Blood and Sweat

ARTIST NAAMA TSABAR EXPLORES DYNAMICS OF POETRY AND POWER

By Shirine Saad

On a crisp November Sunday afternoon, a large crowd of artists, curators and friends, many sporting hipster hairdos, nerd glasses and skinny jeans, has come to watch “performance with Doublecherryburst” at Columbia University’s open studios in Harlem. Two performers, Naama Tsabar and Kristin Mueller, glide around a neon-lit studio, hunched, hair covering their faces, half-closed eyes turned toward the floor. Tsabar and  Mueller hold opposite ends of a double-bodied electric guitar. Tsabar crafted the strange creature by cutting off the head of one guitar and fusing it to the other. It is played simultaneously by a left-handed and a right-handed guitarist. (Only one guitar can be in tune because the two sets of strings are controlled by one central set of pegs.) The music, an improvised, noisy post-punk, is dark and haunting. It sounds like thunder and vibrating steel. The musicians’ dialogue is sometimes languorous, sometimes rhythmic. There are breaths, intense climaxes and moments of disharmony. Attempts to tune interrupt long, whiny riffs with dissonant noises. The women’s bony fingers tap, caress and scratch the strings, manipulating the dials of the amplifiers to modify the volumes. They push the pedal, kneel and circle around an imaginary center. Suddenly Tsabar lays her side of the double guitar down on its amplifier, giving up the stage. She leans on the edge of a table, listening meditatively. She is wearing embroidered cowboy boots and a checked fuchsia top. Thin and pale, with thick black hair and dark pensive eyes, she exudes poised fragility. She picks up the guitar again and plays another long, slow riff.

The 27-year-old Tsabar, who is working towards a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum next summer, often transforms galleries and performance spaces into dodgy nightclubs, concert halls and bars, at least metaphorically. She draws from her past experiences as a bartender and musician in Tel Aviv’s legendary bar scene to explore these havens of freedom and oblivion. There, the nightlife is like “this artificial urban cell that creates closed, confined experiences,” says the artist, sitting cross-legged on the edge of her studio’s beat up mustard leather couch. A tight wool sweater and jeans outline her fit form, maintained by a vigorous at-home exercise routine and a vegetarian diet. She never wears makeup. She is striking, with fleshy lips, angular cheekbones and almond eyes. “Looking at the political situation,” she says, “these environments have such a strong important role in — I wouldn’t call it escapism — but definitely forming microcosms that you could live a normal life in, or escape into a more appealing way of living. The nightlife in Tel Aviv is extreme.” With simple materials often inspired by bars and concert spaces — gaffer’s tape, rubber mats, sheets, velvet, wood, stage lights — Tsabar makes huge installations which suck the viewer in. In “Twilight,” a giant drum case made of velvet holds a set of drums and two broken glass drumsticks, freezing the musical experience before our eyes. In “Curtain Cube,” a folded red velvet curtain rests on a base made of lead weights, forming an imposing mass. The 107 pin spot lights sitting on aluminum pipes in “Light Cube,” a structure about seven feet high, project a powerful light on the performers who play inside the installation. Breaking the lines between music and art, video and performance, sculpture and installation, Tsabar is truly a multidisciplinary artist. Punk, eroticism, performance and an undertone of violence and disillusion shape her creative language, with a conceptual edge that pushes the work towards abstraction. Inspired by the organic installations of Eva Hesse and the massive, stark structures of Richard Serra, her works are imposing and intimate, poetic and political.

Power — sexual, social and institutional — is at the center of Tsabar’s quest. A feminist, she brashly merges Serra’s monumentality with the longstanding use of soft materials by feminist artists like Hesse to question masculine authority. A queer artist, she subverts the icon of the super-virile rock star and explores a feminine, phallus-free eroticism. A pacifist who struggled to be exempted from military service in her native Israel, she offers an alternative to the violent images that have emerged from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1948. Despite the weight of politics in Israel, she avoids confronting the conflict directly in her work, as if to exorcise it altogether. She employs universal language that transcends the local and engages with human and creative questions of miscommunication, love, and the rigidity of art institutions. In a nation burdened by the heritage of the Holocaust, half-a-century of violence and the frustration that followed the failed Oslo negotiations in the 1990s, Tsabar echoes her generation’s search for identity separated out of the collective historical baggage.

The emotional intensity and formal power of Tsabar’s work allowed the artist to start her career at a young age. Upon receiving the Israeli Ministry of Education Outstanding Achievement Award at 19, she enrolled at the prestigious Hamidrasha art college near Tel Aviv. At 23, she showed “Light Cube” alongside two other artists’ installations at Sommer, one of Tel Aviv’s leading galleries. She has been exhibited at Daneyal Mahmood gallery in New York, Art Basle in Switzerland, the Bucharest Biennale, and several Israeli galleries and museums. She has had four solo shows, and has received two grants from the America-Israel Foundation. This year she was selected as a Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation finalist, which grants her a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. “I work in this industry where you see so much art, so you’re oversaturated,” says Dalit Anovik, gallery director at Daneyal Mahmood, “but sometimes you see art that’s really brilliant, like Naama’s. Her work touches me. It makes you stop and breathe. I think she’s going to be very, very successful. The work is very honest, well thought-out, and well executed. And what she does is original and not trendy. It doesn’t even remind me of something else. Her work is about who she is.”

While many Israeli artists engage directly with issues like the Wall built as a barrier between Israel and the West Bank or the occupation of Palestinian territories, others prefer to focus on personal or universal issues. In Israel’s cultural scene political views veer towards left post-Zionism, which advocates equal status for Palestinians and Jews and a peaceful single binational state, says Noga Bernstein, who is writing her master’s thesis about Israeli political art at Columbia. But artists like Tsabar prefer to keep their views private. “A lot of artists don’t want to talk about politics in their work,” says Bernstein, “maybe because it’s so complicated and hard to conceptualize.” In a country where the will to develop a healthy cultural environment from both institutions and individuals has allowed a thriving art world to emerge, there are more artists per capita than anywhere else in the world, according to New-York based Israeli curator Avi Feldman. Sheltered from the daily political and military battles, artists can express themselves freely. With two new art fairs, two museums and more than 30 contemporary art galleries, Tel Aviv is now part of the international art circuit. Critically claimed artists like Yael Bartana, Guy Ben-Ner and Sigalit Landau have become stars in the art scene. Between East and West, strongly influenced by trends in contemporary art, many of them use a post-conceptual language to make art that is complex and multi-layered, at once global and deeply rooted in local concerns.

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Tsabar grew up in the small town of Yavne, half an hour from Tel Aviv. Because her father was a helicopter pilot in the army, she lived in a neighborhood set up for families of military men. Her grandfather and father were both painters; her mother taught literature. The young Tsabar was always surrounded by art and music. “My first book about Dada I took, in English, from my grandmother’s library,” she recalls. This “real tomboy” played only with boys and practiced fencing, horseback riding, swimming and basketball. By the time she was a teenager she became obsessed with her older brother’s collection of music —Nirvana, Pearl Jam, The Pixies. “There weren’t a lot of things to do there,” she says, “no booze in the area, it was kind of like suburban life, so we learned how to entertain ourselves.” Of course, in the neighborhood politics was always an important topic of conversation, but at the Tsabars discussions were wide-ranging and open. “Although I grew up in a military neighborhood with a military father,” she says, “we were always allowed to have our own thoughts. We didn’t talk about politics at home and I always hated reading the news. It’s depressing,” she sighs.

When she reached the age of mandatory military service, that meant saying no. “My parents are very educated and smart people,” she says, “but it definitely was the norm in the neighbourhood where I grew up — you wanted to be a fighter. I was against that. The whole military process, you go into it as a child. This was not a thing I wanted to be part of. It repulsed me to see the pain, the suffering, and the fights. Israel is always on the verge of a war. It’s a very stressful way to go through life.”

Tsabar quickly grew disenchanted with politics. Music, cinema and art provided a relief, an alternative to the gloom. “There are other things in life,” she says, “and that can bring beauty. In my art I deal a lot with beauty. Things that are sensual, that are attractive — and what that can bring into life. You could call it a political reaction,” she snapped, her voice breaking up — “I call it who I am.”

While at Hamidrasha College in her late teens, Tsabar was a singer and guitarist in an electro punk band called Akita. “It was glamorous but punk,” recalls the artist in her husky voice. “We wore fake furs!”  She beams. “It had the glamour in the show and the performance, but it was not so easy on the ears. It had some screaming. I love old Glam, David Bowie, the Velvet Underground, the Rolling Stones. So it was between the two” — between glamour and aggression. “And at the same time I was forming my ideas about the feminine voice. MIA was coming up with new things, as well as Chicks on Speed and Le Tigre, so these were our influences. They are also feminist bands.” Playing concerts at nightclubs around Tel Aviv, she discovered the world of nocturnal excesses and sexual politics. At that point she read about Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s sound installations and became fascinated by her ideas where “the female voice is powerful and expressive and says things that are not in tune with what’s allowed in society,” she says. “Or PJ Harvey, with her unapologetic glam voice. I was mesmerized by really strong women with guitars and I wanted to explore that.”

Tsabar has always felt repulsed by violence and machismo. “Israel is so macho, so macho,” she says. “First of all men go to the army. How does a nation where everybody went to the army, and where most people had their friend killed or have killed, function in society? They are scarred for life. It’s part of their bonding, there’s this male-dominant aggressiveness. But my mother had a very dominant role in our family. I was not brought up like that.” Though reserved and self controlled, she is sometimes antagonistic towards male offensiveness. “On the streets in Israel men often whistle when they see me, and I answer back all the time. I go like, ‘this small!’” she laughs, throwing out her arm and bringing her thumb to the first third of her index finger. After the performance at Columbia’s open studios, when a friend complimented her on the cowboy boots, she joked, “you like them? They’re my performance boots! Anyone who bothers me, I can kick them.”

Tsabar is known for her strong character but in a professional context she keeps a courteous composure at all times; curators say she’s one of the most pleasant artists to work with. She is open to dialogue and criticism, says Jon Kessler, a noted conceptual artist who is one of her professors at Columbia. Her charm allows her to convince strangers to collaborate on musical performances. She is determined and courageous. “It goes back to her being 18 and telling her dad that she doesn’t necessarily agree with his views,” says Einat Amir, a New York-based artist and friend. “She sacrificed a lot to do what she does.” She has iron discipline, which involves working endless hours at her studio, often building huge works with her own hands or replying to numerous emails about upcoming exhibitions or performances, sometimes forgetting to eat.

Maybe because she is so single-minded about succeeding in the art world, maybe because she is fragile, Tsabar is extremely guarded. She never mentions her female partner of eight years, Tali, an arts journalist who moved to New York with her when she decided to enroll in the M.F.A. program at Columbia’s School of the Arts and plans to stay in the city with her after she finishes her degree. She avoids personal questions, mumbling something about the “voyeurism” of some journalists. “Being an artist, it’s a very tough life you take for yourself, you’re on a stage, open for interpretation or misinterpretation and you’re vulnerable,” she says.

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A fan buzzes above the door. The glaucous fluorescent light glows on pasty white walls. A pile of tattered corduroys and shirts sits on a mini-fridge. Metallic shelves overflow with paint gallons, glue-all, spray guns, empty alcohol bottles and coloured plastic sheets. On a desk, four cognac glasses flank bottles of Jack Daniels, Schweppes and Aquafina. Pages from an article, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” by Anna Chave, are thrown in a corner. On the floor, wires fight for space with 27 bottles of alcohol. Elsewhere large planks of wood lay alongside two fused Douglas electric guitars and a recycling bin full of paper. There’s one week left before the open studios and Tsabar locks herself up day and night in this narrow, suffocating studio. She rarely sees daylight. “Sweat” is in progress; she has fixed three black shelves to the wall, white sheets cover the floor, and a graphic rendering of the installation hangs opposite the shelves. In the finished work the shelves carry dozens of open bottles of cognac, vodka, tequila and gin connected by white sheets, which gradually get stained with the alcohol. Tsabar never runs out of words to describe the meaning of her art. “It’s supposed to be slick and seductive, then fall apart,” she explains, alluding to the gradual soaking of the sheets and shelves with alcohol. “It’s about the signifiers of danger and enjoyment in a self-contained world.”

Last year Tsabar showed another version of “Sweat “ at Daneyal Mahmood. A blue sheet was fed through holes in the wall into two cognac bottles that sat on wooden shelves. The sheet gradually became tainted with the amberish liquid, evoking the sunrise after a night out. The strong alcohol scent, the sheet, and the image of the Molotov cocktails filled the gallery with poetry and violence. A reference to the Palestinian fighters’ use of the rudimentary bomb during the Intifada? Tsabar denies it. “The materials for the Molotov bottle come from a certain bourgeois lifestyle, she explains. “So the Molotov bottle can never be ignited, it consumes itself, pleasure and danger are never achieved. It’s a critique of the gallery, of the inability of those spaces and the people associated with them to be in the real plane, outside that which is only signified.”

Power is at the heart of Tsabar’s art, luring, monstrous, cynical, sometimes castrated, sometimes explosive. “Tsabar’s work is both strictly formal and extremely emotional at one and the same time,” explains Hadas Maor, a curator based in Tel Aviv. “Many a times it is concerned with various types of invasion, transgression, deviation; liminal states characterized by the absence of a clearly defined border, which position the artwork, the artist and the viewer in unclear and ostensibly unguarded situations.”

Like the urban youths who rush into the underground nightlife to forget their fears and frustrations, maybe Tsabar’s representation of bars and clubs shows a thwarted urge to escape, too. In an article accompanying the exhibition Real Time at the Israel Museum last year, which showed Israeli art of the past decade, curator Amitai Mendelsohn notes a nihilistic trend among Tsabar’s predecessors. “Very little of the groundbreaking art created in Israel responded directly to these events (the Oslo agreements, the Intifada),” he writes, “either because artists felt powerless to change a harsh reality, or because they chose to adopt a universalist stance in an attempt to rise above the purely local… And at the same time, the choice is often made in the conscious knowledge that real escape is impossible.” The closer artists are to violence, writes Mendelsohn, the more they try to escape it. “This search for alternate paths need not be interpreted as an expression of general apathy; rather, it may be seen as a political statement and a critique of the insensitivity that seems to prevail in Israeli society.”

Tsabar is more interested in exploring gender politics in her art. “Encore,” a monumental stage carrying a set of drums, two microphones, a guitar and an amplifier, all made from Gaffer’s tape, hangs several feet above the floor, like a big black beast. The shiny finish of the tape and soft textures of the instruments clash with the impressive structure. The power of the beast melts. Tsabar uses softness to challenge the traditional materials of sculpture — bronze, marble or steel with intimate elements of everyday life, sheets, a scarf, toilet paper. She says she wants to subvert the huge heroic structures of minimalists like Serra with a feminine — a feminist — softness. The hard becomes weak and the soft becomes dangerous. Another installation, “Untitled,” a semi-rolled up black rubber mat, invaded the Haifa Museum this year, snaking along walls and through doors. This familiar element — the mat in constant contact with people’s soles, at bars and clubs and in their homes — suddenly threatened to take over the institution’s space. The un-precious object became a potent work of art, the phallic form of the rolled-up mat half melting on the floor.

Masculine power is also shattered in “Untitled(Babies),” a video where the artist takes the role of a nonchalant, arrogant and juvenile Jarvis Cocker, singing about love and sex. She plays “Babies,” Pulp’s classic Brit-pop tune, with an all-girl band in a large studio drenched with Mediterranean sun, windows closed, stage encircled by steel fans. She sings with a sultry, coarse voice and mimics male rock stars’ languorous body swings with the electric guitar. “I want to take you home/I want to give you children…” As the song comes to an end she starts banging her guitar on the stage. The robust guitar that she has built stays intact, but the stage falls apart under her feet while the musicians produce free, strident, aggressive sounds. In this brutal cacophony, the parody of the guitar-breaking ritual ridicules images of masculine sex appeal. “The role playing, the male rock ’n roll driven clichés, she’s in a way owning that,” says Avi Feldman. “She’s reengaging that kind of bravado in terms of a queer sexuality. She’s commenting on the failure of that revolutionary gesture of breaking a guitar of what is means today.” Appropriating the voice of the male rock idol, Tsabar challenges the normative model of sexuality.

Beyond her blurring of traditional gender and sex roles Tsabar also pushes apart the boundaries of artistic genres by working in multimedia, criticizing the authority of institutions to create frameworks and categories. In her various “Compositions,” performers play different melodies on the guitar standing on amplifiers, as if edified on pedestals. The superimposed music of the guitars and amplifiers become sound, the musicians on pedestals become soft, living sculptures, and the whole work, creating an enveloping interactive environment, becomes performance. In her use of banal materials of everyday, also favored by Arte Povera to denounce the preciousness of traditional materials, Tsabar is reassessing the nature of sculpture. Paris-based curator Ami Barak, who first saw Tsabar’s work at Art Basel, likens her work to Duchamp’s ready-mades. “I like this approach, he says, because she is renewing sculpture with elements from other disciplines.”

COMPOSITION 8, NEW YORK

Throughout her work, Tsabar traces the tortuous path of power and its multiple boundaries. A path that uncannily recalls the situation in Israel, with its powerful army in a state with uncertain borders. While the artist insistently tries to avoid the political, it catches up with her, grunting as a background soundtrack. “The things that affect me the most, that burn something inside, are usually what comes out in my work,” she says. The artist’s deepest questions and fears are the themes of the “Doublecherryburst” performance as the musicians, masked by their hair, each holding an end of the double-sided guitar, struggles to tune and play the dark music. Is it the post-modern version of an 18th Century serenade, as Jon Kessler, her professor at Columbia, sees it? Or does it symbolize the fragility of love? Or the impossible dream of communicating, and finding balance, in society?