Archive: Tamy Ben-Tor & Miki Carmi

Minerva Projects is delighted to publish their second book: Archive: Tamy Ben-Tor & Miki Carmi.

Archive: Tamy Ben-Tor & Miki Carmi is an image-heavy book with a starting point of either cover. The book manifests in physical form the progression of Ben-Tor and Carmi’s work and the development of their interrelated practices, with Carmi’s images and Ben-Tor’s texts and video stills. The narrative record of each of the artists’ individual practices begins at the outermost edges and builds inwardly together, collapsing time and blending ideologies and artworks at the center, symbolizing a formalization of their collaboration. Both the tome structure and the embedded texts function to shift points of view for both reader and authors. Within these texts, the content intentionally destabilizes the reader, never affirming any particular manner as “correct.” Book designer Joel Brenden, through close collaboration with the artists, has crafted a visceral tactic that prompts the viewer to interact with the book in multi-directional, sometimes disorienting angles, leading to a challenging of thought, culminating in Ben-Tor and Carmi’s central intentionality.

Jointly, Archive is a book about making a book, a book within a book, and a book of artifacts and mark making. Accumulated process-based work, floor photographs, finished paintings, sketches, video stills, studio character shots, varied and fragmented texts, manifestos, performance texts, and un-performed texts and rants were all orchestrated chronologically and transferred from the artists to the designer. Brenden then translated these pieces into Archive, with sensitivity and understanding of the nature of book making and the book as precious object. Archive also holds its share of the “readymade:” primary source selections such as 1930’s German Anti-Semitic posters, film stills from “The Eternal Jew,” and racial studies from Hans Gunther’s books of the 1930’s. The artists’ practices and the book equally speak to the changes that happen over time: to photographs, to faces, to ideology. The mimetic patina of time turns floor photographs from Carmi’s studio and Ben-Tor’s texts and scripts into artifacts in their own right. 

Ben-Tor, a celebrated performance artist, and Carmi, an ambitious painter, while both from Israel, met in New York during their MFA program. Since then, parallel explorations developed into an exchange, full of excavations and analyses of human archetypes/clichés. Using different approaches, both artists strip their subjects bare: Carmi reveals the marks that define internal drives and desires; Ben-Tor turns up the volume of normalcy to the point of perversion. Carmi’s subversion of the role of portraiture includes revealing stark examination of the human epidermis’s entropy based on his primary subjects (his parents and grandparents) which he subjects to the scientific authoritarian gaze.  His large-scale floating heads function as a symbolic metaphor for universe, territory, landscapes, and internal organs. This is set in stark contrast to Ben-Tor’s similarly probing human studies, which are based on close observation and extrapolation of behaviors through her expansive fluency with language, accent, gesture, costuming, and aural effect. In Ben-Tor’s texts, an obsessive mimicry of the evil and the repulsive shifts between overidentification and loathing.

Between Ben-Tor’s absurdist performances that conflate subjects to unravel core emotional, social, and hierarchical formulations that poison contemporary culture and Carmi’s iconic, probing paintings that construe the specificity of humanity and memory, these artists have developed a visual language oriented by the grotesque. They offer an insightful and stirring reflection on the process of disembodiment in our time. The concept of accumulated observations of marks of time, of looking out and back inward, is manifested optically as well as physically in Archive, a topic that is explored in Coco Fusco’s essay about Carmi’s work in the forthcoming accompanying Text Book. Both artists draw from and re-examine history, inherited trauma, and fracturing of self through different conceptual and visual lens. Both choose not to date or title their work, upending time and value.

As their work further melds, so does their relationship, together building family. They manifest an intentional approach through their shared time as artists and as parents, around labor and care. As threads interweave, a variegated vessel is created that houses a unified approach to life and artistic explorations. Archive tells the story of how distinct thought lines merge into a unified and deliberately constructed stronger whole.

Archive is made possible by the support of Elysia Solomon, Becky Hart, and Eugenie Ayse Perret.

The companion volume of Archive, Text Book: Tamy Ben-Tor & Miki Carmi, designed by Joshua Gamma, will be available for purchase in June 2021.