Nahum Tevet

I just had a fas­ci­nat­ing chat with Tel Aviv-​based sculp­tor Nahum Tevet in advance of Seven Walks, his first solo UK show at Dundee Con­tem­po­rary Art. (Or, rather, he said lots of fas­ci­nat­ing things despite not being able to under­stand my ‘Irish’ accent.)

Tevet makes impos­si­bly com­plex, impos­si­bly large instal­la­tions, that take years to com­plete. Using thou­sands of every­day objects, or objects that look like every­day objects, he re-​contextualises and com­bines them in a way that doesn’t so much follow the guides laid down by past move­ments in art his­tory - Mod­ernism, Min­i­mal­ism, per­haps Con­struc­tivism - as muck about with them. With­out having seen it in the flesh, I can’t be sure, but I sus­pect his work nowa­days is mostly about the way we look at art, some­thing touched on in the fol­low­ing conversation.

Here are two images taken from Tevet’s Unti­tled 95-96 to whet the appetite, and so you can get a better idea of the new work he talks about here:

Could you tell me a bit about the delay get­ting your work out of Israel?

There was a strike! The gov­ern­ment is a right wing gov­ern­ment, and they tried to change the strutcure of the ports, which was the strongest union – until now. There is a cer­tain author­ity which uni­fies all the ports in Israel, and that made the union very strong. So they tried to pri­va­tise – they’re very good stu­dents of your Mar­garet Thatcher! – and when they made the new rule in the Par­lia­ment, the Knes­set, at that very moment there was a strike, which is still going on.

That must be frustrating.

Yes, my work was held less than twenty-​four hours before it had to leave the port.

Oh no!

Just my luck.

So – is it pretty frustrating?

Well, it is not what one will expect. It is frus­trat­ing, but it might be inter­est­ing actually.

That’s what I was about to ask – are you taking it as a chal­lenge? Will it change the work?

No, no. The way I work is in a studio, in the very clas­si­cal manner of a studio artist. It is not an instal­la­tion that can vary in dimen­sions, or some­thing. I some­times say the work is a satel­lite that I launch from my studio that lands in some other place.

So it’s com­pletely realised before the installation?

Yes, it’s realised again with the exact struc­ture and plac­ings. On the mil­lime­tre, as they say.

Right.

If you look at pic­tures of my work, you can see how com­pli­cated it is, so there is no room for vari­a­tions. Because every single ele­ment is so much depen­dent on another, if you move some­thing, it is like… it’s like an orches­tra­tion in a way: if you change one tone, every­thing goes wrong.

So what will you be show­ing in DCA when the show opens?

It depends how quickly we open the crates! The first stage of the install­ment is trac­ing a very large, detailed floor-​plan, which I am copy­ing from a map I have with me. This by itself is a few days work. So when people come, they will be able to see a very large draw­ing on the floor, which shows the place­ment, the marks and signs for every single object that is to be placed. So, yes, people will see an abstract draw­ing with a lot of let­ters and num­bers and infor­ma­tion that will allow us to store it later. And I hope that we’ll be able to put at least 20-30% of the instal­la­tion in, but it’s all one piece, so there will only be sec­tions there.

So how do you feel about show­ing it like that?

It isn’t really show­ing it, it’s more like let­ting people have a glimpse, like a work in progress. It might be inter­est­ing in a way. It’s not the opti­mal sit­u­a­tion, I would prefer to have it ready, first so as to be nice to them and second so as to be nice to the work. If some­one will bother to come again and see the com­plete work, then it’s quite amaz­ing to see how all this comes together… I guess on Sat­ur­day, it will be quite messy. There will be per­haps a thou­sand objects spread around, wait­ing to come to a cer­tain place.

Talk­ing more specif­i­cally about the piece – you’ve been devel­op­ing it for a long time…

From the very early nineties, I’ve been push­ing my work, or start­ing a new stage, a new chap­ter. In ‘91 there was a very big career ret­ro­spec­tive, titled Paint­ing Lessons, though it showed sculp­tures. There were sculp­tures that showed com­plex­ity, that were made of many many objects, that were very colour­ful. But since ‘92 or so, I took a few deci­sions. One was to push this inter­est in com­plex­ity and mul­ti­plic­ity to a cer­tain edge, so the works in the last ten years or so really grew, and got bigger and bigger, until they became more like room instal­la­tions. They fill the entire room. You’re with me?

Yes, yes.

Right. Each work will be bigger than your­self, and there was a chal­lenge to make big works with­out making mon­u­men­tal work. There was an inter­est from the 80s to make work that it is impos­si­ble for the viewer to get a hold of.

Because they can’t appre­ci­ate the whole?

Yes, yes. You are coming from the art I guess? You are an art person?

Er, yes – I write about art a lot, but I’m not an artist.

Good good – I’m sorry, I didn’t know what kind of jour­nal­ist you are! So, the main ambi­tion was crit­i­cis­ing or attack­ing the ideas of Donald Judd and his friends, the idea that you see some­thing and you right away know every­thing about it. And also, the job of memory or per­cep­tion. What I tried to do from the early 80s, well, I remem­ber saying in an inter­view then that I would like to do scup­ture that will beat the camera, that there will be no way to rep­re­sent them, or even to tell in lan­guage what is going there. But at the same time, it is not about chaos or a mess. It is about play­ing with a tra­di­tion, the min­i­mal­ist or mod­ernist tra­di­tion, with a ratio­nal object, with images that recall cer­tain objects that we asso­ciate with a cer­tain tra­di­tion or dis­ci­pline. What I want to do is play with that, to turn it upside down. I do this by using boxes, or cubes, or very simple forms, but insert­ing into that not only com­plex­ity but also little sto­ries, a nar­ra­tive – but never with the idea that a work is about, I dunno, a cer­tain story, my biog­ra­phy or some­thing. It’s all about throw­ing hints, and pulling back – some­thing like that. You assume that there is a cer­tain order, and you look and it’s all col­laps­ing, and there is a pro­posal for some­thing else.

So there are little clues for people to work around?

Yes, you are having a clue in a cer­tain area that a cer­tain event is hap­pen­ing, or a cer­tain psy­cho­log­i­cal mood, or a little some­thing that alludes to a spe­cific moment in art his­tory, and, by the way, my own his­tory – there is a lot of quo­ta­tion from ear­lier work, a ret­ro­spec­tive look. If you look even at the inter­net site, you can see that even in the 80s the same ele­ments appear again and again. So the prob­lem is build­ing a cer­tain vocab­u­lary that is kind of lim­ited, then seeing how much wealth there is in it, or whether I am capa­ble of sur­pris­ing myself play­ing with the same stupid cubes!

Right…

Now, the point is this when you ask about this spe­cific work: the work grew and grew, which has a lot to do with work­ing in Tel Aviv, not New York or London where every second week you must pro­duce some­thing. I took the advan­tage of work­ing behind the moun­tains, where no one cares what I am doing, and closed the studio door so I could spend time – and money by the way! The idea is of work­ing in a counter-​productive manner, not play­ing the game of the system. I remem­ber once making a work and saying, ‘I want that piece to be so com­plex and so big that no one can take it to his collection.’ Of course, it was sold! So – this very spe­cific piece was devel­oped in this line. I started in 1998, in a space that was not so big, and my intu­ition was that I wanted to push this kind of busi­ness into a new hor­i­zon­tal­ity. I was inter­ested in the point of walk­ing and look­ing, so you are not stand­ing in one place to see a pic­ture or sculp­ture. You really have to wander, and while you are wan­der­ing, you have an adven­ture. The more I worked on the piece, the more I became inter­ested in this sit­u­a­tion. It is almost like when you read a book, or listen to a con­cert – there is a ques­tion of the nar­ra­tive of the piece, the way one piece links to another. Now, the way I work, I really felt that it was bigger, so I had the oppor­tu­nity to move to another studio, which was bigger, and I really thought I would just add another few pieces here and there, and that would be it. But it so hap­pened that I spent another five years at that studio, and luck­ily that studio is an old bas­ket­ball room from a school. Luck­ily it wasn’t a foot­ball room, or I would have been work­ing for another twenty years! It really bought many inter­est­ing ques­tions – work­ing with all these little ele­ments, how big can it be, with­out becom­ing a mess, or a stor­age? So it was really intrigu­ing. This new scale of the bas­ket­ball studio really into­duced bigger ele­ments into the piece. In the end, the piece kind of stopped in the studio with about sixty cen­time­tres between the piece and the wall. You are really pressed into this labyrinth, as if you are in the labyrinth, but there is not one sec­tion in the whole work where you can enter the work. So there is this inter­est­ing effect of being drawn in, but stay­ing out­side. I worked a lot at cre­at­ing very tempt­ing views. There are these units that are chest level

Those tall table-​like structures?

Yes, there is an ele­ment that is kind of a par­ti­tion, the side of which is about one metre and thirty cen­time­tres. They create a sit­u­a­tion that is like a wall that you want to see behind – like an obsta­cle for the body of the viewer and of the mind, for your abil­ity to see. The whole thing is very dense, there is a lot hap­pen­ing behind these walls of fur­ni­tures and archi­tec­tural struc­tures in a way. It is really about… when you look at this, you are miss­ing some­thing, and if you move a little you will see, but there is again always some­thing that is pre­vent­ing you from seeing. So it is only your imag­i­na­tion that will allow you to get inside. This was the studio sit­u­a­tion, but in Dundee there is more space, because the room is bigger.

But they still won’t be able to get to the heart of it?

No, no. I think what is hap­pen­ing is that there so many inti­mate, and hand-​made objects that they call you to look at them. They are not the kind of things you want to look at from ten metres away. From the dis­tance it’s just a pile of…

Wood?!

Yes! There is a kind of rela­tion­ship between the viewer posi­tion, the viewer posi­tion in a way – the work moves you from this side to that side, you try to push your­self a little back­ward or for­ward. It is like chore­o­graph­ing the view­ers movement.

You’re like a conductor?

Not in that way. The work just stands there. The piece doesn’t care about the viewer, but the viewer has to work. In many ways it looks like a cemetary in a way, rather than a garden or whatever.

I was going to ask whether, with these archi­tec­tural aspects to the work, you were making some sort of alter­na­tive city, or alter­na­tive world? Even that there is some kind of Utopian aspect to the work?

People are often using this metaphor of Tel Aviv, or wher­ever. They call Tel Aviv the White City, or the city likes to call itself that. Tel Aviv is full of Bauhas build­ings that are white, or off-​white now. I don’t work with this in mind, actu­ally. I said some­thing at the begin­ning of the inter­view that the work tries to deny any pos­s­e­sion of mean­ing, or image, or some kind of simple descrip­tive some­thing, so that you could see the piece and say, ‘Ah, that’s about architecture.’ This hap­pens because I am using very simple objects – cubes, par­ti­tions, a table that is like a draw­ing of a build­ing. The tables even came from some sort of joke on the cube. In Israel we say [some­thing in Hebrew] – it means ‘turning up twice’ or some­thing like that. This piece, because of the scale, one could say it is Man­hat­tan, or one could say it is Tel Aviv, and there is this feel­ing that you are walk­ing in a city, because of the vistas that are open, like streets. But actu­ally every­thing is built from inte­rior stuff, from simple things from the home. So if it is an out­door land­scape, the whole tone and touch, the imagery is made from inside things. I mean, if you see two beds beside each other, this is not an out­door archi­tec­ture thing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are many boats in my work – there is an image of a boat that is turned upside down and becomes an iron. There is a lot going on to do with water, for exam­ple, as if the whole struc­ture is sunk in some strange place. So there is a table, but there are boats float­ing under the table legs. Maybe if one started to read the piece and say, ‘This stands for that, and this for that,’ you will maybe find mean­ing. Just as I say – this table is upside down, or this boat is attached to a ver­ti­cal wall, per­haps this means the ground has unfolded. It is very com­plex, not just in terms of there being many many things, but in terms of trying to find mean­ing. The point is that what­ever you try to stamp on it in terms of mean­ing, you will fail.

Or how­ever close you come to under­stand­ing, there is some­thing else in the way deny­ing that understanding?

Right, right. I wrote a little state­ment for the cat­a­logue at the Venice Bien­nale, a few sen­tences that describe this in a little poetic way, the manner that I start work. It said that there is no plan or pro­gram for what I am going to do, and that is why I spend so much time. I may think at the begin­ning that I want to do this and that, but every time I add somet­ing there is a sur­prise, I am pushed in a new direc­tion, given new options to con­tinue. It is as if there is a virus, or a cancer, some­thing that destroys any logic. Part of what will make you inter­ested in under­stand­ing is that despite this, there is a very clear feel­ing that there is an order, that there is a cer­tain logic. This is why I am not going to change the work – every time when I come [to a gallery], I place it as it is, in fact it can be placed with­out me there. So, anyway, in this little state­ment for the Bien­nale ends with the idea that the more you look at a piece… I love this metaphor that you assume it is something… I mean sculp­turally, the­o­ret­i­cally, if you think of some­one like Richard Serra, it is about making you find a place in the world, but in my case I am inter­ested in the idea that you stand on the ground and the carpet is being pulled from under­neath your foot. Or as if you are on a run­ning belt, like they have at air­ports, where the ground is always escap­ing from you. Another reason why I am work­ing for so long is that I am like a dog run­ning after his tail!

So the way you work – let­ting new things sug­gest them­selves and that kind of thing – almost works in the same way as the viewer expe­ri­enc­ing the work?

I’m sorry, you speak so quickly – are you Scot­tish or Irish?

Sorry – I’m Eng­lish, but I’ve lived in Scot­land so long my accent has gone funny!

A whole new accent? Okay!

Yes. What I was saying was is there a sim­i­lar­ity between the way you make a piece and the way some­one view­ing it has to work when they are view­ing it, or inter­act­ing it? Like a mirroring?

Oh, that is cer­tainly true.

So that’s some­thing you aim for?

Well, I won’t ask anyone to stand with it for seven years! Not really that, but when I am doing it I am the viewer. I play until I am pleased with a cer­tain sec­tion, the way I respond to it. You know, when it takes so long to do a piece, by the time I am on the fifth or sixth year, I forgot what I started with. So it is really about whether it works for me or not. So if I am excited about some­thing, I would love the viewer to have a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence. A good viewer is some­one who has really got it. I know I miss many many people – on many levels it is so dif­fer­ent from the way people are used to seeing art today, you know they run in and see things like they see things in a mall. It’s about beg­ginng for atten­tion! Listen, you can’t get in dia­logue with the world if you are always run­ning. The time is really impor­tant. I know many people will just say, ‘Eh, what’s this?’ and then they are not there, but there are a few people who will really get intrigued. I won’t say that these people will have my expe­ri­ence of the work, but if they come out with cer­tain things that excite them, then I am happy.

Right, that should be plenty of stuff for me to work with. Unless there’s any­thing else you really wanted to high­light about the piece?

Well, we spoke about time, we spoke about com­plex­ity, we even spoke about the strike at the port! I think that is all, but I think what might be good is if you have a look on the inter­net site [tevet.org], there are some texts, and an inter­view. Look at those, and look at the images, and you will know every­thing of me.

Okay, thanks very much, and I’ll see you at the opening.

Thank you. Bye bye.

Bye.

Posted at 10am on 13/08/04 by Jack Mottram to the interviews category.
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