Tamy Ben-Tor: Girls Beware

The Israeli-born, New York City-based artist Tamy Ben-Tor has become known over the last two years for a series of short performance-based videos and live performances that center on her ever-expanding catalogue of invented, eccentric characters who rant unpredictably about a world plagued by bigotry, xenophobia, violence, self-absorption, and greed---all qualities which they, in turn, both criticize and embody.

Girls Beware (2005) presents a quintet of new portraits and demonstrates how she resourcefully makes use of her finely-honed theatrical skills developed at the School for Visual Theater in her hometown of Jerusalem. Throughout this work and others, the mercurial Ben-Tor morphs effortlessly from one sharply drawn persona to the next with the simplest changes of clothing, accessories, and impeccably realized accents, as she speaks directly to the camera, and to us, in short, strung together monologues that appear to respond to questions from an absent interviewer.

Ben-Tor situates each of her protagonists in this video against various simulated backdrops, as they enact discrete scenarios based partly on a public flyer circulated in Israel that issued warnings for young girls to beware of Arab men who might entice them with games and money and take advantage of them. The video begins with a woman dancing for the camera in front of a Times Square-like backdrop -- as she sings, ironically in Arabic, a text based on that flyer—at the same time as a ticker tape translation of the text scrolls across the screen in English, issuing the public warning. She is followed by a Russian prostitute who recites listlessly in Hebrew (spoken with a heavy Russian accent) every Arab-slur she can recall. Next, we encounter Ben-Tor as an academic, surrounded by her stack of books in the library, who offers convoluted theories about fear, power, and “the penetration of the foreign man.” Ben-Tor then jump cuts to a bearded man in sunglasses, sitting in front of a classroom blackboard, who, as if in reenactment, begins to engage the attention of an unsuspecting, vulnerable little girl-- who then appears, donning a pig-face mask and dancing insanely for the camera. From there, the absurd mayhem loops back to the beginning in endless repetition.

Borrowing references from art history, television, and past theatrical styles, Ben-Tor’s work, on the one hand, suggests the influence of the likes of Cindy Sherman; however, the artist herself, cites a different set of influences, ranging from Woody Allen to Paul McCarthy to the playwright Richard Maxwell. For the most part, the artist’s humorous and scathing portrayals grow out of her acute observations of people around her and strangers she encounters; she closely notes their physical mannerisms and ways of expressing themselves and then distends selected characteristics to bizarre extremes. Her grotesque amalgamations either emerge from an intuitive memory of a remembered voice, phrase, or gesture--or else grow out of written texts, which sometimes come first, and then the character grows from there to take on a specific form and context. Ben-Tor’s seething medleys of swift, intricate character transformations ultimately reflect a fragmented sensibility as each monologue is always unceremoniously interrupted before an argument can develop into a logical conclusion. In this way, she manages to skewer, in equal measure, conservatives and liberals alike as she uproots familiar moral anchors of right and wrong, good and evil, with illogical explanations and nonsensical commentaries.

At the crux of her project is language itself: she consistently destroys, parodies, and distorts conventional speech, intermixing Arabic, Yiddish, German, Hebrew, and English, ensuring that, for most viewers , significant sections come off as highly charged gobbledygook. Language in her work becomes an unreliable tool that fails to communicate, causing tension and misunderstanding. For Ben-Tor, both identity and difference have linguistic origins, whereby language is the primary marker against which we perceive something to be foreign, alien, or exotic, and the point of origin from which xenophobia and hatred emerge. In this respect Ben-Tor’s work recalls the mid-twentieth-century Theatre of the Absurd (think Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Eugene Ionesco) and its startling attack on rational thought and conventional dramatic structure, which reflected a profound distrust of language’s ability to convey meaning.

In Ben-Tor’s work, similar subversive attacks and futile efforts are at play, as she tries, in her words, “to embody the position of saying the wrong thing in order to communicate a certain truth.” Her Sisyphean characters, however, perpetually fail, stranded as they are, in what Ben-Tor refers to, as the “domain of idiocy.” But, it is precisely in this domain that, like the Theater of the Absurd, the universe expands in exhilarating ways. Liberated from logic, it turns out nonsense opens up other possibilities for a new kind of comprehension and understanding.

Debra Singer

TAMY BEN-TOR was born in 1975 in Jerusalem, and now lives and works in New York City. She received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2006. Her videos and performances have been seen at Zach Feuer Gallery, New York; Cubitt, London; Salon 94, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Reina Sofia, Madrid; P.S.1, Long Island City, New York; Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, as well as at film festivals in Tel Aviv, Vienna, Berlin, and London. Her work has been written about in Artforum, The New York Times, Modern Painters, Contemporary, and the Village Voice, among others.

DEBRA SINGER is executive director and chief curator of The Kitchen in New York. She recently organized solo exhibitions by Edgar Arceneaux, Yto Barrada, Matthew Buckingham and Joachim Koester, Christian Jankowski, Tracy and the Plastics, and Walid Raad/The Atlas Group. Ms. Singer previously served as the associate curator of contemporary art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. During her seven years at the Whitney, she organized solo exhibitions of new work and commissioned projects by artists such as Joseph Grigely, Arturo Herrera, Helen Mirra, Jennifer Pastor, Paul Pfeiffer, Shahzia Sikander, Paul Sietsema, and Sarah Sze, among others, and was the primary performance curator, producing live music, dance, theater, and literary events for the Museum. She was also a co-curator of the 2002 and 2004 Whitney Biennials; a co-curator of BitStreams (2001), a group exhibition of art enabled by digital technologies; and was responsible for the New York presentation of the touring exhibition The Quilts of Gee's Bend (2003).