Guy Ben-Ner: Spies

Issue 50, May 2011. See the entire magazine online here.

Site Gallery, Sheffield
19 March – 14 May

By Oliver Basciano

Structured as a miniretrospective of three filmworks, plus a new commission, Guy Ben-Ner’s exhibition presents a pragmatic meditation on making art when one is the father of two young children, together with a wider investigation into how practice coexists with private life and personal history. This interchange is comically and seductively investigated in the exhibition’s standout work, Drop the Monkey (2009).

Commissioned by Performa 09, the artist pitched the idea of making a film in which he would hold a rhyming conversation with himself via telephone between Tel Aviv and Berlin. This would be shot in chronological order and edited only in the camera, meaning 25 return flights and each new line recorded from where the last left off. What Ben-Ner failed to add was that he had a new girlfriend who lived in Berlin, and that the commission would effectively be facilitating a long-distance relationship. Yet what was initiated as a form of institutional critique takes a far more interesting turn when, halfway through the project, the couple break up, leaving our protagonist to undertake now emotionally senseless trips.

Stealing Beauty (2007), an 18-minute film, likewise operates semiautobiographically, portraying the artist, his then partner and his kids as they experience the ups and downs of family life. It has the feel of a low-budget sitcom, but its flimsy sets are a consequence of the work being shot entirely, and without permission, in the showrooms of various Ikea stores. This ‘theft’ of the retailer’s property chimes neatly with the film’s script. With heavy reference to capitalism as a Marxist stage, there follows an exchange between the artist and his young son on the history of private ownership in which the boy confuses the capitalist means of ownership with the precapitalist mode of people as chattels. “Do you own us, Dad?” the boy asks. In the reply to his son, who is acting at the behest of his father and presumably without financial recompense, Ben-Ner is ambiguous. Such interrogation of the politics of ownership is carried over from I’d Give It to You If I Could But I Borrowed It, created the same year and again involving the kids. Ben-Ner and his diminutive accomplices are portrayed breaking into a museum to assemble a functioning bicycle from various parts of the curatorial display, including elements of Jean Tinguely’s Cyclograveur (1959) and Picasso’s Bull’s Head (1943).

If the undercurrents to these films are theft, family, belonging, personal history and the selling off of private time, then the newly commissioned Spies (2011) makes it explicit how geopolitical these themes are for the Israeli artist. The viewer is presented with a slow pan out from a street sign containing the logo of Israel’s Ministry of Tourism: a stick-man depiction of the 12 biblical spies travelling to Canaan. Two unseen narrators bicker with each other, weaving in quotes from Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Waiting for Godot (1953) as they argue. Their debate concerns the difference between spies and tourists, and moves on to cover settler rights and ancestry. “You take an exhaustive journey back to find your forefathers, only to discover he was an ape. That’s one rotten guided tour.” Like the other exhibits in this engrossing exhibition, Spies expertly exposes – with an abundance of sardonic humour and gentle pathos – how overbearing one’s origins can prove to be.

See this article with full illustrations, plus the entire May issue of ArtReview magazine free on your screen, here.