I have this saying, "Venue is Destiny." How important is venue to your work?
It's part of my final product. I'm not only doing an installation, so the background is like the background of a landscape painting. So for me venue is landscape. It can be a cityscape or a naturescape.
Do you usually work with permission, or do you ask forgiveness? You know the old saying...
I always work with permission. There's nothing romantic for me about being in jail. Maybe five years ago. Now it's good for me to have breakfast with the participants afterwards. I still do my individual work without permission. I just don't want to go through all the red tape to do small scale work. But not on a large scale. In Israel, and the Czech Republic to Buenos Aires, we get up early and find an interesting location and work.
With an artist like Christo, who does large-scale outdoor publc works, his art is all the bureaucratic paperwork and community interaction, the legal maneuvering...
I think Christo has a more difficult time because his work is not temporary.
But his work is only up for a couple of weeks, usually.
Right, but he has to deal with architectural issues, and there's a lot of red tape and everything is owned by corporations and governments. With me the only issue is how many people can fit in one space and that the people are nude. The nudity is obviously the biggest issue.
What is the final outcome of your work? Is it a photo, a performance, or the community action?
It's an installation that I document with photography and video. So there's a projected video installation that's a loop of of images 3-4 minutes long which is projected in a room, along with the photographs, which I take.
If you are not creating a photo as a photographer would, what role does the resulting photo play in your work? Document, souvenir, evidence, calling card?
No, I make installations and the final result is a video projection and the photograph. If I didn't make video projections, then call me one thing, if I didn't make photos, then call me another. I'm kind of in between an installation artist, video artist and photographer. And when you work with nude bodies, you're immediately called a pornographer or a fashion photographer.
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