Who cares about the tree?

Reflections on  “No Matter”- a performance by Adina Bar-On

By Dudi Brailovsky

The tree is tall, the tree is green

The sea is salty, the sea is deep

What does the tree care, that the sea is deep

What does the sea care, that the tree is green. ¹

As part of  “Orientation”, a performance  which took place in the Neve -Tzedek neighborhood in Tel-Aviv, Adina Bar-On turned her gaze upward and invited her audience to follow it to the top floor of a skyscraper, where an olive tree planted in a pot stands on a balcony high in the sky, a vision of exile. Bar-On calls us to task, asking who cares that the tree is tall, that the tree is green.  She lays bare the question of exposure² : which olive grove was stripped preceding the tree’s elevated preservation? The tree was placed up high, it is tall, in the words of the poet; and in the words of Hegelian dialectics, it is sublated (Aufhebung). What is the nature of this dialectic, which destroys while it preserves? Is it an integral mark of historical progress? The elevation of the tree, lifting it to the roof of a skyscraper, functions as an act of erasure. Bar-On delineates its vestiges and remains. Her orientation routes trace the traces of erasure. As in “Orientation”, in her current performance Bar-On sings the song of the uprooted tree, whose exposed roots are cloaked in various disguises  to  conceal the obscenity. Grasping it as one would an icon of Maria Magdalena, moving to and fro, she finds no place for it, neither soil nor native land.  In her unique voice, she sings the songs of the country which has found no respite.

“… should the bird fly away, he will sing no more songs.

What does the bird care if he sings or is still?”

Levine’s poem asks “what does the sea care, that the tree is green”, but one may also ask “what does the tree care that it is green”?  The system of classification based on categorization and differentiation functions by categorizing the tree’s characteristics: green, tall, leaves narrow or wide, and so on. But can this system of signs grasp the tree’s essence? And what does the tree care if it is called date or palm, for example? The system of classified knowledge overlooks  the tree’s presence, it’s be-ing.  In the current performance, Bar-On invites the audience to the window, from which two palm trees can be seen.  Bar-On asks the question of differentiation: is it a date or a palm tree, and what is the difference between them? The tree eludes the chain of signs trying to pin it down: it is found at the end of their endless succession. What does the tree care about the signs, what does it care about the difference between date and palm? The tree cannot place itself within the classifying system, and the artist does not know what is in the grid, and where to place it.

But what if, hypothetically speaking, she should find a place for it? Levine continues: “… should the bird fly away, he will sing no more songs…”. To paraphrase, we could say that were she to find the tree’s place, were it rooted in its land, were it identical to its classification – then, perhaps, she would no longer sing her song. And perhaps  the sole work of the artist is to return things to their source. This return, however, is deferred ad infinitum, so that Bar-On keeps on moving with her tree towards its return to its source.  Salvation is eternally deferred, whilst the songs are heard again and again, compelling as a lament.

Towards the end of the performance, Bar-On gathers the audience around an impromptu grave, as in a memorial service. There, she invokes the name and lifework of the late Daniel Davis, Bar-On’s partner in life and art. She presents one of his works on a small projector – conjuring up an image as on a laterna magica. Bar-On attempts to assign the work of art a language: she describes it, the way it is made of paper  cut –outs folded over;  she notes the different attributes, distinguishing between right  and left fold, between up and down. But as with the tree, so also with the work of art it seems that its essence eludes our perception. The work of art, like the tree, confounds  descriptive language. The source of the work of art, the possibility of grasping and exposing it, is endlessly deferred. As in a memorial service, we may speak of it but only its ghost is present.

Bar-On, one of Israel’s senior and foremost performance artists, outlines in her performances the fundamental basis for a showing, for the art of performance. In this sense she has continued the modernistic tradition, since her beginnings in the 1970’s. Thus throughout the 40 years of her career, Bar-On has redefined, time and time again, the language of performance, the language of art.

Bar-On’s performances are built around a meticulous, formalistic choice of images. This set of images  is condensed to the smallest number of signs necessary for creating a language. At the core of this language is something that cannot be spoken, but whose existence can be easily discerned. “Look at the blue stain between back-rest and the seat” she turns the audience’s attention to an imaginary stain, the figment of her and the audience’s imagination. The artist locates it amongst the linguistic components of the chair, between ‘seat’ and ‘back-rest’. We cannot always say exactly where the line between them is drawn, but at the heart of this borderline dwells a hidden alterity to which Bar-On calls our attention, be it the displaced tree, the stain in between, or something else. Some would say “no matter”, and yet the matter is there despite, or because, of its elusiveness. No matter that we haven’t noticed, she says, perhaps  ironically and perhaps compassionately – “No matter”.

Bar-On’s is the performance of alterity, of that which is in between, not present and yet not absent. And yet let us ask- what is this performance of the attendant absentee? What is performance art? This question arises in each of Bar-On’s performances. We are called to follow the traces left by the artist’s actions, to observe and to chart them, not so that we come up with a definition which answers the question, but so that we gather the markings, the artist’s paths of orientation.

Bar-On’s current performance is actually an installation which arises and collapses several times throughout its duration. Meticulously arranging chairs in the corner, she later tears down the structure with one swoop of her hand, turning order to disarray. The performance is an installation which refuses to stabilize, it is a deferred installation. The being of time in a spatial work. The installation in Bar-On’s performance is not a fixed set of objects arranged in space but rather the appearance and disappearance of its structure, the objects subjected to the back and forth movement of their  being. On the other hand, one can say that the installation is the becoming- space of a performance, the becoming-  space of time. Throughout  the performance, the installation freezes, and traces of actions remain. Once in a while, Bar-On steps back from the performance site and observes it, studying from a point of perspective the work of art that has just been created,  the painting or sculpture which was made during the performance and froze.  Charting Bar-On’s course of action, we may conclude that it is performative of the ambiguity between the spacing of time and the temporalization of space. It is a constant movement to and fro which traverses the difference between space and time, backrest and seat, date and palm. And so we can understand the movement of the tree which is neither here nor there, wandering both in the political and the ontological sense.

The tree’s wanderings bring about Bar-On’s ethics of concern for the other. Who cares about the tree, the question of  hosting the alterity within us – these are rhetorical questions. If no one cares, no poems will be written. Adina Bar-On’s performance is renewed again and again by virtue of concern, by virtue of her asking who cares about the tree, who   cares at all …

Notes:

¹ excerpt from the poem “The Tree is Tall” by Hanoch Levine

² Exposure: a term coined by the Israeli army which describes a procedure that was used predominantly during the second Intifada. The official purpose of this procedure is to clear a Palestinian area in order to turn it into a kind of “safety zone” for Israeli citizens and members of the security forces. As part of this procedure  the Israeli army has destroyed hundreds of houses, uprooted thousands of trees and destroyed thousands of acres of agricultural land.