{"id":1549,"date":"2018-02-19T15:21:24","date_gmt":"2018-02-19T12:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maarav.org.il\/english\/?p=1549"},"modified":"2018-02-19T15:24:40","modified_gmt":"2018-02-19T12:24:40","slug":"tzfia-dgani-avital-barak-conversation-gesture-artistic-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maarav.org.il\/english\/2018\/02\/19\/tzfia-dgani-avital-barak-conversation-gesture-artistic-action\/","title":{"rendered":"Tzfia Dgani and Avital Barak in a Conversation about Gesture and Artistic Action"},"content":{"rendered":"

translated by: Margalit Rodgers<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIf I walk up and down here while speaking to you, that does not constitute an act, but if one day I were to cross a certain threshold by which I put myself outside the law, that day my motor activity will have the value of an act\u201d (Jacques Lacan\u2019s 15th<\/sup> Seminar on the Psychoanalytic Act, 1967-8)<\/p>\n

A conversation between Tzfia Dgani and Avital Barak on the concept of \u201cgesture\u201d and Dgani\u2019s artistic action in recent years.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Avital Barak (AB): This conversation is a continuation of the meetings held by the research group \u201cThoughts About Gesture\u201d in the course of 2017 at the Institute for Public Presence at the Center for Digital Art in Holon. As part of the concluding stage, an event is due to be held in Tel Aviv\u2019s Rothschild Boulevard with actions (performances) by the group members in public space. Tell me what you\u2019re planning.<\/p>\n

Tzfia Dgani (TD): I\u2019m planning a performance called \u201cIntegrating Without Deviation\u201d. It\u2019s a performance in which a camera is installed in the middle of Rothschild Boulevard with me in front of it. I have to remain within the boundaries of the camera frame, without paying attention to it, and without the passersby on the boulevard identifying me as being filmed, for an hour. I have to integrate into the boulevard. I can pretend I\u2019m going somewhere, stopping for a moment, tying my shoelaces, glancing at my watch, arranging my bag. I have to integrate into the existing order in the public space, and not in the staged order the camera creates, even though the stage I\u2019m on is clearly defined.<\/p>\n

AB: In effect you\u2019re proposing a performative action that\u2019s associated with your previous works; once again you\u2019re exploring the boundaries of your presence as an artist and of artistic work as an object, this time using your body. I looked at the works you sent me, several times. It took me a while to understand that I need to look at \u201cThe Gospel\u201d series as a sequence, and that gave me some context. Ayelet Hashahar Cohen wrote in the text accompanying your exhibition: \u201cTzfia Dgani [seeks to] explore the nature of artistic action, to wander between modes of realization, to linger in the \u2018in-between\u2019 between idea and execution, and trace the materialization of the spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m interested in framing \u201clinger in the in-between\u201d and \u201cmaterialization of the spirit\u201d. For me the whole story of \u201cgesture\u201d began in order to try and understand something about the in-between. Between exterior and interior, between movement and stopping. The moment of the encounter and the stopping. Something happens there, something creative that changes the direction of the movement, because the movement continues. This thing, when I identify it, immediately jumps up at me and it connects us with gesture. Gesture as an intermediate space of happening.<\/p>\n

And the second thing is associated with \u201cmaterialization of the spirit\u201d, I can\u2019t stop thinking about it. In recent years I\u2019ve been engaged in a big project, images of Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock and their influence on society and culture in Israel and Palestine, this story of the embodiment of spirit in material acquires different meanings and engenders very dramatic events in the space in which we live.<\/p>\n\"\"\n

Avraham Yitzhak<\/em>, color print, 2015
\nFrom: \u201cThe Gospel\u201d, Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan | Curator: Ayelet Hashahar Cohen<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"
\nUntitled, Formica and gold fabric, 2015
\nFrom: \u201cThe Gospel\u201d, Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan | Curator: Ayelet Hashahar Cohen<\/p>\n

TD: Yes, it\u2019s fascinating that you put your finger on these two points. Gesture, that intermediate space that\u2019s on the threshold, occupies me and enables me to locate myself in relation to the different cultures or institutions I identify. With regard to \u201crealization of spirit in material\u201d \u2013 this is a crucial question that has engaged me since childhood. I was raised with the aspiration to build the Temple \u201cspeedily and in our days\u201d, and to do so in practice. On a Judaism of land and gold, a Judaism of material. I realized that the question of realization is at the center of life here, and it will also decide the Jewish-Palestinian conflict. When I came to study at Bezalel and was exposed to \u201cWant of Matter\u201d and the perception of Judaism as a religion of words, it came to me as a surprise. And all my religious senses screamed: \u201cNo, no, but I know something else. A Judaism in which all the commandments engage with materials, fabrics, food, actions.\u201d The Zionist enterprise is engaged with realization in its modernistic meaning: fantasize something, believe in one ideology or another, and try to realize it in reality. The religious Zionist enterprise takes a different direction, it engages with religious realization: reviving the relationship with God, which happens by means of the religious actions performed in the territory of the Land of Israel. There are all kinds of revival strategies. The Temple also occupies me in the modes of presentation it offers, of concealment: in the very heart of the Temple is the Holy of Holies into which no one is permitted to enter with the exception of the High Priest one day a year \u2013 Yom Kippur. The complete opposite of the democratic museum we are familiar with, which everyone is permitted to enter all the time, and everything is hanging on display. When I\u2019m in a museum I often find myself sitting in the dark room where a video is being screened, just to breathe for a moment. To rest from all this visibility, from the visible observing body that\u2019s in the white spaces of the museum. Bialik and Ravnitzky<\/em>, which is currently showing in Bat Yam, is like a prologue to the exhibition in Art Cube, the Jerusalem Artists Studios that opens this month. In it there are photographed paper cats that I secretly positioned on a table in the national poet\u2019s house. This is a key work because it opened up a lot of questions: What is a museum? What is its connection with nationalism? What can I as an artist do in this space, and what can\u2019t I do? The exhibition at the Artists Studios is a continuation of this investigation, because there too I explore a space with art in it: installations I made in Airbnb apartments in Poland. I present boxes that open and contain photographs and objects. I\u2019m interested in creating an exhibition site that doesn\u2019t belong to the \u201cspectacle\u201d in the frontal view a museum offers us, of a picture hanging on the wall. It\u2019s also connected with the tradition of gazing in Jewish religious institutions, like the Temple and a synagogue, that possess a babushka-doll dimension: spaces nesting within spaces. The curtain, the ark, the mantle, the Torah scroll. An onion with multiple layers. Or the broken Tablets inside the ark, inside the Holy of Holies, in the holiness, in the courtyard, in Jerusalem. What engenders the space, what\u2019s in its center, is the least exposed to view. And there are two more references in this regard: one is Duchamp and how he challenges the institution of the museum with the suitcases he created, and Lacan in whose clinic a painting by Courbet, The Origin of the World<\/em>, hangs behind a curtain.<\/p>\n

\"\"Bialik and Ravnitzky<\/em>, 2014
\nCurrently showing at the Museum of Bat Yam<\/p>\n

AB: Apropos the Temple and thoughts about place, space, and the future, it mainly raised a lot of questions in me. Questions about presence and absence, about blindness and revelation. The disruption that continues, that\u2019s imperceptible.<\/p>\n

TD: I\u2019ll say that I\u2019ve read, and am still reading, the article by Elena Filipovic about Marcel Duchamp, A Museum That is Not<\/em>, which is about an exhibition in a suitcase, a project of Duchamp\u2019s in which he collected photographs of his works and engaged primarily with ways of displaying them, and with an exhibition he secretly created after announcing that he was retiring from doing art. On the one hand he says: I want to show art, and on the other he says: I don\u2019t want to show art. This text was written a hundred years ago, but when you look back at the experiments of art, that\u2019s always what they engage with: surmounting a kind of comprehensible appearance on the one hand, and drawing closer to something that\u2019s impossible to display on the other.<\/p>\n

AB: Do you mean the gap that always exists between experience and language? What can\u2019t be expressed in words?<\/p>\n

TD: That\u2019s right. There, in the article, it goes in the direction of a museum as a disciplining place and an attempt to create a different relationship in which it is not the space that determines the conditions of viewing, but rather the viewer. Disrupting the white space.<\/p>\n

AB: I\u2019m connecting with Duchamp and his engagement with readymade; you also make extensive use of readymade artworks in your art, in games of gesture (and tribute).<\/p>\n

TD: Yes, frequently of iconic readymade art. Images that have already been etched in consciousness, fixed in our eyes even before we see them. It\u2019s interesting to intervene in these kinds of images because you settle in a familiar area and perform an ironic or poetic change in it, or tell a joke. Everyone is familiar with the Mona Lisa<\/em>, so my takeoff, my type of attitude towards it, makes the act simple and readable, yet there\u2019s still something of my subjectivity in it. That is, the choice of readymade is first and foremost communicative. Because I encounter difficulty around this issue. You need a minimum of shared cultural context for what I\u2019m concealing to be discovered. And there have been times when I didn\u2019t have that minimum. Art isn\u2019t some kind of magical universal language of stain and form, as we possibly imagined at some stage in history.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a kind of challenging the culture we\u2019re all supposedly born into. Mona Lisa<\/em>, yeah, right! What is the Mona Lisa<\/em>? I don\u2019t really know anything about her, even if let\u2019s say I\u2019ve read books about when she was painted and how (which I haven\u2019t). But I do know something about how I look at her. We live in a time in which the first layer of culture is the layer of knowledge accumulated about something. Returning to see it mandates some kind of twist.<\/p>\n\"\"\n\"\"\n

Mona Lisa 1 and 2<\/em>: Mona Lisa, 53X77 cm, color print, 2015
\nFrom: \u201cThe Gospel\u201d, Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan | Curator: Ayelet Hashahar Cohen<\/p>\n

AB: I want to go back to your work in the Knesset (Israel\u2019s parliament) and Bialik House, to how you infiltrate into the Knesset archives, perform a manipulation of documentation, leave a mark, disrupt, and eliminate the evidence. The same in Bialik House, a kind of minor resistance, creating a crack, and vanishing.<\/p>\n

TD: Apropos resistance, I don\u2019t think my works meet that standard.<\/p>\n

AB: I actually think they do, it\u2019s precisely that small action, precisely not making world-shifting changes, not saying OK, now I\u2019m changing the government, now I\u2019m stopping the occupation, or now I\u2019m changing women\u2019s status in the world. That\u2019s not the story. It\u2019s the series of small actions that always stand up to a force, an order, or hegemony.<\/p>\n

TD: But there\u2019s something in these actions that conveys a declaration about wider potential.<\/p>\n

AB: Precisely, it\u2019s the declaration about the potential, this place that you say, It\u2019s possible, that\u2019s how it is, it\u2019s a frame of mind. That is, what is potential? It\u2019s the possibility of change.<\/p>\n\"\" \"\" \"\"\n

\"\" \"\" \"\"
\nImages 1-6:
\nUntitled, Bureaucratic Smile<\/em>, 55X50 cm, color print, 2015<\/p>\n

During my residency in the Jerusalem Artists Studios I visited the Knesset archives, I took out images engaging with the space and building of the legislative authority, and processed them into a digital collage. I took the treated images and reinserted them into the Knesset archives for the benefit of researchers who will (surely) come in the future and (hopefully) pick up my trail. As a philosophical action this is an attempt to enter eternity. As a conceptual action it is an attempt to change the mechanisms of representation from within the system.<\/p>\n

TD: I\u2019m not trying to create works that seek to indicate a potential for change. Perhaps you recognize that this is their effect. It still arouses reservations in me. The work in the Knesset engages with the question of representation. I created something particular that seeks to not deviate from its particularity. People ask me: What are these sticks the women are holding? What\u2019s on the table? And I reply: What you see is what is. I want to do art. For me, art is the most important category within this system. Maybe in the future I\u2019ll become a painter, and this headache of where does art exist and why, will stop. I\u2019ll accept tradition \u2013 because a painting exists within a tradition \u2013 I\u2019ll be traditional, and I\u2019ll fit in. But in the meantime, the course of my life is anti-traditionalist, it\u2019s Duchampian. So I ask: What is a museum? What are the conditions in which an artwork exists? And I also ask: What are the viewing conditions in which an artwork exists? And it has a double meaning because of my name [lit. in Hebrew, Tzfia = observing, watching, viewing). So I go to Bialik House and install cats there.<\/p>\n

AB: But even when we talk about art, and not political art in its purest meaning, it\u2019s done within a particular context and in relation to systems of power, fields of action, and, of course, tradition. When you install cats in Bialik House it\u2019s funny and playful, but it also raises a series of questions concerning the place in which you intervened and concerning your choice.<\/p>\n

And when I took an in-depth look at your works I saw the motivation to disrupt something. To say: Hello, I\u2019m doing something in Bialik House that I\u2019m not allowed to do, seizing ownership of it, playing here even though it\u2019s not supposed to be my playground, but you won\u2019t catch me because I don\u2019t leave any traces.<\/p>\n

The question always arises of whether it\u2019s even possible to topple the system, what is the meaning of the small, minor actions, or what is the ratio of an individual\u2019s willpower in the face of big power. I don\u2019t harbor any illusions that I can change the world order in my art or academic writing, I can on a small scale, and this small scale is what interests me. When I try to understand the political potential of a movement, and zoom in, when the movement encounters restriction, and another zoom in, focusing on the in-between, the intermediate space in which gesture appears, on the moment the political appears, to paraphrase Agamben. In that small, momentary place there is potential for praxis, potential for a small change: manipulation of an existing photograph and returning it to the archive, and who knows how it will influence a future reading of history.<\/p>\n

TD: That articulately describes this intermediary space in which I act, which on the one hand seeks to look at history and intervene in it, and on the other, the artwork is smarter than itself, and certainly me, and I\u2019m interested in giving it precedence. This is a principled position that was formulated in contrast with an ideology, even with what\u2019s called \u201cgoodwill\u201d.<\/p>\n

AB: Mona Lisa<\/em> is a woman you disappeared. Rabbi Kook was the spiritual guide of the tradition you come from. These are political choices, they\u2019re not random.<\/p>\n

TD: I don\u2019t come from the kind of thinking of doing political art, but endeavor to do art, and sometimes it\u2019s called political. But it\u2019s never the core, it\u2019s not an attempt to convey a message that will change something in the world outside. It\u2019s not an attempt to influence. I am immersed up to my neck in questions of sovereignty and identity, but these are the same questions concerning what is a man, what is a woman, who said, who decided. And the same questions about God. Political art as a genre sometimes serves me as a canvas on which I can paint something. In this respect, it is not political art that wants someone to understand something. Perhaps it wants someone to not understand something.<\/p>\n

AB: This is interesting with reference to our discussions on gesture. Is the disappearing of Mona Lisa<\/em> a gesture that\u2019s signified as disruption or sequence? If it\u2019s disruption, in the way Benjamin reads Brecht\u2019s plays, that Brechtian moment, the gesture that disrupts the narrative and signifies the critical moment, the moment at which viewers are asked to look at what they\u2019re seeing with a critical eye. Perhaps a moment of lack of understanding or the emergence of a question.<\/p>\n

TD: Making a collage of the Mona Lisa<\/em> without Mona Lisa directs the gaze to the setting that existed at the time of painting. To the landscape, to the background against which she sat. To the space, to the relationship that existed there between Leonardo and Mona Lisa, but also between Mona Lisa and the geography in which she is located. Of course, Mona Lisa<\/em> is considered the \u201cwoman\u201d, and the earth is also sometimes considered a \u201cwoman\u201d. Both of them are engendered by the gaze of the male painter.<\/p>\n

AB: Remember we read Agamben\u2019s On Gesture<\/em>, he actually continues Benjamin\u2019s reading and views gesture and the action of art as a moment of disrupting sequence, also in the space of political happening, where the political can appear. That art is a moment of interrupting the sequence. In the group we placed Goffman in contrast with him. In his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life<\/em> he argues the exact opposite \u2013 gestures are what we communicate through, by means of which I do something and you read what I\u2019m doing and understand it.<\/p>\n

TD: So I\u2019ll say Goffman, because it is a kind of desire to communicate. I assemble moments that create a setting in which relationships exist. For instance, in \u201cThe Gospel\u201d I took the image Avraham Yitzhak<\/em> as an icon, and made it so he closes his eyes for a moment. Blinks. To restore to him that moment of small blindness. It\u2019s also a response to the phrase: \u201cSee it like this and sanctify it\u201d.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

AB: In the verses on sanctifying the month there\u2019s something odd because there\u2019s a leap between the signifier and the signified. When you point at something and say its name. Here it points to the thing itself.<\/p>\n

TD: Rashi says about the first verse of the Torah that God created the world, but it is Israel that establishes time. That it\u2019s only when they point to the moon and sanctify it that a new month begins.<\/p>\n

AB: It\u2019s interesting what establishes what. I\u2019ve just read a definition of the concept of \u201cborder\u201d in an article by Merav Amir in Mafte\u2019akh<\/em>, border as an effect of a multiplicity of performative praxes. She presents the difference between the performativity proposed by Butler in contrast with that proposed by Goffman. Butler would say that it is the naming that establishes identity, while Goffman would say that the gestures of the thing precede the naming. First the light of the moon, and then time.<\/p>\n

TD: I want to take it back, and it\u2019s not only Goffman.<\/p>\n

AB: Obviously, because there\u2019s something dual there. Your motivation for action is dual, it comes back to the place of presence. You want to integrate, but you actually create a disruption of sequence.<\/p>\n

TD: Something in the relationship between signifier and signified and which was there first. The Jewish religion in particular has a set of gestures, imperatives, detailed instructions for every hour of the day, for every day of the year. For example, in the morning you should first put on your right shoe, then the left, and then tie the laces on the left shoe, then on the right. It\u2019s written in Kitzur Shulchan Aruch<\/em>. That is, it\u2019s not that it describes an action, but the action is determined first of all in reading what\u2019s written. It\u2019s an inverse relationship. And there\u2019s a kind of literality in this sort of existence. It\u2019s etched in flesh. I once heard about someone who stopped observing the Commandments, but when he discovered that he\u2019d mistakenly eaten pork his body expelled it. He couldn\u2019t tolerate it. It\u2019s not aversion to the meat. It\u2019s the signifier \u201cpork\u201d.<\/p>\n

AB: So that we aren\u2019t left with the signifier \u201cpork\u201d hanging in the air, I\u2019ll conclude with an open thought. In an attempt to understand what is \u201cgesture\u201d it\u2019s not possible to truly single out just one type of gesture. They exist as a web, sprouting from one another and feeding the explicit and implicit meanings of an entire system \u2013 in our case, your artistic action. Any attempt to single out meaning and create clear boundaries for gesture is destined to fail precisely due to its liminal location.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Top: Jacob<\/em>, goat wool on cast plaster, 2015 (from \u201cThe Gospel\u201d)<\/p>\n

Bottom: Luca Giordano, Presentation of Jacob to Isaac<\/em>, 117X191 cm<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> In the Bible it is written: \u201cAnd the LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt saying, This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you\u201d (Exodus 12:1-2), on which the Talmud elaborates: \u201cSee it like this and sanctify it\u201d.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

translated by: Margalit Rodgers<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIf I walk up and down here while speaking to you, that does not constitute an act, but if one day I<\/p>\n

Read more <\/span>><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[43],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n