After the incredible success of the «Street Bograshov» project in Tel Aviv, where Nekoda Singer's installation «In memory of Robinson Crusoe» was razed on the nearby beach the night before the opening and then restored from the wreckage on the exhibition openning day in the «Bograshov» gallery, the exhibition was closed immediately, and its curator Ariella Azoulay was appointed a chief-curator of the above Museum. For the next season she has announced two concept exhibitions, inviting to participate in them, among others, Gali-Dana and Nekoda Singer, the participants of the mentioned above street action. Obviously, due to participation of these artists in both projects, Ms Azoulay was also fired from this post at the museum no later than six months after the appointment, and all exhibitions she planned were canceled. G.-D. and N.S. self-accusation is based not on delusions of grandeur, as an ignorant outside observer could suspect, but on practical application of probability theory. The fact is that a year later they were officially invited to make a personal project in Herzliya Museum, as part of a series of young conceptualists' exhibitions. As a result, the museum was put on a three-year capital repairs, and the series curator Haim Lusski was banned for all his plans. Wishing no more harm, all the more to progressive Israeli art which already struggled along significant difficulties, G.-D. and N.S. decided to turn down further invitations to participate in their state museums' projects.
The mentioned above exhibition, for which Nekoda Singer has created this series of paintings (acrylics on canvas, 35x27 cm each) has a code named «Do it», and was planned as a part of wider international project. The idea of this project was to invite some leading european artists of the neo-conceptualism, the world's top stars, whose names G.-D. and N.S. have not remembered (and still had not case to regret about it). These artists should give a set of well-defined formalized tasks to lower-ranking participants, so each of the latter picked up one task and implemented the idea sent from above, according to the level of his obedience and local conditions. These assignments are remembered now only partially. One of them required to write an instruction and ask as many people as possible to copy it, then showing all copies. Another, called «Love of red», required to place red objects on some specific areas of the galery floor. And so on ... Anarchistic desire to blow up this totalitarian-bureaucratic construction prompted G.-D. and N.S. to create a «dirty», quite personal, concept which combines all the instructors' orders (it seems there were from seven to ten of them), and thus nullify their cheap attempt to misappropriate the right of primogeniture. Oddly enough, this concept based on the well-known, dingy, and to this day embarrassing for many people, story about the Biblical mess of pottage, was adopted by the Israeli curator, for which she has, as it has been already said, paid her price. The only thing that remains of thishttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif unfinished project, except for the present canvases, is the reminiscence on red squares on the museum floor where plastic bags of red lentils were supposed to be (the museum was ready to allocate a budget for the purchase of 10 kg, while N.S. asked for no less than 20), and that a visual guide for the preparation of lentil soup (see plate number 5) was copied by four people before the process was ceased.
Hebrew text on illustration number 1 reads: «Give me to eat red, this red...» (In King James' Bible: Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage ... (Genesis, 25:30))
On illustration number 5: «Mess of pottage» (Lentil pottage) Bon Appetit!
Translated from Russian by Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya.
The original text in Russian
Published by Antipodes Association
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