The drawings were placed on top of each-other. This negates the possibility to view each one individually, since they stick together in the process of drying.

Wet Drawings is informed by my experiences as a mother-artist. The materials for the drawings, graphite powder and plastic glue form a mixture that

conveys the sensation when being absorbed by actions that are difficult, if not impossible, to define. These actions include pregnancy, giving birth and raising children. This method of drawing stands in contrast to drawings done with a sharp pencil. It refuses clear boundaries. Instead, the drawing material drips, crosses lines, covers surfaces in the way liquid does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inJzn0-PjA0&feature=bf_next&list=HL1347745009
This clip shows preparations for Wet Drawings, a performative drawing that took art in Flint minifest, Salisbury Art Center 2012.
  -  הקישור לווידאו קליפ הנ"ל מראה הכנה לעבודה 'רישומים רטובים' שנעשתה ב'מיניפסט
פלינט' 2012
סולסבורי, אנגליה

YNG, Wet Drawings, Flind minifest 2012

ינג, 'רישומים רטובים', רישום מייצגי

Maternal element – the unmothered

As with all artworks, A Way to Remember is informed by one’s own experiences. Spreading the mixture on the paper opened up an imaginary space where a domestic action of floor cleaning has been echoed, of a woman standing on four, rubbing her hands over a flat surface, as if cleaning or whipping some dirt. This was reinforced by the colour of the mixture which resembles dirt.

Regarding women who were not mothered psychoanalyst Clarisa Pinkola Estes writes: ‘[...] if she is unmothered, her instincts have not been sharpened.’[1] A person who’s basic instinct has been injured ‘instead of aiming toward new life, [...] sits down in a psychic pool of glue. Lack of fleeing when it is absolutely warranted causes depression.’[2] This was written as part of the research, where maternal trauma was explored and analysed. Indeed, this new work, although addressing a Palestinian town which got destroyed in 1948, was done through the artist’s own personal biography.

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[1] Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With The Wolves, London: Rider,1998, p. 186

[2] Ibid, p. 231

---

 

A Way to Remember, Drawing, was a pavement art commission which took place as part of MK Festival Fringe 2012[1]. In respond to the brief the following proposal had been put forward.

I would like to draw the Palestinian town 'Samakh' which got destroyed in 1948 with the 'birth' of Israel as my ‘Objet Trouve’ (Found Object). As an Israeli artist (based in Winchester, UK) I am interested in Palestinian towns and villages that existed until 1948.  History lessons at school excluded this information, so now, as an adult, as a mother-artist I am re-educating myself and some others too. I lived in MK for six years, and both my sons were born there.  

With regard to Oskar Schlemmer's quote, I refer to the definition of 'romantic' as:

'relating to a movement in late 18th- and early 19th-century music, literature, and art that departed from classicism and emphasized sensibility, the free expression of feelings, nature, and interest in other cultures'

From: Encarta Dictionary UK.

Some preparation drawings where made prior to the event, where different materials, techniques and compositions were tested. Finally method, form and composition, as well as materials were chosen. The method involved building a layer of Graphite powder mixed with plastic glue to create the effect of ‘road’ or a ‘car park’, on top of which a ‘drawing’ was made, using white chalk. (I put the word ‘drawing’ in bracket because the whole drawing includes the layers and the work with chalk).  This allowed the drawing to look like it was drawn on pavement. The ‘house’ was simplified to a 3-D box-like shape formed by creating straight lines and angles, using Masking tape. This was a performative drawing in which preparing the surface was part of the work and done as a ritual. It included covering the paper with a layer of white emulsion, waiting for it to dry, then start to mix the Graphite powder with plastic glue, using special bowls and a mixing stick. When the mixture was ready, it was spread over the paper by fingers.

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[1] ‘Objet Trove’ MKFestival Fringe (Milton Keynes)

Kristeva writes: ‘Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which the body becomes separated from another body in order to be [...].’[1]

Abjection, therefore, can be understood as a psychical container of memory. Such a container requires constant attention, movement, and dialogue with other containers. As such, it is utilised as a base on which my practice is formed.

---

[1] J. Kristeva, Power of Horrors: An Essay in Abjection, Columbia University Press New York, 1982, pp. 9-10.

The act of collecting data is a performative act, in which ima becomes a ‘curious tourist’, a ‘detective’, a ‘journalist’ or any other identity as needed at the time. This already enables an active reflection at an early stage of the research. When I collect data, the data ‘collects’ me, in other words, action that is done with an enhanced awareness has the potential to affect me. Enhanced awareness is achieved by creating an intervention and an interruption which are part of the method of ima.

Emulsion is used in my works. It is a link to the following memory. Palestinian decorators had been employed by the kibbutz and occasionally gave me some emulsion for my paintings.

Laura U. Marks asks: ‘Where meaningful knowledge is located?’ It is between cultures, therefore ‘can never be fully verified in the terms of one regime or the other.’[1] Amongst alternative ways to express and produce knowledge, according to Marks, is ‘the very lack of images or memories, itself a meaningful record of what can be expressed.’[2] These quotations are relevant in the context of the invisible presence of the Palestinians and their suffering in my childhood landscape. This childhood was a Palestinian-free zone. One makes a special effort to increase awareness of the ‘other’ (Palestinian) invisibility.

Here, memory was used in bringing material from the past – emulsion - to the present. The past is therefore revisited from the point of consciousness of the present, through materiality. This echoes Foucault’s quotation of Kant’s philosophical question: ‘What are we?’[3] While the Cartesian question: Who are we? implies a universal subject, according to Foucault:

‘Kant’s question appears as an analysis of both us and our present [...] Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time and of what we are in this very moment. Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to built up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political “double bind,” which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures.’[4]

This act of revisiting the past is enabled through materiality and imagination. In that sense, through the art work we ‘build up what we could be.’[5]  

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[1] Laura U. Marks, The Skin of The Film, Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, 2000,

p. 24.

[2] Ibid, p.24.

[3] Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’ in Brian Wallis (ed.), Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, 1996, p. 423.

[4] Ibid, pp. 423-424.

[5] Ibid, p. 424.

A link to YNG's research: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/165505/1.hasCoversheetVersion/Final_version_of_Doctorate_with_appendices_April_29.pdf

Here  is a link to Yonat Nitzan-Green's book: http://www.bod.com/index.php?id=3435&objk_id=407999

The Israeli artist and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger develops a theory of the matrix. This theory considers the womb, as well as other prenatal processes. It does not oppose Freud’s Oedipus model, but rather complements it. In her theory, Ettinger suggests a new conception for subjectivity and its relation to the other, which creates a connection between aesthetic and ethic.

Regarding trauma, aesthetic and ethic Ettinger writes:

‘In art today we are moving from phantasy to trauma. Contemporary aesthetics is moving from the phallic structure to the matrixial sphere. We are carrying, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, enormous traumatic weight, and aesthetic wit(h)nessing in art brings it to culture’s surface. […] The beautiful as accessed via artworks in our era […] carries new possibilities for affective apprehending and produces new artistic effects where aesthetics converges with ethics […] The aesthetic is trauma’s transformed affectability in wit(h)nessing in/by art, beyond time and in different sites and spaces, yet it has ethical and even therapeutic consequences. The new healing potential offered by the idea of wit(h)nessing is ethical, yet profoundly aesthetic, or transferred by aesthetic means.’[1]

---

[1] Brian Massumi (ed.), Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, 2006, pp. 147-8.

Maternal Aesthetics is not pictures of mothers and children.

The methodology which was used in the research is critically considered here in order to gain a better understanding of maternal aesthetics. In other words, the system of thoughts and actions which comprises methods as part of a practice-led fine art research is being revisited with the aim to ‘give birth’ and to name Maternal Aesthetics.

ima as a research method is used in my current artworks, thus, forms a continuity and a 'bridge' between the research and the next stage.

Self and Other III

The persona ima engages with questions of invisibility. In particular, ima’s  actions come as a response to the invisible aspect in the daily maternal experience, mostly of domestic and caring activities. As a method, it is informed by Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ writings as a form of intuition which is invisible, but always accessible. The story ‘The Doll in her Pocket: Vasalisa the Wise’ is used to discuss female intuition. The doll was given to the child by her mother on her death-bed, as a protection.

Pinkola Estes writes:

‘The doll is the symbolic homunculi, little life. It is the symbol of what lies buried in humans that is numinous. It is a small and glowing facsimile of the original self. Superficially, it is just a doll. But inversely, it represents a little piece of soul that carries all the knowledge of the larger soul-self. In the doll is the voice, in diminutive, of old La Que Sabe, The One Who Knows. […] it is our helper which is not seeable, per se, but which is always accessible.’[1]

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[1] Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves, Rider, London, 1998, p. 85.

Self and Other II

The ethnolinguist Richard Bauman articulated performance as the following:

‘All performance involves a consciousness of doubleness, through which the actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a potential, an ideal, or a remembered original model of that action. Normally this comparison is made by an observer of the action – the theatre public, the school teacher, the scientist – but the double consciousness, not the external observation, is what is most central [...] Performance is always performance for someone, some audience that recognizes and validates it as performance even when, as is occasionally the case, that audience is the self.’[1]

The performative act is based on doubleness: the self  invented an other - ima. Within the self there are two entities. This doubleness allows a comparison, as well as a conceptualisation of difference. As soon as ‘I’ becomes ‘we’ there is already an observer who is also an audience. This audience functions as a witness and thus recognises and validates actions performed by the self.

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[1] Marvin Carlson, ‘What Is Performance’ in Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (eds.), The Twentieth Century Performance Reader, 2^nd Edition, Routledge, London and New York, 2005, pp. 149-150. Carlson refers to the definition of performance, articulated by the ethnolinguist Richard Bauman in the International Encyclopaedia of Communications.

http://in2drawing.blogspot.co.uk/

Self and Other I

The French theorist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva writes:

‘Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body […] there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on. ‘It happens, but I’m not there’. ‘I cannot realize it, but it goes on’’.[1]

For Kristeva the subject, in the experience of pregnancy, had been positioned as an outsider of its own body. In terms of psychoanalysis, Kristeva explains:

‘Pregnancy seems to be experienced as the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling up of the body, separation and coexistence of the self and of an other, of nature and consciousness, of physiology and speech. This fundamental challenge to identity is then accompanied by a fantasy of totality – narcissistic completeness – a sort of instituted, socialized, natural psychosis.’[2]

If the subject is outside of her own body it is because, in the experience of pregnancy, there seems to be a split between nature and consciousness, physiology and speech, ‘separation and coexistence of the self and of an other’.[3] In other words, there seems to be a challenge to the unity of the subject’s sense as one coherent self.

A different account of pregnancy, by artist Susan Hiller, suggests a position of observer/participant. Referring to her work 10 Month (1977 – 1979) Susan Hiller writes:

‘In the first half, the texts that I chose to use were subsidiary to the physical. I was dwelling on the physical changes, […]. But in the second half of my pregnancy I was quite tormented and perplexed by a number of things, for example, by observing myself, being a participant and an observer, […] and I began theorizing, reading a lot, trying to understand what I was going through.’[4]

This is not a psychoanalytical position per se, however, it is a comment on the artist’s own feelings and psychic state. Hiller’s reflection may be informed by anthropology, her profession prior to becoming an artist. The position of observer/participant, outside and inside spaces put together, inspired me and thus formed an important part of the methodology. The research looks at the situation and dynamic of occupying both spaces, with the aim of developing tools with which to understand and utilize this new position.

One such a tool was writing as a performative act in ima’s 5 minute writing in the stream of consciousness diaries. This technique enables an engagement with ‘material’, which comes from within, such as dreams and fantasies. Descriptive writing has been used in order to document an observed action, as well as to analyse ideas. Writing created a space and a place, in which a meeting between outside and inside spaces occurred. One becomes one’s own observer as one documents one’s self.

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[1] Kristeva, ‘Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini’ in Desire in Language, 1980, p. 237.

[2] Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’ in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986, p. 206.

[3] Ibid, p. 206.

[4] Susan Hiller, ‘Dedicated to The Unknown Artist, an interview with Rozsika Parker, pp. 26 – 30. From: Barbara Einzig (ed.), Thinking About Art, Conversations with Susan Hiller, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2000, p. 50.

A mother’s love

Is a time axis

In my inout

Ticking

Tic-toc and

Chop-chop

I asked my mum what is the distance between kibbutz Ashdot Yaacov (Meuchad), where both her and I were born, and Samakh, the Palestinian town which got destroyed in 1948. She said about 6 km.

I want to measure that distance geographically, historically and culturally with the help of a ruler made out of wool, as well as stories about other people and their connection with geography, wool and grandmothers.

Bunia (Blatt) Shmueli was born in Ukraine in 1908 to Pearl and Ze'ev Blatt. She joined Zionist youth movements, Hashomer first, then Hachalutz. After the Russian Revolution (1917) the government forbade the teaching of Hebrew in schools or otherwise. Bunia's parents took a private tutor to teach their two children, Bunia and Isaac, at home. With time, more people joined these meetings, where Hebrew was taught and other related matters were discussed. The police was informed and in 1926 Bunia and other friends were arrested (her brother was a year younger, therefore under the legal age; he was arrested a year later). She and her friends were sentenced to three years exile in Middle Asia and Siberia. At the end of the three years Bunia was allowed to move to the city of Samarkand. For 5 years she kept applaying for a permission from the Red Cross to go to Palestine. She finally recieved the permission, on condition never to return to Russia. Bunia arrived at Palestine in 1931.


Bunia helped to build kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov (Meuchad) in the Jordan Valley, one of the hottest places in Palestine/Israel. Her work was to knit woollen sweaters to all the kibbutz members and children. As a child I used to visit my grandmother in the Tzim-ri-ya. I remember playing with the colourful wool, making knots, helping her by untying old sweaters and rolling the threads to small balls.

With another visit (to Israel)

coming up sooooon, ima

is sharpening knitting

needles, both

as noun

anddd

verb.  

שיר בתהליך

מאת יונת ניצן-גרין

25.3.2012

אהבת אם היא

ציר זמן

מתקתק בתוחוצי

תיק-תק

וצ'יק-צ'ק.

**

Most mornings ima writes poems. They are written mostly in Hebrew. I will have a go at translating them to other languages.

The method of a persona has led me to develop a method of performative acts. Judith Butler’s ‘Performative acts and Gender Constitution’[1] informs this method. According to Butler:

‘The formulation of the body as a mode of dramatizing or enacting possibilities offers a way to understand how a cultural convention is embodied and enacted.’[2]

This research aims at revealing cultural conventions and the way the identity of the mother is constructed through them. The idea of embodiment has led me to consider the body as a tool of investigation. If the maternal body embodies cultural conventions, than it can be turned into a tool that investigates itself and the conventions which are imposed on this body. Motherhood can be understood as a social action in which already established meanings are re-enacted and re-experienced. I take, for example, the act of dish washing. By simultaneously doing this act and reflecting on it, a cultural convention has been revealed. I became aware that I occupy two roles at the same time: the nurse (me-ta-pe-let) who looked after the children at the kibbutz (during my childhood) and the mother (at present). A documenting tool, such as a pen and paper, was added to the body as an extension of this investigating tool. In employing the method of performative act, ima enables both knowing-in-action and a reflection-in-action. Performative act enables also a reflection on action, which takes place subsequent to the action. In Diary of washing dishes (2001), the reflection-on-action has led to a second action in which some pages of the diary were translated to Hebrew and Arabic. This has ‘opened’ a space to consider the role of the mother as a social agent.   

[1] J. Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’ in Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (ed.), The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, Routledge, London and New York, 2005, pp. 120 - 134.

[2] Ibid, p. 126.

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Lawn of Displacement is a participatory performative act which was done in respond to the Palestinian poet and author Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah. In his book Barghouti remembers a time when he was a student of literature at a university in Cairo In 1967. When he heard that a war had broken out between Israel and other Arab countries Barghouti writes:

 ‘‘Until this day I do not know why with my arm I drew a wide arc in the air and, aiming at the trunk of that palm tree, hurled the bottle of ink with all my strength so in that midnight-blue collision it burst into fragments of glass that settled on the lawn.’

Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, Bloomsbury, 2004, p. 2.

In interpreting his action through this performative act I wanted to get closer to the narrator’s feelings, as well as other people who have been displaced from their homeland.

Vigil – ‘(noun) 1. Night watch. A period spent in doing something through the night, e.g. watching, guarding, or praying.’ From: Encarta Dictionary (on-line).

Lawn of Displacement was part of Space for Peace, a vigil organised by Winchester University’s Professor June Boyce-Tillman at Winchester Cathedral on 26th January 2012.

Donald Schön termed knowing-in-action, reflection-in-action, reflection-on-action and practicum. ‘Knowing-in-action’ is ‘the implicit knowledge that underpins and accompanies action, the characteristic mode of ordinary practical knowledge.’[1] This methodology includes Schön’s conception of the practicum, as a place which enables a synthesis between theory and practice. Referring to Schön’s definition of practicum, ima asks: ‘what is this place? Is it located in a building, as a studio or laboratory? Or is it a group of locations?’ ima’s practicum is in plural, not confined to one place but in fact open to many places, spaces and times.

Data collection, as well as processing was done both at the studio and in the real world: home, friends’ houses, Tesco car-park, during visits to Israel, family holidays at various other places, exhibitions etc, in short, at every place or time that the everyday provides.

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[1] Bairbre Redmond, Reflection in Action, Developing Reflective Practice in Health and Social Services, Ashgate Publishing Company, Aldershot, Hampshire, 2006, p. 36.

Research in Action methodology has been used in order to find answers to the research question and the questions which followed as the research evolved. A systematic approach has been implemented from the outset of the research. This included a daily studio practice, development of methods of inquiry, data collection, analysis and processing. Tacit knowledge has been re-visited through a variety of methods, primarily performative acts performed by a persona called ima.

ima is derived from invisible mother-artist and the word mother in Hebrew, my language of origin. This method was used in order to deconstruct the cultural constructs Motherhood and artist, as well as Kibbutz childhood. Invisibility refers to a sense of disappearance that prevailed in my experience, both in the Kibbutz childhood and the maternal. ima is informed by the writings of Clarisa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run With the Wolves, 1998, which explores and analyses women’s psyche, supported by a Jungian psychoanalysis. A method of writing diaries in the stream of consciousness has been deployed as a strategy to enable a way into my own unconscious.