Rodney Glick and David Solomon
Joe Binsky's Tree of Life
1995
Mixed media
Variable dimensions
Rodney Glick and David Solomon
Beth
1998
Cardboard boxes, plaques
Variable dimensions
In Joe Binsky's Tree of Life, 1995 and Beth, 1998 Glick and Solomon have gathered the personal memorabilia, letters and photographs of an Australian Jew, along with boxes full of the possessions of his girlfriend, Beth. Together they appear as an archive of personal memories and stories documenting the dynamics of a family across generations and in all their complexities.
On close examination, however, it appears that Joe, a Holocaust survivor, has purchased a variety of picture frames, with photos already displayed in them, and collected domestic kitsch and empty boxes to write his own story around them.
Joe's work was an attempt to keep alive the possibility of connection through imagining a fictional present and past for himself a way of countering the real, of assuaging horror to climb out of isolation and loss. The pathos of Joe's story is not undermined when the grim jest is realized that Joe Binsky was himself a fiction created by Rodney Glick and David Solomon.
That Joe Binsky's Tree of Life is absurd does not preclude it from speaking of the unspeakable and even assists in preventing that being forgotten and isolated in a now distant past. The sheer normality of Joe's letters, with comments on his grandson's dog, his granddaughter's baby photos or his son's divorce makes them appear real and they are a fiction that is representative, at least, of the real.