Fugue

Over the last three decades you’ve illustrated and written five books and a booklet, two of which have been translated into other languages, and you’ve created short films, sketches, pictorial and musical performances and shows that combine all of these. And now comes Fugue, and I want to just take a moment, before we leaf through it, and ask, how does the artistic path you took look to you now, from the distance of time?

We met in art school and came out of it working together, so our entire artistic path is a shared one. We started out and remained confused. We do our thing. The artistic path is to try to understand what we did and also learn how to live in peace with the answer. In addition, we had to learn to work together. Anyway, first we created paintings, acrylic on canvas, on social and political issues. We wanted to show them in a gallery, and then in a museum, and we wanted to change the viewers’ consciousness.

When we realized we had no chance, we switched to making books. We thought it might be easier to reach viewers in a book format. We wrote a text, a story; we created paintings based on or inspired by it; then we bound everything in a printed book and distributed it for a small sum so that it could reach as many people and as many places as possible.

In 2002 we started writing an illustrated trilogy that would touch on life as we know and experience it. We wrote and drew the first book—Lev Afor—a string of clichés of a young couple from the beginning of pregnancy until the birth of a kitten named Lev Afor, Gray Heart. 

We wrote and drew the second book in the trilogy, The Parents of Lev Afor, from 2003 through 2006. It describes the economic deterioration of Lev Afor’s parents following their firing from their jobs. The Diary of Lev Afor was published in 2013 and is the third and last book in the series, in which Lev Afor is now the 16-year-old daughter-cat. In high school she goes through the military education training that all students go through. The book was published in English by the Swiss EDITION PATRICK FREY in 2014.

Please Behave Naturally (2016), the fourth book we published, includes three short stories that each take place in a different location in Tel Aviv-Yafo. The first in HaPisga Garden and Midron Park designed by Avraham Karavan where the Jaffa Kasbah once stood, the second in Culture (Habima) Square at the end of Rothschild Boulevard designed by Dani Karavan, and the third in the traffic island at the corner of Shlabim Street and Kibbutz Galuyot Road in South Tel Aviv, designed by the Tel Aviv Municipality.

Fugue (2021), our fifth book, is a story of a journey spanning three generations. It begins with a trumpet blast, as befits a campaign of world conquest, and ends with the faint sounds of a piano in the darkness, in Tel Aviv of the 1950s by way of the 21st century. The book was made over a five year period and is our longest and most ambitious to date. It includes 136 of our color drawings and another 51 pencil drawings by Shira Borer, and has 416 pages.

In Fugue we broke the structure we had set in the previous books. Until now the drawings in the books we wrote were double-page spreads with a single line of concise and descriptive text on the bottom right page, and a linear plot. In Fugue we changed the structure: the text is relatively long, and is not limited to a description. Some of the drawings are double spreads and some are smaller and located in different places on the double spread. Many drawings appear without any text at all. The layout of the text and drawings and the relationship between them changes throughout the book. The text no longer has a fixed place at the bottom of the page on the right, and the plot is not linear, but is revealed indirectly and fragmented through the characters, who each tell parts of it.

I fell completely in love just from the book’s title. I learned from the Internet that the term “fugue” comes from the field of music and describes a complex piece of music in which several different voices are combined, creating a special harmony. The word “fugue” is a Latin word, which means escape or retreat, and it is also used to describe a temporary dissociative state wherein a person experiences loss of identity that can last for days and they can even end up in a completely different physical place.

All the aforementioned elements are given an equally spectacular visual and textual interpretation in your book, and more than anything, the book meets the dictionary definition of the Hebrew word “fugue,” which means “pause,” “respite" and especially “doubt.” I assume that this is what you meant when you wrote in the “About” section on your website: “Through our work, inspired by our immediate environment, we attempt to depict our vision of Tel Aviv and Israel.” So how do you make a “fugue”?

In hindsight, it seems to us that Fugue is a break we took to observe the path we went through as artists. The core of the book is a short illustrated story called Fugue (2007) (8 drawings), partially based on a short story by Avigdor Hameiri. It was made following an invitation to participate in a special issue of the Dutch art magazine OPEN. The name of the special issue was Amsterdam 2030: War Zone. The story takes place sometime in the future, in Amsterdam. We have added many new paintings to the eight paintings from 2007 and they all appear in the chapter titled “Thomas,” the third chapter in the book and are accompanied by an afterword by Brigitte van der Sande. Thomas, by the way, is Thomas Tooke, one of the book’s protagonists. He is “an artist, who writes stories and then illustrates them, and finally binds everything in a printed book.”

The first image in the book is of a colorful airplane flying in a clear blue sky; everything in it is open and full of possibilities. There’s no text, but it has a clear forward movement. On the other hand, the last image, which includes the caption: “The boat stopped. I went home” is of the Tel Aviv City Hall on the night of a full moon but is blacker than black. It seems like you can’t escape from Tel Aviv even if you really want to. After a long journey of 416 pages you come back here, to the dark house in which the only light is up in the sky, out of reach of hand and mind. As in Fugue, Tel Aviv also stars in all your previous books. In the Lev Afor trilogy, it even appears on the covers. You have a complex relationship with this city.

This is the only city we know. We’ve never lived for an extended period in another city. We are residents of what others call the “state” of Tel Aviv, and by necessity, we always refer to it, because it always surrounds us and is a part of our lives. If Tel Aviv is our home, what would we want to run away from? Only from it. What can we escape from? Only from it. And then we’ll return to it, because that’s what there is.

The opening drawing reminded me of Tzila Binder’s illustration for Journey to the Island of Maybe. Both Tzila and the poet Miriam Yalan-Shteklis and Elisheva the doll went to a land far, far away, but in the end, they returned home. You also have an interesting relationship with the escape, or as you so pertinently wrote “the normative cousin – the journey – that starts yesterday and ends tomorrow.” And yet, until Fugue you insisted on looking directly at the reality close to you, with minimum distraction and maximum sharpness. In what way is this journey different from its predecessors?

It seems that the book Fugue looks at the path we have taken. The three main protagonists—Sheila, Thomas and Sally—are artists with different affinities to us. When we made the three books in the Lev Afor trilogy we knew what we wanted there to be in them, even if not exactly. We started working on the last two books, Please Behave Naturally and Fugue without any such forethought. We were looking for stories that we could leave our mark on and that would allow us to convey our Israeli experience, life, and everything. In Please Behave Naturally we stayed in Tel Aviv, and in Fugue we left it by plane and returned two generations later by boat. At the same time, the experience ceased to be “Israeli” to a large extent. A kind of inner escape, we guess, a “fugue” if you will.

Another thing that has changed: you are big fans of collaborating and merging disciplines, but if I’m not mistaken, with all your previous books you made sure to work as a duo. This is actually the first time that a third party is involved in the illustration of the book. Shira Borer is responsible for 51 pencil drawings. She speaks a different language, devoid of color and full of beauty; line, delicate to the point of fragility and yet sharp like a photograph that is associated with you is preserved and even emphasized in Shira’s work. How did this great union happen?

We are big fans of collaboration, and the first one is between us, Adi and Shahar. In the Lev Afor trilogy we had guest artists: Yoram Blumenkrantz, Itai Onik and Shira Borer chose the line of text they wanted to draw, and drew one picture as they wished, without any direction from us. At a fairly early stage we realized that we wanted Fugue to include a travel diary and for this journey to be drawn by someone else. Shira is a dear and old friend of ours. We know her and her drawings and paintings. We thought that if she was interested and able to commit to such a demanding and long project, she would be perfect, and we were right. We gave her the texts of the travel diary. She drew as she like based on the text, without instructions from us. There were two years of conversations, planning, misunderstandings, praise and blame, fights and reconciliations, but it was worth every moment.

Another person who entered the picture is the book’s editor Noam Kaplan. What was it like for you to work with an editor after all these years?

Noam is Adi’s brother. He’s a filmmaker (now completing the editing of his second feature film that will probably be called The Future), a film teacher and a script editor. Fortunately, he lives nearby us. Every book needs editing, and a graphic novel needs twice as much editing—language editing, text editing and image editing. Noam handled the latter. The work is similar to that of a script editor and he slipped into the role easily. Every time he dropped what we called a “bomb”—a massive deletion or a big change—he’d present it gently and leave us to mull it over, to recognize the need for it.

An editor can look at the work as a whole and point out places that prevent the whole from coming to fruition the way want it to, or that hinders the flow, or prevents it from being communicative and understandable. It is much more difficult for us to look from the outside at the work. But even before we gave a draft of Fugue to Noam for editing, we sent it to friends who read it and offered comments, which led to major changes in the book at an early stage. In this context, we would like to mention Tami Burstein, the language editor. We didn’t have any experience working with a language editor, because until now our books had a few hundred words at most. We don’t know how other language editors work, but when we worked with Tami we saw with our own eyes how a text which we thought was good was not; and that it can be made much better with editing.

In this book you really allowed yourself to write more text, the words play a more significant role than in your other books.

The book contains a lot more words and we love it. Every book we’ve made contained at some point many more words than there were at the end in the printed book. For a long time, the draft version of Fugue had three times as many words as the book that was eventually printed.

The great guru Marina Abramovich wrote a list of strict rules for an artist’s life. One of the most prominent ones is: “An artist should avoid falling in love with another artist.” Apparently, you don’t agree with her; for almost thirty years you’ve shared not only your life but also your work. More than that: you actually finish each other’s drawings. Which begs the question: how do you do it?

We started this way from the beginning, shortly after we met in art school. In our third year we did a joint work and since then all our works are collaborative. Art is another part of our lives, and we conduct our lives “together.” It seems both of us are built for this. In practice it also leads to fights, arguments, attempts to control, and insults; all these things have not disappeared, but they are framed within the “together” and resolved there. If we were not satisfied with the situation, it wouldn’t be. Over the years, we also learned about ourselves—an artist couple, a complete but also divided organ, with inner desires. We learned to distinguish the ways in which each of us creates and to use these differences for the benefit of the work.

And is it always like this? Don’t you feel like drawing alone sometimes?

We draw alone, each in front of their own drawing. What is done together is the painting. But there are paintings that we liked after one of us worked on it without the other. In many paintings, we leave areas that were painted by only one of us. The drawings in the first book we did—Lev Afor—are by either Adi or Shahar. These are quick, largely intuitive, made directly from the imagination. We did not collaborate on these, but in the book they appear side by side, a painting by one of us alongside a painting by the other one. In short—we have two hands, right and left, and they draw in two different ways, and four eyes to observe them with. This expands our range of possibilities.

Do you also write the texts in the same way?

Yes. In the texts, the distinction between us is clearer. It’s easy for both of us to write, but it’s easy for Adi to come up with a story, and Shahar likes to change, edit, style, and polish an existing story.

All your paintings are full of bright colors, so why “Gray Heart”?

We met the cat who launched our books at eleven o’clock at night under a parked car. A dialogue of howls developed between us and at the end she followed us across the street, into the building and into the elevator, and then got out and walked right into our apartment where she remained for twenty-one years and three months. She was a beautiful cat, wonderfully symmetrical, with a smooth dark gray back; her head, chest and belly were yellowish and streaked with dark gray. When she sat like cats do—with her two front legs straight and her tail on the ground—the stripes on her legs, chest and belly converged in a gray fur heart.

Could you tell us about the cover of your current book? From your experience, what’s the best way to work on a book cover?

We start thinking about the cover only towards the end. Our books have a graphic designer, Yochai Matos, and he is responsible for the covers, as well as for the general appearance of all the books, and the interior layout, which includes a dynamic and uninterrupted division between text and drawing. It’s lots of work. In the first books we stuck to a fixed format—a single line of text for a drawing that spans two pages. In Fugue we broke the pattern.

If we return to the cover, in the Lev Afor trilogy we wanted to emphasize the books’ intimacy: Yochai chose to cut the cover to the size of the pages, so that the entire book looks small and simple like a bound notebook. Because of our desire for intimacy, we selected a painting for the cover that showed the house we lived in at the time. The same building appears on the covers of the first two books. For the third, it’s a different building because we moved. It was important to all of us to maintain the uniformity of the cover because the three books comprised a trilogy. When they were all printed we made cardboard boxes to hold all three books. We stopped making the boxes when the edition of the first book (Parents of Gray Heart) sold out.

When we made Please Behave Naturally we thought of a big book, which would look like an atlas. We all thought we would like a simple, somber cover that would contrast with the colorfulness on the inside. Yochai chose red for the cover and gold letters for the title (which was missing from the front cover in the first books). The cover of Fugue refers to the cover of Please Behave Naturally. It’s also somber—one color, and the title is in gold letters. It reminds us of an old botany book. We love the tension between the serious cover and the colorful contents, like opening a treasure chest.

It totally works. You started publishing books in 2008. How does one make books independently? How do you survive? What would you like to offer from your experience to creators and others starting out in the field?

We started in 2006. The idea and drive to make books was born from the frustration we felt, showing paintings for a few weeks in a gallery, after which they’d go back to the warehouse. Above all we wanted to make an impact. We thought books would be more accessible; we thought could bypass the power system that directs movement in the art field. We partially succeeded. We are independent, not so well known, and deal only with our art. That said, we would not have been able to make a living from it if we did not also have money from a small inheritance that came our way.

For an artist printing their book on a small scale—the costs are high, the sales are small, and the satisfaction is great. But if you print on a large scale, you stop being an artist and become a publisher. The country offers several paths of inadequate support, a fraction of the options available today in Western Europe, for example. We published books three times with the support of the Israel Lottery, including the current one. For us, these are exhibitions, and they are full of activity and excitement and more satisfying than a few weeks in a gallery.

Who would you want to leaf through your books?

Everyone, of course. They are for everyone.

Making a book is like….

Giving birth to a cat. No, of course not. Making a book is a long and interesting, exhausting and satisfying process, and the best parts are the ones that happen before the book is published—the drawing, the writing, weaving them into something that is greater than the sum of their parts; all of these are really satisfying. In our opinion, working on a large project in any field is satisfying and gives meaning and a horizon to strive for, provided that whoever is working on it likes the work and the results.

 Where can we get a copy of your books?

At fairs throughout the country: Israel Book Week, Comic-Con, Alternative book fairs (Fun-Fun Fanzine Festival, Alternative Book Week at Nachalat Binyamin, Jerusalem), the ArtPort’s Art Book Fair, and In Print Art Book Fair. In independent bookstores in Tel Aviv-Yafo: Migdalor, Sipur pashut, Magazin III Jaffa Books, and in Jerusalem, at the Mamuta store at Beit Hansen Or by ordering directly from us by sending us an email to tok2tok@gmail.com.