Gracelands Palace

An exhibition (curator: Andreas Shlaegel, 1998)

By Galia Bar Or

There was something ephemeral, magical, and enchanting about Gracelands Palace at Ein Harod; about the visitors, young and old, from Tel Aviv and from the neighbouring kibbutzim making their way in the evening toward the modernist museum building erected in the 1950s, with chopsticks in hand; about the classical column hall where Skin O'Diva and the Electronic Front - guest musicians who recycled Elvis songs as well as the audiences uproar - set up, about the echo permeating each and every level of the museum, returning and reproducing sounds. From the central axis of the museum, the display space of the Gracelands Palace exhibition extended in a single overview: the hall, with its four central pillars, the suspended ceiling, the works which seemed to have been screwed into the space, effecting a perfect transformation from a classical hall to a bar-restaurant. Lisa Cheungs light boxes radiated on the columns, delineating a border-line space, a state of transition as a permanent experience; there were also objects scattered carelessly, as it were, around the hall, creating an open spatial movement of sounds and flickering lights, and a glittering elegant missile which served as part of a karaoke system - both works by Guy Bar Amotz. Placed on the walls were paintings by Michael Raedecker whose simplified human images were devoid of a gaze, and whose sensual texture was sweeping yet did not promise any revelation at the end of the road. Yeondoo Jung hung large-scale photographs oscillating between tableaux and billboards, in which the body language of classical portraits was exchanged for the impervious gaze of the mass, a type of alliance in a public space between different strata in society. Woven into the inner space was a reconstruction in iron of a monumental bar - a focal point of cooking and serving - a work by Andreas Schlaegel. The scrupulous hanging of the works in the simple illuminated rectangular space, the flickering, the sound, the images - all comprised a different kind of space, one which did not convey a permanent physical presence, but rather ephemerality; a sense of wandering without changing position; eclectic images from an urban world such as sites of fast-food, rock culture, the tube; temptation alluding to an entire universe yet promising nothing. Based on the image of the Chinese restaurant Gracelands Palace; from the fact that a very open, albeit well-established, affinity was created between the works, evoking, through their joint installation, a situation at once concrete and metaphorical.

The Gracelands Palace exhibition made an impact even before the show began. This was manifest in the built-up anticipation, in the gathering of diverse visitors in the hall, in the excitement, in a strange sense of liberation, as if the absurd situation where nothing linked to nothing - a restaurant and a museum, Elvis and a kibbutz - provided a pleasant sense of heterogeneity; everything goes and nothing is left out. A response to an experience which was direct and alluring, yet not entirely giving itself, in the sense that all the works preserved an enigmatic quality which offered no interpretation nor a distinct personal or social content.

It was clear already at that moment - even before the aroma of Korean food flooded the museum, before Elvis familiar music set the audience in motion, and before the five artists, who created, each in his/her own way, a figure which communicated with the audience in a different language - that Gracelands Palace conveyed, in its own unique way, a solidarity beyond local, ethnic, or other identities. And the audience responded at once.

The Gracelands Palace show, including a restaurant and an Elvis act, was performed at Ein Harod three evenings in a row, combined with a reenactment of a 1960s demonstration of artist Bjorn Norgaard, a symposium, and another exhibition - It all began in the Seventies (curator: Yacob Fabricius) - which tackled hippie and utopian aspects as well.

The Gracelands Palace artists introduced a very different artist figure to the conventional image of the outsider, the alienated, original artist, who is anchored in the integrity of high art. They transferred into the heart of the museum a sweeping experience of gathering together, which operates on the senses, combining alongside sight and a sense of space, the senses of taste, smell, hearing and motion as well. They employed the inspiration of low mass culture in order to liberate closed narcissistic practices of high culture, which, in their opinion, has become irrelevant to the contemporary society. They opened up a fascinating discussion about the contemporary implications of Pop, revolving around the question of the relationship between the culture industry and artistic avant-garde, perhaps within the context of the inevitable merger between the sphere of the avant-garde and that of the culture industry.

Did the Gracelands Palace artists succeed in effecting a transformation in the transition to the museum? Does their work embed a critical space?

Gracelands Palace did not take upon itself a paedagogical mission; it was not concerned with mocking media cliches and discussing the repercussions of the culture industry. Gracelands Palace, I believe, highlighted an innovative discussion about the image of popular entertainment in a heterogeneous global society. It explored the way in which nationally-oriented cultural identities - music (Elvis, US), food (Chinese or Korean) - are infiltrating into the public sphere all over the world, losing their original messages and being transformed to meet the new needs of a global culture at the end of the second millennium. In Gracelands Palace Elvis has no significance as an original, nor do the original macho or patriotic-American values which he represented. Elvis, like the Beatles, is an image of a superstar that has become a constitutive figure in popular entertainment of a very particular kind - in London, Seoul, or Beer Sheva (Andreas was surprised to find a Gracelands Palace in a religious neighborhood in the city of Safad).

The Gracelands Palace artists do not deal with a reflection of the entertainment activity itself, nor with the phenomenon of the artist as impersonator (whether producer or reproducer), but rather with an image of entertainment. They do not engage in a doctrinal attack on aesthetic conventions, but rather manifest a new dialectic lifestyle.

In every venue in the world where Gracelands Palace will be presented a different relation will, in all probability, be formed between the artists and the audience, one which will depend on the local tradition of employing mass culture in art; the dimension of anxiety inherent in the works will be translated differently, and a different balance will be achieved with the pre-existing local version of cultural nationalism.

And in Israel, Gracelands Palace was reported in one of the major newspapers as follows: What happened at Ein Harod was an important, courageous landmark in the history of the twisted and charged dance relations between the artistic institutions and the audience.[...] There is a discussion about current popular culture (karaoke, D.J., food, club culture) taking place here, but mainly beneath the surface, there is much pain, estrangement and social otherness (both class-oriented and cultural). Set against the pain is the sacred current value of celebrating, loosening up, letting off steam. There is a whole world of values here, beating with a rapid pulse, to which the audience relates right away, and gets swept in. The wonderful message is that there is something very authentic, unmediated, communicative here, from the mainstream of life, truly at eye level, and thus also very very optimistic as an artistic statement (Yoav Shmueli).

Whether optimistic or not, Gracelands Palace is both the messenger and the message; and thus it was perceived at Ein Harod in December 1998.