Tamy Ben-Tor at Salon 94

By Joshua Mack

Bewildering, brilliant and compelling, Tamy Ben-Tor’s half-hour performance Saturday afternoon synthesised her ability to channel personalities, her keen understanding of human foibles and idiosyncrasies, and her biting wit into a poetic meditation on selfishness, bigotry and the narrow-mindedness underlying them in a format somewhere between performance, dance and sculpture.

In the past, Ben-Tor has relied on exaggerated but easily recognised stereotypes while delivering absurd, often hysterical monologues in colloquially accented American English, German and Hebrew. These sketches, live and on video, skewered both the deep and various means and modes of anti-Semitism, the paranoid and victimised psychology of the Israeli mindset and an intellectually slack, self-indulgent American relationship with Zionism and history (both among Jews and Evangelicals) in a mix which revealed a vicious circle of cause and effect, social callousness and individual idiocy. However, her presentations usually came off as skits, raising the question of why they were not being staged in a theatre, or considered as theatre pure and simple. Or to be cruel, Ben-Tor was in danger of becoming a comic mimic.

Tamy Ben-Tor and Miki Carmi, Kathy, 2010, c-print, 61 x 43 cm, edition of 6.
Courtesy Zach Feuer Gallery, Stux Gallery and Salon 94, all New York

Not any more. The five characterisations she presented at New York’s Salon 94 mixed Yiddish, Polish, German, English and Hebrew in a kind of spoken gibberish. Occasionally, and still hilariously, discernible words came through. Among the recognisable phrases: “There was a hazer” (Yiddish: pig), delivered in a hillbilly twang by a Ben-Tor dressed in a blond wig and wooden shoes. Later, sporting a black beard, green turban and babouche, Ben-Tor began, “I’m proud to be the one from Maine”, as if channelling an American born-again Christian on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

Tamy Ben-Tor and Miki Carmi, Kook 2010, c-print, 61 x 43 cm, edition of 6.
Courtesy Zach Feuer Gallery, Stux Gallery and Salon 94, all New York

Israeli identity and Jewish history obviously inflect these characters. All were dressed in odd mixes of Yemenite or North African costumes, recalling the Sephardic immigrants to Israel in the 1950s; in a kind of matronly Communist Bloc mufti, suggesting more recent Russian arrivals – a woman in a kerchief wearing coke-bottle glasses; or in stereotypes of Slavic maidens and Brothers Grimm characters that looked back to the horrors of the shtetl. But Ben-Tor’s mix-and-match use of garments, accents and languages subverted all ideas of identity. This, and the frequent playing of recorded animal sounds, and her underlying texts (hard to follow during the performance and here quoting the most discernible as provided by Zach Feuer Gallery), turned the performance into a grand disquisition on human cruelty and an almost wilful and stupid ignorance of others born of selfishness and self-absorption. Here’s the text:

I’m back.
And someone has eaten
My porridge,
And someone has slaughtered
The sheep,
And in my bed I see a cow is lying,
And in my backyard a pig sits.
You’re back? Says the pig,
Well, animals live here now.
This is a zoo. It’s an animal house.
Animals are people too.
You’re back? Says the cow,
But with my two eyes I saw you leaving…
Look, she says, I’m really sorry
That you have no home,
But I will not give you my apartment, because it’s my apartment. You know?
I’m back, I say. People come back.
Well, all right, they say.
But now, you have to go.

Tamy Ben-Tor and Miki Carmi, Smudi, 2010, c-print, 61 x 43 cm, edition of 6.
Courtesy Zach Feuer Gallery, Stux Gallery and Salon 94, all New York

What held all of this together was Ben-Tor’s magnetic presence. Her careful, and masterful, use of small gestures, body stance, facial expressions and accents galvanised the performance. Her physical ability to attract and hold attention brooks no distractions. By speaking in tongues and mixing her ‘metaphors’ of identity – dress, language and accent – she surpasses the bounds of acting to become a kind of living sculpture or poem. Yes, she risks losing the viewer in a web of associations which are at times hard to follow or to draw personal associations from. And no doubt, the above text tends towards the simplistic conclusion that people are animals. Still, she held me rapt as I struggled to follow the complexities and clues of her meaning.

Tamy Ben-Tor's performances at Salon 94, New York, took place on 19 and 20 March. Additional performances will occur at Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, on 27 March and 3 April, and at Stux Gallery, New York, on 10 and 17 April