Interview with Guy Ben-Ner
Born in 1969 in Ramat-Gan, Guy Ben-Ner is one of Israel’s best-known contemporary artists. In 1996 he graduated in art in Tel Aviv before continuing his studies at Columbia University in New York. His videos frequently refer to different genres of film and television. For his Tree House Kit, which he presented at the 2005 Venice Biennale, he uses a school instruction film. In his video works he mostly plays the protagonist himself, although the rest of his family is also often involved. Berkeley’s Island is an adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The desert island consists of a pile of sand and an iconic palm tree stuck in the middle of Ben-Ner’s kitchen. In his video Guy Ben-Ner tackles the opposition between a solipsistic consciousness, that believes that all the world depends on personal perception, and an existential consciousness such as Sartre’s, that believes our sense of self derives from the gaze of the Other.
Several years ago you moved with your family from Israel to New York. Has the city become your new home?
Not really. We had a tough time adjusting — I guess like any family moving to a new place. Meanwhile we’ve made many friends. New York is a monstrous city but it’s a city of foreigners, so you immediately feel at home. And isn’t the following point interesting: You don’t feel like a foreigner when you’re among foreigners? As soon as we’d started to feel more comfortable here I got a grant for Berlin, which means we’ll be moving there soon — and we have no idea where or how we’ll be living once we’re there.
How was your relationship to your home country developing? Do you feel homesick?
Sure I feel homesick. Maybe a bit more friends-sick because I miss my good friends more than anything. Whenever I go back to Israel I realize that it´s no longer my home and that — strangely enough — I don’t feel at home anywhere. Maybe it just takes time to feel at home elsewhere, or maybe this whole concept of ‘feeling at home’ is something I’ll now have to give up. Since I spent the first 31 years of my life there it’s understandable that most of the influences on my work have come from Israeli artists. You may ask me why I left. First of all because we were getting tired of the political situation, of listening to the news every hour, of experiencing social affairs with such a high level of anxiety within the sphere of our private life. Also it was quite simply a question of now or never. It certainly wasn’t a career move. I went to art school in New York just because that was the only way to get a visa for the four of us.
Your family is very often a part of your work — in the sense that they are acting with you. And as in the video Berkeley’s Island your home is the arena for the play. Is the privacy you’re presenting real or metaphoric?
I could say it’s real because this kind of art-making affects all of us in many ways. There’s no studio and the whole process from beginning to end happens in front of the kids etc. So the intimacy you get to see as a viewer is ‘authentic’. On the other hand no reality is real once a camera is directed at it. That’s why I stage a fictive narrative with my family rather than just recounting a family diary. There is a beautiful laconic saying that truth comes in the form of fiction. To stage a play about other people would reveal more about my family’s power structure than if I were to make a confessional video. It’s a play within a play, and when you’ve seen my video you don’t necessarily think about Robinson Crusoe, but rather about the situation of making a home movie.
Nevertheless, this lonely man on an island in the middle of a kitchen is a very strong image. It’s absurd; it recalls the necessity of satisfying primary and secondary needs on the one hand while underlining the lonesomeness of the human being on the other. This is the basis for something you could call ‘my home’, isn’t it?
Sure, to build your own island at home is kind of a private home inside your home, like Robinson Crusoe within the Swiss family Robinson. So it’s not so much about home as about the longing for a private island, which is, after all, a fantasy of the home dweller — a longing for some privacy to meditate about the way one can continue making art; studio work, while surrounded by little kids who call you ‘Dad’. On a different level, it’s the basis of something you can call ‘my country’. Israel is a political and cultural island in the Middle East. And you cannot leave the country by car — only by boat or by plane. That qualifies it as an island for me.
Several years ago you moved with your family from Israel to New York. Has the city become your new home?
Not really. We had a tough time adjusting — I guess like any family moving to a new place. Meanwhile we’ve made many friends. New York is a monstrous city but it’s a city of foreigners, so you immediately feel at home. And isn’t the following point interesting: You don’t feel like a foreigner when you’re among foreigners? As soon as we’d started to feel more comfortable here I got a grant for Berlin, which means we’ll be moving there soon — and we have no idea where or how we’ll be living once we’re there.
How was your relationship to your home country developing? Do you feel homesick?
Sure I feel homesick. Maybe a bit more friends-sick because I miss my good friends more than anything. Whenever I go back to Israel I realize that it´s no longer my home and that — strangely enough — I don’t feel at home anywhere. Maybe it just takes time to feel at home elsewhere, or maybe this whole concept of ‘feeling at home’ is something I’ll now have to give up. Since I spent the first 31 years of my life there it’s understandable that most of the influences on my work have come from Israeli artists. You may ask me why I left. First of all because we were getting tired of the political situation, of listening to the news every hour, of experiencing social affairs with such a high level of anxiety within the sphere of our private life. Also it was quite simply a question of now or never. It certainly wasn’t a career move. I went to art school in New York just because that was the only way to get a visa for the four of us.
Your family is very often a part of your work — in the sense that they are acting with you. And as in the video Berkeley’s Island your home is the arena for the play. Is the privacy you’re presenting real or metaphoric?
I could say it’s real because this kind of art-making affects all of us in many ways. There’s no studio and the whole process from beginning to end happens in front of the kids etc. So the intimacy you get to see as a viewer is ‘authentic’. On the other hand no reality is real once a camera is directed at it. That’s why I stage a fictive narrative with my family rather than just recounting a family diary. There is a beautiful laconic saying that truth comes in the form of fiction. To stage a play about other people would reveal more about my family’s power structure than if I were to make a confessional video. It’s a play within a play, and when you’ve seen my video you don’t necessarily think about Robinson Crusoe, but rather about the situation of making a home movie.
Nevertheless, this lonely man on an island in the middle of a kitchen is a very strong image. It’s absurd; it recalls the necessity of satisfying primary and secondary needs on the one hand while underlining the lonesomeness of the human being on the other. This is the basis for something you could call ‘my home’, isn’t it?
Sure, to build your own island at home is kind of a private home inside your home, like Robinson Crusoe within the Swiss family Robinson. So it’s not so much about home as about the longing for a private island, which is, after all, a fantasy of the home dweller — a longing for some privacy to meditate about the way one can continue making art; studio work, while surrounded by little kids who call you ‘Dad’. On a different level, it’s the basis of something you can call ‘my country’. Israel is a political and cultural island in the Middle East. And you cannot leave the country by car — only by boat or by plane. That qualifies it as an island for me.
posted by November at 8:19 am
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