“I have not encountered good political art”

The past year has been particularly bleak for the art and culture world. However, precisely in the days when the galleries and museums remained desolate and closed, a “FEEL Home” was opened in Jerusalem – a new space for the “Sacred” organization headed by Naomi Bloch Fortis. It is located in the Jewish-Arab neighborhood of Abu-Tor, which stands on top of a hill and overlooks some of the most iconic points in the capital: the Old City and its walls, the Temple Mount, Mount Zion, the Commissioner’s Palace and more. The space hosts artists from the fields of art and music, who are asked, in return, to re-imagine the capital city as a laboratory of human connections of all kinds. In addition to exhibitions at the place, the space, known by the locals as a “cultural port”, is currently launching a broadcasting station called “Sacred ONAIR”, which will broadcast podcasts, recorded corners, innovative magazines, audio activities and other unconventional formats. One and a half kilometers long, the space gate develops, and will allow for another and intriguing creative space.

These days, the space presents “Open Circle Closed” – the new solo exhibition by the artist Guy Zagorsky, which began working on it following a request from the curator Itai Mautner. “He remembers the neon work I did in the past, and came to me with some abstract idea of ​​turning on the light in the new place,” Zagorsky told Ynet. “It started with the placement of one neon work, but after I got to this place it became a large exhibition whose volume is spread across the entire space.” Zagorsky, 48, is an active and significant artist in the local art scene. He holds a bachelor’s degree in art studies from a seminary and a master’s degree from Bezalel. Over the years he also worked and worked in Germany, and today his studio is located in the center of Tel Aviv. Zagorsky is known for being an artist who works with many materials, from neon to iron and wood, and for his extensive use of optical illusions, in an attempt to enchant viewers and guide them through the exhibition space. His latest solo exhibition, “Climbing the Walls”, which was presented last summer in a pop-up space in south Tel Aviv, and which he defined as a “notebook of sketches in space and in three dimensions”, included works that were presented together as a large installation, full of humor and original use of materials.

In the current exhibition, Zagorsky presents a variety of works, the largest and most central of which is neon work that is experienced at the top of the facade of the “sacred” building and illuminates it with the word “light” in Hebrew, Arabic and sign language. “I started working with images that I have been working on for years,” he says, “and bending them in my directions. As in many of my works, here too there is a simple and binary state of working / not working, darkness versus light. If these contrasts did not exist it would not happen “I like to be literal and produce seductive and accessible things, such that even if you just happen to pass by, they will make you get caught up in them.” Zagorsky is of course not the first artist to use neon in his works. The use of lighting fixtures, mainly to write eye-catching illuminating sentences, has been popular for many years in the international art world, thanks in part to the successful British artist Tracy Amin who uses them on a regular basis. In Israel, too, we have seen the use of this format in recent years by artists such as Maya Aton, Uri Holben and others. “The neons are an impressive image, and I personally perceive them mostly when they compose texts,” he explains. “I’ve done a lot of neon work in the past, some inside larger installations. I like to control the viewer’s movement in space, and the neon makes him immediately look like a fly trap. I control freak when it comes to the viewer’s eye, and I use that control of the gaze as a strategy.”

However, there are quite a few new things that Zagorski did for the first time this time. “I never wrote texts in Arabic. It just did not occur to me, I do not even know why,” he admits, “but this time I realized that it should be communicative to the immediate audience of this place, which is Arabic-speaking. In addition, I created drawings of my hands marking in language. “The signs have the word ‘light’ in Hebrew and Arabic – because it turns out that each language has its own sign language. These drawings have also become neon works, which are part of this great work.” In parallel with the work displayed in front of the building, there is work that complements it within the space itself, only that instead of “light” it carries the word “darkness” in neon – also in Hebrew, Arabic and sign language. In another work in the exhibition, more than 100 different sentences in Hebrew, English and Arabic are run. This too is flickering light work, but not in the neon technique, but made of panels of LED lights that run in a low-tech technique, similar to the one we know from explosions. The everyday sentences that Zagorski chose to present in this section, such as “why she does not call,” or “do not forget to turn on the boiler,” balance the pathos that neon works produce, and remind us that we are all, overall, human beings with similar needs and desires. In the video work that Zagorski presents inside the exhibition space, he focuses on an incandescent bulb that sinks into an oil can, which also turns it off, but also the one that turns it on. “It’s a terribly simple metaphor for old narratives, for the limits of power, and its collapse into itself.”

And does this also communicate to you the physical location where the exhibition is displayed?
“Yeah but I’m not that sophisticated. I have a bank of images going around in my head, and suddenly you could read them as something else. It’s not that I started from the story of the place.”

So you’re not going to say you created work on the occupation.

“No. I can never fall into this category of political art. It annoys me and is unbearable in my eyes.”

Why?

“Because I’ve never come across something like this that is well made. It’s recruited, it has a purpose. From such works you should come out smarter, but I like the opposite – the playfulness and stupidity. Only from there, in my opinion, can one learn deep truths.”

The huge rhinoceros statue in the exhibition space – three meters by 20 meters of styrofoam and fiberglass (“21st Century Marble”), also does not come from a place of reference to political “rhinoceros”. “This is a sculpture I made 20 years ago, perhaps one of my most famous sculptures over the years,” Zagorsky explains. “He has been around a lot in exhibitions in Israel and around the world, and most of the time he is stored in the attic of the studio. He has a topical interpretation and that’s fine, but before he’s a rhino, he’s a huge lump of material. Of cow shit. “

Although not so pleasant for him to admit, but the last year has been good for him. “I’m in the studio all the time anyway, and for me it was a relief that nothing was happening around,” he says, “suddenly we become a general waste of time and I no longer had to explain to my parents why I do what I do.”

Do you really still need to explain to them?
“Not really, but yes there was a time when I had to explain to my father why I cut pallets in shapes that in his eyes ‘destroyed the material’. Today they understand that it is also possible to saw diagonally.”

And what are you working on now?
“I always do something. Recently I went back to work in iron again. During the closures the warehouses were closed, so I had nowhere to get the material. I always work with what is available, and when it is not possible to order material, I just do more ready-made or use wood.” .