An Omer Fast video, “The Casting,” which will its American debut at the Whitney Biennial this week, in progress. It recreates the story of an American soldier in Iraq.Nicholas Trikonis/
Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery
by Eric Herschthal Staff Writer
Omer Fast, one of just two Israeli-born artists in this year’s Whitney Biennial, does not question historical facts; he just highlights the murky process by which they are established. But by dismembering, splicing and re-editing videos documenting highly charged events like the Holocaust and the Civil War, he knows that he is walking a very fine line. “I look at historical events through their present representation,” Fast, 36, said in a telephone interview from Berlin, where he now lives. “But I am not trying to undermine or counteract” the historical narratives themselves, he continued. “I’m more interested in articulating the individual in relation to history or journalistic narratives.” Fast’s approach might be called postmodern for his deconstructive habits. But Fast does not stop and revel
in nihilism — in fact, it his reconfiguration, his re-assembling of facts into comprehensible new narratives that make him so intriguing. He finishes, in other words, what postmodernists began. Since Fast’s first major exhibition appearance, at the 2002 Whitney Biennial (the upcoming Biennial will be his second time at the show, which opens on March 6), he has attracted an ardent following among critics and major curators. His video installations have been acquired and displayed in the world’s leading museums — the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the Tate Modern, among many others. And his work receives the kind of critical praise worthy of its nimble and sensitive — but nonetheless provocative — commentary on issues at the core of the many cultures he navigates. Born in Jerusalem, then having moved to New York as a teenager, and now an artist in Berlin, Fast does not as much work above any political fray as comment from the borders. “Different works reflect the society that I live in,” he says. Though his more recent work deals mainly with American themes — “Godville,” from 2005, documented Civil War re-enactments; “The Casting,” which will have its American debut at the Biennial this week, recreates the story of a U.S. soldier in Iraq — some of his most prominent earlier work trafficks heavily in Jewish subjects. And while none are polemics against Israel or the Holocaust — the subjects on which he focused — the works complicate our understanding of the standard storylines. Beginning in 2002, two years after receiving his masters in fine art from Hunter College, Fast produced a string of Jewish-related works. One was “Berlin-Hura,” since acquired by The Jewish Museum, which displays his grandmother talking about her forced exile from Nazi Germany to Palestine in 1936. The work featured another monitor screened simultaneously that showed an elderly man from the Bedouin lands of the Negev, where his grandmother first moved, repeating her exact same story. The work suggested the intertwined history of two very different people — both nomadic, either by choice or forced exile — and the dubious nature of any ultimate claim to the land. “What we were interested in is how he explained the issue of place in terms of memory,” said Karen Levitov, an associate curator at The Jewish Museum, who lobbied the museum to acquire the work. By having his grandmother’s story “told and retold again,” Levitov added, “the meaning obviously changes.” Which is not to say Fast is falsifying anyone’s account. In fact, that is what makes Fast’s work so disarming — while his works cast doubt on any singular claim to objective truth, they do not imply that there simply is none. He is making a different point, instead focusing on the many different interpretations that can be arrived at from the same set of facts. He highlights the subjectivity of truth. “I think he’s doing this in a very complex way,” said Henriette Huldisch, the co-curator of the upcoming Whitney Biennial. “His mode is very much making apparent the way memory and history are created and organized.” (The other Jerusalem-born artist at the Biennial, Seth Price, has not dealt with Jewish subject matter.) Fast’s first solo show in New York, at the prominent Chelsea gallery Postmasters in 2003, came about after the gallery’s director, Magdalena Sawon, saw his work at the 2002 Whitney Biennial and a few smaller group exhibits in New York and Europe. Sawon was struck, she said, by an earlier piece called “CNN Concatenated,” which re-edited several of the news channel’s post-Sept. 11 broadcasts into an entirely new segment about the fear of death. “He essentially created for himself a dictionary” with the words edited and re-assembled from previous broadcasts, Sawon said. “That for me was a fantastic gesture to use the original material, then completely turn it on its head.” The Postmasters show in 2003 featured Fast’s two other important Jewish-themed works. “A Tank Translated,” featured four monitors screening interviews with various Israeli soldiers. The translated subtitles, in English, occasionally misinterpreted a word so that a tank gunner appears to be talking about shooting a film, not a target. “There’s a lot of politics in the piece,” Fast said, “but the politics is packed into the way the piece speaks about and what it communicates.” Fast leaves both his works, and his words, deliberately vague. But it would be hard to call him coy — he admits the political bias inherent in his work but stresses that his primary concern is communication. “I think it’s very difficult to separate politics with communication,” he says, “I certainly don’t pretend to separate both things.” But, he adds: “On the other hand, I think [my work] will fall flat on its face if it just gets read as expressing my political views.” The other work featured at the Postmasters show — perhaps his most risky — was “Spielberg’s List.” The 59-minute work featured interviews with several Polish extras from Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List,” taken 10 years after the film was made, in 2003. Some interviews reveal how the extras were themselves once concentration camp inmates; the film also shows that the simulated camp Spielberg built for his film has become a greater tourist attraction than the real death camp beside it. Applying his ideas of the malleability of memory and history to an event as monumental as the Holocaust is inherently dangerous. But in no way is Fast’s work meant to attack the event’s historical fact, Fast and all those interviewed said. Nor have the many reviews of the work suggested as much. Instead, he is questioning our desire to re-create history — to relive it. Much like in “Godville,” which came two years later and took a critical look at the “living museums” of Civil War re-enactments, Fast takes aim at the lengths people will go to understand history. “It’s not that he’s challenging the veracity of these events, but he’s questioning our desire to learn about these things through other means,” said Anne Ellegood, a curator at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., which purchased “Godville” in 2005 and will display it at any upcoming group exhibit this summer. Fast’s newest work, “The Casting,” which will be featured in the Whitney Biennial, takes similar ideas conveyed in “Spielberg’s List” and “Godville,” but attempts to recreate the narrative on his own. He no longer uses the “ready-mades,” as he calls them, of previously made films or living museums, but instead has hired actors to perform the story of a U.S. soldier Fast interviewed (not unlike a film “based on a true story.”) Two monitors show two different experiences lived by the same soldier — a love story, and his war experience in Iraq. “The stories are braided together into one story and that’s even more complicated by the different actors” that act out each narrative, Fast said. Complicating the picture even more is the way Fast has chosen to edit and display the footage. He screens only the moments after the actors have performed the script, looking around idly and often confused. “I see the project as a collection of the frozen awkward moments that exist between an actor’s wish to identify with his [or] her subject and the scene,” Fast told a publication in Germany, where the piece was recently exhibited. No doubt viewers at the glitzy Biennial exhibit will question Fast’s politics. But Fast demands the viewer look somewhere else—to the very nature of their looking. “It’s showing how the film and the media are part of our understanding,” Fast says. “It sounds kind of funny perhaps, but it comes down to narrative and storytelling.”
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