Photographs and Chalks

Tamar Getter

(Published in Studio 68, January 1996, pp. 20-21 [Hebrew])

In the late 1970s, I could not conceive of a figure in my work without a camera. What wasn't a camera was a contour, a circumference, a silhouette. The possibilities of creating a figure were tied with the insights bequeathed by Pop Art, and earlier – by abstract; to wit: various schemes, cutout outlines, and stenciled images. Any other option seemed to me like a regressive painting. Two things I categorically did not want: I didn't want to become a photographer, and I didn't want my work to suffer from the conceptual banalization of molds. But two things I could not possibly give up: photography and the stenciled image.

What kind of a pair are photography and stenciled image? What kind of a pair is it when every child knows that photography, first and foremost, provided painting with another type of stenciled image; and also, ultimately, with yet another type of an ideal, generalized figure, and another fiction of absolute space and time, devoid of history and lacking a viewer? So what range is allotted between the contour or the silhouette, and photography's promising voluminosity, which is equally schematic and replicated? An ostensible range, except that photography's inherent schematization, is mentally ignored, and our richer knowledge of things does not affect its magic – it is precisely that mental erasure of the schematic trait. Thus photography can indicate the maximal distance from the line.

I work with a projector. Most of my linear schemes are likewise projected onto the canvas. This was my work mode from the very outset. The torso figure, for example: one was selected, from among numerous drawings, made into a transparency, projected and painted on the canvas – as if it was a photograph, a photograph of a thing in the world, as if it had another existence prior to the painting, as if it still has another existence after painting. Whereas my line withdraws from the intimate, concrete, unique materiality of the "arty" line, my photography is cast onto the intimate, concrete, unique materiality of the painting. This is the hyperbolic absurd that intrigues me.

The image of the "idiot's" head featured in Double Entrances often recurs in my work, for instance on the wall of Fisher Gallery, Los Angeles (1993)(see p. 334): one projection, scores of paintings. Each head is a different gesture, a different "error," a different manual appearance, a different case in matter, a different "chance," and also – a new "idiot." The same applies to the ten paintings comprising The 'U' in Gustave.

The duplicated line in my paintings aspires for fixation (the very same torso, or building, has appeared in different paintings for years, like a photograph that can be printed in a thousand copies), but photography, which is the art of fixation, "opens up" (twice the same "idiot" is impossible).

There is something obsolete about photographs, for they offer a fake intimacy and appear like a conquest of oblivion, although they mainly generate it. I always want to be within them, to penetrate the black-and-white substance, to help it remember and signify, to draw from it the optimal proposal of a world, to extract "being" therefrom. I am interested in an intensified, ideal "being," a fantasy of being, I could say. I have no interest in realism, namely, in the mimetic. By "being" I allude to an opportunity to touch life's non-yielding, indecipherable facet. But something is as terribly miserable about the circumference line: it is likewise an attempt to capture an optimal proposal of a world. The first painting in the world was the contour of a shadow. Such a hypothesis about the birth of painting exists, and whether it is true or not, for me it is axiomatic.

Photographs and chalks have captivating, luminous textures, an irresistible seductiveness. One may discuss it in terms of the favorite, tastiest, most vital food. It is the bread. Hence, painting can be a thought about textures that are solely luring. And painting is necessarily always about painting – it is an ancient thing. You don't eat it. Ultimately, you only see it, and think and talk. Painters who entered the orchard (PARDES) and lost their minds, ate their brushes, or ate their paintings, and ate their paints, or started hearing the canvases speak to them. When poet David Avidan is on the edge, his poem drops itself off the cliff's head. And all this because painting, in its best prospect, is being, and the poem in its best prospect, is being.

The artwork's emotion, its state of mind, its idea is a thing formed, made in matter. There is no way of separating it from meaning, from a conceptual content. You either hit or miss with your matter. And how does one find precision in matter – this is the greatest question in the impossible, the less and less possible, conversation, in the ever-so-rare discussion of painting.

Finally: the here-and-now of photographs (here it is) and the here-and-now of the chalks (it), albeit different, offer me two types of full and seductive presence, equally unbearable and empty. And the chance that their here-and-now will be truly filled with here-and-now involves some resistance to the way in which they sweep across the past.

For Pollock, for Beuys, to paint meant to move, to breath; for me – it is to pause and remember; it is a shame there is no other word in Hebrew to denote such a confrontation of reality. When I say 'remember,' I do not necessarily have in mind a concept of value, nor preservation, reconstruction, judgment, or representation. The experience of life's here-and-now, everywhere, has an uninviting facet, in the sense that it always calls up a "there-and-then" (past) and a "there-and-when" (future) to the fore, as abstract or fantastic as these may be. It is always a form of processing the present. I am attentive to the imagination processes that occur in such call-ups, and in my work I depict them, play with them. That which is judgmental or value-minded in the paintings, in cultural or political terms, is one of Painting's inevitable outcomes rather than its driving force.