Rakefet: Is it OK if I smoke in the studio?

Nomi: I used to smoke, so I have no problem with it. When do you smoke? While you’re working or during the breaks?

R: I certainly smoke more in the studio than in other places, while I’m working. I smoke Gitanes, like the French workers in the 1950s. They are much stronger than other brands, You can’t get them in Israel. When I can’t get them, I hardly smoke at all.

N:  I think you must be quite stubborn, to insist on smoking Gitanes.

R:  My body is really resistant, I can even sleep in the studio. All day I wander about, I’m not sensitive to dust, I have no allergies, but on the other hand there’s another side to me – I don’t know what to call it. Cowardice? Perhaps it’s to do with my being quite closed, quite shy. I’m always trying to broaden that side of me, my life is one long battle to extend this limited area. I’m a woman from the fringe, from Rishon LeZion, who pushes and pushes and pushes at the boundary between “Rishon” and the big city. Maybe in the end I’ll get to live in Tel Aviv or New York. I suppose I could go to New York and work there at various jobs.

N:  So what’s stopping you?

R:  I don’t manage so well with working, even though I look after people and I like doing that. But I don’t have that experience of simply working. I have a manifesto with the title “Women Must Refuse to go Out to Work”. In principle, the manifesto declares that woman is defined as lacking, so you have to give her what she lacks.

N:  The fact that you come from Rishon is an important element in your definition.

R:  It’s part of my position, part of what I have to say. My earlier work, like the video where I talk with a potato in my mouth, is also connected to my attitude – “potato eaters”, chips-and-ketchup eaters. In my work, people seem to me to be rather crushed; even the porno works are connected with the fringe, with life in Rishon.   

N:  You see the porn as a kind of escape from life on the fringe?

R:  The porno has several aspects. There’s an obvious connection between porn and the backyard of the fringe. People move to the suburbs because it’s supposed to be a good place for a family. In the big city there are, for instance, escort agencies. You don’t see them in Rishon, not even adverts for escort services. On the other hand, I work with children of immigrants and with children at risk, and in fact those kids, obviously neglected, are exposed to all of it even there, on the internet, so that we’re living in a very pornographic society. There’s a bit of this in the street graffiti, in the scrawls at the bus-stops.

N:  And the connection between porno and feminism?

R:  The connection with feminism is looking at naked men and using that area in the same way as they use the female body. It’s like a poetic joke – psychoanalytically, when you get closer, the phallus is a man from a porno magazine. Porno also has Jewish associations, though I’m only connected with that indirectly.

N:  In most of your work I actually see some kind of decent people – perhaps people who need care?

R:  I play a double game there too – I’m from Rishon, but I’m also a kept woman, so I’ve got time to be an artist… I go to the opera, or to swim at the centre, have my hair done at City Garden, not really low class. I often sit in a café with a pretty good glass of wine, and feel disappointed, miserable because I don’t have more … There are masses of women who don’t have time to sit in cafes and feel sorry for themselves. Perhaps the sense of “well-off” has to do with having studied with people younger than me, a generation that grew up differently.    

N: So where do your images come from?

R:  When I began doing art I found myself painting, and gradually, out of those doodles, an image was created. The portraits began from looking in the newspapers at all kinds of women being photographed for the paper. In the porno series – I used porno that often included a photo of a backside. I looked in “Globs”, or the “Economist” at the “rich-ass face” and attached it to the backside – it fits quite well…

N:  When you started working in the Print Workshop you were very scared…

R:  I’m a chaotic person, disorganized, with quite a few phobias. I was afraid that I would need  to do some technical studying, that there might be a difference between my ability and what I’d be doing in the studio that might demand working in a completely different style from what I’m used to; and I didn’t know whether I’d succeed. And half an hour later, I relaxed, and straight away began to enjoy myself.

N:  What did you enjoy?

R:  Everything – the people, the place, from the route to Jerusalem to the heaters that needed turning on; the change of lifestyle – there was such a routine. The business of lunch, falafel on Thursday, the meeting at a crossroads where there is material and it has a history – there’s something so nice about that, working for so many years in this way, in metal and acid and asphalt. I don’t know if nostalgia is the right word, but it is the one I want to use… 

N:  It’s very different from how you work in the studio.

R:  There are differences in my work. On one hand I’ve got my finger on the pulse – there’s the spirit of the times, there’s immediacy. On the other hand there’s a battle for intimacy. The Workshop was an encounter that put much more emphasis on values that, for most of us, get lost in today’s world; a kind of modesty, of delicacy, working with materials, support from the knowledge of people versed in hand techniques. All that allows doing a small research together, it was like “going with and feeling without”. You don’t have to give up your temperament, or to acquire all the detailed knowledge, but you encounter all that and are in that society for a specific time. That’s something that I deal with in quite another way in the studio.

N:  And what about translating values such as the flow of color? Did you give up on that?

R:  As a painter, I’m a poet. I know how to write, not to translate. I know how to be skeptical or ironic about my expressivity. But I do know how to translate, and my painting is, in fact, a sort of translation of an image from the newspaper, but it’s a kind of translation that focuses on “characteristics”, kind of overheated, that changes it, the image, absolutely.

N:  So where did you get the ideas for your prints?

R:  Just…from my head… There’s a series I did at the end that integrates works by male artists that I’ve messed about with. But all the images for the etchings are out of my emotions, fears about surviving in this period, and fears about what may happen....     

Translation by Rena Minkoff