Though Performance Art has already been in existence for several decades, its methods of evaluation are not yet properly formulated. There are critics who prefer mere descriptions, and others who seek symbolic contents behind each action. Some try to adapt analytical methods of criticism of other artistic genres – such as theater, music or, sometimes even sports – to Performance.

Performance, however, belongs first of all to the Fine arts where it is difficult to find a point of orientation and even if one can find such a point, it would be the artist himself – his physical existence, his psyche, his individuality. Adina Bar-On`s Performance Art could probably be best evaluated by comparing it with her personality.

For a long time I experiences – and as critic/theoretician also dealt with – held in my surroundings – Performances as if they had been addressed directly to me. Or, reversing this assumption, I set out from the fact that if someone is a good Performance artist, then I have to establish close and friendly relations with him or her. With time, however, I came to realize that the ideal connections between a performer and a spectator are of a different kind, because Performance in its own existence is situated in the reality of life in a special way. Performance is a particular mixture of fiction and reality; This is not the same as in the case of paintings and all kinds of pictures,and wholly different from the theatrical performance. Adina Bar-On transplants these notions into the reality of art very consciously.

I got to know both the artist and her work under really unusual circumstances in October 1999 in Jerusalem, at an exhibition organized at the Teddy Kollek Stadium on the occasion of Art Focus 3.

The work of art consisted of a video projection (Portrait, 1999) in which a woman – the artist herself – was speaking about herself to the cameraman ( i.e, with “the spectator himself”) in front of the rocky desert background. She had chosen a location which is traditionally meant for exile, solitude or meditation, but she wanted  to report on this desolate place, and what is more: to communicate with us. The situation was peculiar also because beside the projected image Adina Bar-On herself was present and she called upon me to put on headphones to be able to listen to the dialogue. Communication became even more complicated when a naked young man started his own performance behind my back. Otherwise it occurred  to me that the dialogue between the artist and the spectator could be developed further if the spectator could be able to ask the projected person questions and she could answer as well. Again, this dialogue could be recorded and so on, as was done in the film “Dream Reconstruction” (1967-77) by the Hungarian artist Miklos Erdely.

The fact that I got to know one of Adina Bar-On’s works of art (and later on her complete life-work from documentation) corresponded to another assumption of mine. I had different notions in connection with Israel that I wanted to contrast with reality. So, I could not help taking Adina Bar-On’s work of art as a symbolic one, which might probably carry underlying meanings of its artistic and social context, first of all referring to relations between traditions and the present time, between religion and present-day Israeli society, and between a Jewish/Israeli artist and the world of international artists. Answers to these questions occurred to me in a “foreign” milieu (actually “home”to me) in Budapest, where I had the opportunity to see one of Adina Bar-On’s performances and to participate in the workshop she held for students at the Hungarian University Of Applied Arts.

Adina Bar-On’s Performance Art is an art of communication (put this way it sounds very common), and within this the art of addressing. Both in her Budapest piece (Sacrifice) and at the workshop there were moments that obviously alluded to this: at the beginning and after an intensive internal meditation she faced the audience (or one of its members) and waited, doing nothing, until this nothing (“tense nothing”) became nearly unendurable. This is a kind of address that prepares the audience mentally and spiritually for the reception of forthcoming events. At the same time the spectator knows that he does not have the right to talk back – but as a reward the artist is increasingly sincere and straight. The artist uses extremely few tools,and “plays” as if she was a mother with a child in her hands. At the same time/sometimes she herself is the child. This kind of role-playing is a difficult one, and has nearly nothing to do with the job of an actor or with “psychoanalyzing”. Her articulation of voice is neither musical nor poetic; we may rather call it “Voice-Performance” (among Hungarian artists we may find similar effects in Katalin Ladik’s phonic-poetic Performances). The duration of the piece is short, but the paucity of tools and the tension make it almost unbearable, also because the topic itself is awkward and tense,because of its banality; the archetypal Mother and her Child, a topic which can transmit not only tender emotions and pity but also fear, anger, and many other things as well. Beyond this it suggests very specific and general contents: The state of a woman who fears not only for her child but also for sons in the army in an unsettled political situation and for other women too. In this way she also contributes to the discussion of the gender-issue, which is so important on the international level as well.

The artist’s direct way of approaching people may cause exceptionally awkward situations, making the message of the non-verbal dialogue more intense. A prototype of such situations is pleading and begging, being at others’ mercy. A Hungarian performer, Janos Szittes, has developed this to a point where he turned begging into offering (he offers the audience a huge basket of bullock’s-eyes!), thus creating a new type of performance; the”Beggars School”. A Rumanian artist, Ion Grigoresco, performing at the same evening as Adina Bar-On, offers the audience his miserable, ascetic-religious unclothedness as a spectacle. As far as I know, Adina Bar-On is the only performer world-wide who teaches about begging. Another issue is that in her work she makes no distinction between the workshop ( i.e. teaching Performance) and Performance as art.

During a non-verbal address the artist uses minimal tools. Voice without words (pre-verbal) becomes the performer’s basic tool. (If performance belongs to the fine arts, voice is like a sculpture.) In Adina Bar-On’s art, voice is the equivalent to rain or to a child’s crying, but it is not similar to them. This is not reproduction of the sounds but rather their production. We can say the same about her motion: It is not an imitation of of usual gestures, but a set of gestures constructed out of the state of motionlessness. This is not a “psychologising”, nor singing, nor theater, nor pantomime.

The environment of these minimal gestures is sometimes a neutral auditorium or an exhibition hall; sometimes, however, it is the sea or a woodland valley with the audience looking down at it from a terrace. Here confrontation turns into its own opposite. Yet the distance does not extinguish communication,but in a paradoxical way makes it even more intense. In “Portrait” dialogue is realized by means of the film; here it is realized by the distance – as seamen send messages to each other by flag-signals, or as in the huge landscape of Andreas Gursky, where the essence can be grasped in the tiny silhouettes on the horizon.

As I mentioned above,the “oeuvre” of the artist should be evaluated by comparing it with her personality. What happens to personality it creates a situation for itself in which the tension is artificially increased? She lets herself be pulled up to a height of a few floors in a Tel Aviv shopping center, “Laying” in a bed suspended in a vertical position, under a bedspread decorated with Israeli flag. Here personality ceases to exist and becomes a pleasantly irritating (in fact rather provocative) “tableau vivant”. She submits herself to a universally valid message.

Most of Adina Bar-On’s Performances, and her complete life-work as well, tell us a lot about the fact that the main existential problem of Israeli art – and Hungarian art too – is the following: to what extent can it be national or international; can it rely on traditions or, on the contrary, does it make efforts to detach itself from them? Walking in the streets of Tel Aviv, I often felt as if I was in Central or Eastern Europe, because the gestures and faces of the passers-by, and the architectural environment, seemed so familiar to me. Adina Bar-On is Central-Eastern European origin, and she confronted this heritage for the first time in Hungary. Now, she is starting to go international, while on the way to finding her own tradition – through performances, which are personal and at the same time can be generalized.