How Do You Short Circuit Control

Nitzan Gaon: So, my dear Lee, here we are together to talk about your first artist’s book, which was published and launched two years ago at the Artport book fair, as part of the residency program. At a book fair, we will often pick up a book because of its cover. The cover of your book struck me the moment I laid eyes on it and drew me into your world. Let’s start from there, what made you chose that for the cover, and also the title How Do You Short Circuit Control?

Lee Nevo: First, about the cover and the color—red. I wanted something that would feel sensual and fleshy, that would be alluring but also elusive. The photograph on the cover is of my reflection on a ticket validation machine in Germany. The actual machine had an “out of order” sign in German on it and to me the literal meaning felt perfect in terms of the idea of the book’s content: a malfunction, an intentional disruption of control.

I have a thing with language, particularly with the ways it appears in the public space, where words exist seemingly freely, without the presence of a subject, autonomous, devoid of belonging. The motif appears in many places in the book. Something about the detached and public status makes me look at their literalness, as if they embody or expose some kind of truth. This enables looking through more than one contextual framework. For example, a photograph from a supermarket in Germany of an avocado imported from Israel called “Hass,” which means “hate” in German.

In any case, the cover image is the only one in the book that was manipulated; I removed the sticker and was left with my blurred reflection, like a shadow on a vinyl-like material. In the process of making the book, I had in my mind a cross between a porn magazine that might be at the bottom of a clerk’s desk drawer and a travel brochure for sleazy cruises, like the kind one might find in a waiting room.

The title How Do You Short Circuit Control relates to a quote by William S. Burroughs—an American writer and artist—whose approach to art has been a great influence. He is considered the father of post-modernist and punk literature. The connection between elements are tied to his work process, the texts he wrote, and his “cut-up” process. The idea behind it is the creation of “an intentional accident”: taking a text, cutting the sentences up into the words, and reassembling them, producing a chance and unraveled narrative that reveals an alternate reality of the text, a completely new syntax. The title means how to cause a short circuit that triggers rewiring.

The “cut-up” process is used in other fields, for example in game theory and military strategy. Similar to the textual “cut-up,” the random act subverts expectations. When actions are random, your opponent cannot foresee your next move or take advantage of a previous strategy. This makes you completely unexpected. Burroughs spoke about the “cut-up” as a way to understand how we are controlled through language, time and space. He said that while drugs, sex, and power might control the body, language and images “lock” our thoughts—make us think, feel, and speak in a certain way. The “cut-up” is a tool that can loosen this control and free the writer and the reader. In the case of my book, free the images.

What exactly is the book comprised of?

The book has over 400 photographs, which I “took” over the course of four years while living in four countries. They function as a cultural-historical-identity axis. In Hebrew, we don’t say “I took” photographs, which is a literal translation from English. It aims at the idea of reclaiming/reuse, another element in the book. This can be the reclaiming of the image itself as being “taken” from somewhere, or more of an idea that relates for example to male cultural realms hinted at in different ways in the book. Of course, this is a direct continuation of the idea of the readymade—creating a new context for an existing object and charging it with a new meaning. There is no accompanying text in the book that explains this (with the exception of one sentence on the book’s middle page), but many of the images include readymade texts—from the world of advertising, street signs, movie subtitles, and more.

Meaning, you did not manipulate the images themselves, but rather it’s all in the combinations you made with them, right?

Yes, I approached the book by thinking about the concept of “bricolage”—a method of creating based on improvisation and the use of everyday materials and ideas to expand a new ad-hoc syntax. The term “bricolage,” attributed to anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, was part of his idea of “la pensée sauvage,” of wild, or untamed human thought. In his writings, he intended to describe a situation where people take whatever ideas or materials are lying about, and improvising and connecting between them in order to explain to themselves and the world and to fit into it. This is in reaction to the ostensibly structured and organized Western thinking. The result is an improvised creation, a new combination of signs taken from existing systems. For me, the “new” means also discovering the “seemingly" naïve potential in each of the elements, and placing them together draws attention to their subversive reading.

Over the last years, I have been working more with spaces, creating scenographies. In the book, I related to the open pages—the page spread—as a display array, a space in itself. The structured minimalism corresponds with my approach to building an installation where I tend to work with what there is, in reaction to its formal and specific characteristics. I related to the book’s structure as the essence of the idea of bricolage, element next to element. Looking at the connections is what changes the objects and creates new meaning.

How does this connect to the countries you crisscrossed?

All the images were taken with my mobile phone. It’s nice that in English the word “mobile” is directly related to movement. Before the phone was “smart,” it was “mobile.” The axis was back and forth between France, Germany, Belgium and Israel. The photographs present things I collected along the way, fascinations, inclinations, fetishes; screen shots; photographs of friends; coincidental references and instants like a screen shot of a message received after leaving a message, revealing an urge or prediction. Many elements repeat themselves and become myth-like. The book is basically exposing what’s inside my head.

Is there any kind of meaning to the specific geography? Could the photographs have been taken anywhere in the world, or do the places have a personal connection?

It’s a personal point in time, but the practice would be the same if I were traveling somewhere else. The images relate to the idea of mobility through references to biking, cars, trains, boats, planes. For me, the nomadic aspect connects to a preoccupation with belonging. Within me is an ongoing internal conflict between the need for a base and opposition to the idea of one place that sanctifies territory and prides itself on occupation. Lingering in these places made me sharpen certain aspects of my work, some around the matter of systems of control such as law and bureaucracy but from a more existentialist than systematic-research perspective.

There are iconic images in the book, for me, that reference fascination with violence, bureaucracy or systems of control.

I cannot really say whether my images are iconic, but many of them do relate to religious, historical and cultural icons: Christian elements, Eichmann’s glass cubicle, Elvis, Boris Becker, Venus, the image of the cowboy. The iconic or more symbolic moments for me are for example the photos from the Stasi Museum, Brutalist architecture or religious buildings. Some are presented in their “low” version, for example the photo of a wrapper for “Cathedral” Cheddar cheese with the words “Aged, but still yellow.”

In the book, there is also a lot of documentation of elements from my works, but the layout or presentation is the same as for other images—nonchalant and equivalent. This connects to my view about art: no pedestal and no spotlight. The aim is to place them within the mundane, and make them the opposite of singular. I try to implement this approach throughout my practice. Another example of this is elements that repeat in various projects in different ways, which is also, as mentioned, connected to building a myth, constructing a language. Often “neutralizing” the usefulness of the object, or the space itself, enables questions about its essence and social function. I remember where every image was taken, and the circumstances. But it goes without saying, when someone else opens the book, they read it differently than I do.

In your book, I also saw many references to time or the timeless. I remember when you did Pleasure Blinds as part of the Artport residency program’s graduate exhibition (2020-2023), it make a strong impression of a place “beyond time.”

Yes, in the works and the images I am trying to create kinds of “spaces” in time. I use narrative tools like for the creation of a scene but it is abstract enough to leave the interpretation open. The created space is devoid of signs and functions as a model of a place.

Regarding “spaces,” in the book, you mention that it is an arsenal of confessions from limbo. The Catholic confession is a repetitive element in your work. What’s the attraction?

I think my attraction to Christianity is tied to my having grown up in Jerusalem, a city with a universal outlook where one feels the presence of religion. But being secular myself, I am looking at it from the outside. I appropriate Christian symbols and practices and study them without the religious obligation: confession, crucifixion, and architectural elements, which create a power framework. My personal distance from these allows me to use the raw materials to examine subjects like control and guilt. Dismantling the religious meanings gives them another personal, cultural and political context. Words and symbols define the borders of consciousness and action, for example, when there is no word [for something] in a language, it can point to the fact that the idea itself does not exist in that society.

Interesting. Apart from one paragraph and the credits, there is one more text hiding in the book that you place in each copy by hand. Can you elaborate on this?

The book proposes looking at things that we don’t always notice—maybe because they are mundane, or because our attention becomes lost amid the explosion of images and stimuli. The appendix is called “4-play,” a play on the word foreplay. It functions as a kind of map for the book, and is comprised of four words—tail, pit, cock, and roach—which repeat in varying order and with different verbs. The words are breakdowns of the words cocktail, cockpit and cockroach, and they create combinations that connect what is perceived as “low” with what is perceived as “high.” The intention is to zigzag and combine the trashy or daily friction with reality with the heavenly, as well as the underworld with the world of the holy.

This text was also central to the one off copy artist’s book launched at the Artport Artist’s Book Fair, called How East Lobe Do Short Circuit Road, in the middle of which I hid an active listening device. It’s a kind of director’s cut—or as it’s called—“the butcher's version״—of the red book, I like to refer to it as the original book’s evil twin.

In 2018, during my residency program in Germany, I created four stamps with these words and started playing with them. For the six months I was there, that was the main thing I did—or rather, the only thing I was happy with. The images of the stamps also appear in the book. I wanted to create a Dadaist text, almost nonsensical—a playful move, that creates a lingual and philological structure, but at the same time describes a situation that escalates like the beginning of a joke: a cock, a pit, a tail and a roach walk into a bar... Like the spaces I create that hold tension, the text also has a feeling that something is about to happen.

Making a book is like...

Sleeping with the CIA, you have no secrets.

Who should we invite next to Madaf?

Hadas Satt.

Lee Nevo’s solo exhibition The Sexual and Social Psychology of the Ejection Seat, is currently on view in two locations: Ta’ar Gallery in Aluf Batzlut Square, and an underground space at 156 Herzl Street. The exhibition, curated by Yoav Weinfeld and Omer Sheizaf, runs through January 31, 2025.