“For years I’ve claimed that art begins in a place that avoids discourse and analysis. This is the value of art – here it receives its own value. Speech by definition should be in advance, in the sense that I’m not going to answer the ’question of questions.’”
Moshe Kupferman in a dialogue with Haim Maor on “Live Without Record: Remember What’s Worth Remembering”, 2000
I’ll begin with a clarification. The photography of Aim D’uel-Lusky, as a final result of the sensitivity of paper exposed to light, as an image in the image field, is irrelevant to me. I have no intrinsic interest in the discourse toward which D’uel-Lusky is directed via his photography in and of itself, and via the totality of his theoretical writing (it’s quite likely that it’s possible to describe this discussion without completely committing an offense against it quite succinctly: The line dividing and linking photography with the Renaissance perspective, in such a way that photography ’proves’ its capacity to reproduce depth, a concrete experience of three-dimensionality as opposed to D’uel-Lusky’s two-dimensionality-in-fact), and I am not even interested, in this case, in litigating the photography of D’uel-Lusky in contexts in which he has been situated up until now.
Aim D’uel-Lusky interests me, pure and simple, and this exhibit is born of this interest. What interests me about him? The manner in which a concurrence between his work and his likeness is formed; the multiplicity of his reflections (artist, teacher, curator, thinker); his choice to illuminate certain sides of his personality and to cast a shadow over others (particularly his functioning as an artist); the relationship between his image (as an aspect of surfaces) and his personality (as a study of depth); and the manner in which these ’qualities’ are captured on paper.
I never met D’uel-Lusky in his studio, (and not just because he doesn’t have a studio). Our discussions about his work in which we engaged in his living room were mainly technical and to the point, and the works shown in this exhibit were not chosen from among them, but rather were created especially for it (one could ask here why the choice of certain images over others isn’t really important: How is it that the image of D’uel-Lusky is always ’interesting’ or ’pretty’ or ’good’? And how does it happen that it almost doesn’t matter what his subject is?). My guiding principle is that of a realization of old ideas or of discovery of materials that existed before. A presentation of a critical mass of the artistic work of D’uel-Lusky is an attempt to break out of the formalistic-theoretical discourse in which it is bound.
Photography is D’uel-Lusky’s point of departure, and in my opinion, his strongest claim about photography is actually conveyed through his process as a ’convert artist’ – a silent artist. In the sense that D’uel-Lusky’s work is known, in the sense that we know of it, that we have seen it more than once, that we’ve heard of it directly from him or indirectly from reading his articles, there is a sort of deception. D’uel-Lusky actually silences his work, casts a shadow over it, chooses to expose it not as a work unto itself, but rather under “made-to-order” conditions, in contexts in which he can make claims via the work, or with its help, to reveal a statement of observation.
From his 1979-80 book Manoname, published during his stay in Paris, it emerges that the centerpiece of D’uel-Lusky’s artistic work – innovative, revolutionary in certain cases – is the withdrawal into a journal format that is internalized in hard-cover notebooks. Inside these notebooks, D’uel-Lusky thinks via various means – writing, drawing, painting, collage – and lays down his ideas. The exhibited book, which is presented as the basis of D’uel-Lusky’s thinking, contains ideas for work that materialized, at times only partially, at times not at all (particularly video installations): thoughts on photography; questions from a contemplative viewpoint on the status of a subject; questions about the effect of the presencing of a subject in a particular space on others present; a conflict between space-related perceptions from the past (perspective-oriented) and those of the future (flat, lacking perspective); and their impact on relationships, emotions, and intimate situations between people.
Isolating art creation, and converting it to an interpretive-investigational writing, the replacing of the writing desk by the camera obscura, has captured my attention for years in relating to D’uel-Lusky as a character and an image, asking me to ask questions – to ask the ’question of questions’ as Kupferman calls it (by his definition, one can assume, the question whose meaning is total and ultimate) – regarding the meaning of this conversion is almost to exchange one way of life for another. Despite the fact that writing has always constituted a central part of D’uel-Lusky’s way of working, his thought processes was woven during his early years into the texture of his artistic work and not looking down upon it, as it is called in his critical-research-interpretive writings of his later years. As a ’convert artist’, masked, bobbing upon the surface of paradoxical significance, it could be said of the photograph that it is a hiding medium, or a medium of the hidden that determines that its revelation of the negative cannot be directed or controlled, but rather is intended as coincidence only. As it was always, photography is an act of the present intended (to be revealed) in some future time in order to be its own past (and only then to be revealed). And back again.
The meaning of photography is as a means of the past (I like to say that photography does not simply prove the existence of a thing in the past, but rather at that actual moment that it exposes its object to light, it is already past) that carries with it a wide range of knowledge (knowledge in all senses, of various types). As I see it, this is the significance of depth: Intellectual-sensual-perceptual depth and emotional-spiritual-mental depth.
In the cameras that D’uel-Lusky builds, there are over 200 tiny apertures, and it is possible to liken them to the action of an MRI, which scans the brain in depth, not surface. Physically, the camera that exposes the photographed object to light via each of the apertures passes through a certain reference point hundreds of times, like a scanner that joins together its data and “remembers” them layer by layer in order to reproduce the interior of the scanned receptacle and all its incisions, and not only its surface.
In this sense, the camera obscura is a resonance chamber for the photographed object. It is not only the object’s reflection, but rather its echo. It is able to contain the object’s other qualities: Not only how it looks, but also how it sounds, how it feels, how it is experienced.
Looks, sounds, feels, experienced – but the question is: In whose eyes? Who is it that is doing the looking, hearing, feeling, and experiencing of this moment in the past? The image, which is a result of the multi-layered act of the pinhole camera, acts as a territory that collects and catches within it a ’lost subject’, spread out in a multiplicity of directions that the camera allows. In this respect, the image of D’uel-Lusky exists precisely in opposition to the rules dictated by the body creating it (the pinhole camera). Via the act of photographing, photography acts to conceal the existence of the One View; the photograph, which is its result, concentrates upon it all views, and transforms splitting into depth.
“Inside the global village,” writes Sarit Shapira in the exhibition catalogue Black Holes: The White Place, “flooded with signs and deliverables that are reproduced and without origin, the space of art is a place where things without an aura are experienced not as opposed to things with an aura, but rather as light that has fallen, that has been reduced until it is used up and transformed into a ’black hole’ that continues to suck into it and to lose within it all other light that comes near it.” (p. 179).
In almost romantic opposition to the drawing in of the subject into the ’black hole’ described by Shapira, D’uel-Lusky’s art, his art space, his obscured resonance chamber, in my opinion enable an encounter with the place in which the subject – its essence, its depth, its ability at that moment to see, hear, feel, and experience idiosyncratically – is reproduced anew.
D’uel-Lusky’s choice to conceal his act of creating art (and I stand by my opinion that it is a choice and not circumstantial, as D’uel-Lusky likes to claim), not only from other viewers, but also to remove it nearly totally from his agenda, from his desk, takes upon itself the exposing of the yoke of silence of the (concealed) subject, of the human, anonymous image that so rapidly changes from one chamber to the next, in the refusal to be exposed to the light beam and to be captured in the eye of the beholder.
D’uel-Lusky looks for the image, searches for it, and finds it in one of the most emotional, human gestures in my opinion in the image of his mother. In bringing her tools for drawing and a platform to paint on, D’uel-Lusky chooses to be her guide, escorting her on the path whereon she can find on her own the place wherein orientation and cohesion find their restoration. This is the process through which, in my opinion, Aim D’uel-Lusky takes his viewers.
Idit Porat
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