Composed: Identity, Politics, Sex

In Seattle in 1977, Gloria Bornstein staged a feminist performance piece, Public Document. In the part of the performance seen here, the artist draped herself in several layers of clothing, including a man’s Hasidic coat and hat, her grandmother’s dress, and ceremonial objects worn in nontraditional ways. Bornstein then ritualistically removed these garments.

Unlike some feminist performance art based on traditional burlesque, Public Document did not end with a “money shot” of Bornstein’s naked body. Instead, the artist’s final reveal was a heavy black wetsuit that masked her body in an androgynous rubber skin. In the tight close-ups of these photographs, Bornstein’s striptease is deliberately clumsy and unalluring. The ambiguous images suggest the impossibility of full disclosure.

Shortly before his death, Jorge Zontal asked the artist AA Bronson to take these photographs of his emaciated body. "Jorge's father had been a survivor of Auschwitz," Bronson recalls, "and he had the idea that he looked exactly as his father had on the day of his release. He wanted to document that similarity, that family similarity of genetics and disaster." Born Slobodan Saia-Levy in an Italian internment camp in 1944, Jorge was one of three members of General Idea, a now-legendary artist collective formed in 1969 with Bronson and Felix Partiz. Their collaboration ended in 1994, when both Felix and Jorge died of AIDS.

Though this triptych is a bleak portrait of a dying man, Jorge's poses also subtly recall a demure pin-up. This theatrical gesture captures the extraordinary wit and satire that defined General Idea’s projects. Bronson writes: "We transformed our bodies into props, significations manipulated to create an image, a reality. We made of ourselves the artists we wanted to be."

These photographs are based on pictures of rural Americans taken by Russell Lee in 1940 in Pie Town, New Mexico. Grossman manipulated the images digitally to create an imaginary record of a utopian lesbian community. The artist’s subtle interventions are almost imperceptible: she shapes a feminine jaw from a masculine one or brings two bodies closer together to create a sense of intimacy. Grossman writes, "I am filled with a longing to connect with that time and the people in Lee’s images. But as a modern, queer woman, there is no room for me or for my objects of desire in his pictures. So in an attempt to make the history I wish was real, I have made over Pie Town to mirror my fantasy."

Art-historical references are vividly present in this vulnerable image of a sleeping Israeli soldier. The composition recalls certain masterpieces of western art, including Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat. This intriguing image raises complex questions about masculinity, eroticism, and military force.

Collier Schorr creates elaborately staged fictions. Shot in Germany—not Israel, as the title suggests—her photograph depicts German youths of uncertain gender dressed as Israeli soldiers.

The photograph emphasizes the power of stereotypes to obscure individual differences—here, the nationalism implied by the uniforms. Schorr’s work is a commentary on the deceptive nature of appearances as well as the ambiguity of social and political positions.

Martha Bouke is the female persona assumed by an eighty-year-old great-grandfather and Holocaust survivor living in Tel Aviv. For nine years the artist Rona Yefman has collaborated with Martha on a portfolio of photographs and videos that reveal the contradictory elements of this character. The clothes of a young woman, the long wig, and the expressionless mask give Martha an appearance that is visually playful, yet emotionally impenetrable. This is a highly unconventional image at odds with standard representations of Holocaust survivors. Her bold pose in front of an iconic Pop painting refers to Warhol’s own gender-bending portraits. It also presents her as both a visitor to and an attraction at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.