Wild Boy

2004 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

17 min

Guy Ben-Ner


Wild Boy is the story of the education of Amir, the artist’s son. Ben-Ner plays the educator’s part, trying to domesticate the child. Using the metaphor of the wild child is Ben-Ner’s homage to this recurring theme in literature and cinema: from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ « Tarzan » to Truffaut’s « L’enfant sauvage », and Rudyard Kipling’s « Jungle book ». The video is an attempt at capturing this decisive moment when the child lets go of its wilderness to become « civilized », and raises the nature/culture dichotomy, dear to the Enlightenment philosophers.


In his films, Guy Ben-Ner plays with the history of cinema, referring to the experimental origins of silent film, to comic figures such as Keaton and Chaplin, and to Truffaut’s French New Wave. Since 1996, the artist has been concentrating on his family members and stages them with burlesque humor. Just as Buster Keaton, he is at once actor-director, his wife and children the only other actors, and his apartment the improvised set: he uses available furniture and objects, creates an artificial island in his kitchen and constructs a tree house for Treehouse Kit (2005), a work in which the sculpture takes part in the video installation. The theatrical aspect of the set relates to the playful situations. Each one of Ben-Ner’s films participates, as an episode, to a collection of fables about human nature, reenacting stereotypical motifs found in literature and cinema, such as the desert island (“Berkeleys Island” 1999) or “Moby Dick” (2000). Guy Ben-Ner was born in 1969, Ramat Gan, Israel. He lives and works in Tel Aviv.


Colors:



Related works of genres: » israeli contemporary artists  
» see more

5,000 Feet
© » KADIST

Omer Fast

2011

“Watching the films of Omer Fast confounds our expectations of the medium...

Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk
© » KADIST

Elad Lassry

2013

In his composition, Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk, Lassry’s subjects are mirrored in their surroundings (both figuratively, through the chocolate colored backdrop and the brown frame; and literally, in the milky white, polished surface of the table), as the artist plays with color, shape, and the conventions of representational art both within and outside of the photographic tradition...

A Declaration
© » KADIST

Yael Bartana

2006

Yael Bartana’s video work A Declaration was shot in southern Tel Aviv, on the visible border between that city and Jaffa...

Related works sharing similar palette  
» see more

Discrete News
© » KADIST

Discrete News is an unofficial news source...

Private Collectors Key to Boosting Russia’s Art Market - via AP News
© » LARRY'S LIST

MOSCOW (AP) — For Russian art collector Roman Babichev, a visit to an artist's family living in a cramped St......

Crash Position I
© » KADIST

Zbigniew Rogalski

2007

Zbigniew Rogalski territory extends from painting to photography...

QUIZ: GAMING THE ARTS
© » ARTS EQUATOR

QUIZ: GAMING THE ARTS | ArtsEquator Skip to content Wanna play a game? Take our latest quiz, Gaming The Arts, and we'll guess your arts profession! Toss a dice, pick a card, load up the Nintendo...

Related artist(s) to: Guy Ben-Ner » Andy Warhol, » Christian Jankowski, » Harun Farocki, » Jesper Just, » Ana Mendieta, » Christian Marclay, » Claire Fontaine, » Francis Alÿs, » Hannah Wilke, » Hernan Bas  
» see more

Rooftop Routine
© » KADIST

Christian Jankowski

2008

In New York City’s Chinatown, subject Suat Ling Chua’s morning exercise is to practice the hula hoop...

Serious Games 3, Immersion
© » KADIST

Harun Farocki

2009

For Immersion , Harun Farocki went to visit a research centre near Seattle specialized in the development of virtual realities and computer simulations...

Hernan Bas’s ‘The Conceptualists’ at The Bass Miami
© » ARTOBSERVED

Hernan Bas

Hernan Bas’s recent works, particularly his series “The Conceptualists,” showcase his continued exploration into the realms of queerness, desire, the occult, and the absurd...

The Nightwatch
© » KADIST

Francis Alÿs

2004

The Nightwatch , which is an ironic reference to the celebrated painting by Rembrandt, follows the course of a fox wandering among the celebrated collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London...

Related works found in the same semantic group  
» see more

Italian Princesses's Claim for Share of British Art Collector's £800m Fortune Backed by DNA - via The Telegraph
© » LARRY'S LIST

She is the Italian Princess who for 25 years has fought to receive a share of one of the world’s most treasured art collections after claiming her mother was the secret love child of a famed British aesthete....

Entrepreneur and Art Collector, Shanyan Koder on Health, Happiness and Home - via Prestige
© » LARRY'S LIST

As she awaits the arrive of her third child, collector and entrepreneur Shanyan Koder welcomes us into her London residence to talk art, family and more....

Bad innovation in the name of protection (Gulf Style)
© » KADIST

Kristof Kintera

2007

Bad innovation in the name of protection is not a ready-made, but was made entirely by the artist, representing a stroller...

Koropa
© » KADIST

Laura Henno

2016

In 2009, Laura Henno began research in the archipelago Comoros for her first film Koropa the first episode of a triptych— completed in 2016...