Text Book: Tamy Ben-Tor & Miki Carmi

Minerva Projects is delighted to publish Text Book: Tamy Ben-Tor & Miki Carmi. 

Text Book: Tamy Ben-Tor & Miki Carmi is a companion to the bound image collection, Archive: Tamy Ben-Tor & Miki Carmi. Text Book’s essays intersect art historical analyses, an artist’s interpretation, the reactions of a playwright and reflections of a film director, and a work of experimental fiction. Here, Minerva Projects aims to upend the usual ways painting and performance art are described. Graphic designer Joshua Gamma interprets Ben-Tor and Carmi’s practice liberally—never simply reproducing images of works, but instead distilling their visual vocabulary into core elements that operate as a language alongside the commissioned authors’ texts.

Ben-Tor & Carmi are longstanding partners in art and life with a robust exhibition record. The book attends to the realities of this collaboration. The contributions include Academy Award nominated filmmaker Martin Brest’s mapping of his experience of Ben Tor and Carmi’s work. Internationally acclaimed artist, author, and theorist, Coco Fusco contributes an analysis of Carmi’s innovations in painting, bringing attention to histories of eugenics and the grotesque as pertain to his contemporary art practice. Minerva’s intention is to expand the platforms and ways art writing and art criticism appear in publishing. Norman Chernick-Zeitlin amplifies the drives that fuel Ben-Tor and Carmi’s collaboration through his poetic fictional narrative that taps the relationships underpinning the artists’ subjects.  An exhibiting artist himself, Chernick-Zeitlin draws on their shared studies of psychology, mythologies, and Jewish histories. Playwright Adara Meyers’ “Gutter Notes” injects pages with insights born from the language of theatre and the dynamics of her studio visit with the artists. Kosuke Kawahara’s rendering of the artists through interconnected themes of the cosmos, Buddhism, fermentation, and dreamscapes deepens further our understanding of Ben-Tor and Carmi practices. Alpesh Kantilal Patel’s art historical scholarship, curating, and criticism reflect his queer, anti-racist, and transnational approach to contemporary art. He brings an analysis of how Ben-Tor and Carmi’s practices re-work the body as never singular or heteronormative, but disembodied, contained, and easily racialized. The writing of Kate Gaudy, an exhibiting artist and curator working in Buffalo, New York, challenges us to stare, to look at Carmi’s paintings, and to watch and listen again to Ben-Tor’s videos. Psychoanalytic, raw, and explicit, Gaudy activates the forces that steer and feed their work as artists and caregivers. 

This book is made possible by the incredibly generous support of The Polish Cultural Institute: New York, Elysia Solomon, and Becky Hart.