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When you think of photography you think of painting
too.
Tal Ben Bassat’s new works are a (direct) continuation of years of
painting. Intuitively yet oddly enough, Ben Bassat doesn’t like her works
to be classified under the title “photography”. She prefers terminology
taken from the field of painting. Between her season of painting and the
current show, Ben Bassat exhibited photographs depicting items of
clothing, such as furs, feathers, lacework collars, hair extensions, pearl
necklaces, etc.; accessories for women’s clothes that were put through a
series of reproductions and duplications, and presented within light
boxes.
In the present exhibition her works consist of digitally processed
photographs, “borrowed” from others. Clearly defined, mostly in gray
shades, the images are typified by cold brightness requiring no verbal
explanations. The rooms are treated as monochromatic surfaces. There is no
interplay of light and shade, nor soft transitions; on the contrary: they
converse with the 1970s Hard-edge painting, yet are surprising in their
inclination toward surrealistic composition. Ben Bassat lends an anonymous
appearance to furnished rooms. Indeed, "Office Furniture" was our first
choice for the show's title. We liked the name for its lack of pretense
and its openness to free interpretations. However, since Bassat named the
computer file Office no. 6, that title was ultimately chosen.
The process begins with an automatic act, leafing through fashion journals
and design magazines, from which she selects images of work and habitation
spaces. The images are then scanned and incorporated into the computer as
raw materials, functioning like paint, canvas and brush. On the other
hand, the built-in graphic applications already inside the computer are
waiting to be set in motion, thus initiating the act of blending, between
that which was taken from the outside with that which is found on the
inside, an act whose products fall under the rubric of “digital
processing”.
The phrase “furnished rooms” refers to hotel bedrooms, office spaces,
kitchens, and lecture halls. Each of the furnished photographs is in a
state of freezing, yet this is not the source of their static quality.
Similarly, the photographs themselves are not necessarily lifeless, but
they do not exert themselves to appear real or drawn from life. Ben Bassat
performs an act of erasure on them, eliminating any detail that might
attest to human presence or signify any live occurrence. Nevertheless, one
may assume that life is lived within these settings at some time, for a
short while during the day, when no one is aware of it. In Office no. 6
the furniture has been frozen momentarily. It is devoid of human presence;
in fact, it is devoid of any narrative whatsoever. In Office no. 6 it is
we who invent the drama. It is ours and ours alone. It is we who foster a
virtual dialogue…
The other rooms may serve as backdrop for an unknown series of films
unrelated to everyday reality, and yet they keep us, the viewers, in
perpetual suspense. The anonymous room is found in a state of deep freeze;
perhaps it is an image taken straight out of a nightmare flooding the
dreamer with a sense of helplessness. There are no people in this dream,
only a place where events transpire. The dreamer tries to draw near, to
recall what had happened there, but in vain – the dream remains empty and
meaningless. It has been effaced. Any attempt to touch upon the real
thing, that seems to be so near-at-hand, remains futile and unobtainable.
Ben Bassat’s rooms are empty, splendidly organized, neat and gray. From
the moment she admits them into her studio, into the computer, she
controls each and every object in the room, drawing them her own way;
painting them in shades of gray, black and white; picturing a night-light
or a flower pot in her mind; creating them in a separate composition, not
daring to introduce them into the rooms, lest they spoil the straight
lines, blur the acute angles, and above all – violate the sense of
anonymity and void; striving to ensure the silence and order and keep the
eye from jumping from one piece of furniture to the next, to limit the
number of focal points. She paints bright red upholstery for a chair, and
envisions the color stains with her virtual brush. Such are the moments of
temptation for variations on the theme of furniture: either toy with the
digital possibilities all night long or stop abruptly. It is the
temptation to press the keys and create new situations within existing
ones; to change the color of the upholstery to white or to leave it red.
The temptation to paint it red must be satisfied, and this entails a
decision to save the file by a name of her choice, and call it a day. A
day or two later, she will reactivate the computer and resume toying with
colors and forms, furnishings and objects; every work will be given a new
filename… and so on and so forth.
Ben Bassat is like a conductor orchestrating not sound, but rather
silence. She attempts to silence form and color, obtaining abstraction and
encapsulation of a theme. One section might consist of only three lamps,
whereas another – could be composed of eyelashes; yet another would
feature a living room, with a table for three, two single beds, and a
picture on the wall. An encounter between the quiet, reserved, melancholic
gray and the romantic, sweeping, raging red takes place on the computer
screen.
Nowadays the word “appropriation” is in fashion, but as I see it, Ben
Bassat primarily takes, or rather adopts, intuitively, the images to which
she relates, and only then does she plot and plan what to do with them.
She does not seek, but rather finds, and subsequently the images find her,
and the link is formed in the course of her work. At these moments they
are truly hers, an integral part of her visual world.
During the first stage, all the people are thrown out of the picture, cast
out, erased. Next to be erased is any written word or character that might
attest to the location of the site, or provide any other identifying mark.
Only then can she sit back and relax, and start the process of “ordering
and tidying up”. The screen remains clean, the room remains empty, and
fear gradually becomes part of the absent story. The chairs are orphaned,
the halls – empty of people but full of chairs. A biting presence of
objects arranged, unaccountably, on a diagonal. And the fear is imbued
with anonymous beauty.
Ben Bassat’s room “parade” is comprised of straight lines. She
concentrates on “keeping inside the lines,” just like she was taught in
penmanship classes in school. Rounded lines are scarcely noticeable in
these works. It is a reality that transpires in the intersection of right
angles. Even the curved lines of the lampshades seem straight. Orderly
occurrence is painstakingly over-emphasized. A sense that everything is
under the computer’s control. A hi-tech world. Now the kitchens too, like
all the other rooms, are painted gray. Gray – the color of computers; the
predominant hi-tech color, just as the whiteness once dominating hospitals
was replaced by a shade of green which invoked in us a strong yearning for
the clean, cold white.
It is quite clear that Ben Bassat would allow no one to enter her rooms
and touch her emptiness. All the more so, as there is nowhere to hide in
them. All the cabinets are shut, and if someone were to hide there, he
would have suffocated, died of asphyxiation, and been buried in a closed
coffin-like cabinet. Mankind remains outside. You can continually stare at
the computer screen, endlessly long for the romanticism that is no more,
and be scared to death of such a futuristic world…
At the moment, Ben Bassat likes the manipulation opportunities provided by
the software, and observes the results from within and from without. She
endures many sleepless nights in front of the screen, that furnishes her
with infinite, ostensibly unfeasible variations.
Her gaze on the rooms is seemingly male, as opposed to her painterly
practice in the 1990s, depicting bodiless women’s clothes in defiance of
the masculine gaze that examines that which occupies the garment, dreaming
of the woman’s body. Back then she painted knitted sweaters, buttoned up
dresses and tailored suits devoid of a female body. They were cut where
the woman’s head or feet were supposed to be. Now too, Ben Bassat excludes
people from her rooms, but this time – not exclusively the women. Now
everyone is left out. And yet, they are there; in her mind. Now, like
then, she employs a somewhat masculine perspective. She empties the rooms
of any identifying signs, just as she emptied the clothes of the female
body, thereby transforming the woman’s clothes into an anonymous subject,
lacking specific identification.
In the present exhibition, Office no. 6, the furniture becomes an object
detached from reality, and, it is briefly freed from its obligation to be
functional, serviceable. As an object, it enjoys the privilege of
impracticality, simply conveying coloration, aesthetics, and beauty. It
fulfills our desire to draw pleasure from beautiful objects, from art that
has no “purpose”, that can exist without a goal, save its very existence
as a work of art. Here we return to Ben Bassat’s discussion of painting
and can better understand her insistence upon continually using the color
stains and engaging in object painting and composition arrangement, as in
painting. The fact that the room was drawn from a photograph is no longer
significant following Ben Bassat’s treatment, whereby she altered its
initial appearance, making it her own, just as she did with the paintings
she executed on canvas several years ago. The offices convey a theatrical
presence, moments prior to fame. Life transpires in another arena. Office
no. 6 is presented as a metaphor for the start-up company. The plot is
confidential. The papers on the table are blank, effaced of information.
Nothing will divulge the secret project. The computers are turned off, and
soon enough, object-laden transparencies will come out of the printers.
Ben Bassat will gather them into light boxes to be exhibited in the show
at Office in Tel Aviv.
In this dual act, the furniture-like objects are juxtaposed to an
illuminated aluminum frame. Only a moment ago they dwelled within the
illuminated computer box, and now they have become objects within light
boxes on the gallery wall. An object within an object.
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