Balloon art tackles climate change, corruption

Artist and activist Doron Gazit’s massively scaled tube-art installations walk the fine line between beauty and tragedy in nature

By IDAN ZONSHINE
BLOOD VEINS of a Wounded Dead Sea.’ Doron Gazit’s ‘Red Line Project’ documents the sinkholes of the Dead Sea. (photo credit: DORON GAZIT)
BLOOD VEINS of a Wounded Dead Sea.’ Doron Gazit’s ‘Red Line Project’ documents the sinkholes of the Dead Sea.
(photo credit: DORON GAZIT)
Doron Gazit’s love affair with air-filled art started when he was a student at Jerusalem’s famed Bezalel Academy in the early ‘80’s, selling balloon animals to fund his studies.
While showing his balloon animals to some local children at a Bedouin village in the Sinai Desert, he had realized, “Many of these children were seeing balloons for the first time in their lives.”
Gazit says their elated responses prompted him to ask himself: “What is it about this very simple object – that is just shape, color and air – that invites such a happy reaction?”
This question drove his art to larger and more industrial proportions, leading him to create several large-scale, ecologically neutral balloon animals, which were featured at the Israel Museum in 1981, while Gazit was still in his final year of studies at Bezalel.
Gazit first rose to international fame only two years after finishing his studies at Bezalel, being invited to work on the 1983 World Expo in New Orleans, then being invited to work on the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.
For the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, he developed – alongside Trinidadian artist Peter Minshall and Israeli designer Arieh Dranger – his patented invention, the “Fly Guys,” also known as the “wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man” often found outside of US car dealerships.
Over the years, Gazit has put up projects all over the world, with his work even being featured in five different Super Bowl half-time shows.
“But those are just my commercial projects.” he tells me at his most recent gallery, which went up in Givatayim in early June.
“My true passion is this,” he says, gesturing toward the plethora of photographs and burnt tree branches hanging around us.
Gazit’s art is nowhere near as flashy and grandiose as his commercial projects. The works featured in his gallery are much more minimalistic, using relatively straight, single colored three-dimensional tubes that are divided by color based on their different meanings.
Gazit’s clear, milky-white tubes are his more introspective, philosophical works. They have been featured several times at the Burning Man festival in Nevada, of which Gazit is a big fan.
Gazit is not afraid of making political statements, however. Since he moved back home to Israel with his wife and children after more than 30 years of working and living in the US, he has taken on a new color.
“A LOT OF English speakers that see this don’t realize that in Hebrew, the word for ‘wind’ and the word for spirit are the same.” He engages in a process he calls “sculpting the wind” to engage the canvas of nature with the Divine nature of the wind.
Gazit’s black tubes represent his social activism and his contempt for political corruption. His installations were recently featured in the black flag protests against indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
However, Gazit’s Red Line Project, currently on display at the reopened Givatayim Art Gallery, is undoubtedly his most prominent series. In it, he documents sites and locations which have been devastated by the effects of climate change or pollution.
“In the last few years, I have become more and more attuned to world ecological disasters. I felt that mother nature was bleeding before my eyes. I knew that I had to rise to action.”
According to Gazit, the red line symbolizes the exposed veins and arteries of Mother Earth, desperately trying to supply the Earth with the oxygen it needs to survive.
The project connects the deepening sinkholes of the Dead Sea in Israel with melting glaciers in Alaska, the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and the Salton Sea in California.
Gazit is currently planning future installations along the Amazon River, the disappearing forests of Sumatra and Borneo, and the infamous Great Pacific garbage patch, also known as “Garbage Island.”
But what does the small, Tel Aviv-adjacent suburb of Givatayim have to do with ecological disaster areas?
Since many of the disaster areas where Gazit puts up his installations are hard to reach (“apparently drawing large crowds to Alaskan glaciers is quite a difficult task”), he often puts up galleries in places of historical significance.
The Givatayim Art Gallery is, in fact, one of the few remaining original buildings in the town. Built slightly less than 100 years ago, the gallery used to function as a covert munitions factory for the Hagana forces in the early 1930s.
The building now used for the gallery was once known as the “Givatayim Water Institute,” utilizing the loud noises from the pumping of the well to drown out the noises of munitions being made.
Gazit’s choice of the Givatayim Art Gallery as the venue for his art is his own way of reusing and recycling, and the endless stream of patches on his 100% recyclable tubes blends well with the boarded up historical site.
 


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