Interview Page One

Interview Page Two

Interview Page Three

73 volunteers – one for each day of the exhibition. Each volunteer sits alone for two hours. The volunteers are requested to bring their own DVD and then sit down in the “living room” and watch it. Light refreshments are served.
If you are interested to participate, please email us with:
1. a choice of 3 optional dates (Thursday April 7 through June 26)
2. Your full name
3. Your age and gender
4. Your occupation
5. The title or description of the DVD you’ll be bringing with you.

The work was exhibited at Dallas Contemporary art Center, Texas

Watch Documentation:

Watch Slideshow:

Five white boxes are placed in a white clinical room. Twenty people at a time are directed into the
bright room and are requested to line up next to each other. Two guides dressed in black are
thoroughly choosing two people at a time and leading them into the small and narrow rooms. Fully
exposed through a glass wall they are waiting for instructions from a synchronized loudspeaker
system:

- Welcome strangers, you are being watched but no one can hear you.

- You are about to be asked a series of questions. Please share your answers with each other.
You will have a limited amount of time to answer each question.

The spectators who were not chosen to go into the boxes are standing against the entrance wall,
observing the couples that were inserted into the boxes: With a tentative body language they start
to converse politely to each other. Every movement, facial expression, and emotional shift of the
room inhabitants is completely exposed, but not a single word or sound can be grasped from the
outside. At times the dialogues break and the body movements are changing simultaneously. The
couples inside the boxes are crossing their arms over their chests, dancing and taking each other’s
hands, caressing each other’s cheek. The nature of the questions is gradually changing from
standard questions to deeper and more personal. The pairs seem to come closer to one another.
They laugh, talk confidentially and listen concentrated to each other. When 13 minutes had past
they are led out of boxes and guided out through a side door of the space.
The performance is shown several times each day. The audience is welcomed to visit the
performance as many times as they wish, taking their chances over and over again: would I be
chosen to go into the box this time? Or would I be left to watch from the outside?

In recent years our possibilities to socialize has been simplified and changed dramatically, thanks
to all the media that provides numerous meeting options. We can read strangers’ diaries and view
their family albums long before we get a closer contact. The conditions to form an opinion in
advance of who the other person is has increased, along with the possibility of rejecting those
whom we do not want have contact with.
Einat Amirs new performance Enough About You touches this subject.
Amir creates a sensuous venue and an observatory for physical encounters, which is
controlled by a predetermined template. In the work she is exploring the meeting as a real action
and as an image, from a traditional starting point of two people, face to face.

The work was first exhibited at Lilith Performance Studio, Sweden.

Einat Amir’s Performance, Men, features four actors stationed throughout the exhibition 100 Years (version #2, PS1, nov 2009). Taking on the roles of characters that often reoccur from one performance to the next, the actors engage with museum visitors to speak about the exhibition as well as themselves. Two are positioned in opposite rooms to discuss the art on view and to also present their own videos showcasing their commercial work as stage and screen actors. A third actor, who is accompanied by the artist and declares himself a literal piece of performance art, wanders through the main exhibition space. As the three engage with visitors, their various character motivations and personalities become apparent, conflating everyday life and the stage.

Men continues to undermine notions of autonomy and representation raised by Amir’s previous performances John, Please (2009), for which Amir hired a comedian to stand in for her art, and Ideal Viewer (2009), for which she hired three actors from Craigslist to improvise three biographical archetypes—a Crying Woman, an Ex-Boyfriend, and an Interpreter—both in a traditional gallery setting and in viewers’ personal spaces. At P.S.1, viewers were similarly implicated as two male actors put their own ego against the exhibition at large, undermining any solid notion of objective legibility, authorship, or art historical narrative.  Actors: Ryan Andes, John Carlton, Melia Smith, and Brad Thomason.

Selected by Klaus Biesenbach as part of 100 Years (version #2, ps1, nov 2009) at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.  Special thanks to Artis-Contemporary Israeli Art Fund, and Office of Cultural Affairs, Consulate General of Israel.

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Ideal Viewer: Phase One

LOCATION:    Scaramouche, 53 Stanton St., NYC

Photographs by Paula Court, Courtesy of Performa

Opening a voyeuristic lens onto conflicting authorship, Ideal Viewer is a two-phased series of performances, beginning with actors hired from Craigslist to improvise three biographical archetypes in Scaramouche’s gallery space—a Crying Woman (Melia Smith), an Ex-Boyfriend (Yoav Levin), and an Interpreter (Ryan Andes). After advertising the actors’ services in the gallery and online, the second phase effectively gave the reins to Performa’s audience, enabling intimate, unmediated encounters between performer and spectator in the spectators’ own private spaces. Partly staged, partly improvised, partly real-time, partly pre-recorded, Ideal Viewer withholds any resolution as to what is authentic, fabricated, or otherwise manipulated. Provoking sexual sport, “author function” dysfunction, and technological disorientation, Ideal Viewer explored sexual and artistic identity, blurring the very notion of what is “real.”

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Ideal Viewer: Phase Two

LOCATIONS:    Greenpoint, Lower East Side, East Williamsburg
Soliciting viewers of the first phase to propose personal scenarios with the actors, three unique encounters between viewer and actor have been picked for Saturday, November 21 as part of Ideal Viewer’s second phase:

11am – 12pm: Genevieve Belleveau’s The Church of gorgeousTaps and the Reality Show with the Crying Woman. Through the “power of suggestion” and “nostalgia inducing media,” the Crying Woman became the living altarpiece of an outdoor service that revised Lutheran rituals to create a secular, emotional theatrical event.

1pm – 2pm: Rafael Rosenberg’s New York Art Gallery Tours with the Interpreter.
“Art history in the making”:  Rafael Rosenberg, Phd, lead a guided gallery tour of SoHo and the Lower East Side accompanied by the Interpreter’s operatic and art historical interjections.

5pm – 6pm: The Ex-Boyfriend impersonates Joseph Roumeliotis’ ex-boyfriend impersonating Freddie Mercury.
Through on-the-spot instruction and critique, Joseph Roumeliotis helped Ideal Viewer’s Ex-Boyfriend portray his own ex-boyfriend performing as Freddie Mercury in “Love Kills.”

Presented by Scaramouche Gallery. Curated by David Everitt Howe.  Selected by Performa 09 as part of “Lust Weekend”

Ideal Viewer

By RACHEL LOIS CLAPHAM

Einat Amir’s Ideal Viewer at Scaramouche uses the artist’s alleged own failed romantic relationship with an ex- boyfriend as a score for a series of structured yet improvisatory encounters with gallery visitors. The exhibition includes Ryan Andes as narrator or interpreter of the break-up story, Melia Smith as ‘the crying woman’ (Einat) and Yoav Levin as ‘the handsome Israeli ex-boyfriend’. What results is a troubling story in which notions of authorship, agency, fact and fiction are played with. Rachel Lois Clapham (RLC) caught up with Yoav Levin (YL) in Chelsea to get his side of the story.

RLC- What exactly was your relationship with the Einat Amir, what are the circumstances around the break-up?

YL – Einat and I used to date a while ago when I was in the Isreali Navy. I was an officer and she was my secretary. We dated for 6 months and eventually I broke up with her because she became a little mental for me. I didn’t realize at the time but she filmed us having sex, doing things in the heat of the moment in my chambers at the military base. Later on she used that as the card with which to ‘out me’ to my superiors, like ‘this is what I’m going to do with you if you break up with me.’ She was a little crazy. She wanted to expose me. If she had done that, I would have been thrown straight in jail and demoted to a lower rank.

RLC- Tell me more about this sex session specifically, what was so controversial about it?

YL- Well, it was the weekend. Most of the soldiers were home for the weekend. Einat and I went into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of wine, it was Friday as per the traditional Kiddush – A Traditional Sabbath Dinner- so we had the bread and everything. We got a little drunk and – without going into too much detail – we decided it would be fun to switch places, do role play, with Einat as the officer and me as her secretary. But what made it worse was that it was quite a tense time at the base, because of the military scenario in Israel at the time, around 9/11. That was the situation at the base, but at the same time you have to relax every now and again, because living with that fear for a long time; you can’t do that.

RLC- How do you feel about the fact Einat was willing to destroy your career by playing that videotape?

YL- Like all the other times I have been in love, you don’t really know what is going on. You have to forgive yourself for stupid things that people do.

RLC- How did you come to be involved in Ideal Viewer?

YL- Einat called me and asked me to be the human side in the story. I knew that she had become an artist. She said she had got me a plane ticket and hotel accommodation to be involved in this thing if I wanted to be. I felt that accepting her invitation would show good feeling between us. Like if she had taken the trouble to make a work out of this story after all these years, maybe she had grown up a little bit and got over it. Maybe she is on Ritalin – or whatever she is taking right now – and making something that is hopeful. Maybe we can both move on. And I get to enjoy New York City for a while, which is very nice.

RLC – When you first got to Scaramouche what did you think of the work, and your part in it?

YL- At first I was really taken aback with the whole thing. It was really shocking. Someone showed me the business card in the gallery that listed the ‘Handsome Israeli Ex-Boyfriend’ as part of the work, and listing the ‘private performance’ on the 21^st that I am supposed to be a part of. I’m being rented out, and people are signing up to hire me! I was very upset. I don’t want to say I was nearly in tears but I was like, why am I here, what am I doing to myself? Why am I acting as a whore?

RLC- Do you know what you are supposed to be doing on the 21^st?

YL- Apparently people can request me. Someone told me that one lady came to the gallery had asked for me to be an Israeli mover, a house mover. It’s a New York stereotype – Israeli’s are into the moving business – they are hardworking, like horses.  An older lady in the gallery requested me for the night, she was very excited to tell me that she wanted to hire me, but wouldn’t say exactly what for. Technically though, Einat could have called her other previous ex’s to do this too. I don’t know, maybe she has? I am just like ‘Mr X’ on the business card, my name is not on it, it’s just ‘Handsome Israeli man’ In fact, any actor could show up as me on the 21st.

RLC- It’s totally unethical, what Einat is doing, putting you through this – coming to New York and not telling you why or how you and your relationship with her might be used in the work.

YL- I don’t think she is concerned with ethics. She feels that she is an artist and can use her life.

RLC- And by implication yours too?

YL – Yes, because I am part of her life.

RLC- Do you worry that she would have made work out of you, even if you had refused her invitation to come to New York?

YL- I do worry, she said the show might actually tour to Europe. I don’t know if she will use a different boyfriend or invite me again. I’m not sure what will happen. I don’t know if I’m the only guy involved in this.

RLC – Wow. OK…. Is there anything you want to ask me about all this?

YL- What did you think about the show?

RLC- I remember you came up to me in the gallery, really insistent that I listen to you. I worried that you were a crazy person but then you told me you were the ex-boyfriend… I don’t really know how I feel about the show, I understand what Einat is trying to do with the work – but I don’t know about the ethics of it, or if I would trust her if I met her. I don’t think I would go for a long walk in the woods with her, put it that way.

Credits

Ideal Viewer by Einat Amir is curated by David Everitt Howe, selected by Performa09 as part of the ‘Lust Weekend’