General Allenby’s Showcase 2012-2017
Gilad Melzer, curator, an art and culture researcher
Excerpts from his essay The General’s downfall, contribution to the book
Allenby is an analogical street. It neither flashes nor flickers. The storefronts and signs are not computerized or digitized; they too are the fading traces of a disappearing era. Allenby, with all its filth and neglect, and perhaps because of it, evokes memories and feels like a city; a city as a place of diversity, vivacity, antagonism, functionality, movement, commerce, noise, activity, surprise, disappointment. Allenby is humane, voluptuous, non-artificial. As trade and human interaction change and become digital and net-based, Allenby welcomes physical contact, unmediated sensuality.
[…]
I shall claim that General Allenby’s Showcase is a large-scale memento mori, a visual lamentation containing the genre’s features, a stage depicting symbols and metaphors for the temporality of this world’s mundane pleasures.
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A skull rests on a glass shelf. Red dishes, one shelf up, embellished with a picture of Bugs Bunny. A clown-shaped clothes hanger on one side of the skull, overly enlarged backgammon dice on the other. The passing cars are reflected in the window. In the middle of the photo – though not in the middle of the window, for Lebée-Nadav sets her unique compositions without considering those set by the shop owner, architect, or furniture – the word ‘only’ is written.
No. Not only. Not only death, but also life and movement. Not only despair and decay, but also commerce, humor, games. Not only distinctness, but also the pleasure of the mess. Not only. More and more meanings, some connecting some contradictory, like an actual street, like life which we ought to notice and live.