The notice board piece is Michael Druks’ first video work. It was filmed in 1970 by the Israeli television team who documented Druks taking apart a Tel Aviv bulletin board with a pickaxe. It was taken while dismantling layers of the “sandwich” that covers the thickening notice board - a violent-looking action, reminiscent of Nam June Paik smashing a piano with an axe during a seminal stage event of Fluxus1.
But direct violence of this kind was not characteristic of Druks’ works. The truth was that the action of dismantling bulletin boards was part of their routine upkeep since, after all, notice boards are gradually covered by a thick layer of posters stuck onto one another, and from time to time they must be removed. So this was not a radical act on the part of Druks but rather cooperation with institutional bodies, even expressed in the thanks which the Tel-Aviv-Jaffa municipality received on the exhibition page, for having helped in realizing the project.
Druks worked with this ‘inferior’ material, a ‘sandwich’ of notices, by cutting, gluing and exposing layers, and the final results - a kind of relief that looked like geological strata of time and graphic media - were presented as the “Sandwiches” exhibition at Gordon Gallery in Tel Aviv (1971). The exhibition included a variety of sandwich works, some of which were poetic in character and not aimed at media, which shocked the local taste at the time. For example, works from fabric scraps gathered at textile factories, or densely packed packages of paper remnants from paper and print factories. However the notice board works - thick layers of “urban garbage” - were a kind of local milestone in this field of art and media in Israel2.
And indeed, in the time in which the “Sandwiches” exhibition was open, Druks began to expand his work in media into the television technology where he lived in London. In fact, the bulletin board is a well-known, traditional technology of communication, a kind of “kiosk,” or urban “forum,” or a physical center for the distribution of information. Looking back, the film and the notices work were an earlier stage that paved the way for Druk’s ongoing engagement with the subject of communication throughout the 1970s.
Text by Galia Bar Or
1 In the early 1950s, Wolf Vostell, in demonstrative violence, ripped layers of notices in an expression of destruction which prevailed in his performances in the following years.
2 And as evidence, is included in the Ministry of Education’s publications on Israeli art studies.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
