Five Legs

How does a book come into the world?

A book is born out of a dream. A big, unrelenting dream that you have been dreaming for a long time. In my case, it is a dream that started 20 years ago, when I began writing. For years, I felt the pang of a dream that didn’t materialize. A book is a journey that requires a lot of strength and you need a reason to do it. To quote Paul Auster: “Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.” It was only after I discovered the story in my life that I knew I’d have to tell it. I realized that this was the engine for the manifestation of the dream in the world.

In addition, I think a book is born when there’s a platform where it can be presented and displayed. In the last years, the field of artist books has flourished in a way it hadn’t before and I’d like to point out two factors that have influenced the development of this field locally. Mifal Hapais, the Israel National for Culture and the Arts, which began to provide support for the publication of catalogs, artist's books, and graphic novels and led to a boom that literally changed the bookshelf. The second is the Artport Book Fair, which created a quality space and context for showcasing artists’ books.

When did you start working on the book?

The work on Five Legs began three and a half years ago, in early 2017. The first version was what is today the book’s first chapter. I wanted to get it out quickly for that year’s fair because I was afraid that if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t have the energy to get the story published. But after editing the book and making some proofs at print shops, I realized that I’d have to dedicate myself to this project and put three years of work into it. I met people and showed them the first version. Later, I submitted the book to the Israel Lottery for Culture and the Arts. During the submission process, I realized that the book needed to be five chapters. 

You’ve already made one artist’s book, dBook, without any text, and here in the studio you have notebooks upon notebooks of sketches, paintings, and drawings. Can you tell me a little bit about your process as an artist active for 30-plus years?

For years, painting was my main medium. I never strayed from it. It was clear to me that this was who I was. And then, I had a crisis. I reached a dead end with painting. At the time, I came across the book The Artist’s Way and it spurred me to start keeping diaries. That was 20 years ago. Writing quickly became a significant aspect of my work and found its place in the art. I started creating site-specific text installations (a glimpse into the process of working on one of these projects is described in the fifth chapter of the book), which I constructed from texts I wrote. I learned that I do not have the ability to influence the sequence in which the visitor reads in the exhibition space, but that I can influence their movement. The choreography of the viewer’s movement is influenced by how the texts are positioned in the space.

At the end of 2012, about a year after my father’s death, I began a new chapter in my work that didn’t previously exist. I started to draw. It was like entering a room that had been locked for years. My work in the medium of drawing happened alongside the rise of social networks, and the journaling element took on a presence. I draw from photos I have on my mobile phone, and the sketchbook is more or less the same size.

This means that the drawings exist in several spaces.

In terms of art history’s definitions, it’s very difficult to say “what is the original” here—the photograph, the drawing, or the scan? I relate to drawing as “first generation,” the digital image (I call it a ghost image) as “second generation,” and the image that was constructed later from my image bank as “third generation.” The image can appear in all kinds of works, there are recurring images. It doesn’t have an expiration date. The image in our age was born as a simulacra. It needs to adapt itself to its various appearances, in digital and real spaces. It turns into a representation of representation. Raw material, original, and copy at the same time. I am very preoccupied with this dynamic.

It’s amazing to think of drawings as an image bank.

The journaling action in sketchbooks has yielded a vast archive of images. I started scanning the images and archiving them on the computer according to year and subject. Once the image was digitized, for me it became a fragment of a language that I can use in different ways.

Most of the time you draw with a pen?

Yes, I work with Pilot pens. Black and red. There’s a link between the sketchbooks, the pen I draw with, and the medium of the journal, which is essentially akin to writing and different from what I do on canvas. 

How did you come up with the book’s five-chapter structure?

A year after I made the first mockup, I presented the book with five chapters. Three chapters were written by me and two more by outside writers. But as I continued to work on the book, I realized that I wanted to write all the chapters myself. It’s interesting to see that the principle of the three and two was preserved.

I knew I wanted each chapter to be written in a different style that would have a unique relationship with the images. Except for the first chapter, which I had already written, I thought about the formats of the interview and the diary because I use these a lot in my writing. At that stage, I had one chapter left. I didn’t know what it would be.  And then a year ago, I was rummaging in a box I have in the studio that I call “My Subconscious.” While looking for something for another project, I came across the envelope with the letters my father had written about the prisoners of the Yom Kippur War. And then, I knew right away that this was the missing chapter, called "Convalescent Home."

When did you decide to add English?

In 2018, I had several exhibitions abroad, and was able to frequent bookstores and fairs. I realized that there was no way I was going through this journey with the book, and then not to be able to present it abroad because of language differences. I decided to plug in the English without making a two-sided book because the texts work together with the images. That gave birth to the idea of a book that opens from the top. Only later, with the English translation, I noticed the difference between lifting and leafing and I realized that there’s an action here that’s like opening a secret treasure chest.

Both languages ​​create a very inspiring cognitive echo, especially in the first chapter. It turns the reader into a researcher who’s trying to understand where the truth lies.

When I met with the translator Gilah, I had already done the mockup of the book. By then I already knew I wanted the English to function like another character in the story. I didn’t want there to be any sense of a “translation,” but rather that there’s another parallel story in another language. While reading the Hebrew, the English runs in the background, and as the reader you knows that you’re not “in on it.” You kind of know, that there are some details lost in translation.

The first chapter was the hardest to translate. We worked on it over and over again, and in some places we also changed Hebrew in favor of the English. It started by giving up on the double meaning of the word “sister,” which in Hebrew can mean a sister in the relational sense, and also nurse, which is lost in English. And in an attempt to make up for the tone “We know we have no other sister.” This continued with the decision to leave deliberate gaps as part of the book’s contents. Despite the feedback I got while working, that readers might think this was a bad mistake in translation, my intuition told me to trust the reader-viewer’s intelligence.

In the course of reading, there is a movement of connecting and dismantling, meaning the raw materials, texts, and images that are collected and broken down.

Yes, the drawing in the book is not illustration. You could say that it does the opposite of “illuminating” the text. It sabotages reading. The image is created from a system of editing and combining, as a kind of “third image,” a hybrid, which is always searching for meaning.

Are all the documents that appear at the beginning of each chapter from your father’s office?

Yes, these are scans of original documents I took from his office when we emptied it after he passed away: copy paper, pay slips (before printing), stickers, notes from his secretary. The stickers I drew on are mailing list stickers printed with the names and addresses of the recipients. The holes on the side show that these were printed on old-style printers that had those pins that held the printing paper in place. Some even had his handwriting on them. The first chapter Hospital has a page of blank stickers. One day Michal, the designer, suggested that we could add drawings to the stickers and then I remembered that I had once done a series of drawings on stickers. Once I found this series it was clear to both of us that this was actually another chapter in the book. Later, Michal made the magic of the book’s cover out of these.

How do you position yourself in relation to the story of the prisoners of war? As a reader, I was completely “disarmed” when I got to this chapter. It’s difficult to be angry with someone who was just in the hospital a moment ago. And the erasures in white, your private censorship, felt to me like white flags within the book.

This chapter is the closest thing to talking to him. I give him the place of the creator, the writer, the editor and the one handing out badges of honor. Opposite his heart-rending voice, his being a hero, telling a story, gaining recognition, I identify with the prisoners who paid the price of the interrogations but also identify with the place of the interrogator who is himself a prisoner of a militant state. This duality is the complexity of the multiplicity of faces and the meanings I want to point out.

While working on the book, as its creator, I take the position of researcher, embarking on a journey of collecting the pieces in an attempt to understand where the story was, and how it was concealed. Very quickly, I realized that the act of completing the puzzle is doomed to fail. The answer is not found in one truth that is or is not revealed, but in the process I go through and the event I create for the reader-viewer. 

This is a book with many secrets, and the name of a book is also like a secret. Will you let us in on it?

When I met Shoham Smith, the book’s literary editor and showed her the mock up, she really liked it. But, she said, there’s one thing you have to change: the title.

What was the book’s title then?

The title was Five Legs. I told Shoham that I wasn’t thinking of changing the title but that I’d think about it. I actually slept on it one night and the next morning I wrote her an email: What do you think of The Three and Two? “Great!” She wrote to me. But then, immediately after that I felt no, the name is Five Legs. A month later, she told me: “You know, I thought about it. You’re right. A lie doesn’t have two legs, it has five.”

There is no access to the book’s starting point. The legs are ostensibly the constitutive image, but also not.

The title Five Legs doesn’t appear in the text, but it does in the images. There is a duality here that is part of the book’s language. You don’t come across this term literally, but you see it throughout the book in infinite visual variations.

How do you define yourself in this context, as an author or painter, a writer and/or editor?

It took me years to realize that the link between identities is based on disconnection. Like two sides of a page that can’t be put side by side. None of these labels fits me comfortably. I feel like I’m both this and that, and not this or that.

While working on the book, I began to define myself as “art queer.” I borrowed this term from gender discourse and brought it into the field of art. It helps me live in peace with the incompatibility I feel with respect to existing definitions.

Who did you dedicate the book to?

The book is dedicated to “My sisters,” “leahayotai” in Hebrew. For me it’s one of the most powerful texts in the book. When you start reading the book, the dedication doesn’t have much meaning. When you read the book again, you understand the additional layer. The word aḥot, “sister” appears many times throughout the book, and of course I consciously refer to the double meaning of “sister”—sister and nurse, as noted above. But when I finished the book and was writing the dedication, I added the Hebrew letter lamed to the word “aḥot,” which is equivalent to the preposition “to” as in “dedicated to.” And then, I realized that this additional letter makes the Hebrew word into the verb leaḥot, which means to stitch together or to patch, like a wound. I realized I had completed the circle. When I wrote the dedication, I burst into tears. 

What do you consider to be the book’s success? 

The success of finding the wonderful partners I worked with: the literary editor Shoham Smith, the graphic designer Michal Shapira and the English translator Gilah Kahn-Hoffman. A book is not something you do alone and choosing the right partners is critical. To my delight, I had the good fortune and privilege to work with wonderful creators. Working with them was part of the book’s creative process and success.

The second thing that I experienced as a miracle is the fact that I was able to connect all the parts. It’s a book that deals with disconnection and connection and gaps in the perception of reality and the multiplicity of languages ​​and mediums of expression. All of these parts are who I am and throughout the creative process, there were many moments when I felt everything had fallen apart. One day I came back from a work meeting with the designer who lives outside Tel Aviv. I was driving on the coastal highway and suddenly I realized that this was the first work I’d created to date that contains the most parts of myself. 

How long did it take to make the book?

I worked on Five Legs for three and a half years. I’ve been writing for 20 years, so it probably takes 20 years.

What book should we add next to our library?

My shelf of Israeli artists’ books has grown a lot in recent years and has many books I love. I bought most of them, and some of them I got through an exchange with other artists. It’s really hard to choose. I’d recommend Leigh Orpaz’s book American Optical, Guy Shoham’s Painting Machine, Tal Yerushalmi’s Baskets Diary, Hila Laviv’s My Rainy-Day Book, but I would also like to recommend another book, The Tear Passages are Clear by Noa Sadka, published by Resling. I took it off the shelf recently and found the dedication that Noa wrote to me 10 years ago: “To Merav, the book came out. It came out in the end.”

Where can readers buy your book?

On my website, at HaMigdalor, Sipur Pashut, the Nahum Gutman Museum shop in Tel Aviv, and Mileta (Rehovot).