Jan 15 Tues 2013 MOLLY BARNES hosts ROGER SMITH: ELANA KATZ with DAVID TERRY
Like a giant peephole through everyday life into emotional reality, Elana Katz's Reflection, her performance in a street window last Friday, a window set into the side of the Roger Smith Hotel on 44th St, impressed us with its striking artistic and emotional power, and we looked forward to joining a small group of people invited to the private apartment owned by Roger Smith on 47th Street, where Jim Knowles the sculptor who owns the hotel and Danika his manager of art events at the hotel hold art briefings by artists, critics, dealers and funders for the benefit of staff and people closely related to the unusual activities of the hotel in this sphere.
On this occasion Elana Katz, who had been proposed for her Roger Smith WIndow event by her sponsor David Terry of the New York Foundation for the Arts, sat down at a table with him and in front of a handful of family and professional friends explained her life and her purpose in her performances of the past to the accompaniment of slides showing her at work in the past few years in European countries she had reached from her new base in Berlin, including Serbia and Czecholslovakia.
As her interview details, she will sweep continually or otherwise perform at a site, say, where the remnants of its pre war Jewish use have been covered over and obliterated by concrete or a new building dedicated to a quite different current purpose, and these and other ways of evoking the significance and the past of a place are hugely effective, transforming the perception of a place from its blandly erased modern form toward and into its earlier meaning in terms of emotions, lost but now remembered, after the physical site has been demolished and its social significance and life swept away, sometimes in horrific ways.
Though never part of formal Jewish religious practice when growing up Katz is unearthing and retrieving her Jewish cultural heritage and history in terms which bring it to life in the minds of onlookers in ways that only performance art can evoke and with an effectiveness that speaks volumes.
Read MoreOn this occasion Elana Katz, who had been proposed for her Roger Smith WIndow event by her sponsor David Terry of the New York Foundation for the Arts, sat down at a table with him and in front of a handful of family and professional friends explained her life and her purpose in her performances of the past to the accompaniment of slides showing her at work in the past few years in European countries she had reached from her new base in Berlin, including Serbia and Czecholslovakia.
As her interview details, she will sweep continually or otherwise perform at a site, say, where the remnants of its pre war Jewish use have been covered over and obliterated by concrete or a new building dedicated to a quite different current purpose, and these and other ways of evoking the significance and the past of a place are hugely effective, transforming the perception of a place from its blandly erased modern form toward and into its earlier meaning in terms of emotions, lost but now remembered, after the physical site has been demolished and its social significance and life swept away, sometimes in horrific ways.
Though never part of formal Jewish religious practice when growing up Katz is unearthing and retrieving her Jewish cultural heritage and history in terms which bring it to life in the minds of onlookers in ways that only performance art can evoke and with an effectiveness that speaks volumes.
