Of Dead Dogs, Winged Horses Dancing Pigs, Wise Monkeys, and Hairy Humans

How did your book come into the world?

It was quite a long time since I had last exhibited, for all kinds of reasons, and many works had accumulated. I wanted to make a book to echo the action. I brought the materials to designer Noa Segal, who is also a good friend. We started looking and saw that there were endless materials in addition to paintings, photographs from trips, photographs of my son Liam, of friends, images from the Internet that interested me. We realized that we were going to work with materials that spread over a period of ten years. We tried to create the climate of my work. Noa defined it as “backstage”. During this process, I realized what an artist’s book is, and what is important to me. For example, I realized that the reproductions cannot be 100% similar to the painting, and there is no point in trying to create a sense of reproduction. What is important is to create an independent and unique world, which is the book. 

I wanted texts, but not academic ones, but more poetic, friendly, intuitive writing. Happily, the friends I asked agreed, Ilit Azoulay and Uri Gershuni. After that, I thought it would be right to have a text that clarifies the Japanese contexts in the works, so I turned to Dr. Shalmit Bejarano, an expert on the Edo period. Through each of them, some truth was revealed and clarified something for me about my work. For example, Ilit Azoulay used many images of sound, from her acquaintance with me. I always say that I would very much like my works to be like sound works, both in their immersive effect, and in the sense that it can be one moment jazz, then techno, then hip-hop. Not a quote, but a naturally unfolding introspective mashup. The process was very reflexive.

The book is edited like a storm. How do you achieve such freedom?

We gave up on chronology pretty early in the process. Even in my exhibitions in recent years, I try to break any kind of seriality or order in the conventional sense. I mix styles, sizes and techniques: watercolors, pencils, oil, ink, etching. We worked spread by spread, with thematic connections but in a very implicit way. Many times only I understand why some images are together. Sometimes the connections are biographical, sometimes formal. It doesn’t scare me that there is seemingly no clear connection. Because if things are not connected, then they need to be made to connect. I believe more and more in a fluid world, things stand alongside of and not opposite.

The title of the book is also a list of things “that stand next to things.”

Uri Gershuni sent me his text with this title, and I immediately asked him to use it as the title of the book. In my eyes, Uri is a wizard with names, among other things. Of course the name is also kind of a joke. I really like the comic-tragic tone in general. It’s nonsense and also Zen Buddhism. I see it in Eastern European culture. I was born in Moldova, and there was a lot of sarcastic humor in everything that had to do with criticism of communism. This is the most effective and stimulating. That’s what I like about the title of the book, it makes light of the tragic contexts of the materials that are inside it.

And the book’s size?

Noa made most of the decisions. She suggested that it be something between a “workbook,” a sketchbook, and a gallery display with white space around the works. We decided that there would be no page numbers, and that you could leaf through it in both directions.

Let’s talk about Japan for a moment. Throughout the last decade, you have been conducting a dialogue with Japanese culture and the Far East in general in your works. How did the Japanese thing start?

It was falling in love without realizing I was in love. I did my BA at Haifa University, double majoring in philosophy and art. One of the courses was Zen Buddhism with Prof. Joel Hoffman. To this day, I remember that the course was on Tuesday, and if it was canceled, I would be really disappointed. Only in retrospect did I realize that a lot of things happened to me there. I fell in love with haiku, then with Butoh (Japanese dance theater), years later I got into Japanese tattoos, and then with UKIYO-E (woodblock prints), which in Japanese is “pictures from the floating world.” It took me years to understand and accept that I am a Japanophile. So things came together, and I traveled to Japan, was bitten by the Japanese bug and it’s been that way ever since. And something beautiful happens over time. At first it’s like learning and thinking at a conceptual level. At some point it internalizes and becomes more refined and experiential. And by then it’s in the blood. I feel that the Japanese iconography has been assimilated into me, and it comes out of me effortlessly. Shalmit and I had a mutual click from the beginning. She understood what I was doing and the contexts in the paintings and she read them in a fascinating way.

In an interview with Portfolio you said that you are completing a trilogy dealing with violence in your current exhibition (Anatomy of a Killer, RawArt Gallery). How is this related to Japanese art, or is it just one channel for reference?

In Japanese art there are genres that are defined as dealing with violence, for example Bloody Prints. There is a genre that deals with pornography (SHUNGA) and in general there are quite a few presentations of violence. Even in Western art there is a lot of violence and in general wherever images are spread, they are violent.  Violence is everywhere, on the road and in the occupation, in line at the post office. I don’t idealize it, but can one imagine a world without it?

Regarding occupation and imperial forces, there is a kind of chapter in the book, which is bordered by two titles and contains portraits of people of authority. Can you expand on them and why they were “given a chapter”?

I have an attraction to paintings of dictators. John Berger, whom I like very much, has a text that is a political reading of a Dutch painting from the 17th century [see: "Frans Hals and the Regentesses of the Old Men’s Alms House, 1664," in John Berger, About Looking, Pitom Press, in Hebrew]. This chapter, bordered by the pink pages, has portraits and still lives, like in Dutch painting. For example, a painting of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef like a bust made of chocolate (70% cocoa), Benjamin and Sarah Netanyahu hugging like a work by Jeff Koons of him hugging Cicciolina. When I drew Mark Zuckerberg in the context of dictators, next to Putin, in 2011, they thought I was crazy, today everyone understands that this is a dictator. The portraits are interwoven with an “Israeli” still life, which includes the artificial sweetener “Sukrazit,” Nescafe instant coffee, wafer cookies, “beigele” (round, donut shaped cracker-type cookies), falafel. In my view, these objects deserve to become a still life. You don’t need to combine them with silver dishes and crabs and lobsters or decorative stemware. On one side I called this chapter “Royalty” and on the other “Still Life &.” This is my homage to kitsch, an important and beloved cultural element, which is why the chapter is bordered in shocking pink.

In the book there are photographs of objects, kind of sculptures that are hybrids, which you also give names like characters.

It’s all kinds of objects that I collect and reassemble into something new, a kind of game. I got “Hipster” as a gift from a friend. It was a lotus-shaped plastic lamp from India that probably cost a shekel and I added the top of a Matryoshka (Russian nesting doll) and a mustache to it. I love these things. “My ancestors” is an object that consists of a skull that I also got from a friend, and a crystal vase that we had at home in Moldova. My father’s grandfather was a carpenter who specialized in building wooden church roofs in Moldova. He is the base of “My Ancestors.” The object “Red Beak” is the first one I made. This is a penguin I bought in the US. One day I was in Lisbon and there were golden halos, which were actually cheap painted metal. I bought one, I couldn’t resist. Only later did I realize that the penguin was going to become a saint.

I can spend hours looking at things like this. “And he followed his eyes,” is made from a shoe tree that stretches shoes—my father also gave that to me.  I attached eyes to it that I bought on Ali Express. Actually, that was a first incarnation. I put more into the current eyes. But in the book I also included photographs of objects that I did not construct. For example, a statue I photographed in a temple in Kyoto, which symbolizes for me the connection between image and sound. It’s really beautiful how the figure seems to take characters in and out of its mouth, like a whisper. It illustrates the connection between the experience of sound and image. Like a mantra. It also reminds me of comics.

It’s thrilling how you take the hybrid to the edge. Ilit Azoulay wrote about it in the book like this: “Not even nausea will help one tolerate the shameless humiliation of abolishing the hierarchy you did here.”

I just think it’s a mistake to compare West and East. They are two things that are present next to each other. There is no point in comparing and ranking a steak and quiche, you can enjoy both. I look at Japanese art from the 17th century and see how it corresponds with pop art from the 20th century. Hybridity is understanding that there is no superior culture. Everything lives together, and the exciting possibility is to be in all worlds.

Making a book is like... 

It’s a very, very concentrated and intimate object and at the same time, you can put it in a bag and go. What a marvel!

What book should we add next to our library?

Miki Kratsman has just published a book that I am reading, The Archivist (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2020). The photographer Yaakov Israel published a newspaper with his works and very beautiful texts. I also really like Boaz Aharonovitch’s books.

Where can readers get a copy of your book? 

Everyone is welcome to write me here: ruvenkup@gmail.com.