The early installation, “Measurement,” exhibited at the House Gallery in London in 1972, was the first in a series of works in which Druks examined concepts of measurement while making use of the body. As in the video work Play Box, he focused on the physical touch points, ie. hands and feet of a person, which are a tangible, sensory way of examining the “outside” and assimilating concepts such as “measurement”. This installation was part of a group exhibition, and Druks presented an architectural plan of the gallery, with the spaces’ measurements given in “feet” according to a photograph of the artist’s foot, and in “inches”, according to a photograph of the span of two of his fingers. A photographic illustration of the artist’s body was also shown in relation to the space of the hall made available to him.
The subject of measurement was further refined in another work of his, which took the form of a statistical study and was recorded in a video called, “Everybody’s Own Square, Assessment of Size Relationships,” 1975. This work was presented in Druks’ solo show at the ICC, International Cultural Center, Antwerp, 1975, in a collection of Jan Devo.
Women and men were asked to draw a square, freehand, as exactly as possible. Later in the video, the particular person standing with his arms outstretched at his sides was matched to the square that he drew, on a background of graph paper. Druks was not satisfied with inventing and performing the exercise and presented a hypothesis:
“The proportions of the drawn square match the freehand deviations from the Platonic form, and the typical proportions of the human body that drew it.”
Another piece, this time in stills photography, “Everybody’s Own Yard,” exhibited in the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1976 and in which Druks examined the free estimate of a unit of measurement - the yard - and the feeling of space that it creates in the person estimating.
It is interesting that in this period, in which he was working with the most innovative medium of the time, Druks chose to focus on the basics, the closest and most tangible — the body. On principle, Druks challenged the key image in art history, of man standing with his arms out at his sides, so familiar to us from the work of the Roman architect Vitruvius and the famous drawing of Leonardo da Vinci. As we know, the ideal human model anchored the canon of painting proportions over hundreds of years, a canon that created harmony between the concept of creation (nature) and the act of man (art, technology) based on a supposedly fixed and objective set of rules. In the Druks’ relational exercise, he sought to prove that individual perception and thought do not conform to any general model.
The process of conceptualization by the individual is based on different physical data, and between different individuals will never be identical. Druks’ model implied that in the alienated, technological society, the individual internalizes the environmental conditions and technological dogma takes over the inner space. His use of different measurement indicates that language preserves an ancient state, in which there was still a direct connection between the body and measurements.
Avraham Ofek addressed the subject of measurement in art in a text written on his friend Micha Ullman:
“By my estimation he [Ullman] measured according to a finger or thumb, a handbreadth, a forearm, a shoe, foot - and not millimeter, centimeter, meter, etc.; he weighed by egg, log, kav, se’ah, ephah - and not gram, kilogram, ton, etc. These units of measurement are based, in addition to the sizes of the human body and its limbs, on the actions of the body and the state of its limbs. The forearm, for example, can be based on the width of a person’s grip in sitting position. The immediate area close to a person are his property. In relations between people, they are the determining factor.”1
Ofek’s poetic text shows how Ancient Hebrew used different parts of the body to mark measurements and to formulate complex relations between a person and place, with all of its physical and metaphysical meanings. The work of Michael Druks and his texts are strewn with insights like these:
“Concepts have no absolute value in and of themselves; they are not real subjects, and so it is possible and also desirable to reexamine them from time to time, so that they will not limit us as though they were laws. Examination of your own concepts involves a reexamination of your relationship with the outside world. Since a concept — measurement, for example, is a function of language, it is necessarily more abstract than the phenomena that it signifies, which we know directly through the senses. But even when a concept originates in completely abstract thought, like in mathematics, it nevertheless appeals to our senses in its structure.”2
Text by Galia Bar Or
1 Avraham Ofek, “The parable of Micha Ullman,” Micha Ullman, 1980-1988, Edited by Igal Zalmona, Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1988, p. 12.
2 Michael Druks, "Introducing through video", Video End, Graz, Pool Pfirsich, 1976, 45050.
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