In my travels around the world I have seen quite a few street artists "abusing" signs. I have always thought this street art has failed in its simple mission: to undermine the master's discourse; to sabotage the sovereignty of the image. They are amusing, often even witty, but harmless. In fact, oddly enough, they are a part of the immune system of the sovereign, who allows for weakened resistance in his bloodstream. The truth is, they are even a nice tourist attraction.
Ido Bar-El's (b. 1959, Tel Aviv; lives and works in Tel Aviv) sign paintings are a completely different thing. They are not graffiti on the parliament building: they dig under its foundations, because they attack the mechanisms of meaning-making, which enable interpolation (a slightly pompous, highbrow word, describing the way in which the language of the sovereign infiltrates our self-identity).
To put it more simply: Bar-El does not respond to the street signs or make a joke of them. He renders them gibberish. He does this by plucking them from the street, thereby truly responding to their visual qualities (composition, color, material), rather than their symbolic meaning. In so doing, he captures more of their truth than when they are installed on the street.
Bar-El empties signs of meaning. He changes their status in the world. Some things exist by the very fact that they are being expressed. Philosophers of language, especially after J.L. Austin, like to give the example of marriage. The famous "I do" statement makes the couple married, as opposed to a drawing of a flower which will never be but a representation of a flower. The Israeli flag, once you have drawn it, what you have is not a representation of the flag of Israel, but the flag of Israel itself. If you want to see for yourself to what extent this statement is true, go out to the street with the Israeli flag you drew and burn it in front of the astonished pedestrians around you; soon enough you will find yourself in big trouble. A no-entry sign is such a thing: it is not a representation, but a decisive instruction by the state. Bar-El's work with the signs frees them from the tyranny of meaning, allowing them to be color fields, shapes and directions, thereby making them "less existent," so to speak.
Each sign, once released of its duty to direct the passers-by on the street, has been exiled from the realm of purpose to the aesthetic sphere, and is essentially an abstract painting. These signs transpire in limbo between existence as an object that carries meaning and something that forever falls under the title "former." They lose their essence as a command of the sovereign, but do not enter another field of meaning. They become a stuttering, a mumble, a hum.
At the same time (and perhaps precisely because of this), I can think of nothing more Israeli than Bar-El's sign paintings. It is visual art's response to the cult Israeli movie Halfon Hill does Not Answer. They contain an odd, truly funny combination of high modernism, abstraction, readymade, a highly charged ground, pop art, and other serious things, with sloppiness, mischievousness (where did he get these signs? I ask myself), and some sort of an offhanded quality, a nonchalant casualness, which takes the air out of all the high speech.
Meir Wieseltier has a poem which is divided into three titled stanzas: "Not out of the sea / Out of bus number 5 / Mariella was discharged / Not on a lofty cliff / At the cafe on the corner / She drank and chatted with me // Not on a bed of moss / In a rented room at the Trumpeldor Hotel / She lay next to my body.
This is the Israeliness I find in Bar-El's work: Not out of the sea, like the foam-born goddess Aphrodite; without metaphysics, without mysticism, without an aura, just like that, out of the bus; not on a bed of moss (which, if I remember correctly, originates in Plato's Republic and represents the bedding of those who possess good virtues), but in the prosaic, slightly shabby, probably neglected, perhaps dirty hotel. Sounds unappealing, but she lay next to his body. There was intimacy between them. There was truth.
