The Fear of What Is Suddenly Too Late

Dear Avraham, I'm very excited to host you in the magazine. We're having this conversation around your current exhibition, “The Fear of What Is Suddenly Too Late,” presented in two adjacent spaces: the Janco-Dada Museum and the Art Gallery in Ein-Hod. This month, your monograph, which gathers over 60 years of your work and is edited by Dr. Galia Bar-Or, was launched at the exhibition.

You have made eight artists’ books and dozens of catalogues. The release of this monograph is an opportunity to talk about an aspect of your practice—bookmaking—which has received less attention until now. You work in all visual media and sound. You are 86 this year, and already 30 years ago, you were making books and book objects. There is so much to discuss, and we'll only be able to touch on parts. I always begin each conversation by asking: How is a book born?

I’ve always loved books, as vessels for texts, and as desirable objects. Even today, I can’t ignore abandoned books; I always sift through them, and I’ll usually rescue one or two that catch my interest and bring them home, to one of the overloaded shelves in the house or studio. From this habit of collecting, I began to create object-books that combined the content or title of a found book with something from my studio or my imagination. At the same time, being someone with a strong instinct for cataloguing and preservation, it was natural for me to compile images and photographs in book format. That’s how all my books were born—including the current monograph.

When we met at the exhibition, you smiled and said, “This isn’t a retrospective.” The fact that this major exhibition is not a retrospective becomes even clearer when you open the book, which contains hundreds of works. One could say that the book is a kind of summary of central themes in your work. How did you select the works for the book? What were its anchor images?

Galia had a clear vision, which is expressed in her research essay, and certain images were important to her in that context. At the same time, we both gave Ayal Zakin, the book’s designer, the freedom to choose and sequence images as he saw fit. I trusted him completely—he had designed my previous book, Out of Boulders, with great sensitivity and understanding. My contribution to the making of the book was to supply dozens of photographs of works, many of them previously unknown to my collaborators, which I had taken over the years and continued taking during the editing process. I photographed the works in the book, and Daniel Hanoch photographed the exhibition installations, which also became part of the visual narrative. Galia wanted the book to serve as a future research tool, so she included installation shots, as well as almost a complete record of exhibitions and publications.

The sequence of works is divided into three "image cycles": Muscles, Brain, Place. How did you arrive at this division? What was important to you in terms of image editing?

When looking at the full scope of my work, one can see that the main series are connected to different aspects of the body, often intertwined with social—and at times political— commentary. Muscles and Brain are titles that encompass relevant creative chapters, which include themes of illness and hospitalization, not in a direct sense, but rather as triggers for series that reach beyond the personal, toward broader human and social meanings.

The title Place refers to the fact that it wasn’t possible to fully feature my decades-long photographic work in the monograph, and so Ayal suggested we include a few images from series that document disappearing worlds—two streets in Haifa and Bedouin villages in the Negev, photographed at the moment of transition from “the tent to the villa.” The "cycles" reflect on the connection between the body and its surroundings, between the personal and the political, and the ways in which themes in the work move across media—something Galia’s text explores in depth.

The book opens with important forewords by Zeela Kotler Hadari and Raya Zommer-Tal, and a comprehensive curatorial essay by Galia Bar Or, who places your bodies of work along a linear timeline while also deciphering them through Georges Bataille’s concept of L’informe (formless). Through this lens, she draws out remarkable insights about the singularity of your works and prophetic elements within your practice. Do you feel this sense of formlessness continues to resonate within the book itself?

The book’s opening was an unconventional suggestion from Ayal, and at first, I had doubts. With no introduction or warning, the reader is confronted with a series of images from the "God" series (2005)—only later does the book settle into a more “normal” flow. I was a little startled at first, but I recovered quickly, and now it’s a part I’m very fond of. Maybe that’s one of the ways the formless pulses through the book.

This is a series you’ve spoken about in past interviews (see: Haaretz1, Portfolio2), which you created after a near-death experience during surgery. It was also the first series I was drawn to in the exhibition space—a brilliant opening to the book that creates a sense of disorientation and breathlessness. How did the collaboration with designer Ayal Zakin unfold?

We had several productive meetings where we exchanged thoughts on the book’s materials and layout. As I said, working with Ayal is a pleasure, and I deeply respect his approach. We’re both built for collaboration and mutual understanding, and that helps a lot.

Here’s an example: in one of our meetings, Ayal unexpectedly focused on a work of mine that was hanging on the wall and said he thought it should be the book’s cover image. He took it with him to scan and explore the idea, and after some time, showed me the final mockup, which I found powerful and beautiful. As a side note, I’ll mention that this work is a three-part etching that was printed at the Jerusalem Print Workshop for an artist’s book of mine called Fear. Throughout the book runs a poem by Rami Ditzni.

It’s fascinating to see how the same images appear in your earlier books in different combinations. Your previous seven artist’s books are almost all photographic works—each a distilled visual inquiry, sometimes minimal, but always full of vitality and beauty: Out of Rocks, gathers your wonderful photographs from Kibbutz Shamir; in The Art of Museums, you paired exhibition space photographs with quotes by artists and thinkers about museums. Each of these books is a precise gem, a complete gesture. The new monograph seems to bring together all the media you’ve worked with—a kind of culmination, perhaps?

The new book is a temporary peak that encourages me to keep going. I’m already thinking about the next one—a collection of portrait photographs. Over the years, a substantial and worthy body of work has accumulated, and the time has come to bring it to light.

That's amazing. Unlike your photography books, The Armchair is made entirely of drawings. In an interview with Neri Livneh (See: Haaretz3), you mentioned that your partner, Margol (Margalit Gutman), found a notebook containing drawings you made during an extended stay in the U.S. for surgery and recovery from cancer. Could you tell us about this book?

We were living in New York, in the home of Rafi Gamzu, the cultural attaché at the Israeli embassy at the time, who generously hosted us during my hospitalization and recovery from surgery to remove my vocal cords. Rafi is the son of critic and theoretician Haim Gamzu, who was also the director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

The armchair in the living room, which I observed and drew daily from my seat, became an intimate, almost mystical space. Naturally, Rafi’s apartment contained books about Israeli art, and in a spontaneous gesture, I began to insert elements from those works into the drawings. For example: Nimrod by Itzhak Danziger, the cat with the hand of Avni’s wife on it, and others.

In one drawing, the armchair is surrounded by portraits of iconic artists from Eretz-Israeli art, inspired by a James Ensor etching I saw at an exhibition in New York. In another, the armchair becomes an abstract form emerging from the head of architect Frank Gehry, also inspired by a powerful exhibition of his work.

The book was produced in a limited edition of 120 copies, in the format of a sketchbook in a high-quality facsimile print. One could easily mistake it for the original sketchbook. It includes a moving text by Joshua Sobol. The book opens with two pages of handwritten drawings and descriptions of the vocal cord surgery process, which I used to explain the experience to friends, followed by a blank double spread. Silence.

The silence and gaping void in The Armchair—in that empty spread—make me think now, as our correspondence draws to a close, about the persistent awareness of the finiteness of life that runs through all your work. It exists in parallel with a virtuosity that reaches toward timelessness. Making a book is like...?

Installing a very complex piece.

To whom is the book dedicated?

My partner, Margol. She is the greatest advisor and supporter in all of my work.

Which artist should we invite to the magazine?

Hila Lulu Lin Farah Kufer Birim. She keeps making new books all the time.