Exhibition:

Museum Janco Dada, Ein Hod
"Amalgamation" Curator: Boaz Tal 2004

On Impressions and Concepts (note 1)

Joseph Kosuth, in his book "Zeno at the Edge of the Known World"(note 2), says that there is no cultural-artistic activity that is not a political act as well. I claim that any activity in Israel today, even if it is not a cultural-artistic one, has by its very nature a political significance. Making art in Israel in our time is a political statement; living in Ein Hod, is a political act; exhibiting at a museum with a Dadaistic orientation, is a political declaration. In view of all these assumptions we review the works of Dror Goldberg, who deals with language, sign and meaning, with earth and material, and with earth as material.
David Hume, in his book "A Treatise of Human Nature" writes: "I believe it is unnecessary to be overly explicit in connection with this observation. Everybody can easily see by himself the difference between emotion and thought. It is easy to distinguish between the ordinary stages of these two, even though in special cases it is not unlikely that they might come very close together."(note 3) The discussion that such a statement may trigger is especially fascinating in connection with Dror Goldberg, who makes a conscious use in his works of visual symbols and conventional language signs to present various reading possibilities and multifarious visual/perceptual meanings and levels.
But when he deals with earth as the subject of discussion, the analytical becomes emotional. Earth has connotations of ownership, history, territorial disputes, national possession and a tangle of emotions. Hence the dichotomy between thought and feeling that was possible in Hume's statement has been eliminated. As a private case, one can examine an apparently innocuous painting that looks like butterfly wings. Inspired by it, we may muse over our lost childhood or delve into the various associations aroused by the image, but we may not ignore the fact that the butterfly wings are outlined by a 'green line', and that the shape of the wings resembles that of the occupied territories/the West Bank, Judea and Samaria. This is when we realize that, in Hume's words, "[...] in a state of fever or frenzy, or a highly agitated state of the soul, our concepts may come close to our impressions." (note 4)
I regret to say that in our country we are always in such a state.

Prof. Boaz Tal
Curator of the exhibition

Notes:
1, Hume David, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1942, Magnes Publishing House, The Hebrew University Press, Jerusalem, (In Hebrew), p. 13.
2, Kosuth. J. (1993), Zeno at the Edge of the Known World, p. 105
3. Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 14.
4. Above, p. 14.

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Dror Goldberg:
The works deal with the unity of contrasts between the existing and the obscured and with their integration; with an attempt to join together at least two points of view and meanings simultaneously; either or, this and that. A vibrant organism, incised and living, of wounding and mending, of joining and separation of images and their significance.
Spousal relationships and family as a promise of happiness and the language as a chance for a dialogue blend with the materiality of earth and wax. A blend of worn material, of the changes of time and its signs, with the language signs as background and as a focus of absurd and fragile situations of couple and family, in the slit open boundary line, between the obvious and the fuzzy, between the present and the absent.
The vowel signs and the punctuation marks in the language as a dialogue become a language as an edge, a threshold of the introduction between the articulate and the indistinct, the edge of the verbal expression blends into the threshold of stammering, as the exposed end of body and soul.
Topography and morphology from the field of linguistics and life sciences are borrowed, as if to blur the testimony, to document the hidden gap between becoming and disappearance and between the random and the intentional.
A breach of the visual illusion of the non-variability and the refutation of the false notion of permanence is an additional level of significance, Stabilization and change of the state of aggregation of materials and of meanings is analogous to spiritual and physical processes, correlating the movement of time and material with the work process.
The earth - disconnected from its context, as the bone of contention, as the place on which we live and feed - becomes silent like the hush before and after a storm, the primordial matter from which we come and to which we return, the dust that eventually covers us. Earth, the ultimate presence, becomes the material constituting the punctuation marks, which mark what is missing, what is out of context. These marks, that were meant to help clarify meanings, turn into signs of absence, into signs of silence between the words, into an unlikely sentence, into an excerpt from nowhere.
The paraffin, the wax substitute, a fuel and medication processed from oil, from the earth, returns to it, blending and merging with the images, with the fumes, with the blood, with the "what", with the earth, with Adam and Eve concealing and revealing, like memory and oblivion, in the kindled fire, burning between light and darkness.