I couldn't remember his name. Only his entrance into the classroom and the excitement of the fact that a real painter is going to teach us in high school, instead of the art history teacher who went on a year off. And the curly girl who whispered, so that the whole line would sound, that this redhead was hot.
He was a new immigrant from America, with Hebrew carved out of English. The first slide he chose to show us was an oil painting by Donald Duck. It wasn't until the interview, when I came across his photograph, that the token fell that the teacher in my memory was the artist Gary Goldstein.
"I wouldn't have attributed such sophistication to my move in those years," Goldstein smiles when I try to ask him if Donald was a planned opening move, his way of lighting up a high school class accustomed to classical art.
We met at the Petach Tikva Museum, where his new exhibition, "Running Up the Wall," curated by Reut Foerster and David Frankel, is on display.
Dozens of exhibitions knew this artist, whose works are included in the permanent collections of major museums in Israel and around the world, and who does not pay respect to the accepted hierarchies of what counts more and what is less. Not in the choice of materials with which he creates, nor in the worlds of inspiration from which he draws. Influenced by Dada art and journals, pop art, posters, surrealism, commercials and comics.
A boy who grew up in the America of the Piptease. Years in which comic books could find a world in which it was clear who was good and who was bad, and where bullies and injustice lost to all that was good, to everything that was "America." A world where the best are safe and win the hearts of the most beautiful girls. Booklets in which every kinky or monstrous subject has been flattened into images that allow distance from pain and anxiety. Like a sweet melody for blunt singing, like music that calls for dancing even the saddest words there is.
A hunger that went terrifying
"My art, even though it doesn't look like it, is very autobiographical," Goldstein says, as if to clarify a few things just before he goes to make us coffee. "Over the years, I realized that my work is a means for me to survive, to go through life, and in a way to understand it," he concludes in the soft voice that English still plays. The man, who immigrated to Israel in the 70s, fell in love with his Hebrew teacher, Anat, the mother of his two daughters, the youngest of whom is the multidisciplinary artist Dina Goldstein.
Like his parenting, so is the love of a woman, not present in his work. A 73-year-old man who, as the years go by, seems to tighten his grip on the hand of the boy he was. He was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to parents who survived the Holocaust and waited five years in a DP camp until their way to America was paved. Just don't go to Israel, which his mother perceived as an unstable place.
"The prospect of her going hungry again terrified her," smiles her child, who was two years old when his parents decided to leave Tennessee for Hartford, Connecticut. A city to which they moved because they wanted a Jewish community for themselves, more people to wrap themselves with in the fragments of the war. A place where the ears can rest in Yiddish and synagogues that offer chants to compose the longing with. And maybe, who knows, to find God again. Gary was sent to study there in a yeshiva, until during one of his father's outbursts about G-d, he took him out of there.
For a long hour I sat with Goldstein on a bench planted in a gray-painted hall in the museum. On the walls of the space around us, his works are divided into series, and when I ask about a particular work - he knows how to answer without looking at it. Like gave a new interpretation to the warning of the teachers of the whole world about the eyes they have in their backs.
Each series and its wall, each with its own theme. Works with ballpoint pen, markers, sharpened pencils, and stickers, most of which are drawn on paper with a past - old atlas pages or book covers. Gehry says he never has a direct dialogue with what's printed on the page, but he's sure something from the paper's past gets into the background noise while painting. Works that at first glance, with small graces of distance vision, can be mistaken, but then the gaze becomes fixed, and out of the cheerfulness of the colors arises the pain of details and the bite of the subjects.
A space that is a kind of invitation by the artist to enter his childhood room with him, the one he shared with his older sister, who would sit for hours copying portraits of beautiful women from journals. On her hand is Shmuel Goldstein, the tailor, whose sewing machine was located in Gehry's headboard. The father would lean into the machine in a frozen position reminiscent of a Sofer Stam yeshiva, the same yeshiva his son adopted when he abandoned work on large formats and replaced his studio stay with work on a table in the living room.
This is not how he imagined the backdrop of success at the beginning, when he enrolled in art school in New York. In his imagination he then saw an atelier bathed in light, where he stood and created with great movements, in the choreography that characterized the New York School, which included artists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, and to which he wished to belong upon graduation.
Stains of acrylic paint or oil splash on clothes, brush strokes resemble noticeable scars on skin. He abandoned all of this more than 30 years ago, replacing it with a job in which sharpened edges, pens or pencils "insert the color into the paper a bit like a tattoo on the skin." I, for my part, try to imagine the frozen sitting of this man, who begins every morning with two hours of cycling, from which he continues to yoga or Pilates classes.
"Our house was full of violence, and there was a clear division between the parents," he says of his childhood home. "My mother mentally and verbally abused my older sister, and my father beat me to death. Only at his funeral did I learn that he didn't raise a hand on our little brother. I, at the age of 18, fled to Syracuse, New York, and would not call. Mom would call from time to time. It was cruel on my part, not something I pride myself on or that comes from fortitude. My brother stayed with them and got to know them. They kept developing, and he did, but I stayed a teenager in front of my parents.
"They were good people, but so hurt. In 1998, when I flew to my father's funeral, I was sitting on a plane and in my mind I saw me with my two brothers, maybe a few other people, by the grave. But there were 250 people there, some of whom I didn't know. People who loved my parents, who were friends with them. I learned that they were prominent figures in the community. I met Holocaust survivors there who I knew as a child, and who I was sure were bad people. I found they were warm and kind. They came over to tell me about my parents. Stories that went all the way back to Auschwitz."
Eight years later, in 2006, his mother, Hanka née Jakubowicz, was buried. A woman who spent her entire life careful about her health, but spent the last decade of her life behind the curtain of dementia. Gary did not attend her funeral, because he was hospitalized in Israel with appendicitis that exploded.
"My parents were not educated people, but it was clear that we would go to university, because we were their fix. We were three children who received the names of people who were no longer there, and we were very big disappointments for the parents, because we couldn't deliver. We couldn't give them their hopes back. Not their parents or their brothers and sisters. It was a house that was empty of pictures or objects that convey memory, but full of ghosts."
Density of intentions
Ghosts left behind in the old homeland, which hurt so much. The spirit of 4-year-old Miriam, Shmuel's eldest daughter, whom he and her mother lost in the war, and whose existence no one mentioned for a lifetime. And there was the spirit of Feiga, the first child born in America, and at the age of a year and a half, when she was left unattended for a moment, she climbed onto a chair and poured a pot of boiling water on herself. "Mom didn't forgive Dad for going out to smoke a cigarette and leaving the child alone. I remember her accusing him that because of the cigarettes, Feige died, and he, like a spring, leaps towards her, in another second he chokes her - and just before the grip he calms down and shuts down."
Artifacts collected by Goldstein for the exhibition. The lives of others - which were his, photo: Etiel Zion
We are facing the series dedicated to ballpoint pen work. It's a collection of portraits, some based on old Hong Kong movie posters, where every face has distinct characteristics. One man reminds me of King Hassan of Morocco, a woman resembles Lebanese singer Fairuz, and another resembles Merav Michaeli. "Michaeli is actually a beautiful woman, but I never copy from photography or from looking at an object," Goldstein smiles. "People look for material about those who were in their family and perished, I end up 'foresting' my works with faces I didn't know, but who were very present and meaningful in my life."
For many years, through continuous work, Goldstein has been creating a family album for himself, himself. An album that makes no attempt to go for continuous memory or fidelity to facial features found in archives. Memory of sensations and fragments of life - they are displayed on the walls. Works that the closer you get, the more the artist's labor, the congestion of details and the density of intentions that cover the paper become apparent.
And it seems as if the terror of silence and emptiness that he knew in the home of Father and Mother is what manages it, pushes it to do, awakens in it a desire to be understood - first of all for himself. He delights in the work of explanation, diving deep into words and intentions, as if there is no need to maintain ambiguity in the relationship between the creator and the observer of his work.
Opposite the bench is a glass display room, where fragments of objects he collected are grouped, like fragments of the lives of others that were his own. Dentures, miniatures or office supplies are painted with white tapex, on which is a minimalist painting. From some angles the cluster looks like a ghost town, sometimes like forgotten bones in the desert.
Noise that achieves silence
On the right is War Sketches, a series that looks like a 50s comic. For a moment, the eyes look for a story on the wall that has a beginning, middle and end, but no plot action is woven between the scenes. Explosions, amputated limbs, soldiers in helmets that make it hard to know if they came out of the battlefields of Nazi Germany or the Korean War.
"Confusion makes perfect sense," the teacher explains to me, whose passion for geopolitics and history is part of his responsibility as a documenter. He adds that in the Korean War, which the US embarked on with a shortage of equipment, the US military made use of equipment left behind by the Nazi army.
The works in this series are all on a black background. "A tradition from the Renaissance, which treats the canvas as a kind of window that the viewer enters," Goldstein explains to an exhibition visitor standing in front of the war cluster. "A window that no one defines its depth, and for me the feeling is that it's a real hole. A lot of my work deals with plugging this hole. In an effort not to fall into it. A hole I walk with inside me, and every time I put it on paper, I gain the illusion of control over it, control that doesn't exist outside the frame."
Atlas 3 is a series drawn entirely on pages of a 50s atlas, which Goldstein found in a used book store. Here it seems as if the entire series is dedicated to one specific woman, whose head seems to be huddled in a cube. "A bit like Adolf Eichmann's aquarium," the teacher throws out a hint of inspiration.
In the series, heads are set within backgrounds crowded with dots, grids and words written by the artist, and which also became a texture in the background that excites to surround the painted head from every angle. And I stand in front of all of this and think about how much noise it takes sometimes to get some quiet.
The fourth collection, created on the covers of old books, is dedicated to horror. Eyes and mouths gaping. "Horror like radioactive fallout that survivors intentionally or unintentionally transmit to children," explains Goldstein, who would see the terror evoke in his silent father – in every conversation, question or contact.
Unraveling old books on their way to a new life also awakens the tailor's son. A memoir by pianist Arthur Rubinstein, describing life in Łódź in prewar Poland, was the first to paint on it. A small paperback book, in which the good life of the city was described before the war swallowed everything - banquets, women, gardens, music.
Time after time he read the book, until it fell apart in his hands, and so he found himself drawing on the pages. "Two years earlier, when I was visiting my parents, I came across a book of war memoirs written by a relative. Both books played a part in my transition from large formats to small works on paper, from drawing with large movements to sitting frozen, from the need for outward dialogue to one that faces inward," he says.
In the end, he clarifies, everything was formulated in his childhood room. He sighs the thought for a moment and adds, "That's how it is. Relationships with the dead are something that develops after death. I was very angry with them, and only after their deaths did I see that a very large part of my perception and memory of my parents was wrong."
I wanted to get up and hug him to the tip of my lungs. Instead, I heard myself say that I wish I had never interrupted him in class.
Photographs of Gary Goldstein's works in the article - from the exhibition "Running Up the Wall" at the Petach Tikva Museum
shishabat@israelhayom.co.il
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