ADINA BAR-ON        PERFORMANCE ARTIST

Breath by Adina Bar-On

text by Idit Porat
 

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The span of 20 years or so of creative work done by Adina Bar-On - artist, inter-media artist, performance artist - has taken place at the margins. The margins - those states of interface the formal and mediumal definition of which is not unambiguous, are characteristic of both the modes of work and the themes of creators of theater and dance, visual artists, musicians, poets and thinkers of the early part of the [20th] century, and more so after the great rupture following the Second World War. The crossing of medium boundaries and the breaking of aesthetic hierarchies - at first in the Dadaist performances and Artaud's theater of cruelty, then in the works of Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci and Alan Kaprow, and in the '80s in the works of Pina Bausch and Robert Wilson - are among the qualities that have made artists such as these the disputed pavers of the way of the retroactive definition of postmodernism, and of what may be expected after it.
Adina Bar-On connects in her work woth the broad range of artists who have tried with their syneasthetic approach to create intersecting and complementary systems of various languages, to the point of dissolution of the object. Paradoxally, the loss of meaning - as a consequence of the decrease in language's capacity of absorption and its difficulties in conductivity - has led these artists and others who have followed them to seek meaning by the way of diminution - in the absent and the minoric. One of the questions that resonates through the work of these artists is how to say/do - in words, in movement, in voice, in visual images and perhaps mainly in what was in between them - without saying/doing anything - i.e. without requiring a solid meaning, out of an understanding that a meaning of this kind does not exist, or changes frequently.
Adina Bar-On's artistic practice takes place on this open stage, where inter-media art has a central place. However, as an Israeli artist working in some degree of isolation and separation and separation in the local Israeli context as well, in her work she chooses to interiorize her relations with the center and, in the performance "Breath", to bring them to a reductive expression in the single body's struggle to conduct a dialogue.
In the early '70s, in the conceptual atmosphere and concurrently with the awakening of the performance arts and their decisive resonance in the Israeli field, Bar-On, then a student in the art department at Bezalel, began seeking a way of abstract the word by means of the body. In the recent years, since the work "A Woman of the Pots" - the performance (1990) and the video (1991) - Bar-On has bee drawing nearer to her early creation, after years during which her work tended towards the more comprehensive planes of the question of identity, which sometimes also touched upon social-political aspects.
In "A Woman of the Pots", Bar-On began a process of parting from the dimentions of the "Acconcian dilemmas", and in the place of these there returned questions that appear more minor, touching upon contexts of everyday life, the family and the neighborhood. These have been minimized in the performance "Breath", where the multiplicity of characters and faces have completely vanished, and only the powerful transparency of the breathing body remains. The video film, directed by Alon Eilat, presences the ephemeral and the imperceptible, and constitutes a kind of convex mirror to the flow of the inner dialogue. In this performance  Bar-On focusses herself on the elementariness of the act of breathing, while hinting at the mental implications of the rythmic changes in the body. The nuances of movement and the oscillations of voice which, together with the visual image of the video, trace lines and forms in the space, formulate Bar-On's "language of no", in which we see the rise and the fall, the appearance and disappearance, the saying and te elimination, of acstract claims which have just began the quest for stability.