The Rooftop Concert
LIVE IN JERUSALEM 2010 is a deluxe gatefold vinyl LP documenting a concert on the roof of the Swedish Christian Study Centre near Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City on October 7, 2010. The culmination of Rakowitz’s contribution to The Jerusalem Show, the performance featured celebrated Palestinian rock band Sabreen playing five Arabic inflected Beatles songs, selected and ordered to form a kind of poem about collaboration and collapse, and about dreams that cannot be deferred indefinitely.
The cover concept for Live in Jerusalem 2010 refers to Live Peace in Toronto 1969, an album documenting a September 13, 1969 performance by the Plastic Ono Band at Varsity Stadium, Toronto. For the cover of Live Peace, John Lennon and Yoko Ono began with Blue, a painting by Yves Klein. The work depicts a sky of pure, sparkling azure; John and Yoko introduced via photo collage the image of a single cloud. “By us putting a cloud there,” Ono said, “it suddenly became the real sky—and the real world—as opposed to perfection.”
Live in Jerusalem takes the same Klein painting, collaged now with a photographic image of the aerial bombardment of Gaza in January 2009, correcting for the utopic perfection proposed in John and Yoko’s gesture by imposing a darker cloud upon Klein’s idealized sky.
