Benni Efrat: Experimental Films from the 1970s

The Artist in Conversation with Adi Englman; held in a meeting with the students of the Department of Photography, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem

24.4.2017

1. From Lebanon to a Young State of Israel: Childhood Memories

Adi: I’ll start by introducing Benni, and together we’ll begin with some biographical details. Benni Efrat, you were born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1934.

Benni: We came to Israel in 1948, around the time of the War of Independence. All of my aunts and uncles had already arrived in Israel much earlier, however my father, who was a big wholesaler in Beirut, decided to stay to maintain his business. During the war he was approached by Palestinian merchants who were in business with him and who had fled from Jerusalem, from Haifa, asking for his assistance. And he did try to help as much as he could, until one day men in covered faces showed up and began to make threats: “Your religions dispossessed us, the Jews dispossessed us, surrender all your belongings to us or else we kill your entire family.” I had no idea about it at the time, I was just a kid. My father contacted friends of his in Lebanon, both Christians and Muslims, and told them of the threats, and they helped us through the border in 1948, shortly after the declaration of independence.

Adi: And in Israel, several years later, you left your family and moved to a kibbutz on your own, still as a child.

Benni: I was a tough kid to handle, a bit of a trouble maker, the kind who gets into all sorts of things just to get noticed. We lived in an old Arab house in the Hatikva Quarter, in southern Tel Aviv, and to show off I’d climb drainpipes to the second floor, the third, sometimes all the way up to the roof, while the entire neighborhood stood stand and watched. One day the pipe broke down and I was suspended there, shouting and screaming, which caused a big commotion. Some neighbor reached his hand out from a window and that’s how I was brought safely in. My older brother, who fled Lebanon much before us and was already in the Palmach and a kibbutz member, talked my parents into sending me to a boarding school at a kibbutz, or else the worst my happen. I was admitted to the boarding school at Kibbutz Yagur, from which point my life took its course.

Adi: Were you an “external child” at the kibbutz?

Benni: Yes, I joined the youth society for the non-kibbutz children.

2. From the Kibbutz to Tel Aviv: First Steps in Art

Benni: I served at the Nahal and the Sayeret, and after my military service I joined Kibbutz Nahsholim. But in the year following my military discharge my father went bankrupt. Ever since moving to Israel he had no success with his business. I left the kibbutz and moved to the city, to Tel Aviv, to help provide for the family. I got a job working on a bulldozer, where the pay was good but the work hours were highly inconvenient. At the same time I enrolled in the Tel Aviv University, for undergraduate studies in physics, but because of the work hours I never made it to the evening classes. Every day after work I’d wonder the streets all by my own, not knowing anybody. One day I ran into a friend from my reserve service and told him how clueless I was, not knowing what to do, having no friends and idling about. And he told me of the Avni Institute, saying there are a lot of girls there. Which is, in fact, the real reason why I went to study art. Avni at the time had teachers like Streichman and Stematsky, who taught lyrical abstract, and Mokady, who taught this sort of minimalist-figurative. And I, to show off, went into a lot of effort and managed a decent lyrical abstract. But generally speaking, all the students were doing pretty much the same thing.

In evenings I’d go to the Mapam club, where they had magazines from all over the world. One day I spotted an art publication from Switzerland, there was a Rothko on the cover and inside an essay about him which I managed to read – however slowly – thanks to the French I had from home. And from that moment on I realized how immensely intellectual the art world is, which triggered a drastic change for me. I never finished my exams at Avni – in fact, I hold no diploma from them. At the end of the school year I heard from someone about a scholarship to study art abroad, by the America-Israel Cultural Fund. But my teachers from Avni sat on the Jury, and my application was denied.

Meanwhile, at work, I became in charge of heavy machinery and earned quite well. I had a solo show at the Czemerinsky Gallery on Gordon Street, among the few galleries that operated in Israel at the time. One day as I stop by at the gallery they tell me that “Sandberg was here, he asks you to call.” So I ask “Who is this Sandberg?” and they tell me that I should be ashamed, “He’s the director of the Israel Museum.” That was shortly after the museum was inaugurated. I called him, we met, and he asks me how I arrived at those paintings in the show. These were minimalist, realist, figurative paintings. Also he asks about the America-Israel scholarship. To which I say that I didn’t get it, and that my former teachers from Avni sat on the jury. A week later I receive a telegram informing me that I’ve gotten it. It came with an invitation to study at the Saint Martin School of Art in London, which was known internationally, with a scholarship for graduate studies in art. Originally my plan was to go to Paris, just like everyone else, but I switched destinations, which turned out to be for the better.

3. Going to London: The Birth of Concrete Art in the Work of Benni Efrat

Adi: London sees the beginning of the chapter we are dealing with here today. There was a significant turning point in your work.

Benni: Right. By the way, at Saint Martin’s I went to the Department of Sculpture, where Anthony Caro was among the faculty. And there weren’t too many students in the class, maybe 16.

Adi: Was Buky Schwartz among them?

Benni: No, that happened before me. Buky Schwartz, also Menashe Kadishman, they both studied before I came. I was already married with a baby and the scholarship only covered the rent, so again I had to work to support my family. And to have to study, work and pay for art supplies all at the same time – that was very hard. I’d paint apartments for Jews in Golders Green and get “one pound a day,” which was quite a sum back then. But my teachers started voicing complaints that I never do anything, that I’m on a scholarship that could have gone to someone else. So I was thinking that I have to do something.

One day, when I finally showed up at school, I spotted a wooden bench with a broken leg. I asked Alex the janitor whether I could take it, and he said yes, and that on top of that he’d provide nails and an extra wooden beam to fix it. We went to class together, put it down and everyone saw and laughed. I inserted nails into every beam, also into the seat and to the back. Not far from there was a produce market and there was a Jaffa crate lying around, with half its oranges rotten. Which I took as well. I spiked the oranges on the nails and went to play at the snooker. When I was back the entire school was there, the teachers held me and shook me and said, “finally you did something.”

You see, everyone was a minimalist at the time, they all did cubes and rectangles and squares in red and blue, and all of a sudden this. The crate’s upper lid, which was also made of thin wooden beams, I drew over with charcoal, turning the pattern into squares inside of which I wrote the work’s title: “Jaffa in Rot”. I laid it against the window and they all started talking about the “Jaffa” that I’ve written down inside. But for me the words weren’t so much the main thing as the squares. Subsequently I bought grid paper, sheets of about 40 x 50 centimeter, with a 0.5 inch grid. I covered over the lines I didn’t want with white and black ink, an erasure that gave way to a new drawing of squares. I called it “Adding to Subtract”.

Adi: I have to go back here a bit and add that Benni is downplaying his achievements. His Ofakim Hadashim paintings from his time at Avni were met with great success. They won him the first prize at the Paris Art Biennial, among other distinctions, but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t feel as though he’s working from a place of authenticity. To me it seems that London offered him the chance to take a distance from “Ofakim Hadashim”. It was there, on foreign territory, in a climate of experimentation and with little money in his pocket – that is, well positioned to arrive at a turning point – that he got to the place that concerns us here today. And now, to return to this special moment where Efrat started doing what we call “concrete art” – which was to become a sub-genre of conceptual art – I’d like to give a short introduction to this particular aesthetic through a number of insights made by Benni himself and others, quotes from an interview which will help us understand this orientation and the thinking behind it.

In an interview you gave to Sarah Breitbeg at the Davar daily, in 1972, you say that “the true is the beautiful,” that you aspire to “an honesty and fidelity to matter.”[1] Carl Andre, a close friend of yours in London, had said things in the same spirit. To give an example, on Frank Stella he had written that he is “not interested in expression or sensitivity,” also that “art excludes the unnecessary.”[2] That is to say, one aspires towards the essence of things, and from this essence are derived significance and beauty.

Benni: Andre had also famously said that “art is what we do and culture is what they do to us.”[3] Which to me is intriguing.

Adi: Another characteristic of Benni’s art in those years can be linked to the famed motto of “the medium is the message,” known from the title of the Marshal Macluhan book. Benni had said in his interview that “a good artist is a thinking artist,” which relates to your previous encounter with Mark Rothko through the essay you read about him. All of a sudden there isn’t this need for art to stem from feeling, there’s no need for this lyrical mannerism and for a painting laden with expressivity, as was familiar in Israel. One can think from the brain, and from there to derive a style and an aesthetic.

Another point that comes up in Benni’s interview is that “beauty is found in nature,” which again relates to the scientific penchant you’ve had since childhood and to this day. As someone who regards the world through scientific lenses, Benni finds that beauty is there already, in the world; that one should regard it and recognize it, and, in art, be able to work with.

Another quote from the interview is again emblematic of Benni’s art: “art, being part of life, does not persist for eternity.” Eva Hesse, an artist who was active in New York during those same years, had also expressed things in a similar spirit: “Life doesn't last; art doesn't last. It doesn't matter.”[4]Hesse, who dealt with notions of ephemerality in her work, means to say that there’s nothing sacred about the artwork, that it shouldn’t be placed above human lives or nature and that it doesn’t need to be preserved for ever. It has its moment, and, like human lives, it has a lifespan that is limited in time.

With respect to that, another thing emblematic of Benni’s art – and which I think has governed his artistic career – is the realization that the art market distorts art; that it’s wrong to work for the sake of a gallery or for your art to be bought and sold. One must simply do art, and the best of it will surface and go on to find its place in life.

4. ‘Brute Art’: Towards the Truthful Representation of Materials and States

Adi: The first film we’ll discuss is “Tailgate,” shot in 1973. Tell us what we see here.

Benni: The rear window of a car, driving, is attached with a strong source of light, a flashlight that faces backward, where a second car follows suit whose front window is attached with a camera.

Adi: In fact, a sort of ‘plot’ or ‘intrigue’ that unfolds in the interaction between these two cars.

Benni: Yes, a ‘chase’ of some sort where one car tails the other. At first the frame only shows the car driving, but then, as the flashlight switches on, the film’s photographic material appears to ‘burn’ from overexposure. Both cars were driving in the city, the one after the other, but we only get to glimpse the urban surrounding when they make a turn, and this too only in the edges of the frame. The rest is burnt out.

Adi: You’ve deliberately staged a situation that, in photography, is considered faulty, with the camera looking straight at the source of light.

Benni: Right. And, by the way, it was all shot with a single take. I never edit any of my films, which is why they run 10 minutes at most, the equivalent of 400 feet in 16 mm (approximately 122 meters). This is the photographic support I’ve been using.

Adi: Robert Pincus-Witten, an American critic and art historian who was following your work during those years, has written that these films have a ‘brute directness’ to them. There’s no editing or manipulation done to them whatsoever and what we see is the material reaction to the situation you’ve staged. Even so, to me these films contain the grain of a cinematic essence, the building up of a drama. We watch in anticipation of a peak moment, we wait for the suspense to unravel: Either for the film to overexpose and burn completely or for some recognizable image to show up in the frame. It’s a suspense that is structured through utterly minimal means, and yet, at the same time, the white frame stands for a visual representation of a physical reaction; a visually striking embodiment of the film in a concrete state of bareness, stripped and exposed. Again, this was concrete art.

Benni: Light obscured the truth, which we only see emerging in the edges. Physics allows truth to reveal itself.

Adi: As you’ve said, beauty is found in nature. We’re able to see these rays of light, these flarings that have much beauty to them. Clearly, your use of film and the interest you’ve had in the cinematic medium was at the service of your ideas at the time. But your output then was not limited to film. You experimented with a variety of media, as with a series of still photographs titled “Skylight”, from 1973.

Benni: The window you see is the roof window in the London apartment I had been living in. I positioned a camera to face the window and took one shot a day without ever moving the camera or covering the lens in between shots. The first shot, seen above left, was taken when I first operated the camera, while the last in the series shows how much dust had gathered on the lens in the meantime. And, you can clearly see how the lens gradually goes out of focus.

Adi: And this is the first work in a series called “Fadings,” also from 1973.

Benni: In 1973 I came to Israel for a visit and rented a rooftop apartment near the Tel Aviv Museum. I bought hundreds of sheets of colored paper and had them cut into squares of about 10 x 11 centimeter in size. I paved the whole roof with the papers, covering each of them with a plate and then removing a plate at every consecutive hour. It took days. There was a group of papers I started with in the first hour, then in the next I exposed another group and so on – except from the last paper, the darkest one, which never got exposed.

Adi: And here is another work in the series, from 1974.

Benni: This would have been the only piece in the series that I executed in cloth. I folded the cloth and then, everyday, opened another fold until the last, which remained unexposed. Above I’ve written down the times.

Adi: All throughout these works – the films, the works in paper, in cloth, the photographs – you were in pursuit of a truth inherent to matter, to a situation, to a process, to the contingencies of matter.

Benni: Yes. And, as you’ve said, in each of these situations I tried to create a tension. To advance a plot. The most basic tension possible, I’ve tried to show that it’s there.

5. The First Cinematic Attempt

Adi: How does an artist who was trained to paint on canvas, who came to London and began doing these pop-constructivist, multicolored sculptural pieces, end up handling a camera? This is hardly self-evident, especially that at the time it was quite uncommon in art.

Benni: In fact, I never really operate the camera myself, someone does that for me. With the exception of still photography, which I’ve in abundance, but I don’t handle the moving image. I stand next to the cameraman, I look into the viewfinder and I check, but I never do the shooting personally. But, to your question – I don’t know if it’s a complete coincidence, in any case it’s not far off. During my studies I had a good friend who left the sculpture department during the school year and transferred to film. We’d go to the National Film Theater together, a grand auditorium with hundreds of chairs in slanted rows. Admission was one shilling and we’d go nearly every day. The projector I knew from the snooker, and, despite not having had an idea for a film yet, I asked his permission to shoot from the projection booth.

So I thought and though about it, until one day I came over saying I’d like to shoot. The box office had a seating plan, they’d mark every place sold with an x and write down the corresponding number on the ticket. I asked to buy 94 seats on the plan, saying I’d like to shoot the auditorium from the screening booth while people are coming in. He disagreed at first but I said that I’ll hand my tickets to the people waiting outside once the film began. We started shooting exactly when the doors opened, and the people who came in and took their seats created a giant x of vacant seats right in the middle. And that was the first film I made, in 1968.

6. Process Art: The Drama of Materials Interacting

Adi: Another film, “Breaking Point of Tension,” again conveys your particular interest in physics. During these years in London, when you were doing concrete art, around the late 1960s and early 1970s, you’ve essentially been trying to arrive at these condensed factual moments, to convey a concrete message via matter, which shows very clearly in the films. But you’ve been trying to convey this in other ways as well. One sculpture that marks this turning point you’ve experienced in London in moving to concrete art is “Matter on the Move.” Could you tell us about it?

Benni: It was part of the second exhibition I’ve had in London, at the Mayfair Gallery, in 1969. My first show, which was held the year before, was shown at the Grabowski Gallery which was quite well known, but specialized in emerging artists. The Gallerist from Mayfair visited my show there and offered me to join his gallery, which had all the big names at the time, Andy Warhol among others. It was the surprise of a lifetime. He asked me to come up with a show, whatever comes to my mind, saying I shouldn’t worry about production costs.

The idea behind “Matter on the Move” was to see what happens when I take two different materials that are totally opposed in character and joins them together. I took a block of foam rubber, 1 meter high, 2.5 meters long and 2 meters wide, and on top I placed a steel plate of one ton, 12 centimeters thick. Obviously, we know what to expect from the physical standpoint, but no one’s ever tried it in practice. The sculpture got outstanding reviews. The connection to pure physics was very much in contrast to the art that was being made at the time.

Adi: In an exhibition at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art we presented a reconstruction of the sculpture. We ran into a lot of effort to produce it, working with two types of cranes and technicians who helped us out.

Adi: Now that we’ve learned earlier in the conversation about your background working with heavy machinery, we can better understand the idea and motivation behind it. In Herzliya we’ve had a long day mounting the piece together, but once it was put in place the sculpture immediately began to “work,” continuously changing and mutating in each day of the three months that the show was open to the public. At first the plate pretty much hovered above the rubber foam, which proved to be strong and supported the load remarkably well; but from then on, each and every moment the piece kept “doing its thing,” with the steel sinking ever lower, very gradually, into the rubber foam. The process of sinking-in took place right in front of the viewers’ eyes, presenting them an event of pure physics.

Benni: It turns out that rubber foam comes in a range of densities, and so the extent of the sinking occurs according to that, up to the maximal spot. That’s why every time I exhibited the piece it sank differently. When the work was again reconstructed two years ago, at the Jewish Museum in New York, they brought in a very rigid type of rubber foam. The curators and visitors who were present came by to see how the work was being mounted. When we’ve laid down the steel plate, one ton heavy, it just sat there on top, and then it sank, 2 centimeters deep. Everyone was stunned at how a plate this heavy can stay afloat. But the air needs to find its way out and in 10 days the plate sank a third into the block.

Adi: It is a work that keeps happening the whole time. In this regard, it’s worth noting that a number of artists who were active at the time were looking to express time-based processes in their art, to represent the passage of time. One noteworthy example of “process art,” as it came to be known, is the “Candle Piece” by Richard Serra, which begins when the candles stand tall and ends when they have been consumed. The dimensions vary constantly, hence they cannot be noted. And it’s interesting to mention that Serra, too, had begun experimenting for the first time with film at around the same time that you did. Among the results of this was “Hand Catching Lead,” a noted example in the genre of experimental filmmaking, which he made in collaboration with Philip Glass.

Yet another film that Benni had made at the time, one of several that he shot using two cameras, is “Relay”. Here the result yields a greater degree of complexity. Can you tell us about this work?

Benni: Two cameras are positioned across from one another, one kilometer apart. I operate one camera, run towards the second and operate it as well; this is when a second screen appears. As I’ve only had about 400 feet of film – the equivalent of some 10 minutes – I’ve had to be very precise in determining the distance, according to the time that it takes to run it. I shot at Hampstead Heath and it took several days of running to get the distance right. Another thing you see in the film is how two cameras, each facing in an opposite direction, capture the light differently.

7. To Break the Illusion

Adi: In this film you’ve concretized the spatial dimension of the artwork – or of the film – with your very own body. You’ve shown how the camera spawns the field that appears in the frame, in fact, the work’s physical dimension. You consume this distance, in person, and we follow you as you mark it. It’s a space you’ve tried to handle and discuss in other works as well, trying as it were to break the illusion of the frame in cinema or photography as a potential stage that might contain, in theory, an infinity of illusions. You’ve tried to show the truth as it unfolds in this space, to make it present, to concretize it. Another piece that was in your Mayfair exhibition, “Make an Eye a Hand,” also relates to this space.

Benni: A photograph of this work appeared on the exhibition’s invite. The square of light is projected onto a corner of the room, and I’ve had to plan the slide in such a way that the angles won’t distort, leaving only square of light in the space. The projector was placed high up, above the visitors, to hide it from view.

Adi: When the visitor enters inside the work and begins to interact with the projected image they soon discover the truth that underlies it. You try to raise an awareness in the viewer to a truth that lies within it, to prevent them from succumbing to its charms. In a way, you de-mystify of the artistic action. In 1972 you’ve had a solo show at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and on the invite was another such photograph that breaks the illusion of three-dimensionality in photography, reminding us that here, in fact, is a two-dimensional surface.

Benni: The photograph of the Israel Museum was taken from the balcony of a building across from the museum. It was then pasted on the sliding door of the balcony’s, and then I took the exact same shot again, with me standing on the balcony and overlooking the view, between the photograph and the museum.

Adi: To conclude, could you tell us about “Round-A-Round”?

Benni: It’s a work I’m very fond of. It was shown in many occasions and I still like doing it. It consists of wheel, 3 meters in diameter, that sits on a revolving axis. The wheel is attached with a camera that looks outward, in front of which there’s another camera, this time on a tripod. I’m turning the wheel myself, manually, and we’ve shot several takes in varying speeds. I was wary not to turn it too fast, because then the viewers might get dizzy. In the end I picked the last take, which was also the slowest.

Adi: A camera, filming, is filmed by yet another camera. The truth comes to light.

*

[1] These and the following quotes from Efrat are taken from: Sarah Breitberg, “An Interview with Benni Efrat: I Create for the Present,” Davar Daily, 7.7.192.

[2] Carl Andre, “Preface to Stripe Painting (Frank Stella),” in Sixteen Americans (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959), p. 76.

[3] Peggy Gale (ed.), Artists talks 1969 – 1977 (Nova Scotia: The Press N.S.C.A.D, 2004), p. 23.

[4] Cindy Nemser, “An Interview with Eva Hesse,” Artforum, May 1970, pp. 59–64.