Artext, Issue 78, Fall
2002
Adi
Nes at The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
By Paul Foss
Lovers of dark-skinned Israeli youths and photographs that crackle with
Old Testament hellfire weren’t about to be disappointed with the first US,
outing of Israeli photographer Adi Nes (May 28 — July 14, 2002). Exhibited in
the MCA's demure downtown space were 14 lavish color prints of doe-eyed boys
and hunky grunts in both military and everyday settings, offering, to say the
least, an arresting sideshow to the Israeli-Palestine conflict then raging
across the world stage.
Nes’s work basically can be divided into the so-called “Soldiers Series”
(1994-2000), depicting young Israeli soldiers at rest, play, or just posing for
the camera, and a more recent series (exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art
last year) harking back to earlier and more peripheral locations in the
soldiers’ lives, when as boys they presumably knocked about in dusty
“development towns.” But both series are neither straight reportage nor idle
male pinups. Painstakingly lit and staged tableaux vivants, Nes’s endeavor is
one of colliding different myths (Israeli national icons, Western masterpieces,
and homoerotic classics à la Eakins, Sorolla, and Faucon) in a single image to
highlight an underlying confusion or ambiguity in the contemporary Israeli
imaginary. Emblematic of this system is a photo from 1999 (all works are
untitled) modeled on The Last Supper, in which the disciples’ scrap bowls have
been replaced with traditional orange-colored army dinnerware.
In fact, these photographs are far wickeder than the standard barracks
romp. Ultimately devices for interrogating Israel’s war machine, all lovingly
rendered through elaborate setups involving hired models, location shoots, and
a full camera crew, Nes’s images are darkly subversive of the various means
whereby that country engineers national memory, just as Mapplethorpe had
earlier tried to slam American sexual and racial amnesia. Not unlike Ridley
Scott’s film Black Hawk Down, which tackles the failure of the chain of
command to uphold the buddy system upon which it is based, Nes’s main target is
the warrior nation’s regime of brotherhood, exercise, sharing, and hierarchy.
Throughout his work, mandatory military service, heroic manhood, and the
centrality of the Israeli Defense Force to the nation’s self-image are pitted
against the mnemonic technology that both fuels and plagues war-torn Israel. As
with his image from 2000 (not included in the exhibition) showing a beautiful
boy admiring himself in a murky puddle along an urban sidewalk, the Narcissus
myth is but the “invert” of what Nes calls “muscular Judaism ... eternal youth,
the unblemished warrior, excellence in meeting challenges, self-sacrifice for
the homeland.”
The Israel that Nes refers to in his work is clearly no longer as
self-assured as it was. To account for such a groundswell of dissent, curator
Toby Kamps points to a growing skepticism in art and music during the '90s
(particularly since the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a rightwing
Israeli) toward the founding myths of that country, which “was no longer a
hardscrabble land of idealistic Zionists; it was a booming, cosmopolitan nation
with all the attendant problems. Increasingly, its citizens asked whether the
country was, as its founders believed, a good kid in a bad neighborhood or a
bully cruelly repressing the Palestinians.”
At the very least, recent history explains why Nes confronts adolescent
masculinity as the epitome of idealized nationalism with the doubting, hesitant
pre-adolescent. He is only cueing into the same jingoism that infects the
panoply of Israeli icons, like Yitzhak Danziger’s Nimrod or Yehiel
Shemi’s Father and Son, or classic war photos like The “Ink Flag” at
Eilat, March 10, 1949. Even a seemingly innocent image of sleeping boys Nes
found in a newspaper or the ones of soldiers sleeping together “on the road”
are occasions for recontextual tweaking, in this case equating sleep with death
(the myth of Adonis). Nothing in the national image repertory is too sacred for
Nes, or else everything is already too sacred. A 1999 work, depicting a group
of semi-naked studs frolicking in a stream, one of them brandishing a MK-47
while staring victoriously up at the heavens, is a wicked send-up of a famous
1957 LIFE cover image showing an Israeli soldier cooling off in the Suez
Canal. The somewhat sleazy deportment of this modern-day soldier’s pals is poor
compensation indeed for the now-fading validity of Israel’s ambitions for the
West Bank and elsewhere.
It’s a shibboleth of the Jewish faith that it lacks any definitive idea
about Satan or Hell. Even the Hebrew word Gehinom, often loosely
translated as “hell,” actually refers to a process of restoration and recovery,
not a permanent place or condition. Whatever role this interpretation may play
in contemporary Judaic practice, the contra-Mephistophelian photography of Adi Nes
is testament to a very ancient tradition that attempts to siphon off negativity
rather than let it stand. But I’d be a schlump if I didn’t add that they also
show how truly sexy Israeli boys are.