Miki Carmi and Tamy Ben-Tor - Interview
Jonathan Goodman, August 14, 2024
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Miki Carmi and Tamy Ben-Tor are married artists originally from Israel. They did not meet there but as graduate students in Columbia University’s MFA program. Carmi works alone as a painter of portraits, most often of family, using photographs of the person that he takes himself. Ben-Tor is known for her performances, which regularly communicate social and political dissonance. The couple also works together; two years ago, they published a remarkable artist’s book, whose pages were filled with intricate typographical patterns moving up, down, and across the page. Currently living in Brooklyn, where they are raising a family, Carmi, and Ben-Tor represent a kind of New York artist no longer easy to find: someone seeking social redress as well as personal illumination. The questions below will consider their position as artists who began outside the States, as well as the motivations behind their art. Questions about their collaborations will also be addressed. (The initials of the artists’ names, MC and TBT, will indicate who is responding to the question.)
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Jonathan Goodman: You both are originally from Israel, but have spent the last twenty years living in New York City and making art. Do you still feel like an outsider here? What is it about the art milieu in New York that resulted in your permanent stay?
Miki Carmi: Paradoxically we were active participants in the New York art world very early on in our career but gradually drifted away due to the more experimental, contemplative, and controversial political nature of our work, which requires isolation and doesn’t always go along with the business as usual mentality of the galleries. However, living in New York doesn’t necessarily mean engaging with art institutions, which are only a tiny, privileged aspect of the urban cosmos of New York City. Living, surviving, and finding the right set-up, which would include a studio practice alongside normal life in the city, is the real challenge and organically ties you down to where you live.
JG: Having grown up in Israel, do you feel that there is anything in your work that remains particularly indebted to life there? Do you see art today as lacking cultural or geographical affiliations? If so, has uniformity of expression become a problem?
MC: Naturally, our work is rooted in a place that facilitates certain discussions as a result of a very specific political climate. Our work shares a cultural urgency with the art of others as we confront institutional indifference toward the personal and the transgressive. I feel that intellectually growing up in Israel was more challenging and eventually determined our subject matter.
Tamy Ben-Tor: Yes. A lot of art today professes to be geographically specific or culturally based but panders to a cliche that has already been digested and legitimized by the art institutions. This kind of work is more ornamental than political and marks itself as legitimate by virtue of its very actions.
JG: Tamy, Can you name three current performance artists you like and why you feel that way? Is performance art still a viable artist's expression now, two generations after it began?
TBT: It has been a long time since I’ve seen anything good in performance. “The Evening,” by Richard Maxwell, felt like a good performance to me when I saw it back in 2015. Dynasty Handbag is pretty good, although she remains on the surface of things and should be seen mostly as an entertainer. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I also think Pope L was interesting, and I saw Akira Kasai in the Japan Society some years ago, but he is 75, so I don’t know if you can count that as contemporary.
Of course, performance art is more viable now than ever. The presence of the human being as a spectacle in the room has enormous potential.
JG: Tamy, How do you prepare for a performance? Is working in costume an important part of your presentation? What can performance art do that traditional fine art cannot?
TBT: There is the building of the character visually, and the writing process. To write a text that works when spoken out loud and has value beyond its saying takes a long time. There is also light and sound, and I am now bringing video back into my live performances. I think because performance involves a living person in the room, there is a potential for vulnerability and excitement beyond what traditional art can do. But that’s also the reason why, when it's bad, there’s nothing worse. So it goes both ways.
JG: Tamy, please name three recent performances and your intentions behind them. How were they received?
TBT: It’s hard for me to explain my intentions concerning my performances. Something I have said remains with me:
My consciousness is a sponge absorbing contemporary filth.
For me, the artistic process, in the form of a performance, is to solidify this sponge into a hard stamp tool and press it back onto the audience's consciousness for the duration of the performance.
I guess It also excites me to think of a scenario in which people can observe an unfamiliar character and take it in without knowing beforehand what kind of being it is. I want to create a crack in their psyche, where they have to use their judgment.
JG: Miki, Please give readers the names of two or three current portrait painters you have an interest in. Why do they attract your consideration?
MC: I would refrain from defining myself as a portrait painter as it suggests I am a painter of commissioned portraits. Even so, I love your phrasing: “painter of portraits.” I love Philip Guston and his approach towards portraiture; his depiction of himself and his wife are internal and iconic at the same time.
I love Alice Neel for her directness, freshness, and humanistic approach. But I also feel her paintings sometimes suffer from her role as a traditional portrait painter who accepts her vocation as a portraitist. On the opposite pole is Francis Bacon, whose subversion of the traditional relationship between the painter and his sitters offers a glimpse into the darkest side of humanity. Yet I find his art fascinating and very compelling esthetically.
JG: Miki, what are the relations between your photography and your portraits? Why do you need to take photographs of your subject first? Why do you concentrate on relatives and close friends for your sitters?
MC: First of all, I would like to comment on my “head paintings.” I don’t consider them portraits; instead, I treat them mostly as maps or surfaces of painterly events. As such, they require an enormous amount of information which I come up with along the way. As I build up the painting, I make use of detailed documentation of the facial surfaces from different angles, and different lighting situations. These orientations and decisions result from close relations with my sitters, who are mostly my immediate elders. At times, relations between myself and my sitters are very steep and difficult
I use the camera as a drawing tool. It helps me maintain an extended consideration and improvisation regarding every detail of life experience reflected on the skin. Then I take hundreds of photos of each side of the sitter’s face and scatter them around my studio floor. I use them almost like an impressionistic pool to reconstruct an imaginary yet still very convincing and naturalistic head, almost the same way a police composite has been created.
JG: Miki, portraiture is a long-established, major genre in painting. Is its historical longevity a strength or a weakness for you as an artist?
MC: I find portraiture a very tedious activity, boring and limited in its constraints. Yet this is true of every traditional genre. I find it very challenging to go against the logic of the portraiture genre, which allows the painters only a very limited set of rules. These rules constrain the artist, forcing him to depict an image of the sitter as an honorable participant of society. Subversion of that role in my case entails my attempt to merge my art with different modes of representation, for example, anthropological early photography of “inferior” races, police indexes from the late 19th century, and the medical depiction of skin diseases, as well as early photographs depicting insanity.
JG: The two of you collaborate on art projects. Please describe your process. What does the collaborative effort allow you to do that you cannot do alone?
TBT. We started by making our first artists' book Disembodied Archetypes in 2008. This book was followed by three exhibitions, instead of the other way around. Gradually, while keeping our studio practices, we treated the venue as a platform for an experiment. Showing together breaks the axioms of medium and gender that the art institutions love so much. Additionally, it also allows the audience to delve into the content and to make our process transparent. An exhibition can be more than a survey of an artist's yearly studio practice. Or career path, as we often see. A show can be a project on its own, which brings forth another kind of intensity.
JG: Please describe the remarkable art book you both created together two years ago. How did you design the very intricate patterns of type on the page? What were the subjects referred to by the writing?
MC, TBT: In 2021 we published with Minerva Press two artist books: Archive, a survey of 20 years of work that starts independently on each side of the book and meets in the middle. That was a project we started working on independently after our collaborative museum show at Zacheta National Gallery in 2015. The exhibition culminated in a finished project when we met Joel Brendan(a photographer and bookmaker) in Buffalo and decided to collaborate based on his engagements with our installation at CEPA Gallery.
Text Book was a fruit of collaboration with Yasmeen Siddiqui, an art writer, publisher, and curator. She put together this project as a wonderful platform for artists, and writers. and book designers to communicate through words, images, typography, design, and content based on our practices.
JG: You are, together and alone, highly independent artists. How important is this independence? Does independence require living and working outside of academic institutions and current art conventions? Is this possible to take on?
TBT: From early on, my experience in the art world, which demands frequent showing and explanation of one’s psychic and organic process, along with my short-lived experience in art academia, where I met many people walking the gray corridors of art school, indoctrinating students with worn out ideas. No one seems to get excited about art. My experience has made it clear to me that we badly need alternative ways to make a living. We need to keep our practice alive; it is what artists have always done—before being an artist became a lifestyle!
JG: Are you optimistic about the future of art? Can you name a couple of young artists, under forty, who are energetic and new? Or has everything been done?
TBT: I am extremely optimistic about art. There has never been a greater need for it. Everyone talks about how AI will make art, but to tell the truth, much of the art out there already looks like it has been made without hands. It can be debated whether this is for the better. Let AI make all the art it is capable of, and let lesser artists have it! All those people, metaphorically speaking, can go chop some wood.