For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine
People are idiots. That is the takeaway from Tamy Ben-Tor’s second New York solo show, which offers four new videos that fearlessly skewer the racism and misunderstanding between not only Jews and gentiles, but among humans as a whole. Using characters too foolish to be believed (including obnoxious art-world denizens), Ben-Tor shifts targets between the ugliness directed at entire groups, and the relatively harmless shortcomings of her peers.
Despite the title of the main piece, Gewald (translatable as ‘violence’), Ben-Tor skirts direct confrontation, or provocation for its own sake. Her characters are laughable enough to be dismissed along with our own culpability in prejudice. Yet stunningly acute insights slipped into fleeting scenes or absurd utterances – a Hasidic woman denying that anyone would ever want to hurt Jews; a ditzy Fraulein still ‘duped’ by Hitler – allow Ben-Tor to lay bare our capacity for ignorance without getting on a soapbox.
If these characters created by Ben-Tor (who just recently performed her live work Judensau, at the Kitchen) are fantastical, her portraits of a frustrated curator, an artist laughing all the way to the bank and an arrogant art critic are also strangely off kilter. Contrary to the supposed careerism of today, a frazzled curator can’t get artists to return her e-mails, while an aggravated critic who “doesn’t even like art, let alone love it” is hilarious but probably not too representative of her ilk. Will Ben-Tor’s jumbled characters actually prompt self-examination? That will be the test of how deep our idiocy runs.