Wild At Heart.(Tamy Ben-Tor )(Interview)

Byline: DODIE KAZANJIAN editor: Valerie Steiker

Artist Tamy Ben-Tor keeps the art world guessing.

Ever since her provocative debut at the Zach Feuer Gallery in Chelsea in 2005, Tamy Ben-Tor has been taking performance art to new heights of politically incorrect bravura. Thirty-two years old and Israeli-born, the blonde, statuesque Ben-Tor zeroes in on the unsayable and then says it, in a wild collage of languages and impersonations. Like Sacha Baron Cohen, she transforms herself (before your eyes) into a range of weirdly believable characters who spew their passionate litanies of racial hatred, Holocaust denial, and other marvels of contemporary idiocy, leaving her audience torn between laughter and disbelief. Is she a stand-up comedian or a new Savonarola? "Wherever you slot her," as The New York Times' s critic Holland Cotter put it in a review, "she's phenomenal, a star."

Ben-Tor grew up in Jerusalem. She studied at the School of Visual Theater there (after spending her obligatory time in the Israeli army) and absorbed some lasting influences: the Untitled Film Stills of Cindy Sherman, the dramatic monologues of Karen Finley and Eric Bogosian, the techniques of puppet theater, Mike Leigh's improvisational films. Coming to New York in 2004, she developed her own performance style at Columbia's graduate art school and started making videos. She had her breakthrough debut while she was still a student, impersonating a wealthy European woman, a German girl scout, a Swedish ...