The Catacombs of Roee Rosen
Until 29 October 2018, a two-tier exhibition reveals Roee Rosen’s manifold oeuvre as an artist, a writer and a film maker. Histoires dans la pénombre (Stories in the Dark) is an expansive exhibition of Roee Rosen at Centre Pompidou which showcases two major artworks, i.e. The Blind Merchant (1989-1991) and Vladimir’s Night (2011-2014), together with the more recent The Dust Channel (2016). It coincides with the artist's film retrospective, Douce sueur, staged at Centre Pompidou in collaboration with Jeu de Paume, an attempt to look at political questioning at the heart of his productions.
This is not only an exciting opportunity to meet a tremendous artist who masters painting, film, writing and music, but also one to become acquainted with a gallery of artists and writers which Rosen has invented and has commissioned work to. This wealth of opportunities is an invitation to a world that reflects our own in absurd, funny and troubling ways. A description of Rosen’ latest film The Dust Channel (2016, 23 Min.), which attracted endless queues in the latest Documenta in Kassel, Germany, should give us a picture of what is at stake in the artist’s work. The film is an operetta about a British home appliance, a Dyson DC07 Vacuum Cleaner, set in a suburban family home in Israel. The realities of private perversion and socio-po- litical phobias are portrayed through a libretto in Russian, to bring to life the vacuum cleaner by recounting its own story. The film includes a ménage à trois between a hedonistic, affluent couple, and their Dyson DC07 cleaner. Hygiene and compulsive cleaning are juxtaposed with cleaners, refugees and the policeman who is after them. A domestic bourgeois affair unfolds as a surreal perverse transgression that includes state detention facilities in the desert, xenophobic behaviour and fetish.To complicate matters even more, the film is very enjoyable and funny.
HYPERMIMETICS
In painting, storytelling, film and music, if you have yet to encounter the world of Roee Rosen, this retrospective made up of films, a drawings exhibition and a special screening followed by a lecture, will bring you into a diabolical world where concepts and objects are unstable as they converge and vibrate; animism, ventriloquism, invented personalities, horror and humour and more await you in the catacombs of Roee Rosen. Surrealism and children’s books, dysfunctional humour and contrived historical jokes, manifestations of trauma are all members of the household in Rosen’s haunting work. The tracing of the unconscious’s dream creation, language’s interference with meaning, the explosion of different historical moments together, these are the markers of an oeuvre spanning more than thirty years, which in-
sists on internal, self-referential and self-negating logic. This logic is present in Rosen’s early large-scale series of paintings (“Martyr
Paintings” 1991-1994; the “Professionals” (1994-1996); and the later, continuous series (“Funerals,” 2006, 2008, 2010), up to the projects based on fictitious figures; the video works based on a range of painterly, theoretical, and literary bodies of work [Justine Frank, (1900-1943), a female Belgian Surrealist who merged eroticism with Jewish imagery, and Efim Poplavsky, aka Maxim Komar-Myshkin (1978-2011), a Russian émigré to Israel whose work is infused with macabre political paranoia]; and in the projects that breathe life into historical and literary figures (Eva Braun, The blind merchant based on Shylock in The Merchant of Venice). This logic is also found in Rosen’s film The Confessions of Roee Rosen (2010, created with his son Hillel, which presents a trio of foreign female workers reading a forced confession in a language they do not speak, and also in Out, which documents a BDSM/exorcism scene whose text consists entirely of quotes published by right-wing Israeli politician Avigdor Lieberman. This self-reflexive dimension operates within the works by means of a parasitical engagement with a classical text by Shakespeare; the Legends of the Saints; the story of Eva Braun and Hitler’s suicide in a Berlin bunker; the fictitious biography of Efim Poplavsky (aka Maxim Komar-Myshkin); the invented biography of the Jewish-Belgian artist Justine Frank; and the confessions of St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In this sense, the speculative frequency of Rosen’s oeuvre —painterly and literary works allegedly produced by figures with invented biographies— serves in fact as a form of counter-speculation. His interest is in the counter-biography that subverts a familiar historical trajectory, as traumatic as it may be. So, for instance, when Rosen engages with the history of the Surrealist movement, whose members were mainly French, Catholic men, he does so through the figure of a Jewish-Belgian woman artist; his engagement with the figure of Hitler takes place through the eyes of Eva Braun; and the axis tying together the tsar, Stalin, and Putin, which is shaped by a Russian tradition of authoritarian rule, is examined from the perspective of a young migrant suffering from paranoid delusions. “Rosen’s oeuvre, as well as the oeuvre of his surrogate artists, is hyper-mimetic and obsessively figurative, yet it is by no means realist,” claims Ekaterina Degot. When power today does not look for respectability
Page de gauche et cette page / left and this page: «The Blind Merchant ». 2017. Dessins, textes, crayon sur papier. Détails de la série (145 dessins) dont certains sont à l’aveugle. 28 x 21,5 cm chaque page / each page
but wallows in its own obscenity, neither grotesque caricature nor descriptive realism will suffice. A deployment of the inner workings of power’s mundane perversions is therefore called for. The mechanisms Rosen develops in his work are entanglement machines perfectly fit to portray the reality of our current predicament. With Rosen’s works, one is sucked into them like a dream that is a time tunnel on the other side of a mirror. With Rosen, each film or drawing series is based on a meticulous structure that is then betrayed. If Rosen’s works can be described as double-sided wormhole mirrors, then what is reflected in them is the true antagonistic nature of the world. This nature is reflected in Rosen’s work through what Hegel called objective humour. Romantic irony for Hegel was characterized by subjective humour, which uses every topic only to emphasize the subjective wit of the author. Objective humour, on the contrary, is not imbued with the illusion of inner freedom and superiority. Objective humour reveals the universal irony of the world, as it puts it to play its own negation.
LEGITIMATE PARANOÏD DELUSIONS
The two drawing and text albums on view at Beaubourg, Vladimir’s Night (2011-2014), and
The Blind Merchant (1989-1991), both unfold a layered narrative of violence and perversion. Vladimir’s Night includes 39 consecutive plates, each is made of a drawing and text. This is the work of Rosen’s character, young artist Efim Poplavsky, known as Maxim Komar-Myshkin, who also produced work in Israel in collaboration with his collective The Buried Alive, made up of immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the early 2000s. Efim Poplavsky has a whole biography; he was born in Moscow in 1978 and took his own life in Tel Aviv in 2011. He was a painter and a film maker, and in 2004 he authored The Buried Alive Manifesto. Among other things, he created the Astrological Pa
ranoia series of paintings (2006-2008), and a series of films which compile historical jokes from Russian history, as they are told by cultural figures in Israel who were taken hostage by the collective ( The Buried Alive Videos, 2013, 36 Min.). In article 17 of The Bu
ried Alive manifesto, Poplavsky writes: “There is no meaning. Everything is senseless chaos. Yet this senseless chaos as the hotbed for evil intentions and conspirations. Paranoia is justified”.
Vladimir’s Night is a manifestation of the belief in justified paranoia. It tells the story of Vladimir Putin, who, before going to sleep is joined in bed by numerous animated objects. While the album begins like a bedtime story, it soon turns into a nightmarish saga in which Putin is molested, tortured and finally murdered by these objects and appliances. In its book form, Vladimir’s Night includes, in addition to the poem and album, an essay by Rosa Chabanova, another Rosen avatar who was instrumental in discovering the work of Poplavsky/ Komar-Myshkin and his artists’ collective. Komar-Myshkin was convinced Putin was after him, therefore the album is full of conspiratorial references to the Putinesque kleptocracy, to Russian medieval literature and to the Soviet police state. If we treat Poplavsky as a real character, as he well deserves, we can compare his work and his collective’s work to that of other contemporary Russian collectives. While, as
art critic Gleb Napreenko explains: “Artists today engage in a buffoonish direct dialogue with power”, we see how Poplavsky’s work is displaced. Taking the contemporary Russian artist group Voina ( Война war) as an example, Napreenko explains: “Voina’s pranks are constructed as mirror-images reflecting the brute, Gulag-style force with which the state thinks and acts […] these contemporary gestures of subversive affirmation point toward the horror of identifying with the logic of power. But they do not open any of the lost territories within power that are forgotten by power itself, nor do they reveal any hidden layers of the unconscious, as the subversive affirmations of artists from socialist countries often did. The difference between the approach of Sots Art or Collective Actions to all things Soviet, and the approach of contemporary artists to Putinism, reads as the difference between the study of a rhetoric hollowed out and robbed of truth, and a rhetoric that consists of lies to begin with.”This is the hyperbolic ambiguous world of truth and lies Poplavsky’s work operates in. Building on the dense history of dissident art in USSR and contemporary Russia, Rosen constructs through Poplavsky indirect, selfinflicted mechanisms relating to the innerlogic of Putinism.
BETWEEN TRUTH AND LIES
The Blind Merchant, an earlier series of works forming an album, consists of three elements: the complete text of Shakespeare’s
The Merchant of Venice, a supplementary text by Roee Rosen in response to the play, and 145 drawings by the artist. Each pair includes a drawing and the Shakespearean text alongside Rosen’s parasitical text. Rosen’s on-going annotation adopts Shylock’s vantage point, and also provides a prologue to the play: before becoming a usurer, Shylock was a Venetian glass merchant until falling victim to a pogrom-like attack, during which his wife was raped and murdered and his eyes were gouged out. Thus, all the drawings depicting scenes in which Shylock is present are blind drawings, line drawings that were executed by Rosen with closed eyes. In this early work dating from 1989-1991, we find Rosen developing some of his interests and sensibilities in a seminal form. Here, long before his cross-gender projects such as Live and Die as Eva Braun (1997), where the viewer assumes the persona of Hitler’s lover, and more than a decade before he completed the oeuvre of Belgian-Jewish pornographic surrealist painter and novelist Justine Frank (2003), Rosen was already using hyper-fictionalizing well-established narratives. And not only that, but here we find a Rosen compelled by commentary. What later in his work will become a gallery of female commentators (Anne Kastorp, Joanna Führer- HaSfary and Rosa Chabanova), appears here as the story of a Jewish man, the Jewish
man— Shylock. Running in parallel to Shakespeare’s story, his narrative is a parasitic one, engulfing and hanging from the verses of the original play. The three elements of Shakespeare's complete text of The Merchant
of Venice, Rosen’s supplementary text written around the body of the play, and the 145 drawings together comprise a polyphonic piece in which each element echoes and intertwines with the others. The parasite text feeds upon the play, and locates itself according to its own taste; it is the text of a foreigner (Rosen’s mother tongue being Hebrew). When Shylock is not on the stage, the drawings are mostly watercolours, with frequent use of other materials, executed, of course, with open eyes. Shylock himself is an attempt at a blind self-portrait by Rosen, and a gallery of close friends is cast for some of the other characters. With all its diversions and entanglements, Rosen’s
The Blind Merchant seems to be true to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice insofar as it follows the basic logic of a play, as a form in search of another form; here the relations between text and image, fragment and archive, are examined exactly around the time when networked computers changed their status completely in a perpetual de-historicizing of time and space. As mentioned before, we can see in this early work of drawing and text many of the characteristics of Rosen’s later work. The device he de- veloped with his blind drawings seems to follow him in his later work. Those familiar with Rosen’s painterly talents would argue that The Blind Merchant is the odd one out, having nothing to do with the lush stylistic technique of his aquarelles and canvases. But The Blind Merchant shows us a paradoxical talent of mastering loss of control. In addition, if we refer to some of Rosen’s videos, we find that a similar logic is applied in The Confessions, for example, where a kind of blind drawing is taking shape in the form of a surrogate delivery of text by women who do not understand its meaning. These are confessions of the artist told in the first person by three illegal foreign workers residing in Israel, who deliver the monologues in Hebrew, a language they do not speak, by reading a transliteration of the text to Latin letters from a teleprompter. Autopuppeteering and ventriloquism seem like the only gesture that would feel genuine. I call his world Roee Rosen’s catacombs, because in it we get to visit the underworld, walk among the ghosts and shadows, and learn about our world, here on the surface.
Editing, I. Rouault-Röhlich
(1) Ekaterina Degot, “Between Joke and Terror: Roee Rosen’s Unsettling Mimesis,” in: Gilad Melzer and Joshua Simon (eds.) Roee Rosen: Group Exhibition – A Retrospective, Tel Aviv Art Museum 2016. (2) G.W.F Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans.T.M. Knox, vol. 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. (3) Roee Rosen, “Maxim Komar-Myshkin: The Buried Alive Manifesto,” In: Cargo Cult: Artists from the ExSoviet Bloc, Curated by Max Lomberg, MoBY: Museums of Bat Yam 2012, p. 39. Also reprinted in: Roee Rosen, Maxim Komar-Myshkin, Vladimir's Night, Berlin and New York, Sternberg Press, 2014, pp. 102-103. (4) Gleb Napreenko, “Back in the USSR?,” e-flux Journal #55, May 2014: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/55/ 60313/back-in-the-ussr/
Joshua Simon is the former director of MoBY Museums of BatYam, Israel. Simon co-curated the retrospective Roee Rosen: A Group exhibition, at theTel Aviv Art Museum (2016).
Roee Rosen Né en / born 1963 à/ in Rehovot Vit et travaille à / lives in Tel Aviv Expositions récentes / Recent shows: 2016 Roee Rosen: A Group Exhibition, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art (catalogue) ; Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg, Allemagne 2017 The Dust Channel, Riccardo Crespi Gallery, Milan 2018 Histoires dans la pénombre, Centre Pompidou (27 juin - 29 octobre) ; Douce sueur (Sweet Sweat), Centre Pompidou en collaboration avec le Jeu de Paume Roee Rosen Film Retrospective, Ficunam International Film Festival, Mexico City Kafka for Kids, Graz (22 septembre). Événement dirigé par Ekaterina Degot 2019 Project Art Centre, Dublin (mars-avril)