“Territory - Living Space” is a performance and film, with images of past and present shown through a children’s game. It began in 1977 as a performance in which Druks recreated a game that is a kind of division of “countries” by sticking a knife in the ground to mark territory. In this case, the film did not document the performance conventionally but was rather filmed from above, like a physical-political map, from a conceptual and principled point of view that addresses the technical possibilities and history of the image. Druks did not focus on humanity and the violence symbolized by the knife, but rather the internal sediments of mapping.
The loaded title of the piece, shown in different countries, attests to its clear political connections. In Germany it was translated into a specific German term, which echoes its ideological use in explaining Nazi aggression in World War II. In Israel the work was shown in 1976 in Tel Aviv’s Gordon Gallery1. ‘Territory - Living Space’ recreated the children’s game by the name of “Country, World”: The participants draw a big circle on the ground, which represents the world. A dividing line crossing the circle serves as a border, and the two participants on either side are not allowed to cross it. The players have to stab a knife into the ground of the neighbor’s territory, and mark a line to appropriate, from their opponent’s territory, a piece of land for themselves. ‘Living Space’ is the deciding stage of the game: a participant who loses significant portions of his land, must stand on one foot and eventually lose his share and stop playing.
For his part, Druks saw the work as a protest against the prevailing socio-economic system and a “defense of the adult as an individual through games of children, who, as we know, are more individualistic than adults.2” Everywhere that Druks exhibited the work, local elements were attributed to it.
During the exhibition in Aachen, the performance was filmed under the direction of Druks and edited into an independent film. The camera was situated, by Druks, as if it were “the eye of God,” and the cartographic view from above created a dynamic political map of a world whose borders spread and take shape throughout the conduct of a seemingly innocent children’s game.
To the Israeli audience in 1976, the year in which the work was shown in Tel Aviv, the division of the land in “the children’s game” was very topical. The feeling of breached and threatened borders following the Yom Kippur war was powerful and disturbing, and several artists also addressed the matter in work that is relevant to Druks’. Joshua Neustein, for example, created “Territorial Imperative” that year - a serious of photographs from the Golan Heights, which show a dog marking territory by urinating. There were already numerous precedents for works on land in Israeli art. In his 1972 project “Mezer-Meser”, Micha Ullman exchanged land between settlements on both sides of the Green Line, and in 1975, and created his complex piece made up of space - a landscape of sand dunes bound in a circle, a kind of microcosm that takes shape and unravels again and again. In the space, Ullman performed “action phrases” of dragging and sweeping, leaving traces that are eliminated throughout the work. Ullman also took care to create his landscape microcosm from a quantity of sand measured by the volume of his body - and this starting point, anchored to the scale of his individual person, corresponds well with Druks’ preoccupation with measure and measurement.
But it is precisely in Israel, where the territory performance was anchored - the living space in the clear political context and connection to “earth art” in the spirit of Ullman, that the work encountered a misunderstanding evident in the critiques in the press. One review read:
In a dense gallery, Druks presented what will be remembered as the first “show” in Israel (if we don’t take into account Adina Bar-On, who also puts on shows, but these developed without context and uninfluenced by the goings on in artistic capitals outside of Israel’s borders). […] In the role of the playing children, to the cheers of the audience, the adult artists Michael Druks and Meir Agassi perform to the crowd’s cheers. Here the reader probably expects me to detail the rules of the children’s game, how it is played, the socio-political allusions hidden in it and so forth - but I prefer not to linger on the subject, since Druks’ show was so stupid that the sympathetic viewer could not help but feel sorry for the talented artist who had fallen into such a trap. Druks’ show does not, of course, prove anything about the nature of performance art as a whole. The only conclusion to be drawn from it is that the quickest does not necessarily succeed.3
Were Druks’ “action phrases” too direct? Or too indirect? Had there been a disconnect between the transmitter and the message because of the choice of performance and not painting, of a children’s game and not a loaded “cultural” myth? It seems that there were two factors at play: the first was the casual and “amusing” dress which was perceived by locals as frivolous, as a lack of seriousness that could not bear a deeper message. As far as the local audience was concerned, it would probably have been more correct to bring in a charismatic artist, making authoritative connections between layers of society, nature and spirit - like artist-shaman Itzhak Danziger, for example. Women artists, by the way, did not have such a collective-authoritative voice, nor claim for themselves a supra-temporal space at the center of society, as the thrilling pulse of the history and the time. Another legitimate option was the social: an artist who expresses social and political commentary from a position of ethical responsibility, and examines local identity patterns in their discussion.
Druks’ “entertainment” did not mix with the shamanic or a real social option, and against the background of local structuring of reluctance to foreign influence, perceived as another imported instance of “Hellenization,” of being spoiled by an external influence. In the atmosphere of those days, the “entertainment” was seen as inauthentic, and not as a distinct, local phenomenon.
Text by Galia Bar Or
1 At the opening of the “Simple Fragments” exhibition, April 7, 1976.
2 Druks quoted by Sarah Breitberg, “Art as Entertainment,” Yedioth Ahronoth. 23.4.1976.
3 Sarah Breitberg, Ibid.
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