The New York Times
ART IN REVIEW
Adi Nes
Jack Shainman Gallery
513 West 20th Street, Chelsea
Through April 12
Adi Nes, an Israeli photographer, is making
his New York solo debut here. But one of his pictures appeared all over the city
a few years ago in advertisements for an exhibition of new art from Israel at
the Jewish Museum. It was an image of a bare-chested young man in combat boots,
army fatigues and a yarmulke, flexing his muscles in front of a tent pitched in
desert sand.
The photographs here pick up where that one
left off, with pictures of more young soldiers in Israeli army uniforms. Some
nap together, leaning against each other. One soldier dresses a fallen
companion's wounds. Another, supported by colleagues, shimmies up a pole as if
to place a victory flag. But things aren't quite right. There is no flag; and
the wound is being treated, or created, with nailpolish and makeup. In fact,
Mr. Nes staged all his tableaus for the camera with actor-models. A result is a
homoerotic dream of military life, interspersed with staged scenes of civilian
violence: three men attack another man in an apparent rape; women gather around
a young man lying unconscious in the street.
In part, the pictures reflect aspects of Mr.
Nes's own outsider status in Israel, as a child of Kurdish and Iranian
immigrants, and a gay man. They are also shrewd sendups of the pervasive, macho
military presence in Israeli life. (Mr. Nes, like most Israeli men and women,
spent three years in the army.) And through an accident of timing, they have
particular resonance at present, in the disjunction they suggest between an
air-brushed fantasy of war as a heroic adventure and the reality that shows up
in the news every day.
HOLLAND COTTER