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The Work ... Aloni reiterates the de-humanising, anonymous face of the web, where man is a non-human, a de-human or gender-less anti-human. By combining visual midrashes (Talmudic commentary) with political, cultural and theological commentaries, and woven into the all-incorporating Kabbalistic web of the 'Tree of Life," Aloni has created a digital vessel for his ambitious and prolific imagery. I found it quite fascinating, the similarity of the Dionysus myth and the Jehovah myth. In both, the divine body is torn to pieces and spread all over the world. One of the main Sisyphean projects of the Jewish people, according to the Lurianic Kabala, is to re- collect the pieces of the divine body, or the sparks, try to separate them from the dirt that had merged with them, and reassemble the pieces into the original whole. Even though they never succeed in creating the original God they manufacture mutations of God. Some are funny, some monsters, but all fascinating.Aloni's canons of the secular and non-secular, combined with his powerful erotic imagery, create a compelling protocol that flows in virtual space and requires several hours of the visitor's time to travel, retrieve and combine. In post-modern tradition, Aloni electively incorporates text, gnostic writings, the New Testament and the Bible, combines and blurs sexual identity, and calls on personal and collective mythology. Through the presentation of digital information, imagery, and audio narrative, both Aloni and Amerika have found efficient vehicles to help them/us try to understand this digital Golam, or to come face to face with the Re-U-Man. |
This is an interesting work. I appreciate the design, and am intrigued in many ways. The gender bending, the application of the human body as a way of illuminating the sense of self in a virtual environment. Maybe it's just me, but the graphic nature of the imagery gets rather abrasive after a while, to the extent that I find myself wishing to get on with something else. I feel like some editing would be useful. Something said once or twice isn't always more meaningful said twenty times. --ch A comprehensive web-based art work constructed around the Tree of Life Kabalastic metaphor. In November, 1996, Udi Aloni exhibited an interactive digital work at an installation at the Photography Gallery of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, "Re-U-Man", which had been previously inaugurated at a presentation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York --sh |