words about my work

The boundaries between art and life are becoming harder and harder to distinguish. Ultimately art is supposed to disappear, so am I.
In the meantime, through a celebration of what I consider the beauty of certain ideas (beware of seductions) and of the notion of the good(beware of knowing) I would like to keep doing my work.

I believe that most of us, myself included, are in urgent need of seeing our blind spots. Otherwise we will keep making the mistakes we keep making - with the erring I deplore the most being the one leading to violence.

Born in a family that partially survived the Holocaust through various strategies, from hiding to resistance (as Jews, they were wanted dead more than alive) I carry the weight of how destructive blindness can be. Whether it is in regard to the authorities "in charge", or in relation to our desire not to be bothered and the belief that if we are good, others have to be, I know from the murdered members of my family that reality is a complex interplay, some kind of hide and seek struggle to perceive what might lie ahead.

So art becomes a platform to create a dialogue both with my audience and myself in an attempt to see where the blindness resides. Instead of James Turrell’s exciting seeing the seeing, I propose to see the non-seeing.

In the late seventies, with performances-for-video that attacked the viewer or through image processing aimed at slowing down the ingestion of images (Tapes, HopeYou and Unity Through Strength), I tried to torture my nemesis, the TV-watching-captive-audience, all consumed by its passivity.

Later through personal documentaries, using myself as a form of seismograph, I explored the legacy of shame as perceived by secular European Jews (Say I’m a Jew), and the unease of another legacy, the one that prescribes violence as a form of expression for men (Like Men).

As museums and galleries started putting video art in a less prominent position during exhibitions (monitor+bench near exit), along with many others, I veered towards video installations. There was another reason: I was always disturbed by the one-way communication that came with video presentations - I speak, you listen- and felt the need to create an environment where the audience was able to respond. My pieces would thus become the confluence of my voice and my audience’s. Most of the time this entailed simply having a black wall with chalk (JEW, Ot HaEd-The Sign of the Witness).

Some of those interactive installations involved graphic triptychs (Information Missing, Ot HaEd-The Sign of the Witness). Most of the time the theme remains still related to some kind of visual impairment, i.e. how peacetime contains the seed of war. In many ways I could say that the books of Ernst Friedrich (War Against War), and Serge Klarsfeld (French Children of the Holocaust) constitute an inspiration, even if their work falls outside the art world.

More recently, within Jews in Paradise (working title), I am addressing the theme of religion (spirituality for those who keep a safe distance from organized religion) as an aspect of Jewish identity. This has taken me to interview many rabbis, scholars, writers and teachers in the field. My goal is to try to address the debatable link between ethics and religion and to present a view of Judaism that makes sense to myself, an overall secular Jew. Why would that most private realm be exposed when it can't be? The final product would be an installation around a DVD; the details are still unclear, except that the issue of time and its seasons would be an organizing factor.

I am also working on Life Sentences a web site consisting of three parts, three chambers.
The first space filters the news on the web to update constantly the country and the number of people killed (so that the desire to kill is not presented as a foreign element, it probably will include the various murders taking place in the U.S.). This would be the equivalent of a chaotic place waiting for some form of recycling.
The second chamber presents the visitor with an input window where they can finish the sentence: There will only be peace when... The sentences become assembled in series of concentric circles. More at: http://artsci.wustl.edu/~marton/sentences.html
The final chamber, a place for interactive contemplation. Inspired by the script written by the Visual Thesaurus (http://www.plumbdesign.com/thesaurus) it would function as a repository for the completed sentences. This third area would function as a place equating a bird’s-eye view of our thinking. It is a place for visiting the floating sentences, which can be tugged at by a mouse move, the whole structure resembling a mobile by Calder (w. the sound of a light breeze?). The arrangement would follow some cataloguing according to key words with the goal of assembling tree-like structures i.e. the no peace ever possible branch, the violence as solution branch, the justice tree, the religion one... The hoped for result being that we would be able to see where most of our thinking leads us, and in that process have a peek at our blind spots.

Some of these pieces can and probably will have various evolving versions, whether within installation, video, graphic or web presentations.
If we think of buying a particular car, then all such cars are suddenly noticed, the power of selective looking is a tremendously treason to our reality and environment, yet most the time we are unaware that our blinders are on. In spite of the blindness of my subjectivity, that of a man, a Jew, with my fears, my desire to believe, can I still widen the scope of the perspective we share?
In my own dirt, from under the carpet, maybe the ground is actually fertile.