frgdr.com Blog

On the road last week, an old song by Israeli band Yarkon Bridge Trio was being played on the radio, and it got me thinking about how cultural norms change over time, and how songs can be time capsules, storing the essence of en era. In this particular case the era of Israel in the 1960’s, when all the men were ‘men’, all the women were ‘girls’, and all acts of blatant sexual harassment were considered acceptable foreplay. This particular song was not only extremely popular at the time, but was considered a praise for womankind.

As always, in my translation of the lyrics to English I tried to adhere to the meaning, the tempo and the rhymes, to the best of my ability, but as always, unless you can read the original Hebrew lyrics, you can only get the general gist of it. As Israel’s national poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik put it: reading a work of art in translation is like kissing somebody through a handkerchief.

Don’t Cross the Street Alone - Yarkon Bridge Trio - lyrics:

Watching the Eurovision Song Contest last night, I could not help notice that while each country had a different representative delivering its votes, somehow the female representatives showed similar characteristics. I am a firm believer in the law of large numbers and thus think a large sample size can sometimes reveal significant issues. As an artist I use mosaics from time to time to express various opinions, and so after composing this new work I think we can agree Europe still thinks women are nothing more than eye candy:

For higher resolution, press F11 and then click the image

Following is a legend with the name of each country corresponding to each photo’s location:

^* Out of a total of 43 representatives, 14 males were excluded.
^† Insignificant minor retouching was done on some of the photos.
^‡ The Turkish representative’s shirt was heavily retouched to remove some superimposed graphics

The image above (click it for a larger size) is an advanced draft of a new artwork of mine. I will be presenting it in a collective work of Israeli portraits by Ehrlich Contemporary Art Gallery in the Florentin Biennale in Tel-Aviv, this coming May.

Format: Digital print
Dimensions: 210mm x 297mm
Name: Undetermined as of now. Possible names in descending order of probability include

• I Was a (Already?) Cliché at Age 14
• cliche93
• Xerox-uality

Technique: The work is made out entirely out of digital-age found objects, that is, readymade images that were found on the Internet and were not photographed by me. The 12 images are all self portraits of 14 year old Israeli girls, each one published at Bona.co.il, an Israeli social networking website for high school students. The text below each image is the stats that appear in each of the online profiles correspondingly (stats were accurate when gathered, but may have changed since).
Theme: While the complete artwork stands by itself, it is the first of a series of planned works, all of which present my commentary on the role and image of contemporary women as reflected by the online presence of the next emerging crop.

Feel free to check out the online profiles, by clicking the link that corresponds with each photo’s location.

As always, I welcome your comments and observations. Oh, I forgot to mention I am toying with the idea of sending a personal invitation to the exhibit to each of the girls.