Barbed Hula

source: sigalitlandau

Barbed Hula, 2000

This act of desensitization – spinning a hula hoop of barbed wire – I performed at sunrise on a southern beach of Tel-Aviv, where fishermen and old people come to start their day and exercise. The beach is the only calm and natural border Israel has. Danger is generated from history into life and into the body. In this video loop I am performing a hula belly dance. This is a personal and senso-political act concerned with invisible, sub-skin borders, surrounding the body actively and endlessly. All my work relates, in one way or another, to a loss of orientation. The pain here is escaped by the speed of the act, and the fact that the spikes of the barbed wire are mostly turned outwards.
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source: courseswashingtonedu

Israeli artist, Sigalit Landau addresses her complex geopolitical and feminist stance through her work in video and installation art. Born in Jerusalem, Israel in 1969 to parents Maya Sonntag and Simcha Landau, Sigalit spent a portion of her childhood traveling and living internationally. Residing in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1974-75 and London, England from 1978-79, Landau experienced a bi-lingual and multi-cultural upbringing.

According to the autobiography found on sigalitlandau.com, this international environment persisted in her homeland of Jerusalem, where she grew up “on a hill over-looking the Judean Dessert, the skyline of Jordan, and the northern part of the Dead Sea”. The diverse nature of Landau’s formative years pervades her work as a contemporary artist. A dreamlike amalgam of nature, urbanity, feminist and political commentary, Landau’s video and installation pieces force the viewer to question the contextual significance of found objects, creating a conversation between history, geopolitical space and the female body.

Barbed Hula, (2000) addresses such geopolitical connections and body issues. Filmed on a beach in Tel-Aviv, Barbed Hula features an image of a nude woman (Landau). Only her body from the neck down is visible. She spins a hula-hoop made of barbed wire around her bare waist. No music except for the ambient sounds of the ocean waves accompanies the video.

Feminist commentary is injected into Barbed Hula in the most basic of ways. By performing nude, Landau makes her biological sex very clear. She relies on this scientific definition of “woman” as a platform upon which she can enact the forces of the hula-hoop. The hula-hoops’ action on the female body represents a number of societal influences and expectations that are imposed upon women. This preliminary definition of the hula-hoop offers a basic concept that can be used to develop deeper, multi faceted understandings of Landau’s work.

One such understanding concerns Landau’s nudeness, which Landau’s is innately sexual, as is the gyrating movement of her hips. Yet, the accessory (barbed wire hula hoop) with which she performs this erotic act is far from sensual. Instead, the wounds inflicted by the hula-hoop have a masochistic feel. The soft, jiggling movement of Landau’s stomach indicates she is relaxed during this act, emphasizing the perversity of the hula-hooping. Does Landau revel in the pain of the dance or is she attempting to eliminate and desensitize the body through repetitive motion? The answer to this question is made more evident when examining Barbed Hula through a geopolitical lens.

Established in 1948, The State of Israel is a historically volatile area in both political and religious contexts. Contained within Israeli borders is the West Bank, an area controlled mostly by Palestinians. The Gaza Strip, a small portion of land on the East Coast of the Mediterranean Sea bordering Israel is also under Palestinian rule. Years of violence and animosity between Israelis and Palestinians, especially Hamas, a terrorist organization that rules the Gaza Strip contributes to the unpredictable nature of Israel’s borders.

Landau’s Barbed Hula exists within this multifarious geopolitical context. According to Landau’s artist statement, the beach on which Barbed Hula is performed is “the only calm and natural border Israel has”. When considering the space in which she performs as part of a desensitizing act, Landau’s dance makes sense. By spinning the hula-hoop endlessly, numbing her waist to the pain of the spikes, Landau is also numbing the pain of Israel’s borders.

Her use of barbed wire, a medium usually made to build a fence references and warps popular understandings of borders. By transforming the barbed wire into her hula-hoop, the barriers created by fences become imprinted upon Landau’s physical body. The raw violence contained within this performance acts as a commentary on how politics and geography can brutally shape and affect self-understanding.

In addition to the significance of barbed wire as a representation of fences, Landau’s hula-hoop contains religious implications as well. The spiky circle of the hula is reminiscent of a crown of thorns, an Instrument of The Passion. These “instruments” are the objects associated with the suffering Christ experienced during his trial and subsequent crucifixion. By including such religious symbolism, Landau references the deep spirituality associated with both Israel and the Middle East as a whole.

As a citizen of Israel, Landau exists in a nebulous area of national identity, ethnicity and religion. Created as a Jewish nation state, Israel defines the Jewish tradition primarily as an ethnic nationality. Yet, popular cultural understandings of Judaism define it as a religion, not unlike Islam or Christianity. Landau’s incorporation of religious symbols into her work addresses how she understands the spiritual history associated with her homeland of Israel as an almost violent force in society. The brutality that the crown of thorns enacts upon her body further emphasizes Landau’s self-understanding as a woman being shaped by many outside forces, religious and geopolitical.

Roughly one minute in length, Barbed Hula features no other action than that of the hula hooping. The movement of Landau’s hips is hypnotic, in stark juxtaposition with the biting, ripping action of the hula-hoop upon her flesh. The tension created between the hypnotic and painful nature of the video creates a mesmerizing feel for the viewer. The entrancing rhythm of the video feels endless and infinite, greatly emphasizing the process through which Landau is desensitizing her body and the space in which she performs this piece.

Another work of Landau’s, titled Standing on a Watermelon in the Dead Sea, (2005) is spellbinding and dreamlike as well, yet less overt in its’ feminist commentary. A video piece, Standing on a Watermelon in the Dead Sea, is shot underwater looking upwards to the surface. The underwater setting of the video is diaphanous and almost fantastical. The spectrum of light greens and luminescence of the work create a wondrous, and mysterious feel. Landau’s nude body is suspended in the ocean, her feet perched upon a watermelon. Landau attempts to balance on the watermelon in the saline heavy water of the Dead Sea. The flapping of her arms evidences her struggle against the watermelons’ buoyancy and the natural inclination to float horizontally.

Landau’s use of a watermelon is thematic of much of her work done in the mid 2000s. An intrinsically natural object, the watermelon can be considered as a representation of organic life and nature. Combining this interpretation of the watermelon with Landau’s distinctively female nudity serves as a commentary on biological conceptions of sex and gender. Her attempts to balance upon “nature” (symbolized by the watermelon) while nude address her struggle with biological universals that associate women with nature and the reproduction of life. The watermelon wants to bob to the surface, rejecting the woman balancing upon it, and effectively rejecting the limiting definition of female and woman as natural.

Landau not only rejects popular understanding of “woman” through this piece, but also attempts to introduce new ideas about sexuality. Spherical in shape, the watermelon is reminiscent of a planet, or the globe. As stated before, the watermelons’ natural inclination is to rise to the top, forced up by the salty waters of the Dead Sea. This inclination is indicative of the true nature of gender. Not biologically determined, but rather existing upon a spectrum, modern understandings of gender are varied. Landau stands upon the watermelon world as a biological woman, trying to reconcile scientific definitions of gender with natural, more fluid interpretations of gender and sexuality.

Sigalit Landau’s work as a video artist incorporates dream-like colors and rhythmic movement sequences. The hypnotic nature of Barbed Hula and Standing on a Watermelon in the Dead Sea, are reminiscent of Yoko Ono’s work, another performance artist.

Yoko Ono’s work as an influential Japanese feminist artist is often overshadowed by her role as musician John Lennon’s wife. The sensationalized nature of their shared cult of personality as partners has largely eliminated Ono’s work from popular discourse. Yet, her part in the New York feminist art scene of the 1960s remains undeniable. Her numerous performance pieces act as intermedia commentary on sexuality, the performative nature of gender and objectification of women.

First exhibited in 1966 in London, England, Ono’s performance of Cut Piece placed the artist sitting on stage, garbed in a black dress. Audience members were invited to join Ono on stage and cut her dress with a pair of scissors. A sexually charged and interactive piece, Ono’s performance broke the fourth wall, or the hypothetical barrier between performer and audience. As a result, Cut Piece has been described as “a mirror to reflect a person’s [participating audience members] inner self” (Yoshimoto 30).

Ono’s silent and disengaged demeanor is the mirror for such self-reflection. The way in which Ono does not react to being methodically and almost violently undressed characterizes her as a mere object. Yet, this objectification is juxtaposed with the fact that Ono herself has provided the scissors for the willing audience members. Is it through her own agency that she has allowed herself to be objectified? What is truly revealed in Ono’s eventual nakedness? Her nudity offers neither offers answers to these questions or reveals Ono’s deeper intentions. Rather, Cut Piece leaves the viewer with more uncertainty than solutions.

This uncertainty is the result of the obliteration of self that both Ono and the viewer experience during Cut Piece. The removal of Ono’s clothes is symbolic of the deconstruction of self-identity and gender in particular. By cutting off her outward expression of woman-ness (dress, brassiere, stockings etc.), Ono dismantles the ways in which Western women have been taught to perform gender as well as demonstrating the power of patriarchy over women.

According to Midori Yoshimoto, author of Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, Ono’s Cut Piece does indeed address self-identity, but it is far from narcissistic. Rather it offers “….opportunities to the audience to participate in the obliterating act and to reflect upon itself as an audience…the contemplative atmosphere that permeated Ono’s Cut Piece intensified the viewer’s self-reflective experience” (31). In short, the interactive nature of Ono’s performance forces the viewer and participants to examine their daily performances of gender and understanding self-identity.

Ono’s inclination to force her viewers and participants to reexamine their own personal performances is in direct relation to Landau’s work discussed earlier. Both artists use violent, almost painful techniques to dismantle and question the power society holds in determining self-understanding. Landau’s Barbed Hula is physically and viscerally painful, as is Ono’s Cut Piece.

The desensitization of the female body showcased in both these pieces attempt to change the context in which we think of woman. Ono removes her outward expression of female-ness by eliminating her clothes. Landau separates herself from societal constructs surrounding woman in Standing on a Watermelon in a Dead Sea by showing that biological definitions of gender and sex are not fixed, but are fluid and malleable.

Furthermore, both artists engage in an obliteration of the self through repetitive motion. Landau spins her barbed hula-hoop in order to numb the pain associated with the geographical, political and spiritual borders that shape her self-understanding. Her transformation of a found object (the hula-hoop) into a symbol that molds personal understanding is much like Ono’s use of the scissors to remove her clothes. Both objects act as tools that desensitize the self, rejecting popular notions of womanhood and forcing the viewer/participant to question and recontextulize the ways in which they view themselves and others.

Both Landau and Ono’s work enriched my understandings of self as a feminist scholar. I found Landau’s video works to be especially compelling, in part because they are incredibly aesthetically pleasing to me. This was what initially inspiried me to study her. Secondly I found the silent, mesmerizing violence of Landau’s Barbed Hula to be very effective in drawing in and holding the viewer’s attention. Lastly, I was interested in Landau’s nationality as an Israel. I have been studying Judaism this quarter and found that my enriched understanding of the tradition helped me better interpret Landau’s art.

Although I continue to contemplate the meaning of Landau’s work, I have begun to think that Landau is very successful and almost shrewd in the way she performs gender and sexuality. By exhibiting her nudity and inflicting pain on herself, such as in Barbed Hula, Landau appeals to the morbid curiosity of the viewer. In this way she draws in her audience, capturing their attention further with the hypnotic and mystical feel of her videos. The observer then undergoes a transformation from mere viewer to enraptured participant. The rhythmic draw of Landau’s work allows the mind to relax, open, and examine the deeper meaning of the performance. A wonderful and sometimes confusing mix of pleasure and pain, the tension contained within Landau’s work helped me begin to consider the ways in which politics, spirituality and culture affect her feminist self-identity.

Landau defines her work as feminist. This self-definition made me more comfortable examining her work through a feminist lens, because I did not feel as if I was imposing unwanted meaning or titles onto her work. The two works I focused on, Barbed Hula and Standing on a Watermelon in the Dead Sea, featured Landau nude. To me this seemed a very fundamental representation of biological understandings of woman. Her use of found objects, such as the hula-hoop and the watermelon warp this biological understanding. In examining the symbolic significance of these objects I came to better understand the cultural construction of gender as Landau sees it.

I found this in depth examination of Landau to be both enlightening and at times difficult. . I hope to continue my research on feminism, art and their existence outside the all-popular western cannon. The conversation between geopolitics, history, spirituality and the female body that Landau’s works addresses has helped me begin to question the limited exposure we have to global feminisms.

I hope to be able to actively pursue international feminist thought in the future and continue to question and reexamine the ways that interpretation shifts across lines of race, geography, spirituality and nationality. The dynamic nature of feminism and feminist art remains the movement’s greatest trait. There is no one definition of feminism. Discussion surrounding art such as Landau and Ono’s works allow for fresh interpretations that broaden the horizon of understanding what it is to simultaneously be a woman, an artist and a feminist.
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source: zazzetounmindblogspot

Sigalit Landau, née en 1969, vit à Tel Aviv. Elle a été sélectionnée, deux ans seulement après sa sortie de la Bezalel Academy of Art de Jerusalem, pour représenter l’Israël à la Biennale de Venise de 1997. Elle est aujourd’hui l’une des artistes israeliennes les plus célèbres.
Ses installations et interventions se construisent à partir d’une réalité ordinaire avec son compte de brutalité et de cruauté mais aussi sa part de merveilleux. Elles ont la démesure d’un conte pour enfants.
En se penchant sur son identité israélienne, ses travaux mettent en question le corps, le lieu et les frontières, l’étranger et la migration, l’individu et la société, la réalité et l’utopie. Pour cela, l’artiste se sert de techniques diverses et fait se rejoindre à des niveaux formels et narratifs différents, la sculpture, l’installation, la vidéo et la performance.

Barbed Hula

Dans la vidéo Barbed Hula l’artiste israélienne Sigalit Landau est filmée nue, sur une plage au sud de Tel Aviv, en train de faire du hula hoop, le dos face à la mer. Mais son cerceau n’est pas en plastique, il est en fil de fer barbelé.
Ce qui, d’une part, est connu comme un jeu d’enfant anodin, et qui d’autre part à été interdit par exemple au Japon à cause de son côté erotique évident, présent aussi dans la vidéo de Sigalit Landau, se transfrome en un rituel frénétique autodestructeur.
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source: lacajarevueltablogspot

Sigalit Landau (Jerusalén 1969): En esta artista multidisciplinar, su origen israelí deja una importante huella. En sus obras experimenta e investiga sobre las fronteras, no sólo geográficas, sino físicas y de identidad. Algunas de sus creaciones tocan de lleno el arte feminista, el accionismo vienés o el body art. La búsqueda de la concepción propia, de la individualidad, de la relación con el cuerpo (femenino) en lugares donde los conflictos bélicos anulan la personalidad, se convierte en poética y en transgresión a lo largo de su trayectoria.