“Profile of Tamy Ben-Tor .” Contemporary 89 (November 2006).
Tamy Ben-Tor
Profiled by Melissa Pearl Friedling
Donning a slapdash assortment of wigs and costumes, the Israeli-born artist, Tamy Ben-Tor, acts out a cavalcade of egotistic, bigoted, and bitter characters, all guaranteed to get under your skin. Indeed, her incendiary live performances and performance-based videos fire up racial sensitivities and poke fun at art-world seriousness. And, while having only just recently completed her MFA at New York’s Columbia University, Ben-Tor has already developed her own signature brand of burlesque satire that degrades and offends, taking deadly aim at the same self-identified liberal and sophisticated art-going public that has overwhelmingly embraced her.
In 2005, Ben-Tor made her U.S debut at PS1/MoMA’s “Greater New York” show with her provocative video, Women Talk About Adolph Hitler (2004). In it, she performs a series of loony female characters, all addressing the camera as they deliver insane commentary on the notorious architect of the Holocaust. Ben-Tor soon followed up with a solo show that jettisoned the artist into the New York spotlight. Her work has been compared to the shape-shifting self-portraiture of Cindy Sherman and the politically incorrect stylings of the comedian, Sarah Silverman. But, Ben-Tor is not as chameleon-like, slickly produced, or incisively feminist as Sherman and her comic timing is more haphazard than calculated. Nevertheless, Ben-Tor’s virtuosity lies in her skills as a performer, honed while studying theater in her home-town of Jerusalem.
Ben-Tor’s series of single character portraits elevate whining to an art form while her multi-character works feature exaggerated ethnic caricatures that play against each and offer a more complex treatment of partisan legacies and cultural stereotypes. In Girls Beware (2005), for example, Ben-Tor stages the Arab-Israeli conflict as a sexual matter, presenting five characters who together issue warnings to Israeli women about the predatory nature of Arab men. Similarly, in her live performance of Exotica, the Rat, and the Liberal, (2005), Ben-Tor digs in to the ridiculous logic of Holocaust denial with another series of five characters including a fervently anti-American tambourine-banging, Hitler-youth type and a woman who chants, “How can you deny the Holocaust?” to the beat of her own drum machine. Audiences at these performances writhe and squirm as Ben-Tor sends up racial sensitivities – impersonating both the insensitive and the overly sensitive, and playing anti-Semitism for laughs.
In one of her most recent videos, The End of Art (2006), Ben-Tor does a scathing impression of an artist who bears striking similarities to “social sculpture” artist, Rirkrit Tiravanija. This squinting and grinning Asian caricature comes closest to a blackface-style minstrelsy, and is likely to raise the eyebrows of even the least delicate of sensibilities. The character laughs hysterically while exclaiming in broken English, “I make million dollar for making Pad Thai!” The artist character is intercut with the declarations of an arrogant art critic who repeatedly makes self-conscious air quote gestures around her head and confesses to not even liking art. While the video shares an approach to “institution critique” reminiscent of Andrea Fraser, the work additionally complicates and confuses the liberal fallacy that only someone secure in his or her own lack of racism would dare to make, or to laugh at, a racist impression.
Ben-Tor is a one-woman Tower of Babel as her characters speak in a medley of languages – Arabic, Yiddish, German, Hebrew, and English, with occasional gibberish and a grab-bag full of accents. Misunderstanding is part of the show and nonsense, it turns out, is the lingua franca of her multiple personalities. And, as her characters at times befuddle and often elicit disdain, they also entice you to stick around, if only to see just how far she’ll go in the name of sending up a multi-cultural epidemic of idiocy.