Slingshot Girl                                                         

Words at the Opening – Gordon Gallery, Tel-Aviv.

 

  Many writers and artists at the early 20th.Century shared certain awareness about the nature of images and their mode of being. I think of Pessoa now, because the way he posed the issue has been intriguing for me; At one point ¹ he sets some contrast between two propositions: 1. Landscape is a state of the mind. 2. A state of the mind is a landscape. Of the two he sees an advantage in the latter as it does not include the fallacy of theory, only the truth of a metaphor.

    During the work on Slingshot Girl, I thought that even an exhausted metaphor may offer such an advantage.

 

   The stone launched by the girl (in the video work) hits precisely the pistol a gangster aims at her, and disarms him - a delicate action, nobody is injured. By the film "Murder Masters of Kong Fu" from which I took the scene, thus she rescues her lover held by the gangster. So goes the tale – for me merely a trigger, though it is indeed tempting to think of painting or of art as of a rescue operation of sorts. But as art conveys no definite addressee, no absolute denotation, thinking of it as of a 'rescue operation' amount to none more than a poetic exaggeration. And yet, it is worthy to stay by the notion of action. This work certainly gazes at action; the girl's action, and my action on her cinematic range, and my drawing range. I could also speak of two continuums.

 

  A tale, or should I say an image, is the flimsiest settlement for artworks. It is also universally known that settlements must be abandoned as quickly as possible, or, be not settled at all, in the first place. I belong with those who believe that an image may be worth anything when it is negligible, or frail enough.

 

  The painter Eti Jacobi told me once a very precise sentence:" Image is always the last thing; forever it recedes into the background."

 

  Slingshot Girl is dedicated to her and to Yudit Sasportas because their work is deeply preoccupied with the gaze on an action and because I learn from them a lot.

 

Pessoa says² that each gaze resembles a pyramid, and each point of view is the edge of an inverted pyramid, its base indefinable. I can think it is so because it is infinity open.

 

 

 

17 October 2004.

 

  1.  fragment 36 in the Book of Disquiet in the Yoram Meltzer Hebrew translation

  2. Ibid. fragment 106 from the 15 May 1930