Audience, Artist, Performance
I went to Haifa today, searching for a small apartment I could purchase. I was born in Haifa, in the Hadar HaCarmel neighbourhood, and I heard this area had some of the cheapest apartment prices in Israel. When I entered the train station in Tel Aviv, I saw a young man holding a big sign: "Free Hugs". I approached him and we hugged. I think he might have been a member of some international movement of huggers, but is this prologue related to our subject, and how? I hope things will become clearer as we go on.
In the 1970s, Gideon Ofrat coined the Hebrew term meitzag for performance art, addressing the need to define this newly emerging phenomenon. Performance first appeared in Israel as a trendy, popular expression of conceptual art, about 15 years after this development of the Happening had first appeared in the USA and in Europe as an independent medium. Ofrat's newly coined term was a combination of mutzag, "exhibit", and hatzaga, "play" (as in a theatre play), expressing a perception of performance as a blend between plastic art and theatre. As an artist who, for various reasons (on which I would be happy to speculate in another opportunity), was defined as a performance artist, and as the founder and manager of Bamat Meitzag, I question the current validity of this Hebrew interpretation for the activity of performance artists in general, as well as my particular inclusion in that category. Yet I must say that 30 years ago, when I started out as an artist, I did identify with that definition and acted upon it.
The audience as a psychologist/listener
I will lie on the psychologist's sofa, then, and invite you to listen to my story.
At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, I was an art student at Haifa University. The reverberations of performance events such as those organized by Ofrat at the Tel Aviv Artists House, Meitzag 76 and Meitzag 79, hardly got across to Haifa; most of us picked up very faint echoes, although some of our teachers were "hip". And yet, something must have stuck in my unconsciousness, motivating the "strange" actions I performed during conventional art classes. An example is "Missing", my reaction to an assignment in our second-year drawing class. Not only did my assignment contain nothing that could be qualified as conventional drawing, it wasn't handed in during the predefined time frame of class, but rather a month later (when my low grade for this class was final), as a guerrilla action during graduate assignments. In this forum, I got to perform before a larger audience of students from all classes, teachers, and outside guests – an audience which, in those circumstances, was expected to sit still, watch the work, and admire it. Or criticize it, of course, but I knew there were no accessible means of criticism, as well as no points of comparison. I was certain I had invented something new.
I do not attempt to revel in anything, certainly not in my ignorance and nerve. In fact, I was very shy and insecure. In my years of teaching and encounters with students and performance artists, I have discovered these characteristics apply to a high majority of them,
A few years ago, during one of my artist talks, I was asked what had made me choose performance; I was not ready for this question and had to fish for an answer on the spot. I found myself confessing that I was a very shy person, having difficulties to express myself properly in everyday life; this must have been the reason I felt I had to find another medium to convey my unusual messages, with the help of various conventions such as the familiar format of the performance, stage - light, audience - darkness, the performer expressing herself, the audience absorbing in silent, a cue for the beginning, a cue for the end, and finally, the conventional applause. This is indeed how I began, but things changed later on…
Later on
Still shy, with much more awareness – but also questions – regarding the choice I had made, one of the things I was searching for was a way to engage in a dialogue with audiences, as opposed to the monologues of my first performances. If opting for an alternative mode of communication, then performance art: not a show but a conversation, not an exhibit but action; performance as a live event between people. Dialogues, to me, come in various forms. Even in our everyday life, they are not necessarily verbal. Can a hug be considered a dialogue?
An invitation
I invite you to go back in time with me and visit an artistic action. In 1993, I visited Venice for the first time; the late Dan Zakhem, who was my partner at Shelter 209, joined me for the professional opening of the Venice Biennale. I spent three days running between the pavilions of this large exhibition, from one side of the City of Water to the next. My legs hurt from walking between art exhibits and standing in front of them, and my head, overloaded with so many works of art, nearly exploded. Endless stimulations with no time for interiorization and critique. On the last day, we sailed to one of the remote islands to visit a historical exhibition, which I believe was dedicated to ground-breaking works from the early 20th century. The long hall was divided into a series of spaces, displaying absurd dada and surrealist objects: horn-like objects with a manual playing 30,000 different noises, created by painter Russolo for his futuristic concert, cans containing Manzoni's Artist's Shit and other famous sensations, which populate my lectures about the origins of performance art. The last space was different; It was a room resembling a simple, homelike living room. It had couches and a small coffee table with magazines and brochures, a large table surrounded by chairs, a refrigerator, a TV and a VCR, a music player (a simple tape recorder), video and audio tapes, and a bulletin board with postcards from the biennale's various exhibitions… We grabbed some drinks from the refrigerator and sprawled out on the couches, let our legs and mind rest, quenched our thirst, and browsed through the magazines. Slowly and indirectly, we came to understand this space hosted an 'exhibition' related to John Cage, including, as if by accident, in the spirit of his work, information about his work, without imposing it on the audience through finished autonomic exhibits.
Visiting this exhibition by Cage was one of the key events in my life as an artist. It made me reach the conclusion that instead of performing before an audience, I wished to host the audience in my work. This was the moment I gave up on my oppositionist stance towards the audience (partially, as I still hold the artist's oppositional stance in society). Dan Zakhem would say that for him, criticizing a work art meant being hosted inside it, that is a visit (bikur, in Hebrew) as opposed to criticism (bikoret). His aim was a non-oppositional crowd.
Hosting
I like homes. In 1988, I turned my studio in Public Shelter 209 into a home, inviting performance artists Dany Zakhem and Anat Shen to join me. Together we founded the Shelter 209 non-profit organization and invited the audience to come watch our works. The works were created specifically for this small subterranean space. The very physical proximity forced us into an intimate relationship with the audience, and what started out as a constraint soon became a habit. The small shelter always looked full, even when the audience was scarce. At full capacity it held no more than 40 people, adequate for the number of spectators assisting performance acts held in closed spaces (not during festivals). From then on, I adopted the structure of 'intimate hosting performances' even when performing in large spaces.
In my work Dinner Dress – Tales about Dora (2003-1997) I hosted 24 people around a round table covered with my dress in varying locations (the living room of a Vienna apartment, a huge hangar in Zurich, a theatre venue in Hamburg, Shelter 209, Bamat Meitzag at Beit Merkazim, the Israel Museum). This fixed number matched the fixed dimensions of table and time. The audience was served a meal that was cooked on the spot, while listening to tales about Dora, which I told each of them personally. In this complex performance, the audience is an active participant: they eat, drink, watch, listen and react. Whenever we had a last-minute cancellation, we needed to ask a crew member to fill in. The work could only take place in the 24-guest format. Each member of the audience sitting around the table inevitably became a performer for the others.
When Ensemble 209 began operating in 2001 and as the organization's activity expanded, I had to look for a new, bigger, more suitable home. Our next home was at Beit Merkazim in Jaffa, and we named it Bamat Meitzag (performance stage). In the two years of its operation, I saw my main role as an artist in providing an open, welcoming home for performance artists and their guests, as well as to the other tenants of this industrial complex – artists and artisans. I wanted to focus on the kitchen and hosting space, and specialized in making soups, but before we celebrated our two year-anniversary there and before the idea had had time to mature, a fire broke out and destroyed the place, as well as most of the objects from my works and a whole archive. With no home to create and host in, and with very little documentation of my artistic past left, I chose to become a guest in another displaced reality. I joined B'Tselem and Machsom Watch in the Occupied Territories.
Action
Performance art is frequently defined as a cross-domain discipline, which breaks down the boundaries between art and life. This was when I consciously crossed the border. I visited Palestinian homes, some of them destroyed, their walls perforated with bullets, their orchards uprooted. I witnessed their lives and the checkpoints blocking their way and wrote reports. All the while I never lost sight of my path as an artist, not just as an observing artist, who will later process that reality into art displayed before a ticket-purchasing audience (such as the performance Rock-Paper-Scissors staged during the Blur International Performance Biennale, which included testimonies from the checkpoints); to me, the entire process was an artistic action. Dany Zakhem used to say that even breakfast was an artistic action, simply because he was an artist. In this statement, he refers to what Marcel Duchamps and many others have said before – art is defined as something that is performed by an artist. It is interesting to examine the question of audience in this context of visiting Palestinian homes and checkpoints. The premise is that performance (as an action, not a show) of a performance artist takes place in the presence of an audience or as a documented action exhibited before an audience. Here reality raises other, more urgent questions; existential and fundamental questions regarding ethics and humanism, and especially about what it takes to make a change. This was when I believed that in such a time, it was my duty as an artist to prefer action over displaying "art". In this action, I am the one who is looking and listening, the gaze is mine, the performer's, and it is directed at the incidental/hosting audience, and not the other way around. My presence places them and their situation at the front of the stage, in the spotlight, while I retain my anonymity, being, at most, a member of a recognized group. My aim was to establish a dialogue between this audience and myself, one that will include questions as well as answers, as much as circumstances allow.
German artist Joseph Beuys saw each human being as an artist, and I, as an artist, wanted to be human, wanted to be as emphatic to my neighbours as possible. This experience, as I have said, evolved as a consequence of my "homeless" state, and mainly helped keep my trauma in proportion. At the same time, an invitation we received from the managers of the new central bus station of Tel Aviv ended our fascinating search for a home, and we founded the new home of Bamat Meitzag. The opportunity to spend time and to work in such a difficult, derelict area, was a result of the time I spent wandering through the Occupied Territories.
I discovered interactive modes of action in 'non-artistic' environments and fell in love. In this phase, I practice hosting, both as a host and as a guest: a host in Bamat Meitzag's newly reopened home, and a guest in the public sphere.
Project Zaz
After two years of regular activity at the central station, and with many years of activity as performance artists behind us, just before the medium became established in the almost mainstream art discourse, Yaron David (the curator of Bamat Meitzag at the time) and I felt we needed to move on and away from the discourse, the habit and the danger of atrophy. With a group of Bamat Meitzag's active artists, we tried to find new modules and motivations for the presence of performance in our current time and place. Yaron suggested a fascinating action in outer environments and the homes of each of the participants. We embarked on personal autobiographical journeys, trying to discover something about the non-artistic and public outer environments that surround us. For me, this was the beginning of an ongoing process, which took place in parallel with my performance work, but as its consequence.
Home/Studio?
Shelter 209 and Bamat Meitzag are where I created, hosted, and performed for more than 20 years. This is how Ensemble 209's Old Wives' Tales came about. The audience who joins me and Guy Gutman, my partner in this work, in my studio, listens to stories and fairy tales while watching a baking action taking place in another space, beyond a glass partition. As most of the space was occupied by bleachers built for the audience, I had to give up on using my studio for my everyday work. 'Homeless' once again, I embarked on a Project Zaz (Hebrew for "moving project") of my own – looking for a home/studio outside of Bamat Meitzag.
At first, I looked for apartments in the area of the Tel Aviv central station. With the help of ads and brokers, I visited different apartments and had an opportunity to meet their residents. The character and location of each apartment sent my imagination on a different form of creation. In one, I was a writer, in the other – a painter, and in another – just a resident. Each apartment awakened a different side of my personality and constructed a different imaginary persona. The encounter with the residents allowed me, once again, to leave the performance stage to them. Through these allegedly real estate-related dialogues, I met Bamat Meitzag's neighbours for the first time. I told them about myself and about Bamat Meitzag, inviting them to a show of Old Wives' Tale. At the same time, I wrote my real estate stories and read them out to my partners in Project Zaz. The apartment hunt was real, and finally, I found the apartment that would become my studio, as well as where we host Bamat Meitzag's visiting artists.
Now I keep looking for apartments, this time inspired by a Project Zaz assignment, a return to biographical environments. I am looking for my home in Haifa, the city in which I was born, and where real estate is inexpensive. In the meantime, I am writing this article, in other words, I am telling you stories, as usual. I am a performance artist, and you, if you have read this far, and even if you only read these words, are the audience – yet we are separated by time and place, text editors and proof-readers, visual designers and more.
Another thing
On the last Cookies show, an unusual looking man stood out in the scarce audience at Bamat Meitzag, At the end of the show, I invite the audience to comment, ask questions, react and in general, say something. That odd looking man accepted my invitation and asked: "Isn't it a pity that while shows are being held in this venue, there are so many homeless people outside!? They could have all been housed here."
And the young man from the international huggers movements, what was it that he wanted? To hug us? That we hug him? That we should hug each another?
Translated by Michal Shalev