Doctor And Patient, 3:11", 2015, Sound work
The Nut Case and the Victim – two person show by Dan Allon and Gary Goldstein | Art Space TLV Gallery, Tel Aviv, July 9 – July 30 2015 | Curator: Dr. Guy Morag
People have the tendency to collect almost anything: stamps, cars, toys, soda cans or any other more or less reasonable item. It’s commonly understood that collecting is a positive activity that has common roots with ancient hunting instincts, but the truth is more complicated than that. It can also be a pathological manifestation such as compulsive hoarding, which makes the one who has it suffer severely. According to Sigmund Freud, hoarding occurs when there are disturbances in toilet training phase at the end of the anal-urethral period in infancy. The collector tries to form a safe and stress-free environment for himself. Freud went on to describe 4 types of collectors:
1. The pathological: harmed severely from the collecting process and hoards out of proportion
2. The nut-case: collects object out of emotional and nostalgic reasons
3. The victim: will collect whatever is sold to him
4. The accidental: will collect items that were given to him by mistake by other people, misunderstanding him to be fond of them
The collecting of Dan Allon, Gary Goldstein, and curator Guy Morag, are a combination of all those four categories. The artists collected themselves a massive amount of papers, images, memorabilia and notes. With the exhibition they rewrite their own biographies and let the visitors sneak peak at their collections showing a small part of it, suggesting more, like the tip of an iceberg. The project deals with the connection of biography, gender and emotion, and their collections are testimony for life being a never-ending quest.
Dan Allon’s project consists of three works. Starting point were the memories of his Bar Mitzva in 1995, the Jewish ceremony of “becoming a man”. The work plays in the same atmosphere that is a strange mixtures of masculinity and strength and ridiculousness. The first work is an installation of two blue tables with two pamphlets on them: They contain Allon’s medical history since 1995 and now, introducing him as a hypochondriac young man who does not trust his body; and, a newsletter called Dynamic Growth from the gym Allon had registered for in 1995, showing the other side of his poor body image through the absurd and hilarious texts that he received to motivate him. The second work is a sound work imitating the format of a medical radio show: Allon wrote a “question” to the radio doctor also portrayed by Allon on the recording, and we listen to the detailed answer. The third work is a pink wall with two theatrical images displaying masculinity and aggression: the photo from Allon’s moroccan Bar Mitzva above an image from Pictorial Physique, the first all male nude magazine.
Gary Goldstein’s project is composed of drawings from the last five years, hanged in bundles, and often drawn on the backside of pamphlets and books covers. Some of these – Japanese Baseball Players, Little Heads, Medley and Cheap Literature, remind on eof pop art at first with their technicolor hues. But on a second look one becomes aware of a deeper layer of darkness, chaos and revolt. The genderless characters look like imaginary and non-cohesive, islands of memories in a sea of forgetting. Goldstein’s handwriting unifies all of them into a big anxious being, and testifies to the connection between collecting and the art of drawing.
To read a review By Uzi Zur, Haaretz Newspaper, July 2015 (HEBREW) - press here.
To read a text written about the installation by Avi Lubin (HEBREW)-press here.
CREDITS:
Photo editing: Itay Lustgarten
Photos: Goni Riskin
The Sound work was created with the kind assistance of Shani Broner
Art Space TLV Team: Nir Harmat, Orit and Roy Duer, Leeron Kaspa Tur
Special Thanks: Julia Strebelow, Eran Inbar, Shimon Allon, Didi Allon, Hadas Kedar
Thanks to: Avital Globerman, Shai Zuker, Avi Lubin