Dancing With Men
By Oreet Ashery
Live Art Development, £15
The Novel of Nonel and Vovel
By Oreet Ashery and Larissa Sansour
Charta Art Books, £30
Art books tend to be glossy affairs, full of rich colour illustrations which attempt to replicate as far as possible the experience of seeing the works of art in the original. But what if, as in the case of Jerusalem-born artist Oreet Ashery, your practice is rooted in performance art? Surely DVDs are the only way to appreciate this kind of work.
Well, Dancing With Men, about Ashery’s work, covers 10 years of her interactive performances, interventions and other artworks, and includes photographs and four new essays exploring Ashery’s work in detail.
In her introduction, Lois Keidan, director of the Live Art Agency, describes how Ashery has developed “a language to talk about the complexities of cultural, religious, gender and sexual identities”.
Ashery makes much of her outsider status. “I was brought up in Jerusalem, somewhere between the Arab village Shoafat and the Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods beginning with Bar Ilan Boulevard. I was all too aware that, as I was trespassing both geographical boundaries on separate occasions, these two alien territories equally exclude me,” she writes.
Ashery often takes on an alter ego in her performances to explore these feelings of exclusion and the book is named after perhaps her best known work, when, dressed as a character she has many times inhabited — Marcus Fisher, a young Orthodox male — she joined thousands of Orthodox men commemorating the death of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, on Mount Meron.
There she felt completely accepted although she was an imposter. Other works discussed include Central Location, in which Ashery offered free head-shaving in Berlin to the public to denote both the act of head-shaving that took place in the concentration camps and the choice of the shaven head as the contemporary neo-Nazi hairstyle.
In Ashery’s most recent performance, she explored the life and relationships of the 17th-century false Messiah, Shabbetai Zevi, whose “strange acts” Ashery views as performance art and which she recreated at last year’s Whitstable Biennale.
In one recreation — of Zevi pushing a fish around in a pram — Ashery was unsurprisingly greeted with incomprehension by local youths. Fascinatingly, as well as yelling abuse when she started to kiss the fish, the boys also reached for their mobile phones to photograph and record the performance.
A number of Ashery’s works explore the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and she has tried to work with Palestinian artists — though this has become increasingly difficult over the years.
But Ashery’s other new publication, The Novel of Nonel and Vovel, sees Ashery and Jerusalem-born Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour transformed into superheroes to solve the problem.
The book makes clear that their efforts are all wishful thinking as Ashery admits at the close when she says: “It would seem a bit odd if we had actually managed to solve the Palestinian problem just by dressing up in capes and tight suits.”
But the story in which the artists contract a virus which gives them superpowers but compromises their creativity is diverting and entertaining — as are the other photographs, artworks, essays and trivia which punctuate the pair’s narrative.
What I found most intriguing — and would have liked to have heard more of — was the similarity of experiences in the lives of Ashery and Sansour, both of whom came to England in their teens and had difficulties settling into their new environment.
