Oppressive performances by Yael Davids
Edo Dijksterhuis
A man with his head stuck
inside a filled aquarium. A girl confined in a hollowed out mattress that looks
like a quilted tomb. A boy lying on a bed with his head in a pillowcase. The
performances of Yael Davids are certainly not suitable for people with a
sensitivity to claustrophobia. And as though the sense of oppression were not
enough, the performers in these works scarcely move. The fish tank man, the
mattress girl and the pillowcase boy are breathing – in some cases through air
hoses – and that’s it. Davids’ work is usually labeled performance art, but the
Israeli-Dutch artist has little in common with the intense performances of the
pioneers in the 1970s. Since graduating from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam
in 1994 she has been making installations that are almost static by nature.
This can be seen well in the video documentations of them, which consist of
short loops. But it is even clearer in the live performances.
David’s works are acts
with no beginning or end, with the action limited to minimal movements. With
her there’s no theatre, no drama, no grand gestures. Her installations are
decors for physical functions that are primary, banal and at the same time
essential. They become visible precisely through their being isolated. The
swelling and deflating of the pillowcase, the slight undulations of the
mattress, the air sucked in and out of the aquarium – breathing determines the
rhythm of the performance and is the only indication of time in otherwise
immobile works.
In the catalogue of her
first retrospective exhibition Davids refers to the fact that in Hebrew the
word for breath is the same as that for ‘soul’. Her works are animated to the
extent that the breathing participants form the motor of a mechanism that is
just as linear and logical as the hands ticking away the minutes on a clock.
However, they are not animated in the way that much Body Art was. Instead of
determining its environment, the body enters into a synthesis with it and
changes in the process. In most of the pieces, bodies, or parts of bodies,
become living statues. As in the highly sculptural Cupboard, in which five men
and women crawl through a cupboard and stick out a leg, thigh, arm, head or
trunk through holes in the wall. Together they form a half-turned, stretched
profile raising associations with Picasso’s Cubist portraits and Matisse’s
cut-outs.
The exhibition in Museum
De Paviljoens shows the enormous consistency of the body of work she has built
up in the last nine years. The sixteen works are displayed in such a way that
they can be experienced as one large entity. The photograph of Davids herself
upside-down, wearing trousers and a blouse, with pubic hair sticking out from
the neck, can be seen as a direct comment on the boy sitting zipped up in an
armchair, as though in a straitjacket of conventions. A bit further away, a
girl’s buttocks sticking up through the seat of a chair offer another
counterpoint.
The actors and dancers carrying
out the performances become one with the chairs, mirrors, tables and walls. Yet
they do not become furniture themselves. Extremely subtle movements – the
rotating wig in Face that each time gives us a different look at the face, the
minimal dance movements of the ballerinas in Music Box – afford a certain
dynamics, however bare and minimal it may be.
It was not for nothing
that Davids gave her catalogue the title No object. But by milking the concept
of performance in the way that she does she sits very much on life’s edge. The
pillowcase and the mattress only have to not bulge out and you end up with two
lifeless victims of asphyxiation. If the breathing in the aquarium ceases then
you’re left with a head preserved in a glass jar. The boundary between
performance and sculpture is as thin as a few litres of lung contents.
This article previously
appeared in Dutch in NRC HANDELSBLAD on January 24, 2004.
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