Art on Israel in NY

NEW YORK—When I was nine years old, I rode in the car with a family friend who picked up an Israeli soldier hitchhiking on a highway outside of Tel Aviv. Not yet illegal, transporting homeward-bound soldiers on Shabbat was common practice. Nonetheless, I felt significantly distraught when our new companion hefted his uzi to rest it between the driver’s and passenger’s seats, inadvertently pointing it at me.

Upon entering the Francis Alys show, at David Zwirner Gallery until March 17, I again felt the discomfort of coming face to face with artillery. Alys’ 51 sculptures of guns surround the exhibition space and are positioned aggressively so that from almost every vantage point in the room, you will likely find yourself staring down the barrel of at least one gun. But unlike the uzi that once frightened me with its reflexive jerks to every pothole and sharp turn, Alÿs’ guns are made from remnants of film projectors.

The guns may have an element of absurdity, but their hybridized anatomy—an artist’s tool reconstructed as a weapon—alludes to the serious theme of the show: how the artist can fuse political and artistic interventions.

In “Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political, Sometimes Doing Something Political can Become Poetic,” Alys’ first solo show at Zwirner, the artist continues his pattern of filming in volatile regions of the world, this time focusing on Israel. The documentary on display shows Alys in a beau geste that lasted for two days in June 2004, as he walked the border established in the 1948 ceasefire between Israel and Palestine and marked his path with the overflow from a punctured can of green paint.

The audio track of the film is composed of Alys’ interviews with various Israeli academics, writers, artists and activists on the subject of the partition, which was originally delineated by the green pencil of Moshe Dayan and the red pencil of Abdullah Al-Tal on a 1:20,000-scale map, reproduced here in the gallery.

The film, conceived in collaboration with Julien Devaux, records Alys’ trajectory and captures the pedestrians’ reaction. Children follow along in amused consternation, a street vendor is agitated when he discovers that the wheels of his cart have picked up the paint, and Hassids of a knowing age seem perturbed and saddened as they face memories kicked up by Alys’ trail.

The artist, though, registers nothing and continues his leaky pilgrimage unaware of the reactions he arouses. His determined and detached performance suggests the hollowness behind the authority—artistic or official—that draws a line in the earth.

The Israeli-Palestinean border appears elsewhere in Chelsea, in a Miki Kratsman photograph, Gilo # 2 (2001), at the Andrea Meislin Gallery. Out of all of the works in “Current Visions: Inside Israel (Part 2),” a group show of 14 photographers that opened March 10, Kratsman’s is one of the few pieces with a patently political subject matter.

Meislin, the preeminent gallerist dealing in Israeli photography, explains that the common theme amongst the works is actually “all of the different uses of the land.” Thus, we see Israel at its brightest in an Orit Siman-Tov photograph of the Dead Sea (reminiscent of Massimo Vitali’s beachscapes) and Josh Shamsi’s enchanting portrait of two fruit trees cast under protective nets, looking like sylvan creatures in a wedding party.

And yet, the specter of conflict persists in Rina Castelnuovo’s shadowy portrait of a “Golan Heights Cowboy” walking through the fog alongside an armored tank, and in her depiction of three female soldiers weathering the evacuation of a synagogue in Gaza.

But the height of the show can be found just beyond Barry Frydlender’s overwrought Breakwater (2006), in a series of untitled works by Daniel Bauer, who debuts in New York with this show. The rich but flat tones of Bauer’s 2005 compositions whiff of vintage prints and convey the illusory texture of a paint-layered canvas.

Despite Bauer’s and Shamsi’s fine shots, the selection in this show still feels diluted. Walking through, I could not forget the imperative that Alys penned on a post-it note in the Zwirner gallery: “Let the images talk on many different levels, as only poetry can.”