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Video art pioneer passes away at 77
By Ellie Armon Azoulay

Sculptor and video artist Buky Schwartz passed away yesterday. He was 77. Schwartz was born in Jerusalem in 1932, studied at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv, worked as an assistant to Itzhak Danziger and studied at Saint Martins College of Art in London with Anthony Caro. In 1965, Schwartz was among the founders of the local 10+ Group, along with sculptors Pinhas Eshet, Uri Lifshitz, Ika Braun and other artists, including Raffi Lavie and Ziona Shimshi. In 2007, the Tel Aviv Museum displayed a comprehensive exhibition on the vivacious group, which held scores of shows throughout the course of its activity.

Schwartz represented Israel at the Venice Biennale in 1966, and a year later sculpted the "Pillar of Heroism" at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. He also designed for the theater and in 1970 built the set for Hanoch Levin's play "Queen of the Bathtub." In 1968 he held one-man shows at the Tel Aviv Museum, as well as at the Israel Museum in 1971.
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Schwartz became deeply engaged in video art in 1977, and his work is considered pivotal in the development of the field in Israel. In the catalogue for the group show "Beyond Drawing" at the Israel Museum, which Schwartz participated in, Joshua Neustein wrote of the artists in the exhibition: "All of them have respect for the spirit of inquiry, the importance of which is sometimes greater than that of 'creative talent.'"

Indeed, Schwartz's works investigated the various tensions in different sculpted materials and drew attention to the relations between the viewer and the piece. Most of his works were displayed in public spaces. Among his best-known works over the years: the 1991 installation "Tel Aviv-New York," which made optimal and colossal use of space; "Pinball Machine" at the Isracard Building in Tel Aviv; a sculpture inspired by Shel Silverstein's book "The Giving Tree" in the Story Gardens in Holon; and the elevated green chair that stands in the middle of Tel Aviv's Rothschild Boulevard.

At the start of the 1980s, Schwartz returned after spending several years in New York. In a 2007 interview with Haaretz, Schwartz, considered to be an artist who did not seek much publicity, said: "There was a big problem from an economic point of view. At some stage I felt that I wasn't receiving recompense from the United States for what I was giving it. In Israel I never felt that I had anything coming to me." His wife Ziva added in that same interview that "he never was a businessman."

During that interview, Schwartz also spoke about being a trailblazer among Israeli artists who exhibit abroad: "I was the model for those who are successful now. When I was invited to show at the Whitney it was an earthquake. Nowadays no one has any problem. Curators talk among themselves and there is a kind of American Israeli art. I see myself as among those who made this situation possible."
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