1. In terms of LINEAGE, what do you see as key points, in the development of your language, from ancient expression to what your process is today?

A partial list of historic influences on my performance work are: the gaze in Rembrandt’s portraits, crossing into the viewer’s space; Leonardo da Vinci’s association between landscape and portrait; Vermeer’s coordination between object, gaze, space; Francisco Goya’s modes of positioning of the human figure; James Joyce’s “stream of consciousness”; Minimal and Conceptual art which triggered the use of my person as the manifestation of the minimal and conceptual; Federico Fellini’s non-actors; Jean-Luc Godard’s insertion of the political in film; Luciano Berio’s and Mauricio Kagel’s voice work; Vito Acconci’s spaces of consciousness; Jerzy Grotowski’s Sacred Actor; and Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinematic compositions.

2. What are the important EXPERIENCES / REALIZATIONS that moved you,
towards making the work that you make today?

In 1973, during my third year at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, in the context of my own society which was preoccupied with the sustenance of the military, and an academy dominated by male teachers, I became intrigued with creating events which will legitimize sentimentalities that are neither national nor religious, and make them visible. In the spring of 1973, I organized a wedding, at the old Bezalel Academy building. While this was not yet the performances and actions I would soon make, I placed most of my attention into forming my strategy on behavior whose purpose was to motivate the wedding guests—first, emotionally; and then, in their own actions—in an engaged manner, in the celebration. Later in that year, I posted a notice around the central spaces of Bezalel Academy of a smiling portrait of myself, printed in black and white, in silk-screen. It specified a place, a date and an hour of meeting, but did not include any information as to the nature of the gathering. My premonition, which was proven right, was that my amiable and recognized face would be enough of a temptation for others to adhere to the invitation. In the context of my art studies and work, with this printed notice I had achieved my first step in a visual and social transmission; I had now become engaged in a new medium in which the stimulation of one’s independent attitudes, in behavior, would become my visual and social art— “social sculpture” or “performance art.”

3. What are your thoughts on the relationship between the work and AUDIENCE / RECEIVER ?

Throughout the process of creating the situation which will become my performance, I perceive an audience as a group of individuals. It is not only the location and its physical characteristics which I take into account when I create the performance, but also the context in which I will perform; whether it will be an art festival, a social-political demonstration, or an educational occasion. I also am interested in knowing what is the span of ages and social backgrounds of those who will attend the performance are, and of course, eventually, I have to decide how many persons the specific performance can contain. My performances deal, in essence, with the issue of multiple points of view, so that my work strives to make the individual in the audience aware that one is a part of a changing composition in which one must constantly make an individual choice of how to view the scene. In addition, in my performances, the individual in the audience will realize that neither one physical point of view is like another nor can one’s private impressions, thoughts and emotions, be identical to someone else’s. My intention is to make the individual in my audience aware of their own individual reactions to he performance event, which always touches on the social and political. If a person returns home with the impressions and definitions of what I had done (rather than being preoccupied with their own reactions) and they had become more conscious of their private intellectual and emotional stand, I have achieved much of what I had set out to do.

4. What motivates you to introduce MATERIALS / OBJECTS into your work?

The performance is a dynamic and changing installation of persons and objects within the span of a time and a location. In my performances, chairs, platforms and carriages are explicitly chosen or designed and built especially for the performance. Whether the viewer is seated or being lead to view the performance from a carriage, the “furniture” facilitates the experiences of viewing the performance from other and particular spatial angles, distances and spans of time. The carriage in “Tearing Hymn” for instance, elevates, separates and distances some members of the audience from the remaining members, thus creating different vantages of comprehensive vision; now that two audience groups are formed, they also both become, to each other, a possible point of focus. And a few words about chairs—though chairs have been used countlessly in my work, they are still a source of inspiration. I am still fascinated by the possibilities inherent in them, as definers of points of view and of division of the space and audience, whether sat on or not. The objects and materials facilitate compositions of images, in addition to the audience, thus creating more references in the performance. Materials and objects such as vegetables, a bowl, a child’s shirt, a blanket, a shoe that excretes red paint, have all been a part of my work. My fingers touch and fondle the objects to arouse the sensuality
inherent in the physical material, as an extension of the observer’s eyes. Under the spell of my tactile movement, the objects will often go through metamorphoses and change their form, thus investing new unexpected notions into the performance situation.

5. What are your thoughts on SOUND / SILENCE in your process?

About the sound: the physical, bodily production of my voice as a sound is an auditory element that is present as excerpts in many of my works, and more dominant in others. I would like to elaborate here on my use of the voice in my performances: I imagine the sound of my voice as matter—physical, with the consistency of shape, of texture, of weight, of temperature—as detailed and as real as imagination can envision. I then animate my internal muscles, contracting and expanding them, to various extents and to imagined forms, with care and energetic thrusting, with flexibility and stiffness, with attention to breathing and swallowing, and contraction and expanding of abdomen and womb, thus, maneuvering the sounds within my body. In this plasticity, the physical dialogue of the movement of the visible and invisible organs, in the torso and the limbs and, of course, the shoulders, neck, head and face will have physically facilitated the production of sounds. The imagined materiality of the sound also alters the movement of the muscles of the face and the mouth, to their final excretion of the substance. About the silence: in the plasticity of the bodily production of voice, there are such exerted efforts, physical and expressive, that the quiet manifests itself as tension before any sound is expelled. This occurs often and sometimes for long durations and as a release of tension at the end of a voice movement. Still, there are many works where there is no use of my voice. In these performances there is the quietude of the gazes—my own and the gaze of the audience—which project another presence. One may name that quiet “the silence of expectancy,” which is meaningful in that it fills the space with the presence of the monologues of the minds of the audience, which are audible in an unphysical manner.

6. What are your thoughts on TIME / RHYTHM in your process?

Time is a quality that is sensed in my work and brought to awareness by the viewer. The individual watching my work is preoccupied densely with their own thoughts. A part of these thoughts is their own reflections about the meaning of time. The performances do not captivate in the sense in which one is enthralled by a story, but one finds themself immersed in questions about their self, their own existence and time. In this situation, rhythm is very subjective and not at all objectively shared in the same manner by all present. Tension, immersion, captivation and unquiet are all present in the atmosphere but not as a sound component, and this applies also to my voice performances. Although these performances also project sound, and some may call it music, one cannot term it rhythmic if rhythmic is a quality that everyone can tap to in unison. My work does not project the common, the similar, but only the option that we are all rightfully not alike.

7. What are your thoughts on SPACE / EMPTINESS in your process?

In truth, I like the empty space. When I choose a location for evolving and creating a new performance I try to interfere as little as I possibly can with the site’s unique characteristics. The place where I have chosen to perform already has, to my sensibility, a state of consciousness; it already has a vision, in itself, which I wish to retain and envelope into my own. I place or situate my viewers meticulously so that their presence does not block their own vision of the location, nor mine. The empty space must be retained, just as a canvas of a painting must not be blocked by too much paint. When presenting a performance at a new location, I want the location to speak through the work. The first thing I consider is the effect of the architectural structure on sound and acoustics, on objects, lighting, and on the atmosphere. The second thing I consider is the number of persons and their physical situations, within the space. I arrange the space in the exact manner in which people will sit, stand, lie down, or walk. These points of view, sound, angles and distance, shades and tones, renew and change in the sum of the coordinates of each specific location and the specific individuals’ experiences in that specific Installation.

8. Where do you see the greatest challenges in your future process? 

For me the challenges occur in the process of working, and not before, beside, alongside, or after … All I can say is that I look forward to these challenges.

9. If you had to use WORDS to describe what you do, what would those words
be ?

I have recently come across a short text that I had written as a very young artist, in 1973, which I feel is related to this discussion. It was written in Hebrew but I have translated it to English: The Interdisciplinary in my work … I mean, the process of work is not realized necessarily in its attachment to one medium or another, in the actual work with body or voice, but in the concentration that, in fact, has no outer expression in the process of preparations. The process of work actualizes in the bias between me—my body, my voice—and the
context in which I live and create. From here, the interdisciplinary for me is a state of the spirit more than anything else. The interdisciplinary reflects in the clearest way my view and my manner of thinking. This is why, paradoxically, I witness my body as no medium, in any formal sense of the
word, but a channel through which I transmit my person.

9b. What is the question I fail to answer? 

What images does your work project in your plight to legitimize differences?

My answer, in short: My performance-work has echoed “National Traum” —not only Jewish, or Israeli, but the human trauma. I present images in my work which are aesthetic, familiar, and therefore attractive, but which I hope will arouse ambivalence as well. Some images which have prevailed in my work, during the span of 45 years are: the fundamental woman, Motherhood, the lamenting woman, the triumphant.