When Hagar flees into the desert, carrying Ishmael in her womb (Genesis 16), an encounter with the angel yields the annunciation of her pregnancy. Aware of her gestation, Hagar responds to the excess content of the announcement with surprise – it is an announcement without announcement, let alone an annunciation. Indeed, annunciations are not given to those who exile themselves to the desert, but rather to those who welcome the expulsed refugees, sketching something that looks like a human oasis in the desertedness of the desert. It may well be that the announcement of Hagar’s pregnancy was in fact given to the angel, and that Hagar was the bearer or receptacle of the epiphany. A tensional relationality between the announcement and its promise, its immanent desertization, constitutes the basic structure of any announcement, certainly the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, where it seems that the excess of the desert has been fatally erased or, rather, inundated by over- excessiveness, upon the erasure of the desert from the scene of the Annunciation as it has been displaced to Nazareth. The displaced Annunciation is already a repetition of an empty announcement; even if the desert as such has been expulsed as a kind of exteriority in terms of the Annunciation’s topography, the desert’s essence has been incorporated into the Annunciation itself as it keeps recurring in its absence. Nonetheless, one is ostensibly left with the Word in the desert that according to Gospel of Luke is transformed into God’s Word (“Be it unto me according to thy word.” Luke 1:38). The desertization of the announcement and the abstraction it entails turn the desert into that which it attempts to evade. As a trope of ambivalence, the desert assumes the absence and muteness that acts of abstraction resolutely invoke in terms of their religious, aesthetic, ethical, and therefore also political aspects. What happens when Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher flee to the desert, fleeing without being able to escape or secure an announcement? What is the political essence manifested in the desert’s fissure presented by them?
Aziz and Cucher’s work resonates the imaginary narrative of the desert while displacing it to a political realm, enunciating “there is nothing new under the sun.” The work, whose title is a quotation from a poem written by Wisława Szymborska, describes the inability to announce or bear tidings. The work unfolds by a gesture of reiteration of semi-religious acts in a semi-desert-like expanse. However, Aziz and Cucher’s desert is already not a mere desert but an abstraction of a desert (which is, itself, an abstraction of something else). The part of their work that engages with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be read in terms of autobiographical characteristics1 and is part of an extensive video project that critically observes conflict areas around the world. Comprised of eight video screens, the work depicts figures, dressed in western and oriental clothes, engaged in repetitive movements, enacting the desert’s tendency toward ambivalence and undecisiveness; one is uncertain whether the figures are reclining, helplessly bending forward on the ground, praying with religious fervor, or dancing. Sometimes they do none of the above, and at other times they perform all of them at once.2 The figures’ movement (choreographed by Maya Lipsker-Carol) is Gaga, a movement language developed by the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. Above the figures, some of whom are enveloped in the American flag, helicopters hover, and behind them there are occasional Hora and Dabke dance circles. While the figures do not gaze directly at the viewers, they interpolate them to confront the impossibility of defending the Word in the desert – an impossibility immanently tied to the impossibility of speech. Their silent, mute gestures expose the viewer’s impossibility to respond. As a dialogue without dialogue, their relationality mimics the structure of an announcement without announcement, now displaced, sadly, to the political discourse. The soundtrack, composed by Larry Buksbaum, enhances the repetitive character of the dancers’ movement and the desert landscape, whose topography suddenly changes as the work progresses (7 min 50 sec). Following something that looks like a series of empty gestures performed by the figures, the desert changes into parched, arid land, as if stating that nothing has changed and everything remains as it has ever been. There is nothing new under the sun. All that remains is the desert’s fissure, into which the work suddenly disappears, exposing the impossibility of a visible change and rendering it as a broken announcement.
Anthony Aziz, born 1961 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, USA; Sammy Cucher, born 1958 in Lima, Peru; have lived and worked together in the USA since
1992.
Nimrod Reitman, curator and researcher. Teaches at New York and Columbia Universities and is currently completing his PhD dissertation in the department of German at NYU.
[1] Tami Katz-Freiman writes about the allegorical aspect of this work as reflecting the biographical tension between Anthony Aziz’s Lebanese origins and Sammy Cucher’s Israeli ones. See Tami Katz-Freiman, “From Body Politics to Conflict Politics: Aziz+Cucher Come Out of the (Biography) Closet,” In Lisa D. Friedman (ed.), Aziz + Cucher: Some People (Indianapolis, IN: Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Berlin: Hatje Cantz Publishing, 2012).
[2] The religious repetitiousness and the ritual elements in the work invite a Freudian reading referencing Freud’s text “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices.”
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