Leisure: The flip side of art

Joshua Neustein’s Drawing in the Margins exhibition may leave the viewer with a raised brow, but the artist’s self-described unorthodox approach may offer clarity as to what it all means.

By BARRY DAVIS
Margins art sow (photo credit: Courtesy of the Israel Museum)
Margins art sow
(photo credit: Courtesy of the Israel Museum)
Who says art can’t be fun? Walk around any of the world’s museums or art galleries and you’re likely to find exhibits that invite scrutiny, meditative thought and/or raise question marks, but how many leave you with a smile on your face and a song in your heart, naturally along with plenty of food for thought? Joshua Neustein’s Drawing in the Margins show, running at the Israel Museum until October 20, is largely of the latter kind.
Some of the works in the exhibition may leave the observer with a pensive furrow or two in their brow, while others may elicit a smile, but regardless of the emotional or cerebral response they prompt, Neustein tends to motivate the beholder into positive channels of thought or emotion.
Drawing in the Margins incorporates works by the 71-year-young, Polish-born and Israeli-trained artist from 1968 up to the present day. Neustein began his artistic odyssey in earnest in Jerusalem in the 1960s, as a student at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. It was there that he had a creative epiphany, which spawned a career based on a definitively out-of-the-box approach.
“One day the teacher at Bezalel asked us to create some work, so I drew a line, a plain line, on one side of the page and then continued it on the other side,” Neustein recalls. “She got very angry and said it wasn’t art, but I wondered why you couldn’t have a work on both sides of the same piece of paper.
What’s wrong with that?” Neustein has been asking that question for around half a century, and challenging lay observers and arts professionals alike to go with his unorthodox flow. While the artist traces his first public expression of his “anti-art” ethos to that classroom incident in Jerusalem, in fact his ability to see the flip side of conventional thinking may have something to do with genes, and pure survival.
“My birth was not at an opportune time,” Neustein notes with his customary dry wit, referring to his emergence into the world in the middle of the Holocaust, in war-torn Poland. “I was an only child and my parents and I were constantly moving, just ahead of disaster. If we were told to move in a certain direction, my father just moved us in the other way. That’s how we got through it.”
In that sense, Neustein is a chip off the old block.
As with his artistic output, Neustein prefers an enigmatic approach to recounting his personal history, offering seemingly disjointed tidbits rather than facts and figures in a logical sequence. More often than not, the listener has to connect the dots himself. Visitors to Drawing in the Margins will also have to meet the artist halfway.
THE INSIGHT the observer gains into Neustein’s work can also be seasoned by juxtaposition, personal input and, naturally, not forgetting some comic ingredients, too.
“On my way to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv I thought about a Pollak, a German and a Jew walking in the Valley of the Cross – this must be the beginning of a joke,” chuckles Neustein. “I don’t know how to proceed with this joke. You can fill it in. This is the Valley of the Cross. There is a German artist and a Polish artist, and me, I am pretty much Jewish.”
The three figures in his truncated quip refer to Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor, German artist Joseph Beuys and Neustein himself, and the fact that all three currently have works on show on the same floor at the Israel Museum.
Neustein also sees things in context. Near the entrance to the hall which houses his exhibition is an array of basalt monoliths that comprise Beuys’s The End of Twentieth Century, 1983-85 work.
“These are enormous pieces of stone, and you have my little [papier-mâché] stones over there [the first item in his exhibition, on the floor by the entrance], sort of in dialogue,” Neustein observes. “Are they in a dialogue? To some extent. They can’t really help being in dialogue, being next to each other – like Beuys is in dialogue with Kantor.”
The items in the diminutive Drawing in the Margins opener cluster have writing on them and, hence, invite closer scrutiny.
Typically, that is not necessarily the point.
“The pieces were taken from all sorts of previous works of mine,” says the artist.
“The text on the stones is in English, German, Hebrew and Arabic.”
Surely, the languages were not chosen, and juxtaposed, randomly? “We always read too much into art,” states Neustein, in typical deadpan fashion.
“I like to look at my art as, what you see is what you see. I would like to look at the works as if they are occupying some kind of space as you or me. When I say ‘what do you mean,’ I don’t mean ‘what do you intend to say.’ What does ‘Barry’ mean? what does ‘Joshua’ mean? We don’t mean anything. We just are. We don’t represent anything else, except ourselves.”
That may something of a rule of thumb for approaching works of art in general, but in the case of Drawing in the Margins, we are in the lucky position of being able to ask the artist himself about his motivation for producing a seemingly enigmatic exhibit.
Alas, any hope of gaining a better understanding from the source itself was dashed in peremptory fashion.
“If my intention is to make the work occupy real space, and not be representational, then it doesn’t mean anything. It just means itself,” is the definitive Neustein comeback.
We move on from Neustein’s papiermâché pebbles to another case in point.
“This is Caster. It is just a huge, folded piece of paper, [folded] four times, making four layers,” explains the artist. “I tore this part away and brought it down to the floor, so you see the underside of the paper. One side is sprayed and the other side is painted.
When I bring this torn piece down to the floor that means that the height of this torn piece is exactly the same as its own height again.”
So, to paraphrase Michael Caine, what’s it all about? “It means that it is a folded piece of paper, painted on one side and sprayed on the other. It only means what it describes.”
‘Nuff said.
While the works may, at first glance, appear simple, if not simplistic, there is a beguiling charm to them, too. Neustein’s “anti-art” or, possibly, “anti-being” approach is exemplified by his Erasures video in which we see one hand furiously scribbling words in pencil, hotly pursued by another wielding an eraser that erases the text as soon as it emerges. Another video work shows a dripping faucet, which fills a glass with wine instead of water. The work is contradictorily titled Wine into Water.
There are tactile and febrile elements to the Neustein oeuvre, and an overriding sense of the here and now, and of the value of the substance itself. Some works also allude to an environmental approach, and entirely comprise materials that were superfluous to the needs of previous works.
It is almost as if Neustein just grabbed the nearest pieces of paper, wood or metal, rearranged them and offered them to the public. And there generally appears to be some subtext lurking, ready to pounce on the unsuspecting onlooker. Or is there? Drawing in the Margins will run at the Israel Museum until October 20.
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