Some artworks explicitly allegorize the spectator’s predicament; they show you what looking looks like. Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder / Grief Hunters, curated by Doron Rabina and now on view at the Philadelphia ICA, delivers a few such works—with rich implications for the show as a whole. For example, the brief film Plasma by Lior Waterman and Amit Levinger shows the following: a dissolute Serge Gainsbourg sings to a few attentive women; watching the televised performance of Gainsbourg is another attentive woman. Suddenly, a thick mass of amber stuff crashes through the window behind the latter, barely missing her head to fly directly into the eyes of the viewer. Cut to black. Plasma argues that to look at anything, whether with longing, boredom or fascination, is to miss something else—and this thing can kill you.

Guy Ben Ner, Second Nature, 2008; single channel video, color and sound; courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, New York.

Directly across from Plasma is another film, Second Nature by Guy Ben-Ner, that instead delights in such blind spots. We see Ben-Ner stage one of Aesop’s more famous fables, “The Fox and the Crow.” He directs a woman and a man who in turn direct the fable’s eponymous animals: the woman trains a crow to drop a piece of cheese, and the man trains a fox to look up, seemingly at the crow, but actually at a ball on a stick. Ben-Ner narrates the fable and gesticulates at the trainers; the trainers train in turn, and several cameras record Ben-Ner and the trainers at work. Second Nature ends with the final result of this thoroughly choreographed and thoroughly exposed production: the proverbial fox cajoles the proverbial crow into a cheese-freeing caw, stealing said cheese and rushing off with it. The man who had trained the fox then peeks out from behind a tree, revealing again the ubiquity of artifice. The viewer is to see through the fable to its rigging, through the animals to their training, through the film to its production, through the theft to its so-called moral. Second Nature lays everything before the viewer, an extravagant feast.

So, what’s a viewer to do with this exhibition? Tune in to what’s there but await the inevitable blows from what lies beyond the frame? Or drift upon its giddy roils of artifice, enjoying crime and moral alike? Hairy Shoulder asks but doesn’t answer these questions—to its credit. The show posits a viewer at home with enigmas, at home while adrift, ready to be unprepared, and worried that “good” answers are perhaps even more dangerous than unanswered questions. 

The questions that most interest Rabina and his coterie of mostly Israeli and almost entirely male artists circulate around originality and origins. But just as artworks can teach you how to look at them, so too can artworks define the very terms of their deployment. So, according to Hairy Shoulder, what is an origin and what originality?  Here origins come from and return to the ground, to dirt, mud, debris and dust. Gilad Ratman’s 588 Project reveals a hive of ostensibly human creatures steeping in burbling, gelatinous mud. This mud is amniotic fluid, slippery flesh and acidic goo, both creative and destructive. Mark Manders’ Figure with Thin White Rope is a supine clay marionette, one knee lifted coyly by the rope; a barely made creature, less finished body than stiff failure. For A Day’s Ending Eli Petel scatters and organizes the remains of a life: photographs, books, mirrors, clothing, dishware, drawings, a watch and so forth. Though dead remnants, they could easily provoke flea market euphorias. Reflections from the mirrors float above this debris, another sign of afterlife. The dusty bleached ribs and shattered white plastic chair in Yochai Avrahami’s untitled photograph find their way to each other and back to earth. So, for Rabina, genesis is decay is genesis; the soil swallows and vomits plastics and bones and more soil. Origins are murderous and muddy, less let-there-be-light than ashes-to-ashes.

Oliver Husain, Stimulation, 2008; single channel video; with Mark Manders, Figure with Thin White Rope, 2007-2008; painted ceramic, painted polyester, painted apoxy, wig, rope and iron; installation view from Blowing on a Hairy Shoulder / Grief Hunters at the ICA Philadelphia.

Likewise, originality isn’t exactly creation ex nihilo; here it looks like fakery, retrofit and mock technophilia. Ariel Schlesinger’s Oil Lamp is a Bic lighter fitted with a new hole and wick. Carson Fisk-Vittori props open a book, the cover canted like the open screen of a laptop; he then places a lit candle on it. Behind the book, but just as large and thus mirroring it, is an open laptop. He photographs the tableau and calls it Computer. For Furnace Ronnie Bass projects video of a roaring fire into the middle of an overturned cabinet: no warmth, nothing but light and crackle. Three works, three adjusted objects: lighter, book and cabinet. Each delivers a cheeky but elegiac regression: not a lighter but a lamp, not a computer but a book, not a furnace but a cold fire. If there is invention, if lighters, computers, and furnaces come from somewhere, then these artists de-invent them and place their lamps, photographs and videos near enough to razz the ubiquity and true utility of the former.

Uri Nir, Sphinx, 2006; digital print; courtesy of the artist.

Hairy Shoulder sustains these twinned reinscriptions—origins as ruins and originality as devolution. Uri Nir’s 2006 photograph, Sphinx, which accompanies the exhibition’s publicity materials—travelling as its very emblem—pitches headlong into these paradoxes. If, as Oedipus answered, man is the one who walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon and three in the evening—whether supplemented by cane or Nir’s umbrella—then this man does his best to be all of the above and something more: a big baby, a brawny clown and a long-haired woman, ear to the sand, guarding the gates of a distant Thebes and wearing the umbrella’s displaced canopy as a diaper and a skirt. This sphinx too says “enigma” and proposes a post-human answer: we can no longer count on maturation as the essential trait of this thing called “man.” But Oedipus, so clever before this beast, doesn’t know his true origins, and so rushes into murder, incest and blindness—which become in Freud’s hands even truer origins: homesickness, homelessness, trauma. Hairy Shoulder argues that those who seek origins find only fables and those who fashion these fables rediscover their roots and their pleasures in crime.

Rabina’s Israeli artists, however, register their troubles with particular origin stories. Two put Stars of David to work. One fills all of Harel Luz’ untitled photograph; two blue lines connect the wispy creases of an upturned palm, creating a delicate six-pointed star. The other star is formed by two stacked blue triangular protractors in Petel’s scatter piece. These icons are delicate—which may grossly understate the force of country, birth and homeland weighing upon Palestinians, Israelis and others. Just because nations are fabrications, just because the lines on palms and maps are drawn and can be redrawn, erased or forgotten, doesn’t mean they are ineffective or insignificant. As Plasma teaches, the viewer will suffer blows from beyond while enjoying the plaited constructions—the second natures—that declare their own weakness.

Corinne Day, Gardening Time, 2003; c-print; courtesy of the estate of Corinne Day and Gimpel Fils, London.

Thus do the men of Hairy Shoulder, Rabina included, play serious games: the fragments of this world are dark and puzzling, and to go on at all is to rewrite the old stories using the same words, the same machines, the same animals. So too does the exhibition’s single woman. Corrine Day’s photograph, Gardening Time—from a 2003 spread for Vogue Italia—shows a thin woman, all shoulders and elbows, standing outside in white pumps and a leopard skin coat. Holding a cigarette, she turns away from the camera and towards the closed door behind her. She neither stays nor goes, neither returns nor simply waits; she, like Nir’s sphinx, is an unanswered question. I see the coat and think of the other animals in the show: the fox and the crow, the bones, the sphinx, Gordon the rooster in Boaz Arad’s Gordon and I and the peacock in Oliver Husain’s Stimulation. These animals are singular and iconic, representative less of a species than of connotations fixed by fable and usage, domestication and breeding; they have no future because they aren’t even in time, aren’t granted times and lands of their own. I wonder how other artists, Israeli women, other women, might fashion origins and originalities open to the futures that are still coming?  How might they garden and sustain other times than these?