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UID:Indybay-18505240
SEQUENCE:18535695
CREATED:20080608T233000Z
DESCRIPTION:Guy Ben-Ner was born in Ramat Gam, Israel. He currently lives in New 
 York.\n\nStealing Beauty (2007) was shot without permission at numerous 
 IKEA stores around New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv. In the movie the Ben-Ners 
 quite naturally inhabit idealized showroom interiors with price tags 
 dangling from furniture, and shoppers occasionally interrupting the 
 family's daily routines. Because of the hit-and-run filming, the 
 traditional cinematic continuity is abandoned and the changing sets are 
 stand-ins for their home. The narrative, however, remains linear as the 
 father offers life lessons on the subjects of economic exchange, meaning of 
 private property, ethics, and family love eventually leading to the 
 children's rebellious manifesto.\n\nIn Berkeley's Island (1999) the first 
 video to address his position of "domestic artist", Guy Ben-Ner placed a 
 small sandy island complete with a palm tree in the middle of the kitchen 
 and became a shipwreck survivor living in solitude amidst domestic life 
 going on around him. Through existential introspection combined with often 
 hilarious use of resources that the kitchen set provides ("I learned to use 
 what the island supplied me with"), "Berkeley's Island" depicts the home 
 environment as an exile and simultaneously as a place to escape from.\n\n 
 Moby Dick (2000) adapts Herman Melville’s classic novel, a sprawling tale 
 centered on Captain Ahab’s quest to exact revenge against the great white 
 whale Moby-Dick. The video features Guy and his 6-year-old daughter 
 play-acting in their home kitchen in ways that take to absurd extremes the 
 aesthetic of family home videos. Using minimal props (a rope and a pole) 
 Ben-Ner transforms the space into a make-believe ship – a playground for 
 the reenactment of the classic tale.\n \nWild Boy (2004) tells the story of 
 a wild child and his educator, a story of power relations and the fantasy 
 of bringing somebody up after one's own image. It is the story of every 
 parent-child rearing, but more than that, it is a story of a director and 
 his child-actor, raising the question of what it means to direct a child, 
 to contain a child inside a fixed frame, to command him in and out of the 
 frame (as if it is his private room).\nOn another level, it also raises the 
 possibility of looking at early cinema (the “Cinema of attractions” as 
 was coined by Tom Gunning), as a mute wild child that was tamed, 
 eventually, by language (sound, narrative). “Wild boy” is based on 
 several case histories, some myths, some educational manuals and is 
 referring to a wide range of movies, from old photos left of the vaudeville 
 acts by father and son, Buster and Joe Keaton, through Truffaut's “Wild 
 Child”, to “The Kid” by Chaplin.\n\nThanks to Postmasters Gallery in 
 Chelsea for lending us Guy’s work www.postmastersart.com\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/06/08/18505240.php
SUMMARY:GLOBAL UNDERGROUNDS - videos by Guy Ben-Ner
LOCATION:Artists' Television Access\n992 Valencia Street\nSan Francisco, CA 94110
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/06/08/18505240.php
DTSTART:20080621T030000Z
DTEND:20080621T043000Z
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