“Next year, I plan to publish a book called ‘Do It Yourself’… The book will be published in a cheap edition and anyone who creates a work according to the guidelines in the book will have a cheap work of art at home…”
Benni Efrat in an interview with Sara Breitberg, “I create for the present” (Davar, July 7, 1972)

The current exhibition deviates in its format from the nature of the exhibitions at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art: (1) it displays historical works alongside works from recent years; (2) This is a real group exhibition (the works on display share common spaces), contrary to the common format of solo exhibitions clusters; (3) It combines two bodies of work under one roof: a private collection (Prof. Michael Adler’s collection of Israeli art, recently donated in its entirety to the museum) alongside a curated exhibition, in which the works, both historical and contemporary, are an enlightenment and extension to the collection in the center of the exhibition.

There is a common denominator to all the works on display in the exhibition: they all have a direct or indirect affinity for the minimalist tradition that was developed and formulated in New York in the first half of the 1960s. And more precisely, it can be said that the works on display in the exhibition are post-minimalist works.

The logic that guided the grouping of works in the exhibition, the logic of the DIY (Do it Yourself), was inspired by the book of guidelines for creating works of art conceived by Benni Efrat, one of the artists participating in the exhibition. The book was not published, and it remains an original and generous idea presented by the artist to his audience (see the artist’s quote from 1972 at the beginning). The exhibition’s instrumental use of DIY logic has made it possible to illuminate the post-minimalist artistic situation as a concrete scene of occurrence, in which idea and material meet through action. Post-minimalist art is bare art; it does not talk about things but rather speaks the very things. The message it conveys overlaps with its visibility and is presented to the audience in an extroverted and overt manner, devoid of any dimension of concealment, illusion, or metaphor. The exposure strategy, or externalization, that is characteristic of this art allows – and in fact, requires – a direct and overt confrontation with the works in front of which the viewer stands. Since post-minimalist art rejects content that is external to it, the viewer is required to trace the extroverted artistic move, and adhere to it to dive into the task of deciphering the message and meaning in the work…

The long title of the exhibition DIY* seeks to trace the strategy of post-minimalist externalization, and to mark it, already in the initial stage of the audience meeting in the exhibition, as a key to understanding the meaning in the works displayed. The specific verbs in the title refer to the actions of the post-minimalist artist. These verbs offer concrete alternatives to the general, ordinary, “do” from which the first letter in the acronym DIY is derived. The choice of these specific verbs, over others, is directed at the diverse modes of action adopted by post-minimalist artists in an attempt to expand the limited range of common artistic actions. The long list of verbs in the title of the exhibition is a support and extension to the rhetorical question posed by the young post-minimalist artist, Joshua Neustein in the early 1970s: “I look for a connection between a name of an object and its materiality. Process is the key word. Process not as a verb, but as a subject. If the process is the subject, what is the verb?”

Adi Engelman

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