Avi Ifergan:
Your installations refuse to be just another object in a lineup
of objects. They avoid aesthetic wholeness and do not obey
the dominant narcissistic, hedonistic gaze. Your objects
seem to be attached to each other through some sort of
psychological metabolism, while your installations are traces
of evidence from your performance from which energies
emanate without an audience. The space itself is transformed
into a flowing body and a site of the soul in which the objects
are dependent and full of movement. Pencils are attached to
pencils to create an arterial flow.
Etti Abergel:
My installations develop as chapters of a continuous diary,
the documentation of an internal journey, a semi-imaginary
scenario drawn from memory and blending or conflicting with
reality. The installation’s complexity enables association of
autobiographical with domestic elements within the imagined
space, thus creating the specific place towards which I strive.
This facilitates a peripheral construction process bounding the
space and sculpting it. The medium binding the imagined layer
with the material stratum makes it possible to lay down many
angles of observation at the site of the event, staging several
narratives in a single arena, connecting oppositional sculptural
approaches and languages in real time in concrete space. The
diverse operations come together in time for the climactic
moment of the exhibition opening, the instant that freezes the
action.
The exhibition spaces are actual sites placed at my disposal,
which become the arena for the encounter between my
stream of consciousness, which may or may not be imaginary
or autobiographical, and between the possibilities arising from
the architectonics of the exhibition space and its context.
The sculptural object unravels and is exposed, formed as the
cumulative result of treatment of matter and defining form
during the sculptural actions of deconstruction, removal,
severing and rebuilding accumulated in the space. The actions
preserve the identifying marks left over from the source of
the object located in daily life to remind us of moments from
conflicts, events and subjective moments engraved in my
memory. These are loaded images that demand decoding as
they arise and are turned into unknown mysteries.
Placement of the objects in space is a domestication process,
hidden from the observer, part of the total sculptural actions
making up the site’s enigmatic essence and drama. The space
begins as my tabula rasa, which then gives birth to events
and an order leading to presence and visibility. By the end of
the exhibition, each chapter of my sculptural narrative breaks
down and vanishes into the raw state from which the next
chapter develops. What remains are the relics, fragments and
pieces of broken objects, the work’s archaeological finds which
form an archival inventory of the missing space.
The material presence is temporary, yet it sends out tendrils
and roots towards the origins of modern sculpture in the
Twentieth Century, when an innovative understanding of space
as a total whole was conceived. Place, site and space function
as a system of visual signs and codes leading to personal
interpretation and homage to various sculptors. The works
refer to Yannis Kounelis’s material connections; to Eva Hesse’s
fiber labyrinths and coils; Giacometti’s surrealistic spatial
divisions; Gordon Matta-Clark’s destruction; Pollock’s Action
Painting with its automatic actions that transformed painting
into sculptural fragments; and populist variations of Duchamp’s
classical ready-mades, while shaking up myths.
Along with my references to art history, I have an unbearable
urge to replace all of it with symbols and objects constituting
a closed code of internal memory. I am attempting to link
space as image with the utopian idea of imaginary place and
between any given space possible at a given moment of the
process, complete with its characteristics and limitations. The
merger of the two processes solidifies the sculptural site. When
the signal is given and the exhibition opens, I exit the space
to leave behind me signs, codes and traces of the behind-thescenes
event. The space then becomes an abandoned site, an
archaeological location in my consciousness.
Avi:
Your objects carry knowledge and bear invisible energies
from a specific event taken from the broader narrative of
your work.
Your private narrative is intertwined with your parents’
journey, their travails of immigration and absorption, and
the difficulty with the Zionist model as the basic paradigm
of Israeli culture. You are the first generation of immigrant
parents. How does this connect to your objects wandering
from previous installations into the next one?
Etti:
The journey is an attempt to write an autobiographical history
in material. It is a reconstruction of the process of symbolic
architecture building rooms and events as they were recorded
in the subjective emotional experience and in real memory.
This parallels narratives engaged in the search for place, with
temporary settling down, with hospitality and nomadism. I had
already developed a quasi-historical documentation at a time
during which issues of immigration, adaptation and identity
had not yet formed part of public discourse, nor was this an era
in which personal issues were considered legitimate themes for
an artist. Yet these issues have crossed over into the language
of painting and sculpture. The choice and the struggle for
continuity in developing the chapters of the installation
arose from the need to connect autobiography to the spatial
elements of contemporary sculpture.
This was the moment of inevitable choice leading me to
develop the installations. The burning need to document my
identity forced me to confront the issue and assimilate it into
my sculptural vocabulary. From this point on, my installations
developed as abstract autobiographical sites for events that
encompassed the source of the experiences, emotional pain
and other feelings. The narrative then continued to develop
subconsciously in a poetic stream linking real and imagined
events. The process traps conflicts and releases them when the
process is concluded. When a chapter is ended, I am free of the
cultural responsibility or testimony.
The journey is continuous in time with no final destination. It
is a loop, returning to the traumatic place with its overload, to
crash and rebuild memory in a concrete, sculptural mode with
physical material presence. The sculptural action intensifies
absence by giving it a three-dimensional, volumetric presence.
The selection and division of the space and placement of
objects throughout the space signifies the creative act and
the energy motivating the work. The empty place left in
the installation is the center of gravity, the location of the
event at its source. It is dim and unattainable, marking the
realistic layer of my experience, yet is essentially fragmented
and deconstructed. After dismantling the installations and
archiving the work, I freeze it through photography and,
video documentation. The work then collapses into a new
sedimentary layer.
Avi:
The lines of words forming the titles to your installations
create stanzas for a poem reflecting the atmosphere of your
childhood, adolescence and maturity, and the experience of
the first generation of native-born Israelis. I feel that your
titles embody a harsh criticism of Israeli culture and address
issues referring to its subconscious. Objects and words
cannot be entrapped in the visual. How do you relate to the
literary dimension of your installations?
Etti:
On the poetic level, the titles are linked to my surrealistic way
of thinking, and usually follow the dynamics and emphases
of the piece, with their salients, parentheses and expansions.
All of these are elements in the work’s physical structure. The
titles have a structural function in the paradoxical dialectic that
the work attempts to create, but appear at a later stage of the
process.
The initial stage is archetypical, nonverbal, mummified and
very abstract, without being located in a specific time and
place. The titles form a layer whose purpose was to locate the
work within a context, to link it to Hebrew, to Israeli art, to the
issue of the question of personal private identity within the
collective context of Israeli identity. The inception was a mute
and emotional contemplation from the inside towards the
external world.
Since the Common cyclamen (2001), the titles attempted
to verbally locate the construction in local time and place. The
cyclamen is the official symbol of Tivon, my birthplace, and was
assimilated as a symbol of belonging by Tivon’s native sons as
a local symbol. The scientific name of the flower, the Common
cyclamen, lowers the high myth of the tragic or religious
symbol (such as used by Gershuni) into a pastoral flower that is
the object of yearning.
The effort to communicate with the local art discourse created
paradoxes between different weights, between abstract
movement and relative realism that began to arise in the work.
Inconsistencies resulted, and sometimes ironies, between strata
of visual presence and contents, between the titles and the
amorphous presences in the space.
In Winter.tude, the cyclamen is the image of the body,
with its shy bowing of the head, another cultural echo of
Gershuni’s cyclamen. Scribbles and drawings are interspersed
in all of my installations, which I associate with the drawing
tradition of Arie Aroch and Aviva Uri.
Avi:
“I begin from a place of disruption…of error and
incompatibility between things,” like waking up from one
dream into another, in a passage from one imagined space
to another. How do you explain the turning point that took
place in your installations from 1998-2000, with their
constructivist, motionless structures, as compared to your
work from 2000 onward, in which the installations open up
and hint at post-performance? In these installations, there
is movement and flow. The muted color of the cyclamens
broadened in the Basic Memory of One Street, which
was performed in The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
Etti:
Error and deviation from the classical definition of sculpture as
a closed, define object with boundaries is the visual basis and
philosophical underpinning of the entire process. The work
begins at a place of mismatch between elements, materials,
emotions and narratives. A new space is formed through
hybridization of things that could never have initially come
together, and whose existence takes place in uncategorized
space, in an encounter between domesticated Baroque and
hinted Minimalism, between my raw material approach and
the classical, polished model of the artwork, between emotions
and thoughts on contemporary discourse, between linguistic
codes and structures from the mingling of languages spoken at
home – Moroccan Arabic, French, Hebrew mixed with English
and in the language of abstract art, codes of contradiction and
new becoming, of contradiction but also of an opening up
towards the unknown new.
The physical space of the installation is constructed as a
temporary space making possible the simultaneous connection
of all of the above oppositions. Error, incompatibility and
disrupted order are designed as the envelope of a concrete
sculpture, forming the shell and negative of a potential
sculpture that did not take place, and which are replaced by a
stage of relics and signs, lattices that envelope and bound the
space, marks, hints and sketches of a possible sculpture.
The surrealism created from the hybridization of images and
themes, different forms of thought making up the different
parts of my identity, is my means to link my autobiographical
narrative with a visual process through paradox. I strive to
construct a new layer of thematic objects which mediate
between the language of the pillows of domestic space
and the perception of the reductive, dense installation
space. Shaking up the oppositions and reducing the space,
dismantling the structure focusing on space rather than object,
makes the experience of absence present. The site of absence
becomes filled up with work and material, transformed into
a place of anti-creation and a non-representational site.
Imagination is the glue that binds all of the seemingly foreign
elements in the space. It is the conductor of the narrative,
the active force making creativity possible. Consciousness and
knowledge are the only reacting elements to the concentrated
intensity of the imaging.
Avi:
In the titles of your installation and the process of
constructing your installation itself in the Venice Biennale,
Salient: The Workshop of the Conch Shell
Maker, there is a kind of Sisyphean act by a dream-weaver
who then shatters the dreams through repetitive action.
You build artificial conches, an infinite number of plaster
replications of natural conch shell, as a Kafkaesque act. There
is an echo here of chaotic flooding. What is the meaning of
the title?
Etti:
My piece, Salient: The Workshop of the Conch
Shell Maker was inspired by Franz Kafka’s short story, The
Metamorphosis. It engages in the imaginary world of the
artist as a sensitive creature who builds rigid structures from
the material of the soul. The artist is an anti-hero who creates
out of the absurd, Sisyphean daily struggle, which is itself a
parody. The artist acts out of intuitive needs, lacking strategies
and the capacity to maneuver the complex structure of the
world, but with the mental capacity to create from what the
artist has.
The entity of the Conch Shell Maker is later joined by the
“Wizard of Oz” - inspired Tin Man, a being with a life-long
striving for love. But the essence of the anti-artist is embodied
in the urge for infinite expansion. The artist’s very “other-ness”
and “outsider” nature is the direct result of emotional energy
larger than the correct aesthetic form and order. The artist acts
out of a drive to dismantle and melt the object as soon as it is
attained, but, through an irrational power, succeeds in building
a world.
At the Venice Biennale 2003, I felt that I was standing alone
against the world. It was a cosmic moment of existential insight
as an artist, as a woman, confronting a powerful system with
limited means at my disposal, but with a need for expression in
contradiction to the conditions under which I was working. It
was a moment in time in which weakness became transformed
into an active force.
Avi:
Your artwork, with its wide spectrum of images and
narratives, is deeply rooted in Israeli culture. At the
Edge of the Forest, 1, 2, 3… refers to the forest of
Kiryat Tivon, the realm of your childhood, as well as the
landscape of the collective memory. C ommo n c y c l ame n
is a clear Land of Israel symbol anchored in local culture.
You have taken these symbols and clothed them with an
autobiographical narrative, and yet they still remain symbols
of that same collective memory. It seems that your imagery
is taken straight from the cultural collective into realms of
imagination and dream. Your images are journey images, but
your narrative lacks harsh criticism of that culture.
Etti:
The poetic, conceptual process is nourished by my emotional
and cultural autobiography based on my need for expression,
and not necessarily from the need for direct protest against
the culture. Nevertheless, my artistic expression can be
crude and include the desire for destruction and protest
embedded in the work of art. I do not work in reaction to the
art world discourse, but progress in an unmediated manner,
often forging ahead blindly, wandering through reams of
imagination and half-dreams. However, I consider the struggle
for my creative work to be a clearly political and feminist act.
Art provides a refuge, a bridge between worlds that had, in the
past, been severed from each other, between life as the oldest
daughter of an immigrant, working-class family, educated
for labor, and between the need and the choice to engage in
making art, the necessity of my soul-driven and ego-driven,
against the backdrop of my need to cope with the world of
postmodernist art in the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design,
Jerusalem, of the 1980s. This was a beginning accompanied
by numerous emotional conflicts and crises resulting from my
inability to connect these worlds. Only after about a decade
of avoiding the art world, a period of persistent work, did my
installation language become formulated as an intermediate
space linking the autobiographical and sculptural through
the imagination. My aesthetic awareness, conscious of the
observer’s gaze, developed later.
The task of linking the autobiographical in the historical
space of art still engages me. The attempt to find form for an
overloaded labyrinthine narrative, to succeed in building a
visual body and presence for interior unexpressed experiences
and emotions, to tie the non-European archetypal historical
experience to a contemporary time and place: these are each
complicated tasks whose objective is cultural expansion and
constructing a place within the culture.
The protest aspect, which is contained in my works, arises,
perhaps, from the need not to just represent my “other-ness,”
but to live it, to restore the conflicts while remaining loyal to
their origins without re-shaping or processing them.
Avi:
In one of the conversations on “What is Art,” between Joseph
Beuys and Heiner Bastian and Jeannot Simmen (1979),
Beuys stated, “If nothing says anything, I don’t draw.” What
is the relationship between his drawing and your sculpture,
and what is its place in your pre-sculptural thinking? Is
there two-way movement between drawing and sculpture
and sculpture and drawing, and, if so, what does it mean?
What inspires you with the form that becomes the concrete
image/object or is transformed into the amorphous form of
thought?
Etti:
My drawings are the scores of the installation and the
architectural working drawings. Drawing is the subconscious
of the work of art: it is dense, loaded and thick, developing
throughout the entire process. Drawing nourishes the work
and supports the process itself through numerous variations
in sketches made during the planning and placement stages.
Drawing dictates the opening points in the space, as the
installation is born out of the act of expanding the intimate,
diary-like drawings into three-dimensional space. Drawing
reveals the handwriting, documents the source cognition,
variations, thoughts and soul-searching during the planning
stage and placement in space while documenting the thought
process.
Drawing is the two-dimensional construction, the skeleton of
the spatial structure. After the structure collapses, the drawing
remains as the eternal relic of the installation. The installation
combines the two-dimensional illusionary line and the strings
and cables that divided the space, marking out a grid similar to
the sketchbook.
When the three-dimensional work cannot be realized, the
drawing is the ultimate space.
Avi:
Is there a ceremonial aspect involved in selecting the spaces
for your installations?
What anti-logic lies behind the choice and suiting the
installation and its body to the body of the space? Each of
your installations embraces the entire space, giving the
feeling that the space was created for the installation. What
is this mystical flow between the space and the installation,
and what motivates your choices? For example, the wide
open space at the Reading Power Station was extremely
problematic, but your installation seemed compatible with
the huge space.
Etti:
The ceremonial aspect is associated with the act of
domestication in which I forget the characteristics of the
representational space, which is then transformed into a
personal location. It becomes a private refuge of protection
and concealment, a kind of isolation cell within the larger
space of the art world, or a temporary home. Only when I
conclude the placement process do I identify the place that has
been formed.
Each piece has a different logic of merging with the space
in which it has been installed; each space is loaded with
historical echoes of experiences. I chose some spaces, and
constructed works in them, but most of my installation spaces
were allocated by curators following preparatory drawings
and conversations. My task is to install the narrative and
the concept which I constructed in my imagination within
the actual given physical space to create a specific dialogue
between the imagined space as I sense it as memory and
poetic structure and between the concrete space, with all its
particular limitations and characteristics.
After the drawing stage, the work develops through models
and simulations in the studio, placing sections of the piece
in the studio, which are disassembled and re-installed in the
space. The composition and division of space in the installation
always results from the preparatory drawings and models. At
other times I arrive ready to work in a particular space, then
question the entire design and begin to respond instinctively to
the space.
The emotional experience of working in the space during the
days of installing the piece is extreme: it feels like walking
a tightrope over an abyss. However, I grow from the active
experience, which is very sensitive to changes in time, and
the pressure of the time limit, which must end just prior to
the opening date. The process takes place under conditions
of uncertainty, and requires a great deal of trust on the part
of the curators plus a high level of self-confidence to execute
the installation within a given timetable. However, sometimes
the work in the space may continue after the official
opening in a continued action of sculpture, transformation
and deconstruction of the work during the exhibition. The
continuation enables dialogue with viewers and other
experiences that I accomplish prior to dismantling.
After I built the Salient: Workshop of the Conch
Shell Maker in the Arsenale in Venice, I dismantled
it in view of the visitors during the last three days of the
2003 Biennale, thus creating a philosophical blurring of the
seemingly representational presence of the opening with the
site of the ruins exhibited during the final three days. This
had an especially deep significance, given the way most of the
artworks were exhibited in the other rooms which were white
or black cubes designated for the video pieces. Crushing this
manner of representation was a motif that stretched the piece
to its extreme.
In my Piece for Two Rooms, installed in the Jerusalem
Artists’ House 1999, I came in every day during the times that
the show was closed to visitors, and continued to work in the
space. And so each day, viewers saw a slightly different version
of the piece. In some cases, I built a second version of the piece,
which was actually a new piece which developed as a variation
with modifications, like a musical improvisation or jazz jam.
Elements could be reincarnated from one chapter to another,
or appear unchanged in different exhibition spaces, creating
a link and continuity between chapters. Some of the elements
are gently cut up and preserved as the foundation and hint of
what is to come in the next chapter.
The moments of dismantling accompanied by documentation
and special activities are clearly a ritual of farewell and storage.
Avi:
Every act of dismantling an installation is a kind of act of
farewell for you, of waiver and erasure, leaving behind its
pieces only as a memory in your past. You do not preserve
installations whole to rebuild them, but you select several
objects from each dismantled installation that are transferred
to the forthcoming piece. What is the meaning behind this
process, with so many energies motivating the rituality of
construction, dismantling and documentation? What is this
creative trinity?
Etti:
Dismantling is a complementary process to placement,
a continuation of the construction process through
transformation of the materials and the objects, smashing
and breaking them into tiny fragments, slicing the space and
objects internally to reveal the new intuitive objects resulting
directly from the larger bodies. This is an act of deconstruction
of the structure and its spiritual state, its internal search for
expansion and interpretation. The dismantling of the complex
structure built with hard labor necessitates liberation from
possessiveness towards the work of art. It challenges the
unmediated aspect of the work and delays the appearance of
the desired object and the viewer’s reaction. The pause and the
delayed visual gratification require a high degree of discipline
and skill to create the work under conditions of uncertainty.
The act of dismantling emphasizes the work’s necessity and
provides it with its metaphysical significance, its non-material
spiritual meaning. My greatest wish is for infinity, as it exists
in painting. Paradoxically, it is through the dismantling that I
experience the reality of the work of art.
Avi:
Your installations are white, all white – the color of cleansing,
purifying, erasing, wounding and binding. Greatly restrained
color appears in the cyclamens, the Tivon street and in only a
few of your pieces.
Your breakthrough to color has only been recent, while white
features in all of the installations, broken here and there
with a specific color dictated by the object itself, such as the
whistles, brown tape and red shoes. White is not only the
color, but the physicality of plaster, which blocks and seals.
Etti:
White is the base that unifies foreign elements, materials and
topographies that have become trapped. White re-calibrates,
censors and facilitates the simultaneous acts of marking and
erasing, as it merges with the materiality of the plaster and the
sensation of stone that is present in all of my work. This is the
archetype of my emotions, moving between disappearance
and presence. White is absence, mystery and lack, but it is
also the quiet after the stormy drama of continuous work.
White cools and calms like the act of whitewashing walls in
Mediterranean lands to create a covering. White is the veil, the
container and the foundation of inspiration.
Black is the polar opposite of white. Sometimes I am exhausted
by the conflict between the need to blacken and cancel out
matter, or whiten it and leave relics of the material. I am closely
tied to Malevich’s white and to Rothko’s black, but the source
of my white may very well lie in traditional experiences from
childhood linked to the symbolism of spiritual cleansing. These
are remnants of the sacred peeking through the mundane:
white as clothing worn for holiday celebrations, the white grid
of my grandmother’s floor tiles visible under the pre-Passover
whitewash, white tablecloths and men’s prayer shawls, white
as the blend of milk and whitewash. White is also the flag
of surrender, the color of innocence, the sublime sterility of
landscape, of Utopia regenerating from shards and fragments.
White creates distance. It is membrane and partition, veil and
filter, the color of meditation and abstention.
White is my most essential raw material after the pencil.
Avi Ifergan is an artist and curator
from: Installation Diary, Etti Abergel