Jan. 15, 2000 - Mar. 4, 2000
“From a certain point in time, death – the very experience of facing death – was posed as a source of authority underlying Gechtman’s work, through re-activation of the notion of eternity (what is left of it, as a term). the current set-up is already a stage-like modeling of an experience endured, of the after-death – the death of someone who was crucially significant testimony, the waste, the remains, the secular relic. The possible persistence of memory, and thus the very ability to experience the work beyond the formal context, assume the existence of a community possessing prior knowledge (a community which Gechtman indeed activated, for real, when raising funds for his son’s medical treatment) – or a late, belated, belief in the ability to reconstitute a community based on shared experience (which is no longer the common experience which Zionist agenda, for instance, sought to engender, one of whose articulations is contained within ‘Yad Labanim’ the memorial room for fallen soldiers located on the other side of the wall).
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Gechtman’s work – whose components are to consolidate in the course of time into a total work of art – comprises concentric systems of formal hybridizations based on a metaphorical adoption of prevalent concepts from the field of genetics – reproduction-mutation-evolution – and their activation through the attributes of local material culture (or to be more exact’ through the surface embodying the ersatz-culture of the lower-middle class suburbia). Alongside the engagement with the material culture there lies the biographical artery – the axis of personal and familial fate, an institution which is the ultimate embodiment of reproduction and transformation relations – intersecting, in different modes, the chain of reproductions and mutations comprising the world of objects which is the material culture. At the thematic focal point of these concentric circles lies Gechtman’s own body – an everyman whose heat contains an object without which he has no life – and next to it, from a certain moment on the accompanying figure of his son Yotam – a reproduction both fine and flawed. The current cycle of works is farewell, parting with the son as a life partner, and, in a sense, as the object and the primary, privileged addressee of his work as a whole.
Moshe Ninio
Gideon Gechtman was born in 1942, Israel. Died in 2008.
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