Yehudit Sasportas
"Simple Mountain", 2002
courtesy Galerie EIGEN+ART Leipzig/Berlin
In the ’60s, Marshall
McLuhan wrote about the phenomenon of the hybrid in the context of
media theory. A new entity arises out of the reciprocal effects between
different media – a "bastard" characterized by an interaction between
disparate elements. What are the various elements joining together in your
work to form a hybrid?
Actually, the hybrid is the perfect
vehicle for synthesizing the contradictions in my work. As a metaphor, it
suggests the coexistence of different codes of origin and perception in a
single being, two different
DNAs. This finds its formal expression in the use of different media
as a variety of different languages interacting in a given piece; it also
finds expression in the different ways I approach drawing. In terms of the
landscape, I draw directly from nature, engaging in the actual looking and
experiencing of what I see. But I also take slides and draw from them in
the studio, and these interact with the impression of nature as I remember
it. And sometimes I shoot a video and record sound of the same situation
and project it while I’m working; in this case, I immerse myself in an
artificial situation that refers back to the actual situation that formed
the original point of departure for a piece. And so I’m using the studio
as a laboratory to juggle different channels of perception, creating a
hybrid to play with different distances to the original experience.
Yehudit Sasportas
"The Love Rain",
2006
courtesy Galerie EIGEN+ART
Leipzig/Berlin
This concept of the hybrid
plays an important role in your work on a number of levels: there’s an
allegorical level in terms of a joining of images otherwise discontinuous
in nature, such as the combination of the foliage of different countries
and climates in a single, homogenous organism; but there’s also a kind of
crossbreeding characterizing the formal development of your work, for
instance when you begin exploring an idea in one medium and transpose it
into another.
Yes. It’s like when I take a slide of an object’s
shadow and project it onto that object and continue working from there. In
my early works, I began with an everyday domestic object and rebuilt it;
it was like a perpetual rewriting of a single story, with a simultaneity
of different times and different levels of perception, an inner dialogue
among a multitude of different voices. Later, the idea of the garden
became very important in my work, the notion of the tree as an allegory of
the human psyche. Here, however, the emphasis is less on the different
DNAs and the friction among them than on the overall structure or pattern.
If I had a narrative for life, then it would be an inner explosion with an
immense scattering of the various particles of the self. And so life’s
process becomes motivated by a profound longing to reunite these various
parts; this comes to expression in an attachment to different forms and
media simultaneously. The result is a hybrid, the appearance of continuity
in something that is not continuous. But there’s a kind of scratch in this
illusion of reality, and this scratch jars us; it wakes us up and makes us
take a closer look.
Yehudit Sasportas
"How did it ever
come so far..."
Installation view: Galerie EIGEN+ART Berlin, 2001
Photo: © Uwe Walter
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Perhaps art’s role is to put us back in touch with the
utter improbability of being.
Yes. This scratch in the
illusion of reality momentarily separates the object from its name. I
expect a good work of art to remind me of my own alienation from the
things around me; that I’m no more than a guest in this life. According to
Walter Benjamin, the only stage when language still possessed any
synchronicity with the world was at the moment of creation; the two have
been moving further and further apart ever since.
Hybrid forms
bring about a shifting of existing borders that replaces the modernist
dichotomies of time, space, and identity. How does this hybrid element
determine the construction of meaning in your work?
One aspect
that can characterize postmodernism is its distance to an original
starting point, in this case nature. On one level, there’s a disconnection
from the body; it’s like living in a synthetic body, perceiving yourself
within and at the same time removed from your life. Reality can be read
from many different angles. One of the early sources of my work were
descriptions of mental illnesses. I used these as a source of inspiration
to create three-dimensional objects. It wasn’t so much the content of the
disease that interested me as the structure it created in the brain. There
is a disease in which the brain starts losing its ability to distinguish
between different sounds; it is a disturbance in sound balance that gives
equal significance to everything at once.
Yehudit Sasportas
"The Carpenter and
the Seamstress II", 2001
Installation view: Deitch Projects, New York
courtesy Galerie EIGEN+ART Leipzig/Berlin
And
so sanity consists in the degree with which we are able to screen out a
large degree of what we’re perceiving at any given moment.
Yes, exactly. And the people who lose this ability go crazy. Everything is
perceived with the same intensity.
In terms of structure, it’s
an overall pattern without any clear hierarchy. You seem concerned with
creating an installation without a center, in which everything possesses
an equivalent meaning.
Yes, and this brings
Robert Altman’s Short Cuts to mind – it’s no longer a
question of a main actor or key scene, but an intricate interconnectedness
among everything. This was his genius: that each little story held the
same significance. When I began combining imagery from various different
sources and unifying it all in a kind of overall diagram, I was concerned
with flattening it out to create a larger, more transparent view.
Yehudit Sasportas
"The Carpenter and
the Seamstress I", 2000,
Installation view: Tel Aviv Museum of Art
courtesy Galerie EIGEN+ART Leipzig/Berlin
A
good example of this is your installation The Carpenter and the
Seamstress, shown in 2002 at the
Kunsthalle Basel, probably your best-known work.
This also
began quite simply. I was building a model of the floor plan of my
parents’ house. And then I built it the size of the installation. One
morning when I arrived at the studio, two of the walls had caved in. And I
suddenly thought that this was a fantastic idea. So I opened it up like a
box, ironing the images out, but still retaining a certain depth – the
somewhat paradoxical depth of a two-dimensional image that consists in the
enormous energy a pattern can convey. I worked on the installation for one
and a half years, playing with the elements as though they were huge cards
that described my life somehow. The structure is minimalist, but at the
same time it contains all this narrative information – in another kind of
hybrid.
Yehudit Sasportas
"Chemical Garden
I", 2000
courtesy Galerie
EIGEN+ART Leipzig/Berlin
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