Halfway Home The Recent Artwork of Uri Dotan

Erik Bakke


“I’m
Jewish-American,” “Encino California, US,” “Jewish,”
“Jewish,” “I’m Jewish,” are audible fragments in Uri
Dotan’s sound and video piece of 2002 We Fall. The viewer sees Daniel Pearl’s
throat cut.

Ted Koppel makes an argument, on his program “Tip of the Spear” documenting
the 3rd Infantry’s two week march to Baghdad, for showing dead bodies on
TV. He shows some.

Uri Dotan has a
camera trained on the intersection outside his studio. It is a bird’s eye
view. People and automobiles pass. Dotan monitors their activity on the feed
to his computer screen. Dotan speaks about waiting for a moment, for something
needing capturing. He takes a picture of his computer screen with his digital
camera of a man looking at his watch. A print is made of this image which will
be viewed in an art gallery. The image has decayed on the journey from the street
to the wall. In a blue pixilated field a man’s shirt glows as he stops to
check the time.


The man in the
image is not quite frozen in time. One imagines he is at once captured as on
a Lascaux wall and is, also, continuing on, stopping once more to look at his
watch. “Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you said
Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored; if ever you
wanted one thing twice, if ever you said, ‘You please me, happiness! Abide,
moment!’ then you wanted all back. All anew, all eternally, all entangled,
ensnared, enamored—oh, then you loved the world, Eternal ones, love it eternally
and evermore; and to woe too, you say: go, but return! For all joy wants—eternity.”i
Daniel Pearl dies again.


Uri Dotan’s
Disintegrating Ball series offers up a volley ball that in one video peels apart
with the peeled fragments disappearing into space only to later reappear and
form the ball whole once again. When the ball peels it reveals a sphere of tangled
strings, cords…delineations. Superimposed onto the sphere, before and after
peeling, are images from the street, from the intersection, outside Dotan’s
studio window. The soundtrack for the piece includes Dotan’s interviews
with people on the street. Dotan goes down from his studio, tape recorder in
hand, to bridge, one imagines, the distance between image and soul. He asks the
people, or more likely completely different people, he has been observing, “how
do you feel about crossing the street?” The question sounds suspiciously
ridiculous, slightly pathetic. There is a vaguely hostile tone to the answers:
“Got to get to the other side don’t you;” “I don’t give
hoot one way or another;” “It gets me from point A to point B;”
“I don’t feel anything at all. I don’t like this part of the street
because it is filled with these awful bumps.” One guesses Dotan is closer
to these souls when studying the light reflected from their bodies as it appears
on his computer monitor than he is while in these non-conversations. The comments
are part of the six channel sound piece which goes on for eight hours or so as
the ball falls apart and comes together, over and over again in the looping video
that spans just a few minutes.

Dotan has been collaborating with the jazz musician Ornette Coleman for a number
of years. One of these collaborations, the video Activation, is on view at Dotan’s
exhibition at Paul Rodgers 9W along with several Disintegrating Ball pieces (one
video and other still works) and still works from Left Behind and Blue Streets
(from which the Watchman image comes). Coleman once said, “We in the Western
world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that
we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.” In
Activation a model— a translucent, androgynous, computer generated character—nods
its head up and down. Coleman plays his music. The eyes are closed on the head
and sometimes it is visible as one head and sometimes it separates into two—one
head green another purple. (In thinking about these colors and their proximity
to blue and the blue series Dotan exhibits at 9W it is worth reviewing the relationship
between CMYK and RGB. For a clear tutorial go to http://www.adobe.com/support/techguides/color/colormodels/rgbcmy.html.)
Through the translucent heads the viewer sees the warm metal of a saxophone glimmering.


Dotan sites Robert
Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, rather than avant-garde video/digital artist,
as early touchstones. Putting the words “Rauschenberg” and “gap”
into a Google search gets around 800 responses. Some include the quote, “Painting
relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in that gap between
the two.” Those subjected to these words for a number of decade running
might be inclined to say, “I don’t give hoot one way or another”
long before agreeing that, “all joy wants—eternity.”

But the question is raised. Is the future of art clearly determined to return
to this gap time after time? In one of Dotan’s Left Behind images the scene
is in sharp focus. In clear photographic representation a workman’s blue
jumpsuit seems to have been left behind; it sits amidst fluid and trash on a
soiled stretch of asphalt. No people are in sight. Here Dotan is on familiar
artistic territory, finding beauty in the abject just as he had found it in the
representation, with works like Watchman, of how far our perceptions leave us
from understanding what one would take to be a simple reality playing out right
in front of our eyes. The gap has become large and it is filled with missed connections
and beauty and the terrible, known and unknown. But terror we understand; we
understand the televised horror of an Iraqi child’s fear. We understand
that as “woman, Muslim, homosexual, priest, homeless, tax evader, communist,
patriot, scientist,” we are moments from persecution, from having our throat
cut.


Dotan’s works
pass through these understandings but they also express a visionary side. Dotan
makes an argument for leaving the gap, for leaving behind the idea that “joy”
and “woe” have to return in the same measure. His recent videos with
their digital constructions strive for new territory in their narrative and form.
In the midst of the soundtrack, of Coleman’s beautiful playing of the sax,
for Activation a conversation from what one guesses to be a Christian radio talk
show is heard for a few moments before the music of Coleman returns. The music
and the nodding figure make the conversation about Christ on the cross seem completely
irrelevant. The conversation itself is supplanted history not necessary to repeat.
In this work Dotan offers the hope that Coleman is right and that we all have
a lot to learn about art and life—that Pearl only has to die once.


The title of Dotan’s
recent exhibition points to the optimism in his approach. Constructive Beauty
suggests there is a chance for progress through art. But as the Disintegrating
Ball video illustrates, with the action of the disintegrating and reassembling
ball confused by the projection’s occurring over a static image of a ball
on canvas, every progressive thought very slowly extricates itself from the history
in which it was formed.

Galileo was tried in 1633 by the Inquisition and forced to abjure his beliefs.
On his knees he stated aloud that indeed the earth did not circle the sun. In
1992 the church annulled Galileo’s conviction and rescinded its ban on teaching
Copernican theory .