulacra is of an empty space around which all the images surrounding us orbit. (2) We can say that in contemporary culture this empty center is being filled again by a new substance made up of media produced images. The substance is not a prototype but rather an already existing copy. Televised experiences, memories and meta-narratives are located in the center of this new arrangement of signs and simulations. It is media-filtered reality of Israeli culture and society, Israeli experience and memory, often personally and publicly traumatic, that is in the center of the works in this selection. It is this reality which they all refer to, re-enact, or speculate about. In the selected works, the source of reinactions are derived from media-produced or influenced events, thus re-enacting and ’pre-enacting’ are replicas of a copy, or representation. Although the works relate to mediated constructed events, events in which the borders between the reality of experience and the televised experience are blurred, it is exactly these media technologies that re-introduce an ancient role that was central to rituals of re-enactment in Pagan societies. It is as if the old Shaman, the medium in the center of re-enactment rituals in the past, has been replaced by the medium of television, as the medium through which reality is experienced and according to which it is shaped. The Shaman was a moderator between the inner life of the tribe and the external world or the world of the dead. This role was executed in many cultures as a ritual of re-enactment in which events related to the lives of the tribe members such as birth, puberty, and marriage were performed as rites of passage or events related to traumatic natural phenomena, performed often by a sort of a visual quest that was visualized to the tribe. The ritual allowed tribe members to experience again, in a moderated way, a traumatic event and parallel to that to fix it as an event of importance in the narrative of the tribe. It was the Shaman, the medium, that allowed for this therapeutic process to take place. It is the TV as technological medium that gradually takes the position of moderator between our society and the external world. Doing so again, with visual means. Thus, televised images in our society can be read as ritual, a medium through which we can experience reality in a moderated way, revisit trauma and relive it in a kind of “correction” process in which order is regained and the event becomes a simulation. The trauma that cannot be spoken becomes an open ceremony. Through the televised ritual, we experience reality. (3) Re-enacting also produces a sense of sterility. It creates new territories in which events can be recreated in laboratory-like conditions. This enables not only an accurate repetition but also an “improvement,” a better and much more effective re-creation. Deleuze and Guattari, defining the idea of simulacra, discuss the separation of an elevated idea from reality and the re-introduction of it back into reality in order to reshape reality according to the elevated ideals of the simulacra. So happens that both model and copy are a result of the same process of fabrication aimed at creating a new reality. (4) In the work “Wild Seeds” by Yael Bartana a group of Israeli youth play a strange game. They are playing against the backdrop of an amazingly beautiful landscape of the Prat settlement in the occupied West Bank. Part of the group play the role of the authority – policemen or soldiers – who try to separate a cluster of other players holding on to each other and trying to stick together. This game imitates familiar images of evacuations of Jewish settlements by the state authorities and the resistance of the settlers to the evacuation. These events became well know especially after Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza strip in August 2005, an event that was exposed internationally by the media. The players are not settlers. They play a game re-enacting televised images in which young Israelis, more or less at the same age as theirs, act the same way but out of ideological conviction. Both the players’ re-enactment and Bartana’s break the “original” image into separate components granting us a new look at them. Bartana’s techniques of slow motion, rotating camera, close ups, landscape wideshots, separation of text and image – so different from the visual language of news coverage – give room for a different emphasis that questions issues about which side represents the model of violence, how we use the body in political contexts, and what constructs shared imagery. We can understand the affinity to reality in the acts of re-enactment and pre-enactment as a means and not an end. When what is copied is already a fabrication, affinity is a mere tactic and means through which these acts can be introduced back to reality. So we can consider the acts of re-enactment in the works as maintaining affinity to a certain event, stamped in the collective Israeli memory, only as a surface level affinity. Beyond this, the works offer new territories of discussion altogether which transcend the events which they allude to, and move to a discussion about its representation and about the way this representation is shaped by reality and shaping reality. The work “Promotional Video” by Public Movement can be seen as an example for such a process. The work was created in the guise of a promotional film and it features a collection of choreographies performed by the group members. Public movement usually perform in the public sphere and recreate military and civic ceremonies and rituals. These are well known by the Israeli public from events such as memorial days, Independence Day, official ceremonies and well known TV broadcasts fixed in the public memory through their exposure in the media. The group members wear uniforms for most of their performances. These give them an institutional look, unidentified but recognizable. It makes them part of a general body of power be it the military, police or youth movement. This allows them to blur the boundaries between the “legitimized” violence of the state to uncontrolled acts of violence. The re-enactments of Public Movement deal with the visibility and aesthetics of the events and their violent nature. They juxtapose the choreography and decoration with the content of the re-enacted event thus emphasizing its violent fascist dimension. The group uses ambivalence as a tactic for camouflage. It is at the same time a part of the establishment and an outsider. Their appearance gives credit to their re-enactment and makes it more “real.” Amir Yatziv and Yossi & Itamar in their works fabricate pre-enactments - they act according to a model of an event even before it has happened. The works suggest that in dealing with even the most personal events like death and bereavement, we take our cues from consumed images and easily regurgitate them. In the work “Compressed Ceramic Powder” (The Battle in the Orchard), Amir Yatziv documented a group of Israeli soldiers describing their last moments in the fight, just before their own death. This is the ultimate soldier fantasy: dying in a battle, becoming a hero and finally being interviewed about it. But in this fight they use bullets made of compressed ceramic powder (to simulate) instead of real ones. The work creates a hyperreality (5) in which soldiers can describe their own deaths, and shape the myth of their bravery according to a well known model shaped by the myth of self-sacrifice that is at the core of Israeli narrative. The soldiers telling the happenings of their own deaths allows for a new, improved version of this myth, given from a first hand witness. Yossi Atia and Itamar Rose in their works “Memorial Day” and “Missiles in Ramat-Gan” offer a similar act of pre-enactment. For “Memorial Day” Atia and Rose asked people in the street to film their own future televised eulogy to be broadcast in case they will be hit by a suicide bomb attack. The work deals with bereavement as it is experienced on the national level, through the state owned TV channel that broadcasts a 24 hour long series of captions, listing the names of the fallen during Memorial Day. They asked people to speculate their future deaths, to imagine themselves as victims of a terrorist attack and shape the way they will be remembered by the public. The idea that memory is shaped by the media is in the basis of the work but pre-enacting it allows for the interference of the victim in the process of the production of myth and memory. In “Missiles in Ramat-Gan”, which was shot in the summer of 2006 during the Second Lebanon War, Atia and Rose present themselves as reporters from a TV channel with little financial means. On the premise that missiles will no doubt fall in Ramat Gan one day, they interview the public as if they have just fallen, capturing mock-reactions versed in the language of war unique to the Israeli psyche. Participants from the streets of Ramat-Gan were asked to create footage for the TV station that will be used in the future case of missiles falling on the city. In order to do so they had to re-enact images they have seen hundreds of times before in Israeli media – images of citizens a few minutes after a violent act happened, fear, casualties, survivors calling their families etc. They re-enact a terror attack according to the way it has been shaped by the media so that Yossi and Itamar’s fabricated television station can use it. They pre-enact their own deaths in a familiar way so that it can fit into the familiar framework of media coverage. The question of origin and affinity is also present in Avi Mograbi’s work “Mrs. Goldstein.” The work is a sequence from the movie “August” (2002) in which Mograbi holds auditions for actresses for the role of Miryam Goldstein, the wife of the Jewish terrorist, Baruch Goldstein, who murdered Muslims in Hebron in 1994, during her testimony to the Shamgar committee that investigated the massacre. In the work, actresses change in front of the camera but the testimony continues. Mograbi re-enacts the testimony by focusing on the text, the act of imitation of the scene itself is of less importance. The massacre of Baruch Goldstein is stamped in the collective memory as the first suicide event that led to the deterioration of the Oslo agreements into violence. The testimonies at the Shamger committy are not that well known and were not exposed that much to the public, thus, the re-enactment in the work is done in the shadow of the memory of the massacre as it was projected in the media and not of the testimony itself. The affinity of the re-enactment to the event is based on a general proximity that enables the contextualization of it. Mograbi, by a careful selection of specific parts of the testimony, gives a new and horrifying perspective of the massacre through the words of the wife of its perpetrator. This work and the others in the screening invite viewers to share an intensified look into Israeli reality, as reflections of the past and foretold in the future. The artists perspective treats reality and representation of it as part of the same sphere of events. What the works do is create a needed link between events and the way they are represented, a link that allows for a new perspective but also for a sharing of responsibility. It brings a new focus to the central role televised images have in the shaping of Israeli reality. (1) A term popular in the writting of television and media critics. It is used for describing the unifying role of the media as a power around which society unites. It is the bonfire’s light and warmth which the tribe used to gather around that is replaced by the television light around which Israeli society gathers. (2) Jean Baudrillard, talking about the Simulacra, claimed that our world has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of postmodern apocalypse. There is no longer a relation to any reality whatsoever that connects all the images we are surrounded by and so they orbit around an empty center. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Quoted in “REALER THAN REAL”, The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari, Brian Massumi. http://www.anu.edu.au/hrc/first_and_last/works/realer.htm (3) It is interesting to examine “Reality TV” and the way it shapes reality although it claims to merely reflect it. This genre flattens human society into types such as “the bitch”, “the intellectual”, “the nerd”, “the cool” and so on, thus creating a false model of reality which is introduced back into culture. (4) Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. (5) Jean Baudrillard, Simulations
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