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Creating with God
By Ellie Armon Azoulai

Although he has lived in London for almost 40 years, the Israel-born artist Michael Druks has made sure that his works are shown in Israel frequently. Among the major group shows in which he participated in the last four decades were "Concept + Information" in 1971; "Tel Hai Event" (1983); "80 Years of Sculpture in Israel" (1984); "The Poverty of Material as an Essence in Israeli Art" (1986); "90-70-90 The Development of Israeli Photography in the Last 20 Years" (1994), and more.

He was here recently for a new exhibition of his works entitled "Deuteronomy Chapter 1, Pictures, Chapter 2" which opened at the Yair Gallery in Tel Aviv last month. It is a small and modest show, comprising 12 works made in the past three years, and a text entitled "Expanding the Limits of Art."
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A book bearing the same name as the exhibition has also come out, containing pictures and texts, laid out by the veteran designer Michael Gordon.

A conversation with Druks, 69, reveals that his work is more important to him than ever. One of the reasons for this, he explains, is God.

He goes back to his boyhood, his time at the religious boarding school Kfar Batya in Raanana. When he approaches a painting, he says, his eyes are turned toward the sources of Jewish culture.

"I grew up in this country, I received a religious education, and although I am not a religious person, the Bible is part of my cultural property, and I too was brought up on the concept of the creation of the world," he says. "What is it, this creation thing? What is the difference between creation, briah, and yetzirah, artisitic creation? In English there's no difference, but in Hebrew there is."

That difference is the key to understanding the motives that drive him today: "My contention is that the artist's basic wish is to create something out of nothing and not just to be creative."

These thoughts are reflected in the book too, leaving the reader wondering and confused. When you open it, a fake Internet address hits the eye, all alone on the blank second page: "Yeshmeain@hamakom.com", or Somethingoutofnothing@theplace.com.

On other pages, there are fragments of text such as "Before anything had been created" - a line from the hymn "Adon Olam," - or "A religious picture" or "Hamakom [a euphamism for God] will take pity on the creator of the places."

Druks explains the act of God in the work of the Creation.

"He created by speaking, not by thinking. He said 'Let there be light' and there was light. And finally, it is written that 'And he saw that it was good'; like an artist, he signed it," he says.

Druks began his own creating in the 1960s and he became well-known around the middle of that decade. He was one of the first in Israel to use television and video both as a subject and medium and accordingly most of his works were innovative.

Already at that early stage he was aware of the potential domination of those media, and his work can be interpreted inter alia as a kind of protest against the new "visitor" which had plunked itself down in people's living rooms.

What is more, he frequently used to shed his clothing, responding to his body and his movement through space, paying close attention to the effect that he succeeded in creating through this in the artistic sphere.

He mastered the technique of collage, and his originality found expression in the various platforms that he used for his work. The latter served him not only as backgrounds, but also as "ready-made" works, with all of the meanings implicit therein, such as sewing patterns, which became the topographical maps through which he often traced the course of his life.

Druks also was prominent as a provocateur and a challenger of convention. In his work "Concealments, Counterfeits," for example, made in 1974, a year after the Yom Kippur War, he showed pictures of Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir and others on a TV screen, while the artist himself confronted them using his own body: waving his fists and his penis at them, and similar antics.

In an interview he said: "Without my body I wouldn't be. When I want to say 'I', I show my body - I took my body to the utmost extreme: I put my prick on the leader. That is a political response, an expression of one man against society."

As an one of the artists who work with whatever is handy, Druks made use of his body as part of this practice. "That's what was most handy at the time, cheapest, simple, at-hand," he said.

Druks' transition from his pre-1980s works to painting sprang from a sense that he had nowhere to grow anymore in the sphere of conceptual art. It peeved him that people were trying to shove him into a set artistic mold without allowing him to venture out of it.

His own personal life circumstances also played a part in the transition. For a year he was unable to work, after which his marriage broke up and his father died. He reacted in a highly emotional manner to these events, and some of this found expression in his sketches.

"Perhaps I reacted too powerfully to the crisis, and from then on I could not react," he observes.

From then on, Druks was incapable of photographing, either stills or video. "Painting is a one-on-one action, perhaps I felt that I have to confront myself and the environment. And all art is therapeutic," he says.

Today he no longer needs art for therapeutic purposes, and painting provides him with a daily challenge.

Is he, by occupying himself with abstract painting, trying to conduct a dialogue with the abstract art that was so prevalent in Israel while he was working here?

Druks rejects the adjective "abstract" out of hand.

"There is no 'abstract.' There is true abstraction in mathematics, where everything is internal relationships that have nothing to do with anything external, concrete. But in art, how can you speak about 'abstract' when you are using concrete sensual materials and implements? I begin from the abstract and do a kind of 'figurativication' of the abstraction. I subject it to the laws that exist in nature, like 'up' and 'down', weight, and more, and then something emerges that looks figurative. The illusion is created that the painting has a meaning but the viewer has to invent it for himself, it is not the artist who has to give it."

Druks says of his contemporary work, "I do not want to decorate, or to serve. I am looking for functions."

This the reason that he no longer has an interest in works of protest, or "reactive work" as he terms it.

"Why don't I like 'reactive work' nowadays? Because it is not free. You are subject to forces and you react. I didn't want to be dragged after things anymore."

And what about the context of time and place?

"I work on things that are humanistic and relevant to everyone, but I am a product of my own culture. A still life is relevant to the whole world and all languages. People experience visual reality in the same way, both people who live in refugee camps and people who live in the center of London."

That's a romantic attitude.

"Maybe I am a romantic, but that's not a negative thing in my eyes. The very concept of being an artist is also romantic. I am not prepared to see art as entertainment or as a material or economic thing. It is egoistically important to me to keep the only real adventure. If I commercialize my work, then it's all over."

If you are connected to the place and the culture, have you considered coming back to live in Israel?

"Tribalism here is powerful, and you have to have a position, and another position. I live there, in London, because I am free from all that. I feel that I belong there too, and I love living in London, I feel that I can breathe there. Here, I would lose my sensitivity, and grow a thick skin."
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