Image courtesy of the artist.

All art is collaboration, whether I am collaborating with myself, or with the subject, or doing a home portrait for someone—it’s one of the things I love best about painting. Then the painting is shared and it becomes a collaboration between the viewer and the piece.

blacklionart.com

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CM: There is a palpable emotional force that is present, a back story to your work that is very connected to your psyche, even when the narrative is clear, there is ambiguity, you are still leaving a lot to the audience.
OH: Basically it’s about my Dad, my relationship with my father. My father is always present in my life and work. He was a truck driver and when I was five years old he had a truck accident that left him paralyzed from his chest down. I have no memory of him walking, for me he was always in a wheelchair. Eventually I became interested in art and I had this vision of lifting him up and put him up on an unexpected spot just for a photograph. I wanted to place him on a big rock, a building, a ladder—an inaccessible platform and look up toward him. When I grew up I grew taller and taller and he always stayed the same height because he was in a wheelchair. So, my idea was to lift him up and look up at him, changing the angle of looking. This film has developed from this childhood longing.

CM: You went to great lengths. Your father wasn’t able to be physically available in your life since you were five. That physical burden made visible or manifest in 50 Blue with not only your brother assisting him by wheeling him across the Israeli landscape, but you include your family and the community to raise him up the platform you had built. You physically pushed those limits. 
OH: Right, when you growing up with an un-walking Dad you think of accessibility all the time. You think of motion, you see everything as a physical feat. Motion and accessibility became major issues in my life. The simple action of climbing the stairs becomes a huge challenge. I started to look at the world through my father’s disability. Its not just any person, its my dad—the person that set the example for me as a little boy. So it became a major issue, the burden, the hardships, the incapability. I think it’s also present in the situations that I develop in the films. Everything is awkward and heavy and cumbersome. People push big wheels uphill, they carry huge poles, it all comes from this primordial desire of mine to see my invalid dad on top of an inaccessible spot.

Film still from The Tractor, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

CM: The mind-body connection somehow was disrupted or interrupted for you. There is a physicality that you are questioning always. The hoisting of the rope—it doesn’t take one person, it takes many people to make this happen. 
OH: I think that’s another context story, I grew up in a kibbutz. It’s a small community, everybody knows each other, everybody depends on each other. It’s an ideology driven organization that is based on communist ideas of social equality and sharing. The community is like a big family that provides for its members, it creates living conditions of great dependence.

CM: That is in complete opposition to being here in America.
OH: Of course it’s a magnificent contrast. I think my work tries to explore the boundaries where the individual ends and the community begins. I seek the tension between the private and the collective. There is a theme that repeats in several of my works in which the entire society is being recruited to rescue one of their sons, this is where I manifest this tension. I also play with how much the identities are obscured, because the participants are usually covered.

CM: They are anonymous. 
OH: Yes, they look and act like an ant farm, everyone fills their role silently.

CM: You make collaboration happen in Israel from here. You have this ability to get everyone involved in your films, and you are about to go and physically make work with people again in the Ein-Harod museum in Israel. How are you able to make that happen in Israel from here?
OH: Maybe because I am in between, an insider, and an outsider at the same time. I left the Kibbutz and live in New York now, it gives me the opportunity to create these kind of spectacles. Since I come with the title of an artist, people actually go along with me. It’s really rewarding. In Nothing New I had a 90 year-old member, his name is also Oded. He came to me while filming and said that he hadn’t seen so many people together working in the field in 25 years. This is something I will remember forever. It’s very hard to convince people to participate, but with every production it becomes easier because the circle grows bigger and bigger. I started with ten people in my first film and it became 25, then it became a couple hundred. It’s a powerful experience to see all these people actually doing something together, and there is no incentive other than the pure idea of making art together.

CM: You are touching on another important component of the work though. In the kibbutz lifestyle community is first, this is key to the work you are doing.
OH: Yes, definitely. The context of my personal background, where and how I grew up, this is the junction where the community and the individual intersect and become present in my work. I try to create that equation.

CM: Even though there are no words but still a narrative, you have developed a strong visual language.
OH: Yes, in a way when you work with people in the field it’s exactly that. You don’t have to communicate with people verbally. As a worker in a factory you know your role in the assembly line and you know that each one must just do his job. There is no need for unnecessary distractions. You work together as an integral organized group that functions as a body together. For me talking is a distraction, there is no need for it in my films.

There are so many things that are being communicated without saying a thing, so many visual codes. Everything is something that tells the story of who you are. It’s the same in the kibbutz, but in a very different way. The codes are different, for example how dirty your clothes are, how rugged your hands, how strong your grip feels when you shake hands.

CM: The visual language is tied to who the person is and what they do with their day, which makes the mind-body connection so present in the work.
OH: There are many visual codes. I think that what makes the mind-body connection is the strict authenticity. The participants are Kibbutz members, not just random actors, and they really work hard out there to create those spectacles. In my last piece I had a 75 yr old who broke his back on set, it wasn’t nice. I went to visit him in the hospital and he was so happy for the opportunity to participate. He is OK now. People work hard and you can sense it in the intensity of the actions that are being performed. For the short time of filming it’s a mini-scale utopia in a bubble. I think there is art that can bring people together, I try to integrate that notion into the visual language that I continue to develop and work on.

odedhirsch.com

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Brian Getnick: Art for me is a way of joining thoughts that might not belong together in any other discourse. When you make art, you can actualize these thoughts into forms and create models where they are indisputably united. I like that stubborn insistence.

As far as my family is concerned, I’ll start with Halloween. We would start sewing costumes in early September. There’s a picture of me as an 8-year-old howling at the camera in a green tunic, swim goggles, witch nails and a felt rat sewn to my chest. Obviously, I was rat-man. I almost never wanted to be a recognizable character. When the holiday was over, I would make small figures with fabric and florist’s wire drawn from the world I had inhabited in costume, playing out stories around the house and in the woods. I never wanted the fantasy to end.

LO: What’s your working process?

BG: Play is my process. When I begin working on a performance, I make an object, mask or costume and start activating it by moving inside it or handing it off to a collaborator. For The Pest Horse, a performance I’m doing with Bryatt Bryant this August, I hand him the horse bodies and say, “Give me two performances.” It can be as simple a directive as that. He intuitively knows how to make something come alive and find out how it wants to behave. We record what he comes up with, we try it again, and eventually whittle it down.

LO: Where did you go to school and how did that effect your artistic development?

BG: I got my MFA in the Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The department’s philosophy of encouraging the intuitive and pleasurable process of experimenting with materials gave me the breathing room to grow. Five years after getting my MFA, I went back to making plays with figures and costumes. 

LO: What are the ideas in your work?

BG: Memory, control, freedom and the body. In the total sensorial experience of my performance work, I want these subjects to weave in and out of visibility and articulation. My first desire is to mesmerize the audience with how the sculptural bodies that I make come alive, later fall apart, and how they behave in general. What they interpret this interplay to mean is up to them. That is a type of research that I couldn’t get if I simply installed my costumes as static sculpture in a gallery. I could only theorize about what the audience’s response would be. When I first moved to LA, I performed exclusively in queer nightclubs. The audience would shout back, walk away, and participate unexpectedly. No one felt cowed into submission by the pressure to interpret. They came to the club for pleasure and I wanted to give it to them. If they walked away entertained I was happy. If they absorbed some of the nascent content later, that was even better.

LO: You are a performance artist who also creates sculptural objects. How is performance different from making objects conceptually for you as an artist?

BG: My sculptures often take the form of theaters nested inside other things: a hog’s head, a prison, or a decrepit airport, for instance. I think of the theater’s architecture as a body or an extension of the architect’s body, which implies that the audience is being digested by the play. My performances are the inverse; all the fantasy is attached to the body and surrounded by the audience.

LO: What is it like to be observed as a performing artist, and to also be observing the audience?

BG: It feels like a political moment to be the center of attention. I feel that pressure. What am I saying in this arena? What are my values? I think this is why I tend not to perform as myself but as other things and with other people. I’m not interested in presenting a singular representation of selfhood. I’m not interested in the audience reifying me in a cult-like way. I’m interested in showing the audience a system of reorganizing or exploding the self into multiple, independent beings. I also prefer to have the audience mobile and unseated if possible, so that they can choose to see what they want, or to leave.

LO: What kind of reactions and impressions have your performance works engendered from audience members?

BG: My friend told me once that she thought of my performances as “home-school kabuki theater,” and I like that. My work has a lot of absurdist elements, so laughter is one of the first responses I get in galleries. Artists come to galleries prepared to scrutinize forms and analyze their meaning. I get this too. It’s hard to shut off the politic and history-seeking part of my brain, but with performance, the opportunity is to experience art bodily. The analysis is important, but it can happen later, or at certain moments within the total experience.

LO: Why do you think art is important to people and to the world?

BG: Art offers models of ways of being that are at best, deeply, internally researched. This is so important in the era of social media determined identities. I’m speaking here not of all art which, of course, can use social media as a material or a vehicle, but specifically of the fabrication of objects and of live performance. Solid things are derived at a slower rate and that gives you time to fantasize about an audience or ignore the possibility of an audience. I don’t think that can happen when you make things for the web.

LO: What advice would you give an artist who has just arrived in NYC and who is not sure where to begin?

BG: I would say: Consider measuring the energy expended on seeking prestige with the effects that it has on your body and your creative output.  Instead, find a community of people who will support you making your work and find places where you can experiment freely. I live in LA where the rent is low and the pay-off for experimentation and collaboration is very high. What I would suggest to the New York performance artist is to visit LA. I run a performance art journal and platform called Native Strategies with my partner Tanya Rubbak. If you’re a performance artist reading this and are thinking of visiting LA, look us up if you want an orientation. nativestrategiesla@gmail.com

LO: Who are you favorite artists and why? 

BG: There are so many. I love Asher Hartman who is more of an experimental theater director and works closely with an ensemble of perfomers who have worked together for over five years. Hartman tends to collide narratives and switch the identities of his characters in the script. The language he uses is often very dense and chaotic but because of the strength of his ensemble, the abstraction in his narrative(s) become grounded through the obvious humanness of the actor’s relationships. I just saw Glass Bang by Hartman, which is about violence, real estate, and ghosts. I also love Mike Kelly’s Day is Done project. He made this parallel universe of ghosts, vampires, virgins, pagan rituals, and bits and pieces from a pseudo biography all extrapolated from high school yearbook photos. It’s a template for someone like me who starts his process by making objects and then finds the performances inside them. I also have found precedent in his writing for the way I treat subject matter, how it comes in and out of focus in my work. In an Art21 interview he talks about beauty in relationship to a deliberate confusion between different contents: “I think what I make is beautiful … because terms and divisions between terms are confused, and divisions between categories start to slip. That produces what I think of as a sublime effect, or it produces humor. And both things interest me.”

LO: What are your upcoming projects?

BG: I’ve started color-coding my yearly output. What I’m presenting at Station Independent Projects this summer is the culmination of a year’s production of green performances and objects. I realized I was coloring work in 2012 when I was making Memories, a performance in which a big puppet’s limbs and head are controlled by dancers and musicians in blood red costumes.  I decided to research how color resonates for my work by starting this year by consciously choosing a color.

I think of intuition as faith in finding substance in darkness. For the next several years I’ll be coloring that void until I have the complete works of the rainbow.

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