Naama Arad’s ‘Har Hazofim’ quotes the view from the window of the fictional Frank Lloyd Wright creation from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic ‘North by Northwest.’ A peach-toned silken curtain intervenes between our gaze and the Xerox copies pasted to the opposite wall on which landscapes can be seen. The paternalistic presidential visages of Mount Rushmore and the modernist architecture both see their material and ideological texture inverted in the most tender of feminist veilings. The title of the work refers to the mountain of the same name, and Israeli enclave in East Jerusalem that houses the Bezalel Academy of Art founded in 1906.
My problem is that we in a room contemplating parental pains and conflicts of cannon have a very separate threshold for suffering… so let us suspend our belief that gravity affects us the same… make folly of the struggle to flatten… pervert or whatever… And see a different destiny, one in which the object of the idea… the document the ephemera or the pseudo-social contract decompose when we together lose our shit. Lose our shit because we might not be worthy of being Art Princesses and Conceptual Priests, that maybe the world we want to create doesn’t have room for those personalities… Maybe it’s not an art critique, but call to lose control, or your delusion of controlling legacy, which is relatively limited in capacity anyway.
Full transcript of the lecture performance:
holdmyhairback.wordpress.com/2016/03/28/da-da-daddy-hasselhoff/