Mr. Aziz and Mr. Cucher then perform their own folk dance, holding hands for the camera, before knocking off for the day and heading down the street toward the Manhattan skyline. Throughout, they’re dressed as clowns.
The costumes, they say, are part of their attempt to wrestle with the madness they perceive underlying everyday life in the age of terrorism and especially in the Middle East — and for them, it’s personal. Mr. Cucher, 54, was raised in Venezuela in a Zionist family that moved to Israel. And Mr. Aziz, 50, who grew up near Boston, is third-generation Lebanese and members of his extended family still live in Lebanon.
Referring to the outbreak of military hostilities between Israel and Lebanon in 2006, Mr. Aziz said, “It was especially painful for us because Sammy’s nephews were serving in the military, while my family was receiving the bombs being sent by the Israeli military.”
Called “By Aporia, Pure and Simple,” the 10-minute piece is one of four video and sound installations in the exhibition “Aziz + Cucher: Some People,” on view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art through Oct. 21, which looks at a range of tribal tensions, ageless and continuing. “The source of this project was a feeling of impotence and despair, watching this endless tragic thing that was older than we could imagine,” Mr. Cucher said.
Mr. Aziz said, “Only a fool would touch this subject.”
“Or a clown,” Mr. Cucher added. “We felt kind of ridiculous, going around Israel and Palestine with a little video camera talking to people, but at the same time compelled. The clown is that character who tries to fix something broken and never gives up because he’s so determined, but it always comes out wrong. We felt that was us.”
This is the first time Mr. Aziz and Mr. Cucher have put themselves or their relationship at the heart of their work, which has always responded to political and cultural currents. They met in graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1990, soon after politicized battles over the works of Robert Mapplethorpe and whether the National Endowment for the Arts should give money to controversial artists.
Mr. Aziz and Mr. Cucher decided to satirize the moment and became pioneers in the use of Photoshop as an artistic tool. In their pantheon of life-size photographs titled “Faith, Honor and Beauty,” made in 1992, they presented physically perfect nude models, hawking consumer items, whose genitals had been digitally erased.
“They were like blown-up Barbie and Ken dolls,” Mr. Aziz said.
“We were making fun of this idealized notion of a white society that had no room for difference,” Mr. Cucher said, noting that the AIDS crisis and the threat to gay men hung over their consideration of the body. “Advertising was pushing sex as part of consumerism, but at the same time the politics in Washington were completely censorious when it came to art.”
The series was shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1993 and widely reproduced. They continued to work together when artist teams were much less common than today. When Mr. Cucher was invited to represent Venezuela in the 1995 Venice Biennale, he had to petition to get Mr. Aziz included. “The idea that we were two gay men, living together, working together — not a lot of models existed,” Mr. Cucher said.
Mr. Aziz, who studied documentary filmmaking, and Mr. Cucher, trained in experimental theater, have never had a signature style. The four videos in the current show — begun in 2009, when they were on sabbatical from teaching at Parsons the New School for Design and took their road trip through Israel, Lebanon, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia — are stylistically diverse, yet the artists consider them a single piece.
