2018

The book was published in December 2017, and is, as you call it, a “useful daily planner” for 2018, celebrating the bicentennial of the birth of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's fictional masterpiece. We are conducting this interview in late 2020, so instead of asking “How does a book come into the world?” I would love to start by thinking backwards from right now and asking what the year 2018 was like for you, and whether the journaling action proposed by the book to its readers materialized?

The journaling action was a great surprise. I didn’t think it would generate so much buzz or get so much attention. I wanted people to use the book, as a diary, and I also knew it was hard to use because it’s loaded with details and there isn’t much free space. Nonetheless, it felt right to me to invite people to intervene in it, because today we experience reality in a layered way; augmented reality is a kind of conceptualization of layers of history in which we exist. The state of being born as a tabula rasa, like Frankenstein's creation, lacking knowledge, is not accessible to us in an age of image overload. I was hoping people would intervene in the layers of the planner, and this really happened. Artists responded and sent examples of their interventions.  

And you also held a launch event. How was the book’s circulation?

There were many launches of the book in 2018. I was invited to stage a launch exhibition at the London Jewish Museum in which I presented the planner together with some of the drawings that appear in it. My action at the museum was to generate by way of the planner, a double narrative within the museum’s permanent exhibition, which invites an additional narrative reading of the objects in it. I went into the museum’s archives and the collection on display and selected items which I combined with the drawings from the book. In addition, I incorporated my works along with second-hand items with no museum value. The museum has three floors: on the entrance floor, I staged an exhibition simulating the display of the museum's display cases, on the second floor where the Judaica exhibition is located, I fixed numbers to items in the display cases; and on the third floor, I inserted my works into the museum showcases. Wandering through the exhibition began in the lower space. The viewer was invited to put on red gloves and pull out the diary from metal drawers, to wander with it among the objects of the museum.

The exhibition led to an interesting dialogue with the poet Fiona Sampson who published a biography of Mary Shelley that same year. Fiona wrote a short text for the exhibition and an 80-line poem (one line for every image in the planner). Since the contents of the book and the museum aren’t synchronized and don’t overlap, this forced me to make challenging pairings in order to produce an alternative narrative. To me, that’s what Gothicism does. It creates a world in which new connections can exist. The more I insist on this world, the more I feel embraced into its mothership.

Apropos the mothership, there are many images from the world of shipping and the sea in 2018, and the book Frankenstein also opens with a monologue of the character of the captain. This is perhaps the emblematic figure of modernity, the man who sails into the unknown. In movies, when a captain is seen writing a diary, he begins by noting the date and the spatial coordinates of his ship’s location. That is, time and private space merge with the global, as does the personal search with a collective search for new knowledge.

Yes. The figure of the captain is perhaps also the figure of the artist, the thinker, the modern scientist, although the figure of the artist is also represented in the book, Frankenstein—the mad scientist. Although many will say, and I will agree, that there has never been modernity. We were “born” into postmodernism. 

What is certain is that the diary takes place in the coordinates of a non-linear time, it contains 12 months that add up to 57 weeks, with the month of November going back to 1818, so a kind of overlapping of time is created. When I was working on the book, the separation between the weeks and the months drove me crazy. I had to produce it page after page in editing. There are about 80 drawings throughout the planner—some from my personal life, some from ready-made Instagram photos I collected, some from 19th-century atlases and guidebooks. In fact, without realizing it, I created images for myself for a whole year, in advance.

Kind of a return to the future.

Yes, it was essentially creating a year and then living through it; a futurism that relies on the past, or vice versa. I set out with the thought of marking 200 years, but this moment stretched, and it was a surprise. When I embarked on the project, I didn’t think that dealing with time would be such a dominant component. Throughout 2018, I uploaded an image to Facebook every week. Social media somehow managed to dissolve the sharpness of the act of assembling linearly. 

This process led me to my next exhibition, in Magasin III Jaffa, Solar Mountains and Broken Hearts. It deals with landscape, climate and human time also from a dialogue with tarot cards, which for me are a representation of portals into the past, present and future, all together. Here, too, there is of course the influence of the inhuman creature in Frankenstein. We don’t know whether he’s alive or dead at the end of the story, maybe he never aged. He is a new man, who has given birth to a new time. 

​Thinking of new time, in the planner one can feel a hybrid of times, something from the imagined, slow and laborious time of the 19th century mixing with the fast, hectic, quick-to-consume-image time of the 21st century.

Interesting. My drawing is very slow, disassembled and technical, and for me it’s a bit time-stopping. It’s the opposite of the instantaneousness of Instagram. But, the thing for me is not reactionary, because I work with that immediacy. What interests me is the validity of each image as iconography. Icons are non-linear, like tarot cards. They represent something broader than human time on earth. To illustrate the point, I can tell you that my interest in Frankenstein began at the age of five, when I saw a costumed character outside a Florida amusement park. This Frankenstein is etched in my mind: attractive and scary. Today I can say that it is the romantic sublime—a window to another world. In this sense, I see the images that are created today as equal to the images that were created in the 19th century. We’re constantly reading images and using them as portals.

And your act of extremely exacting drawing in pencil is a kind of reading in itself. I am not exactly sure how to describe it, but there is something in your drawing that envelops the thing it’s creating, like it is trying to understand the abstraction of what’s being drawn. 

It’s like throwing a stone into the water and looking at the ripples, drawing is a movement in space and time. When I was in school, I would take notes during class, and that’s how the instructional material would enter my head. Apparently, there’s something in the physical action that makes an abstract idea concrete for me. This, of course, returns to the body. This insight sharpened for me with the work on 2018. It’s not just about finding the right pencil thickness.

The ripples that are produced are also narrational.

Yes, the book Frankenstein is also comprised of three circles. It begins with the captain’s monologue, continues with Frankenstein's text, and within it the monologue of the creature itself. Like a babushka doll.

You also create a lot of intertextuality between text and image. For example, the planner opens with a precise drawing you made of the title palge of Frankenstein from the same copy that once belonged to Edgar Allan Poe.

Yes, it again relates to layers and layered reality. The way my story, Mary Shelley’s, and Frankenstein’s story merge together. As a teenager in Jerusalem, my Gothic identity was tied up in an identity of rebellion and otherness. Mary Shelley wrote the book at the age of nineteen. The richness offered to me by the Gothic world relates to this layered beauty. The Sublime being a concept and an experience that we are still struggling with. 

Or the idea of absolute freedom, which was invented alongside modernity. And its other side—fear of freedom, of otherness, the lack of boundaries. Right now, in the current pandemic, suddenly I could feel these two parts collide ever so strongly. For a moment, the silence made it possible to catch from a bird’s eye view some “wholeness” between us and nature, and the fact that we’re living in a never-ending disaster.

In this sense, the coronavirus eruption is like the eruption of the volcano in Tambura in 1815, which you refer to in the book. Both had numerous effects over the world as “we” “knew” it.

Yes, this outburst affected writers like Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. It affected all of Europe—culturally, economically and psychologically. After 2018, my ecological thinking sharpened, and this was reflected in an exhibition I presented at the Jerusalem Print Workshop in 2019. At the same time, while at the Gottesman Etching Center at Kibbutz Kabri, I made another artist book of 12 engravings in a 35-copy edition, called Moon Walk. It’s a book of engravings, each of which is made in a different technique—aquatint, cold etching, sanding, greasy chalk.

I wrote a short text for it that talks about modernism’s golden cage. In it, I allegorize the moment of the eruption of the volcano to the moment of the birth of Neo-Gothicism and our period, which is the connection between romance and the beginning of modernism. This is the moment in which there is no separation; there’s no essential or incidental, no scientific or esoteric. Today we’re in a place of disintegration, of fake news. I see the parallels to today; we’re at a point where it’s difficult to filter what’s important. We are basically blind, but constantly trying to see. It’s a pathetic experience, and I’m very much in favor of the pathetic, because it contains pathos.

It reminds me of an amazing passage from the Book of Tao: 

“He who knows he is blind,

Perhaps he does not see,

But he at least does not have the disease.”

I will respond with a quote. This blindness you are referring to reminds me of the opening page of 2018, which features a quote by John Milton from Paradise Lost:

"Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay,

To mould me man?

Did I solicit thee From Darkness to promote me?"

I think this solicitation is an act of art. It’s an act of unraveling; not knowing what you’re doing until the end, because if you understand you won’t be able to keep rummaging around. It’s like my preoccupation with Frankenstein, I’ve been scratching at it for so many years, and each time I discover more shades within the black.

What difficulties did you encounter while making 2018?

As always, there were budgetary difficulties. There was also the pressure to get everything done on time. I started working a year and a half before the planner had to be ready. The drawings take time and they can’t be hurried. Another big difficulty was trying to market it, to find a publisher. And there were the technical problems of producing the object. I wanted a planner complete with the rubber band of a planner, a bookmark, and rounded corners; for it to be palm-sized and fit into a bag. I wanted 2,018 copies, and because rounded corners are made by hand, it was impossible to produce them in Israel; it could only be done in Europe and China. I worked with the graphic designer, Nadav Shalev, who knew how to work long distance on all the details. In the end, we printed everything in China, and I received organized boxes, with my name printed on them. The planner was essentially sent back to me by ship.

Amazing.

Yes, and another thing happened too. Because I made a website and sold the planner in advance, I had to send copies to everyone who had purchased it. Like the captain who sends his sister in England a letter at the beginning of Frankenstein, I sent the planners to supporters at the end of the project. Everything was hand-wrapped and mailed out. It became a part of the work without my planning it.

How did you edit the book?

There wasn’t much to edit. I worked on the layout with the designer and curator Tali Ben-Nun. At first, we had to determine the look of a page, of the weeks and months. To understand the longitudinal layout of the days, the look of the numbers. After that, I organized the content. There wasn’t a lot of internal editing, because the logic of the planner was already built in.

Who did you dedicate the book to?

The book is dedicated to my son, whose name is Hanoch. While working on it, I discovered that Hanoch is the Jewish Prometheus. There’s a parallel between the character of Hanoch—who gave the written word and knowledge to human beings—and Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods. This corresponds nicely with Milton’s quote you just read: there’s an etymological connection between the word promote and Prometheus, both of which speak of groundbreaking thinking, of forward or seemingly forward movement, and its costs.

Thank you so much for this talk. Where can readers get a copy of your book?

At the artist’s studio, Givon Gallery, or on the book’s website.