Video Interview: Tamar Getter
Produced in January 2023.
In the Studio with Tamar Getter was created by Artis, edited and directed by Ian Sternthal, and produced by Sternthal Books. All rights reserved by Artis, 2023.
In the video profile, Tamar discusses image-making and reflects on her extensive artistic career that spans painting, video, performance, and stage projects.
Tamar's large-scale painting installations are multidimensional and often incorporate text. Forms of text that are present in her work include a line, a printed title, or a hand-written short story that takes the form of a letter to a fictional addressee. A Letter to Joseph Beuys (1974) contained printed text, written on a typewriter, and a photograph. This work marks the first time that Tamar used long-format text in her work. In the piece, Tamar addresses the artist Joseph Beuys, sharing three fictional short autobiographies of individuals that have lived through important revolutionary and historic occurrences of the 20th Century. At the end of each story, Tamar begs Joseph Beuys to make her a coat. She includes her own body measurements to create the coat. The piece is ironic, reflecting on issues of cultural marginality, and mocking the experience of artists needing "world recognition." Describing the use of storytelling in her later work, Tamar says, "I thought that if I put text in [my] paintings, it is a way to steer away from the sacred modernistic decree that paintings must be viewed in their entirety, all at once. Including text, I let the painting talk, speak... there's an aspect of time, where the viewer has to walk to view the full work and read the text... It is not only for show. I let the painting be read, opening up its space and place. It was a way to change the ways of viewing art."
Tamar mentions conceptualism as a prominent influence on her work in the mid-'70s, when her career began. In questioning what constitutes art, the issues of skill, know-how, and hand-work were significant concerns. Painting as the very paradigm of skill came under attack, and was seen as outdated. In the video profile, Tamar explains how she engaged in this discourse while introducing a more refined approach to painterly skill. "My [art]work is not about an agenda," she explains, "my practice from the beginning, no matter what media I use, deals with restricted view, restricted body, and restricted motion. It is a confrontation with the materiality of things. The skill needed is acquired through a genuine act. It is never a given; once you get it, it is never assumed to be completely acquired."
Getter's compositions are made up of successive repetitions that often represent highly fragmented views or aspects of things. Such is the major piece Hēliotropion (2018), a large painting installation presented at the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod. The piece stems from Tamar's drawing studies of the horse relaxation roll. This is the very short instant when horses wallow on their back, a moment of rare freedom and pleasure. The poor awkward posture of the horse – on its back – is a contrast to the ways that horses are commonly depicted in art to present power, perfection, and absolute beauty. This contrast caught Tamar’s attention. The installation comprises a 42-meter-long band-painting made of clusters of larger-than-life-sized horses, tables, and sunflowers, all turned on their 'backs.' Tamar calls these bizarre gigantic clusters "stoppages," pointing to the modes of production of these images and their forced togetherness, floating as an integrated image. The notion of “stoppages” is present throughout Tamar’s practice, where motion is used to depict objects but is not depicted in the finished work.