ADI NES: AFTER IDEALISM
by Horace Brockington
Adi Nes’s photographic works are a series of staged and digitally manipulated conceptual images that explore issues of gender, personal and national identity. While Nes’s photographs are staged, they aim to illuminate the space between Israel’s social realities and its ideals. Although highly regarded in his own country, Adi Nes’s works have received limited exposure in the United States despite being included in several group exhibitions. He creates his images from the point of view of the expectant construction only to reveal that it is a complex series of negotiations and re-negotiations of cultural, nationalist, historical, and personal dynamics. Nes proposes that it is this complex notion of identity that establishes the set the conditions of how we enact, resist, and interpret the world.
In one of his extensive series of image works, Nes focuses on the depiction of Israeli soldiers and questions the very context of the macho role often equated with the figure. In his work the image of the soldier, traditionally operating as a fetishized nationalist symbol, becomes human through his re-interpretation.
Nes hired models, make-up and a teams of assistants to create large-scale staged photographs depicting Israeli soldiers at work, in combat, at play, and at rest. Placed within the context of the Israeli military, Nes subverts the image of the rugged legendary Israeli soldier of the l967 legend into a series of pretty boys posing and letting off steam. In Nes’s photographs, the image of the Israeli soldier is transformed from the fit-and-friendly youth of fifty years ago to a figure far more edgy, incongruous, overbuilt, narcissistic, masculine, homoerotic, and orthodox, but still powerful. Nes has said, "This was my way of criticizing the bad mix that is Power and Judaism"
Judy Dempsey has observed that the macho image permeates many aspects of Israeli society. Former generals, senior commanders and retired officers function within the government and business: former intelligence chiefs operate banks or insurance companies. Still the army remains one of the main sources for personal and economic advancement.
By making direct reference to the Israeli military, Nes intends for the viewer to question the nature of identity: real, assumed, invented, cultural, national, and specific. In Nes’s work the Israeli soldier becomes a symbol for the nation as a whole. He has defined the series as exploring themes of masculinity, fraternity, and of national and cultural identity. Although initially seeming to be confident images, they gradually reveal themselves to be filled with inner turmoil. At first glance the soldiers appear tough and macho, however this is soon undermined by the tender poses. In one related work, five soldiers are depicted on a flagpole re-staging of the famous photograph by Micah Perry of the flag being raised in Um Rashrash (Eilat) during the War of Independence. In Nes’s version, however, there is no flag. His re-interpretation of Perry’s image, familiar to many Israelis, is loaded with political cynicism. The absence of the flag in Nes’s treatment of the subject deprives the image of it original meaning and impact. In another image Nes depicts a group of rugged-looking, handsome young men in fatigues lounging under a tree; it takes a few seconds to observed that one figure in a white T-shirt has a missing arm which the artist has removed by digitally manipulating the photograph. In a related image, a half dozen soldiers applaud in an odd stop–frame motion, but a seventh soldier cannot applaud because he is missing a limb.
A highly circulated photograph by Nes involves a muscular youth in army pants and a knit yarmulke. Half naked, he stands in the sand outside his pitched tent flexing his biceps in a bodybuilding pose and wearing military boots on his feet. The image combines the religious and militaristic identities of Israel in a single figure and the strangeness of the image brings into question the continued coexistence of these divergent aspects of the definition of the country. Nes’s images are not meant to be sentimental; they are a decisive statement of gender and sexuality filled with intellectual insight, which relates to the turbulent undercurrent in the dreams, politics, personal issues, and social realities of the Middle East.
Often the artist will reference tradition art historical sources such as work by artists such as Rubens, da Vinci, Caravaggio and other important art historical sources, photographs, and mythology.
