Text Book

Text Book: Tamy Ben-Tor & Miki Carmi intersects art historical analyses, artists' interpretations, the reaction of a playwright, and a work of experimental fiction in order to upend the usual ways painting and performance art are described. Highly regarded experimental graphic designer Joshua Gamma interprets their practice liberally-never simply reproducing images of works, but instead distilling Ben-Tor & Carmi's visual language into core elements that operate as a language alongside...
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Text Book: Tamy Ben-Tor & Miki Carmi intersects art historical analyses, artists' interpretations, the reaction of a playwright, and a work of experimental fiction in order to upend the usual ways painting and performance art are described. Highly regarded experimental graphic designer Joshua Gamma interprets their practice liberally-never simply reproducing images of works, but instead distilling Ben-Tor & Carmi's visual language into core elements that operate as a language alongside the work of the commissioned authors' texts.The book attends to the realities of this collaboration. The contributors include celebrated film maker Martin Brest's mapping of his experience of Ben Tor and Carmi's work. Internationally acclaimed artist, author, and theorist, Coco Fusco contributes an analysis of Carmi's innovations in painting, bringing attention to histories of eugenics and the grotesque as pertain to his contemporary art practice. Our intention is to expand the platforms and ways art writing and art criticism appear in publishing. C.Z amplifies the drives that fuel Ben-Tor and Carmi's collaboration through his poetic fictional narrative that taps the relationships underpinning the subjects tackled by these artists. An exhibiting artist himself, C.Z. draws on their shared studies of psychology, mythologies, and Jewish histories. Playwright Adara Meyers studio visit notes. Kosuke Kawahara experimental rendering of the artists further expresses Ben-Tor and Carmi as teachers and friends creating an artist community, Alpesh Kantilal Patel's art historical scholarship, curating, and criticism reflect his queer, anti-racist, and transnational approach to contemporary art. He brings an analysis of how Ben-Tor and Carmi's practices re-work the body as never singular or heteronormative, but disembodied, contained, and easily racialized. The writing of Kate Gaudy, an exhibiting artist and curator working in Buffalo, New York, challenges us to stare, to look at Carmi's paintings, to watch and listen again to Ben-Tor's videos. Psychoanalytic, raw, explicit, Gaudy activates the forces that steer and feed their work, as artists and caregivers.