Norma Drimmer: What liberates you? What liberates me?
Interview by Abraham Lubelski
Courtesy of the artist
Norma Drimmer?s work asks vital questions about the tensions involved in the creative process of art-making. Drimmer deftly explores how the spiritual side of our imagination helps to form the pragmatic reality of what we finally create. Informed by the Kabbalistic concept of the ten Sefirot?the ten forces or energies that provide a way of seeing the relationship between and among the powers in the world?Drimmer`s work reveals and accepts the wild inconsistencies that accompany our modern views.
For her next project, Drimmer is tackling the idea of paradise, ever-present in the world today. After conducting investigative internet searches on the topic, Drimmer found that the generated results revealed that Paradise is mostly used as a marketing gimmick associated with hotels and shopping centers. Drimmer confronts this gimmick with its original philosophical implications. Drimmer`s artwork navigates the world, realistically, politically, and always with a sense of humor.
Abraham Lubelski: In the work that you?re doing, you have opened new directions in photography and video, integrating new methods for creating art?what do you find opens up these processes? How does that liberate you?
Norma Drimmer: We all have a million different lives. We all go in different directions. In each one of us there are many different splinters of life that are warring with one another for priority. We have a job, a family, friends; we live in different countries, belong to a majority, a minority.?Well, this is one of the major reasons that I do art, it takes all the different elements that intersect in people?s lives and� fuses them together. This fusion might last only one minute, one moment or one project; then life goes on again with all its centrifugal forces?and that is a very liberating feeling, for one minute to be able to be coherent, to put everything together.
AL:� One of your recent pieces incorporated four elements. I found the compositions were tangential to one another. Could you describe the ways in which you intended them to interrelate?
ND: Yeah, I am obsessed by the questions of the obvious and the hidden, the outside and the inside. I do like it when a work achieves a universal meaning but generates some of its strength through the location where it gets displayed. Different materials or different methods are like different approaches to the same questions. They are inter-related like different instruments at a jam session. Their tensions might create something different.
I had researched Moses Mendelssohn, the famous Jewish philosopher, and his ideas about integration or assimilation into German culture. One of the materials I used was a light box. You can see shadows which could be houses, could be people; it`s more of an abstract piece. Hanging right next to it is a canvas with a Tryptichon image. The side images are of a Mendelssohn bust and a plaque, the middle is an image of a memorial wall with the names of the major concentration camps and a small version of Mendelssohn�s head under one of those names. You walked right by the real memorial wall before you entered the building where the work was shown. To your right in the library was the real bust. The plaque explained that during the Kristallnacht the Synagogue that was standing here was destroyed. Someone had found that bust in the rubble with the nose chipped off. He returned the sculpture after the war to the Jewish community. This was the canvas piece. The video was beamed onto this work and onto the floor; very big, very beautiful poetic soap bubbles, scintillating and easy floating. You never see them burst; will they? The text is the fourth piece. It approaches the same kind of question through chemistry language of a definition of a solution, combined with one about its philosophical meaning?maybe. The work is called solutions one, two, three?or?�
AL: I would like to discuss your recent exhibition in Tel-Aviv. I was fascinated by the fact that a number of works were exhibited in a window like street sidewalk installation.
ND: There were 15 works each 1.20 m x 1.60m each unframed piece was framed by one of those windows. They almost looked black and you didn`t really know what you were looking at. The displayed text was not an explanation but part of� the works; an installation about too much light, no light, the different meanings of the color black and the idea that the utopian element is shifting back from urbanism to what we consider ?nature? after so much interaction with man. There were many reactions but also some that actually recognized that the works are based on the relationships between the ten Sefirot, a kabbalistic theory to explain the balance of the forces that govern our world.�
AL: How do these exhibitions and works of art connect to your personal history as a Jew?
ND: My personal history is the particular view point from where I come from. Jewish culture is part of me. The memory of the Shoah is part of me. Living in Germany is part of me. Being a woman is part of me. Being a�human being is part of me. Our perception is clouded by a�conflicting overload of information. Each particular language will carry hidden meanings that get transported with it. It affects us even deeper as we are not even aware of it any more. All that is what my work is about.
AL: All of the photography today, and the new technology lends itself to a�form of documentation which can be very lyrical or a�very cut-and-dry presentation. How do�you utilize these technologies, these materials as an artist? How does this work for you?
ND: that would depend upon which work I�am planning to do, which one will suit its purpose better. I�like cross over methods. Use images as if you were writing, use language as if it was an image, paint with the camera. I�use materials that might contradict its content; aluminium for a�soft image, canvas for something very solid. I�like contradiction, tensions between things. Any fact, any object in the world is interpreted and thus changed by our own individual stories. They inform what we call our society, our civilization. Contradiction might break some of that up; images and materials might create, through this clash, through this tension, something unpredictable.I like installations that will work on different levels. The basic story level should talk to you. You should not have to know anything about the ideas behind the work in order to be visually drawn to it. But then there are all those other levels that are not so visible right away but might unfold if you take your time and interest. If you look at a�work and say: "Mm, I�get the idea", then it will probably bore you very fast. There should be a�relationship between the viewer and the work and it does not have to be the one that I�had in mind when I�created the work.
AL: Are you aware of any specific antecedents to your work and your position?
ND: Not on a�conscious level but there are artists that surely have influenced me even though they work very differently from me. I�was reflecting about their work and admired and respected the works of Walter de Maria or of Richard Long for example and I�am sure they gave me some input even though I�could not pinpoint it for you.
AL: You sometimes describe your work as having this collaborative interpretive quality?you do�want to see how people interact with it, have a�dialogue with it. Do�you imagine that you yourself have been having this significant dialogue with others, in terms of your reading and experimenting with these materials? What is the most challenging part of this experience you?ve been grappling with?
ND: Well, that is what I�meant that some artists have been influencing me on a�more subconscious level. Some of the strongest experiences I?ve had in my life were not with people, but with works of art or with books. They became key experiences from where I� started on different tangents. I� hope that one day somebody will look at my work and a�new idea or concept will be developed or someone will start on another tangent that has to do�only indirectly with what I�am doing or thinking; that would be great. Or someone will really get what I�had in mind and take that further; that would be great too. That is where the challenge is: you work to research materials, ideas, images, you work to create. You`re pretty alone, it is new territory; there is no security netting, but then you have this hope for communication?maybe.
AL: In your readings of the Kabbalah or other philosophical texts?what were the specific aspects of these readings that were most compelling for you?
ND: I?m trying to make sense of this very accelerated life that we are leading, and I�found to my absolute amazement that the kabbalistic concept of the 10 Sefirot which had its highlight between the 10th to the 12th century, could give me the tools, the means of researching my questions and inform my way of working .
AL: What projects are you creating for the next venue, next opportunity?
ND: I�am working on a�video and canvas installation called "Let`s build paradise". It will deal with the replacement of the search for meaning by the kick in life and the concept of control getting out of control.
