Tamy Ben-Tor
A special preview of an interview with PERFORMA05 artist Tamy Ben-Tor by Director RoseLee Goldberg, to be published in its entirety in the forthcoming PERFORMA book.
PERFORMA: New Visual Art Performance, a new book published by PERFORMA and scheduled for release in spring 2007, will feature extensive documentation of work by the 100 artists who made the first performance biennial so extraordinary. It will offer an exciting view into contemporary visual art and ‘perform’ as a collective artists’ journal might. Photographs of each artist’s performance, by Paula Court, will be accompanied by their texts, sketches, and storyboards; interviews with artists including Francis Alys, Tamy Ben-Tor, Jesper Just, Laurie Simmons, Michael Smith, and curators and critics Jens Hoffmann and Michael Rush, amongst others, will appear alongside texts by PERFORMA curators including Lia Gangitano, Sofia Hernandez, Anthony Huberman, and Jay Sanders. Goldberg’s introduction will address the many performance forms presented at the biennial, from radio broadcast to site specific projects, video installations, new music, historic reconstructions, and lecture-as-performance among them. With its extensive coverage of each artist’s work, histories of the presenting venues, and overall characterization of the international performance scene today, PERFORMA will be both an invaluable reference to contemporary art and new media as well as a new kind of guide to cultural life in New York City.
RLG: You premiered Exotica, the Rat and the Liberal in Jeanne Greenberg-Rohatyn’s private home [during PERFORMA05]. Was that a first for you?
TBT: Performing in a private home? Yes, I believe so.
RLG: How did that feel? It had to be very strange being that close to your audience.
TBT: It was intense. Being in Jeanne’s home, everything I did seemed very vulgar and unpleasant, like an invasion, kind of an emotional vandalism. But what was interesting was performing it for Jeanne alone. When she saw it first in rehearsal there was a tense moment for me.
RLG: What kind of tension?
TBT: What I felt with Jeanne was like a test of limits, not the stereotypical danger that’s usually related to performance art. I was just trying to create an unpredictable situation, something that won’t make you immediately say, ‘Oh, it’s one of those”that’s so hard to do. I can rarely do it.
RLG: Your material obviously is very provocative. Is it your intention to make the audience angry? How do you expect them to react?
TBT: I want to make them react, but not in order to create anger, not at all. On the contrary, the performance is meant to disarm anger. In my opinion, that’s what it does. I’m sure some people get angry, but they never talk to me afterwards, so I don’t know. I heard that one woman got angry at this performance, and I didn’t like that. That’s not what I’m trying to do.
RLG: You say ‘disarm”can you elaborate?
TBT: The drive is first of all for me to make something fresh; you have to become engaged in it because you can’t immediately decide what it is and just cast it aside. It disarms you from prejudice.
. . .
RLG: Are your characters speaking real German and real Yiddish?
TBT: Sometimes I do some gibberish or Yiddish gibberish. In Exotica, The Rat and The Liberal, it’s all real German, but sometimes real German spoken in an Arabic accent, so that makes it sound like gibberish. There was English, too.
RLG: You also have a rap section in the performance. Is that something that interests you, the way rap describes current politics, or hatred, or racism? Did you make those connections?
TBT: No, it just came out. I wanted that character, the Jewish woman, to sing, ‘The Holocaust, the Holocaust, How can you deny it’? When I first envisioned her in my head, she was a very old woman with white hair and a tin drum. But then it took its own form and I was this curly black-haired, Long Island woman. When I found a drum machine, the rhythms were mostly rap and hip-hop. So the rap came out of the machine actually.
. . .
RLG: Let’s talk about your different characters. Can you go into the head of each one of them and tell me, who is the Exotica, who is the Rat, and who is the Liberal?
TBT: It’s funny that you use that expression, ‘going into the head,’ because for me it’s not like that, it’s all myself. I’m pretending, I’m not going into a deep psychological place. What helps me is the way they look and what I know about them.
RLG: So you’re acting? You’re wearing the character rather than acting the character.
TBT: Something like that. So the first one, Exotica’I wanted to do an exotic Arab dance in that living room of Jeanne’s. That’s why I asked her to do it up there and not in the gallery, because I thought it would be great to do an exotic Arab dance in her living room, dressed up in gold and acting like a completely Western person.
RLG: What was that lady doing the Arab dance saying?
TBT: ‘Why should I feel inhibited? Why should I feel uncomfortable in any way? I should feel perfectly relaxed.’ Then she’s talking about helping others: ‘If I don’t feel good about myself, then how could I give to others’? . . . I don’t know, it just made me laugh to think about it.
RLG: Maybe she was guilty about her wealth?
TBT: No, it’s an internal thing. You can be poor and be like that. It’s a mental laziness of some sort that I was trying to pinpoint. It came out of a text that I wrote for some very busy woman on the phone’all that Oprah, psychoanalytic talk that people have with themselves. Then I dressed it up as this Arab woman with the long black hair. I have that video, Alejandra, and there was a woman I saw in the post office once talking in a funny accent. It was a hybrid. Then it took on its own life and I started to have her speaking German in an Arab accent, which just worked better in that situation.
RLG: Then the next character was . . .?
TBT: The Rat, which was the ‘German Youth’ girl. She was talking about capitalists, gossiping about someone. She was saying things like, ‘She is a capitalist, she liked to take vacations” and ‘her liberal notions stand in direct proportion to her distance from her problems.’
RLG: And does rat mean the same in English, or is it a German expression?
TBT: Like she’s ratting on someone. But then she’s also a rat. The rat is of course the German stereotype of the Jew.
RLG: They use that word, ‘rat,’ for Jews?
TBT: Of course. In the German propaganda movie The Eternal Jew, they have actual footage alternating, rats, Jews, rats, Jews. So I thought, she’s ratting, but she’s also kind of the rat herself, standing there with her big teeth screaming about someone else, screaming about capitalists and cappuccino.
RLG: She’s quite a frightening character. What is she a hybrid of?
TBT: She represents an enthusiastic, young power that is able to divert or brainwash you into something. Or she’s brainwashed herself. It’s funny how the left, liberal, anti-capitalist environmentalists say things that can also be said by Nazis’trashing America, trashing capitalism. It’s not like I’m doing the news. It’s not journalism. It’s not history. It’s chaos. I consider myself a trashcan out of which come all of these hybrids. So you don’t know who she is. Do you agree with her? Because you might think, ‘Ah, cappuccino, Starbucks, all those blond, stupid girls sipping their straws.’ Then I’m thinking, yeah, that could be said about me. I don’t know who’s talking. I don’t know if I agree or if she is talking about me or if I think that about someone else. It’s constantly revolving.