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“Propagate air,” she intones elastically, her voice morphing from a childish

treble to an inhuman basso profundo. “Blast the spine that has become

reptile… keep breathing, as it will save you, as it is electricity… Sound

athlete…Body-instrument… Source-transmitter.”

Anat Ben David’s Deleuzian-Dalcrozian text score cum-manifesto is performed to a

backing track of looped electronic croaks and stutters in the main gallery at Stanley

Picker. Simultaneously stripping back and complicating the code sand gestures of

pop, Ben David is multiplied and transformed by diverse digital prostheses (echoes,

loops, harmonisers, video projections); her machinic, Cathy Berberian-esque

Sprechstimme itself becoming the arch double of a pop singer’s affected hyperaffectivity.

This electrifying performance is just one aspect of Ben David’s current show, but the

way her stage equipment remains set up throughout the life of the exhibition

suggests that a concert might spontaneously erupt at any moment (and, indeed, Ben

David is apt to rehearse here during gallery hours). Ultimately the artist considers the

whole show to be one work, MeleCh (king, 2014), with each iteration housed in the

gallery’s two rooms – photographs, video, performance, text, a vinyl album –

sprouting from the same technical-conceptual seed. That process, elaborated in the

text already quoted, combines the surrealist art of automatic writing with the

biomechanical theatre practice of Soviet director Vsevolod Meyerhold to forge a

versatile autopoietic discipline.

In the first room of the gallery we find a series of black-and-white photographs that

immediately evoke images of Meyerhold’s avant-garde workshops, with Ben David

herself striking a series of dynamic poses: arms outstretched or crooked at 90

degrees, legs bent and poised for action. But in the next room we find a set of

strikingly different – though formally similar (A4, portrait, colourless, etc) – images.

Here the artist throws her body violently against the ground, her naked torso brutally

contorted.

Though wrung from the same technique, these images present a dramatically

different image of the body from the futurist strongmen in the other room. It is

significant, perhaps, that Ben David worked alone, snapping herself on a timer. If

there is a relation of subjection to be dealt with, it is the artist’s relationship with

herself – or with the device.

The three videos in the main room at once provide the mirrored reverse of the

photographs while closing the circuit back to the performance. Their bright primary

colours contrast with the photographic greyscale. Though set in constant motion,

Ben David’s variously starched or supine static poses counterpoise the sprung

vitality of the stills.

Each video emits noises, mostly layered vocals processed into lolling oscillator

whoops, and superimposed they produce a strangely inviting kind of cacophony. It is

from the third video that the show takes its title. Though generated as spontaneously

as the others, the sounds subsequently evoked for Ben David a ritual of supplication

to an Egyptian king.

Developed by Aleksei Gastev as a kind of Soviet scientific management for the

socialist workplace, in Meyerhold’s hands biomechanics became a utopia of mind

and body, physical discipline and futurist dream. Anat Ben David’s work reaches

towards these other worlds with disarming frankness. A soft machine for the

production of new myths, as engaging as it is unsettling.

This article was first published in the April 2014 issue.

Anat Ben David, MeleCh, 2014. Courtesy the artist Anat Ben David, MeleCh,

Anat Ben David, by Robert Barry / ArtReview 07/12/2017, 10(52

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