* 1975 in Jerusalem (IL), lives and works in New York (US)
The End of Art, 2006
Artist in Residence, 2005
Normal, 2006
The Israeli-American artist began her career in experimental theater. In her solo performances and video works, she stages cultural stereotypes and taboos, which she parodies with a virtuosity bordering on the excruciating. Whereas all of Ben-Tor’s multiple characters possess idiotic features and mumble, slur, stammer, or yell through their multilingual text, they still frequently contrive to bring astonishing truths to light.
With those of her works exhibited here, Tamy Ben-Tor reveals herself as an acute observer of the international art world and their protagonists. Thus, in The End of Art, a Thai artist and typical American critic speak contrasting monologues on the amenities and absurdities of the art business. While this “outsider artist” with a heavy accent (the allusion to Rirkrit Tiravanija is impossible to be missed) is visibly amused when her “culinary arts” are praised as social sculpture, and that these have even made her wealthy, the art historian (in explicit reference to Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man) readily admits with pursed lips and grand gesturing that she neither values nor, for that matter, has any especial love of art. She enjoys all the more being one step ahead of her generation in anticipating new trends and, with just one word, to shift something to the center of attention. With this video, Ben-Tor purposely exposes the efficacy of cultural clichés in the sphere of art, as well as the mechanisms of liberalism, the market, and criticism.
A by far more humble figure appears in the guise of a not so young residency artist clad in a yellow rain cape in the video Artist in Residence. In an altogether uninspiring manner, she reports on her archival projects in Baden-Baden: “We didn’t have any ideas. So I found something and we decided to make an archive of this.” A sharp commentary on the system of publically sponsored grant programs and on the concept of non-profit art locations which, not infrequently, become a platform for mediocre art production while at the same time signifying an existential basis for not so aspiring artists.
Finally, in her video Normal Ben-Tor accelerates the spiral of communication of vigorously eloquent email-chains to the point of being intolerable. Visibly overstrained, both from her own demands as well as by those of her surroundings, and exhausted by the uninterrupted flow of multitasking, the protagonist is an example for the everyday madness of a frenzied culture of communication, which now appears to have become an end unto itself. (AM)
