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September 5, 2013 – Review
Guy Ben-Ner’s “Soundtrack”
Barbara Casavecchia
In her essay on Martha Rosler’s Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967–72) , art critic Laura Cottingham states that the infamous photomontages of Vietnam’s killing fields and American bourgeois interiors came as a reaction to frustration. Rosler couldn’t bear what she herself calls “the images [that] were always very far away, in a place we couldn’t imagine.” Cottingham writes: “Rosler reveals the artificiality of this severed causality. The separation of us from them, here from there, is an illusion we want, as a war-profit society and as immediately war-free individuals, to maintain.” In Soundtrack (2013), Guy Ben-Ner’s latest video on show in Genoa, at Pinksummer (which commissioned the work) brings the war home too. It’s a fictional war, in principle—the soundtrack that gives the work its title is a “readymade” eleven-minute excerpt from Steven Spielberg’s movie War of the Worlds (2005)—while the household where Ben-Ner brings it to, is not: it’s his flat, in Tel Aviv, and the LiveLeak reportage images of attacks on Gaza that run on a computer screen, open on the table, remind us that the real wars are happening next door. A line from the movie like “Are we under attack?” or the farcical …