Guy Ben-Ner
Low-tech, but ingeniously inventive, Guy Ben-Ner’s videos often centre on home and family, exploring, exposing and exploiting the relationship he has with his children.
Simultaneously serious and funny, tender and torturous, they resonate with and build on the history of cinema. Guy Ben-Ner is best known for his video Moby Dick (2000) - a silent slapstick conceptual comedy in which he re-enacted the famous novel in his kitchen with his six year old daughter. His subsequent works Elia - A Story of an Ostrich Chick (2003) and Wild Boy (2004) also feature the artist and his children.
In Second Nature Ben-Ner has created a video that emerges from Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Crow. It’s a video in three parts that blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. One part of the video is shot as a documentary about specialist animal trainers training a fox and a crow to re-enact the fable, but develops into a fictional re-telling of the fable itself by the animals, interjected with a re-enactment of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by the animal trainers. The dialogue between human and animal is crucial, exploring subtle modifications in behaviour made through the interaction between the two, where one can never truly control the other.
In the repetitive and questionably futile action of trainee and trainer, Ben-Ner’s video owes much to the plays of Beckett - the trainer trains the animals to re-enact the fable; Ben-Ner trains the trainer to act in the documentary and the play; and the animals train each other within the tale itself. He uses the same setting, a lonely tree, to tell two different stories – one a fable and one a play. Ben-Ner reveals the function of fables – the use of animals to tell human stories and instruct our own moral behaviour – and mimics their strategies to manipulate the animal trainers as the fable unfolds. Essentially the action is the same, repeated again and again. The documentary and the fiction mirror each other and thus the fiction becomes the reality, questioning the parameters of both concepts, whilst also examining the peculiar and blurred power relationships between the trainer and the trained.
In Second Nature Ben-Ner has created a video that emerges from Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Crow. It’s a video in three parts that blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. One part of the video is shot as a documentary about specialist animal trainers training a fox and a crow to re-enact the fable, but develops into a fictional re-telling of the fable itself by the animals, interjected with a re-enactment of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by the animal trainers. The dialogue between human and animal is crucial, exploring subtle modifications in behaviour made through the interaction between the two, where one can never truly control the other.
In the repetitive and questionably futile action of trainee and trainer, Ben-Ner’s video owes much to the plays of Beckett - the trainer trains the animals to re-enact the fable; Ben-Ner trains the trainer to act in the documentary and the play; and the animals train each other within the tale itself. He uses the same setting, a lonely tree, to tell two different stories – one a fable and one a play. Ben-Ner reveals the function of fables – the use of animals to tell human stories and instruct our own moral behaviour – and mimics their strategies to manipulate the animal trainers as the fable unfolds. Essentially the action is the same, repeated again and again. The documentary and the fiction mirror each other and thus the fiction becomes the reality, questioning the parameters of both concepts, whilst also examining the peculiar and blurred power relationships between the trainer and the trained.
