M USEUM OF C ONTEMPORARY A RT, SAN D IEGO The San Diego presentation of Adi Nes: M AY 28–JULY 14, 2002 Photographs is made possible by contributions from Joyce and Ted Strauss and by the Garfield Family Foundation. Additional support comes from the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, and the California Arts Council. ADI NES PHOTOGRAPHS

M USEUM OF C ONTEMPORARY P HOTOGRAPHY, The Chicago presentation of Adi Nes is C OLUMBIA C OLLEGE C HICAGO, supported in part by grants from the S EPTEMBER 27-DECEMBER 21, 2002 Illinois Art Council, a state agency, and the ational Endowment for the Arts; and the Consulate General of , Chicago. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adi Nes Photography in Israel: A changing View, Monographic Catalogues 2 6 Born 1966, Israel Margolis Gallery, Houston Adi Nes: Recent Photographs. exh. cat. : Tel 1 4 5 Lives and works in Tel Aviv Exposure: Recent Acquisitions from the Aviv Museum of Art, 2001. 3 7 Education Doron Sebbag Art Collection, O.R.S. Ltd., Adi Nes. exh. cat. Tel Aviv: Dvir Gallery, 2000. 10 13 14 * 8 9 12 1989– Department of Photography, Bezalel Selected Articles in English 11 1992 Academy of Art and Design, From Mirror to Memory: One Hundred Dempsey, Judy. ‘Seeing Through the Image.’ Years of Photography in the Land of Awards and Scholarships Financial Times (March 11–12, 2000), pp. 9. Israel, Mané-Katz Museum, Haifa, 1. Untitled, 2000, 39 3/8 x 49 1/4 in. (100 x 125 cm.) 2000 The Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Grushkin, Daniel. ‘Telling It in Gat.’ The Jerusalem Israel (traveled)* 1 1 Israeli Art Prize, Tel Aviv Museum of Art Report 12, no. 3 (June 4, 2001), pp. 40–41. 2. Untitled, 1999, 35 /2 x 35 /2 in. (90 x 90 cm.) 1999 Recipients of the 1999 Minister of Karpel, Dalia. ‘Man’s Work.’ Ha’aretz Magazine 3. Untitled, 1995, 35 1/2 x 35 1/2 in. (90 x 90 cm.) 1999 Education, Culture & Sport Minister’s Science,Culture and Sport Prize, Israel (April 6, 2001), pp. 20–23. 1 2 Prize for Artists in the Visual Arts, Jerusalem Painters and Sculptors Association, Tel Aviv 4. Untitled, 2000, 73 x 92 / in. (185 x 235 cm.) Tzur, Uzi. ‘Renaissance Men.’ Ha’aretz Magazine 5. Untitled, 2000, 39 3/8 x 49 1/4 in. (100 x 125 cm.) 1993 Sandra Jacobs’ Anglo-Israeli Photographic Old and New: Recent Acquisitions in (April 6, 2001), p. 19. 1 1 Awards Project Scholarship, Department of Photography, , Jerusalem. 6. Untitled, 1999, 23 /2 x 35 /2 in. (60 x 90 cm.) Plastic Arts, Cultural Office, Jerusalem 1 1 1998 After Rabin: new Art from Israel, Collections: 7. Untitled, 1999, 23 /2 x 35 /2 in. (60 x 90 cm.) Solo Exhibitions The Jewish Museum, New York* Israel Museum, Jerusalem 8. Untitled, 2000, 39 3/8 x 39 3/8 in. (100 x 100 cm.) 2001 Recent Photographs, Tel Aviv Museum of Art* 3 1 Fou de roi, Nîmes, France The Tel Aviv Museum of Art 9. Untitled, 2000, 39 /8 x 49 /4 in. (100 x 125 cm.) The Jewish Museum, New York 2000 Adi Nes: Photographs, Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv* Bamot—Art from Israel, Jüdisches 10. Untitled, 1998, 35 1/2 x 35 1/2 in. (90 x 90 cm.) Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego 1998 The Soldiers, Milkweg Gallery, Amsterdam Museum der Stadt Wien, Vienna* 1 1 Various Private Collections in Israel & abroad 11. Untitled, 1996, 35 /2 x 35 /2 in. (90 x 90 cm.) 1996 First Act, Photography Department Blanche Kol Hakavod, Janco Dada Museum, Eim 12. Untitled, 2000 39 3/8 x 39 3/8 in. (100 x 100 cm.) and Romi Shapira Gallery, Bezalel Academy Hod, Israel* 13. Untitled, 1999 35 1/2 x 35 1/2 in. (90 x 90 cm.) of Art and Design,Jerusalem Condition Report: Photography in Israel Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego 1 1 14. Untitled, 1999 23 /2 x35 /2 in. (60 x 90 cm.) Selected Group Exhibitions Today, Israel Museum, Jerusalem.* 700 Prospect Street 2002 Revelation: Representations of Christ in Capturing Reality: 19 Israeli and Palestinian La Jolla, California 92037 Photograpy, Hotel de Sully, , and Israel Photographers, Tennessee State Museum, (858) 454–3541 © 2002 by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. All rights reserved. Museum, Jerusalem* No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without written Nashville* permission of the publisher. The copyrights to the works of art in this book 2001 Aspiration: Toward the Future in the Serial Number, Memorial Center, Kiryat Museum of Contemporary Photography, are retained by the artists, their heirs, successors, and assigns. Middle East—11 Israeli and Palestinian Tivon, Israel, and Municipal Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago Artists, Riffe Gallery, Columbus, Ohio Rehovot, Israel 600 SouthMichigan Avenue, (traveled)* 1996 Israeli Diary, Tel Aviv Cinematheque Chicago, Illinois 60605 (312) 663-5554 Re-Thinking: Photographs and Video 1994 90-70-90, Tel Aviv Museum of Art from Israel, IFA Gallery Bonn, Germany Export Surplus, Bograshov Gallery, Tel Aviv (traveled)* 1993 Jewish Gay Life, Akehurst Gallery, London, 2000 Time Frame: A Century of Photography in and Artist House Gallery, Jerusalem the Land of Israel, Israel Museum, Jerusalem. * Adi Nes and Naomi Talisman, Camera La repubblica dell’arte—Israel, Centro Obscura School of Art Gallery, Tel Aviv Arte Contemporanea, Palazzo Delle Papesse, Siena, Italy. * indicates the exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue DESIGNED BY BURRITT DESIGN

Adi Nes makes large-scale color staged photographs charged with a slyly audacious theatricality, Israeli Artist symbolism, and sexuality that both surprises and informs. Using hired models and teams of assistants, he carefully constructs dramatic scenes to be frozen by the camera's shutter.

Set in actual locations, Nes' images depict simultaneously inhabit significant moments no longer a hardscrabble land of idealistic commonplace subjects from contemporary life and displace his preoccupations into Zionists; it was a booming, cosmopolitan in his country: soldiers on military exercises, aestheticized realms. Because they focus nation with all the attendant problems. boys in rough-edged housing projects, women primarily on men, the photographs enable Nes Increasingly, its citizens asked whether the and children enacting street dramas. Although to consider the objects of his desire as well as country was, as its founders believed, a good they employ real people, places, and themes, connect himself with connoisseurs of the male kid in a bad neighborhood or a bully cruelly Nes' photographs are not strictly naturalistic. form ranging from Michelangelo to Robert repressing the Palestinians. Young artists like From scouting locations to providing costumes Mapplethorpe. Because they frame daily life in Nir Hod and musicians like Aviv Geffen openly and props, to renting lighting equipment and Israel in mythological or art-historical contexts, expressed undercurrents of dissent. They wind machines, Nes leaves no elements of his the works enable the artist to look for abiding questioned mandatory military service as well compositions to chance. He carefully creates a truths in a troubled present. as conventional gender roles—something heightened realism that alchemically Nes’ first staged photographs, the Soldiers shocking in a place where adolescent transforms everyday life in Israel. Series, considers the role of the army in Israel. existential angst traditionally took a back seat Mythology and art history inspire many of The powerful Israeli Defense Force is central to to patriotic duty. The 1995 assassination of Nes’ photographs. Among his sources are the the country’s self-image, and the role you play stories of biblical figures and Greek and Roman in it is crucial to your social standing and gods, paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and career opportunities. Like all Israeli men and Caravaggio, and historic photographs women, Nes was required to serve in the documenting the founding of Israel. Like military, and he landed a prestigious tableaux vivants, in which actors reenact the assignment as an air traffic controller at a static compositions of famous paintings or desert airbase. However, he found himself events, Nes photographs allow him to collapse serving at pivotal periods in his own life and ancient and modern eras as well as personal the life of Israel. He was a young gay man in and cultural allegories. The images allow him his country’s most macho institution and a to consider his existence as a gay man and an soldier for a nation engaged in a process of Israeli. “I am interested in the gap that exists self-examination. between objective reality, and the reality that During the 1990s, as Israel approached its exists in my mind,” he says. Mixing artifice fiftieth anniversary, a new skepticism toward and real life, Nes’ work allows him to its cultural legends emerged. The country was Untitled, 1996, 90 x 90 cm. challenges, self-sacrifice for the contemporaries by using raffish peasants as Nes’ version, however, the Star of David banner homeland. . . . It’s a form of power models for religious scenes are inspirations for a is conspicuously absent, suggesting a vacuum that is meant to show itself and not group of three photographs of soldiers sleeping of ideals. Another image, based on a famous necessarily to protect the society.”1 on busses. Are these men, sprawled vulnerably Life Magazine cover image of soldier Yossi Ben- An untitled image from 1995 across each other in slanted, golden sunlight Hanan celebrating victory in the 1967 Six-Day (Nes never gives his photographs lambs to the slaughter, or might they War by brandishing his assault rifle while titles) emblematizes the artist’s themselves harm innocents? And Leonardo da splashing in the Suez Canal. In Nes’ updated subversive approach. Its Vinci’s fresco The Last Supper 1498 is the version, five handsome, muscular soldiers frolic configuration borrowed from a source for Nes’ largest photograph to date. Set together in a pool of dark water, radiating a Christian pieta, the photograph in an abandoned barracks, the arresting six-by self-satisfied glamour that seems more Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, 1498, fresco in the convent of Santa Maria delle shows a medic treating a wounded ten-foot image depicts fourteen soldiers Hollywood than Holy Land. Grazie, Milon, 15 x 29 feet soldier. Instead of bandages, gathered at a table set with orange cups and Nes’ newest works consider the civilian however, this soldier applies stage plates—the army’s traditional dinnerware. Where sphere and life in rural cities. Born in Kiryat Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing makeup to his patient. Absurdly tender and da Vinci’s original registers the upset of the Gat, a “development town” populated mostly by Israeli, a traumatic event that disrupted a theatrical, this image makes obvious the moment in which Jesus announces that he will recent immigrants in the northern Negev desert, promising peace process and revealed vast rifts melodrama of Nes’ approach, while also be betrayed, Nes’ version illustrates no such he is familiar with the difficult conditions in Israeli society, intensified the nation’s soul- tragicomically highlighting the real horrors of tension. The disciples, including one extra that searching. Nes’ Soldiers Series simultaneously combat. Other military scenes similarly combine Nes says he added to get away from a direct illuminates the spectrum of masculine identity allegory and satire. quotation, are locked in private conversations and investigates the mythology of one of the An image of a group of soldiers seated on a while the central Jesus, his head haloed by a bedrock institutions of Israel. hillside, all of whom—except one who is missing bush positioned behind him in the background, The first photographs in the series envisioned an arm—are shown applauding, employs the stares vacantly into space. Is this dazed Christ the army as a circus, with models in military ancient Zen riddle, “what’s the sound of one figure responding to the ongoing spiritual dress posing as tightrope walkers, fire-eaters, hand clapping?” to highlight the madness of shellshock of life in the Middle East? The artist acrobats, and strong men. While celebrating war. (Nes met his handicapped model while leaves interpretation open-ended, saying simply male beauty, these images also consider what working at a center for disabled soldiers and and sympathetically, “I hope this isn’t their last Nes calls “muscular Judaism,” a cocky derring- their distraught relatives.) The Greek myth of supper.” do integral to the image of the Sabra, the Sisyphus, who is damned to eternally roll a Several works from the Soldiers Series tackle native-born Israeli nicknamed for the prickly huge stone up a mountain, is the inspiration for icons of modern Israeli military history. One sweet cactus pear. Nes states, “Israeli manhood an image of a gang of soldiers pushing a restages a famous 1949 photograph of soldiers in this case is aggressive and show-offy. . . . leaking water tank up a rocky hill. The raising a homemade flag over the Red Sea city There is an element in , which is given dramatically lighted and shadowed paintings of of Eilat—Israel’s equivalent to American expression in literature and film, that is taken Caravaggio, a Renaissance painter, widely photographer Joe Rosenthal’s shot of marines from Greek mythology: eternal youth, the The “Ink Flag” at Eilat, March 10 1949. Photographer believed to be gay, who scandalized his raising of the stars and stripes over Iwo Jima. In © unblemished warrior, excellence in meeting Micha Perry. National Photo Collection, Israel. Palestine to pagan peoples described in the slide suggests that the country is not the the social realm and also on the Old Testament as a means of paradise for children its founders intended composition and lighting of circumventing centuries of Arabic and it to be. A photograph of boys grappling photographs.”2 At the same time, the artist Muslim influences. Speaking of Danziger’s in front of a faded socialist-realist-style also acknowledges a greater symbolism iconic figure, Nes says, “My Nimrod is not mural of industrious fishermen—a scene informing his project: “Israeli light, you cut from sandstone but rather lives in a the artist says is inspired by the Rape of know, is harsh and searing, it creates deep sandy town. He is not a hunter; he is a Dionysus—contrasts the country’s utopian contrasts. What are we if not a people of survivor. Like other teenagers in my ideals with its violent reality. A scene of a contrasts who are always doing battle pictures, he tries to build his own world in boy lying on a street surrounded by between the dark and the light, between the backyards of a barren town.” grieving women, inspired by boyhood what is shadowed and glaring?”3 An Often, Nes interweaves social memories of seeing a contemporary struck outsider in a country like no other, Nes is commentary and personal memories, by a car, becomes in Nes’ conception an aware of parallels between his own quest creating images that seem part image of the death of Adonis, the “most for self-realization and the odyssey of documentary and part dreamscape. An Greek of the Greek gods,” and a divine Israel. He rereads historical precedents as a

Life Magazine, June 13, 1967. Cover photograph of image of six boys sleeping in a barren tragedy set in a place where violence can means of legitimizing his own life and of Yossi Ben-Hanan by Denis Simon room was inspired by a newspaper surprise you at any time, on any street framing his young country’s travails in the photograph illustrating an article about a corner. And a portrait of a man lifting a continuum of world culture. In the process, experienced by many of Israel’s newest poor family. When he noticed the boy over his head, enacted by two Nes creates his own personal and cultural and poorest citizens. Nes is especially photograph was staged, Nes was compelled members of a Capoeira club in a suburb of pantheon—a collection of everyday myths interested in representations of Mizrahim, to create his own version in an apartment Tel Aviv, becomes an emblem of same-sex and masterpieces—which serves as a bridge or Jews from Asia. The son of an Iranian specially rented for the occasion. While connection or possibly even an updated between past and present, tragedy and father and a Kurdistani mother, the artist working with his hired models—again version of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. triumph, fear and hope, fact and fiction, knows firsthand the subtle prejudices chosen for their Middle-Eastern features— While his photographs clearly tackle the individual and the world. experienced by dark-skinned Israelis and childhood memories of sleepovers with timeless and timely subjects—life, death, frequently casts them as his protagonists. friends, of hordes of cousins descending war, love, and religion in the Middle East— In a portrait of an adolescent Mizrahi boy on his house, and of a friend abused by Nes makes nothing explicit. Using the TOBY KAMPS, CURATOR with a bird on his shoulder, for instance, his parents came flooding back. Nes distancing lenses of art and legend, he Nes creates a contemporary Nimrod, a realized he was creating a multiple self- deftly suggests, yet never defines, the mighty hunter from the Old Testament. portrait, a composite image of his young allegories, dramas, and erotics latent in his Among the inspirations for the image is a selves. contemporary subjects. Nes describes his well-known 1939 sandstone of Other works read as trenchant artistic goals in straightforward terms: “I Nimrod by Yitzhak Danziger, a member of allegories of the clashes of values in am bringing the presence of the other into the Canaanite Movement, which tried to contemporary Israel. An image of boys the public discourse. The photographs connect the first Jewish settlers in skulking next to a burning playground make comments on Israeli manliness, on

NOTES: 1. Daliah Karpel, ‘Man’s Work,’ Ha’aretz Magazine (April 6, 2001), 23 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid.