e-mail interview

Tehila Zigman and Ram Samocha: e-mail interview, 2010










Is there a difference between drawings created through the performance art process and those created in the studio?

The way I see it, the underlying energy is the same. However, since the process of creation is briefer in the context of performance art than work made in the studio, the resulting artwork also differs. The encounter with a live audience raises expectations on both ends and sometimes influences or guides the drawing in a new direction.

Is the process or activity itself the purpose of the performance, and the artwork merely a byproduct? Or is the creation of the drawing the purpose of the performance?

That depends on the piece, but usually both elements are intertwined and taken into consideration before the performative process begins. The physical process of line-making is an important part of my research, but it is not the aim of focus of the artwork; each line is laid down with purpose to create a consciously predetermined image.

What is the role of the audience’s in your performances? Do you consider your process to be performative even when you are working alone?

I always consider my process to be perfomative. When I lack a live audience, I consider the video camera to be a substitute. However, having an audience alters the atmosphere and experience—the resulting artwork is inevitably different as well. For example, sometimes the audience takes part in the creation or interacts and that creates a product completely different from a solitary performance in front of a camera lens.

















Do you use props that are created or constructed especially for the performance?

Usually I try to explore the extent of what my body alone enables me to do. However, sometimes I use additional equipment. Regardless of what I choose to do, there is always a connection to the body and to its capabilities and limitations. Sometimes I use a ladder, a large chalk or a long paintbrush. Other times I consciously explore the reach of my body. For example, I have purposely hung the canvas higher than usual so that I had to strain to reach it to see how that affected the work.

Does the planning involved in performance art impact the creation of the drawing? Do you limit the duration of the performative process?

Yes, planning the performance has significant impact on my creative process. Though randomness is an element in my work, it does not play a crucial role. The length of the performance varies with each piece. I’ve done performances that lasted 30 minutes, while others lasted an entire day if not several days. I do always plan the duration in advance.

How does the idea and phsyciality of the body impact your work? What intrigues you about the presence of the body in your creative process?

I was always intrigued by how the artist decides to leave or to design his marks. By working with the body I explore myself, my capabilities and the time that passes as I create. The element of time goes hand in hand with physical movement and the body in my creations. Initially I looked for ways to capture and retain the figure in the final work, but I gradually realized that what mattered most to me was how the physicality hints at a corporeal presence: first, because it actively enhances the connection with the viewer; and second, because my body becomes the essence of the creation—the drawing is linked to my body through the immediacy of creation. The sketch and the body become one.

How does the process of filming and documentation take place? Can performance art exist without documentation?

Generally, performance art can exist without filming, but then it is captured solely by the people who actually saw it take place. Filming allows performance art to be transported into a different place or, more accurately, to a different medium. The filming process is separate from the performance itself—the documentation becomes an independent work of art that can also be used as a tool. I either film myself or let a videographer film me. Even when the performance includes an audience, I always insist on filmed documentation. In one of my recent works I chose to film the creation, destruction and then recreation of an exhibit and then I showed the documentation next to its final product, which exposed something entirely different than I could have created through the documentation process or mere recollection alone.

From Scratch - Metalpoint drawings

By Jane Buyers

The work of art is an ordered world of its own kind in which we are aware, at every point, of its becoming. Meyer Shapiro [i]
There is no way to make a drawing-there is only drawing. Richard Serra [ii]

















Ram Samocha’s work has foregrounded drawing for a number of years - drawing of a very physical kind, prominently featuring a frenetic layering of lines that serves to trace a history of performative gestures over time. In fact he has also engaged quite literally in the act of drawing through physically demanding drawing performances.

Samocha has always freely experimented with a variety of materials, processes, media and forms of representation. In his latest body of work From Scratch, Samocha is exploring the medium of metalpoint, which may seem at first to be a surprising choice for an artist so focused on gesture. Using metal to inscribe lines is an ancient practice. However, for most of us, if we have any knowledge of it at all, it is likely as a reference to a mysterious process from the early Renaissance known as silverpoint, associated mostly with artists engaged in very fine-lined, highly-detailed, labour-intensive work such as Albrecht Dürer . The decision to use such an out-moded technique is reminiscent of Jasper Johns’ resuscitation of encaustic. While it might at first seem eccentric and contrary, the resultant work shows that the choice is firmly based on the artist’s sense of his primary material interests and requirements.

Using metalpoint slows down the act of drawing - the hectic pace of now is replaced by a slower tempo from another time. But every mark made by the metal is an uncompromising feature on the paper - an almost sculptural presence that can never be removed. In Samocha’s words - “There is no way back.” In some of the works, such as the Heavy Duty drawings (2011), the paper has buckled and heaved under the weight of accumulated metal markings, becoming a kind of contour map. In others, the repetitious scarring of the surface has resulted in the paper giving way in some parts, tearing and splitting like skin. The insistent materiality of the working process and the hardness of the materials seem more akin to sculpture than drawing, including the paper Samocha uses, which is manufactured from limestone dust.
The metals employed in the work of From Scratch suggest an alchemist’s laboratory: silver, copper, bronze, gold. As the metals will continue to oxidize, changing colour in unpredictable ways over time, the finished drawing is only the beginning, not the end of the alchemical process. The notion of “finished” in the case of this work is provisional and once again the emphasis returns to the performative. It is as though the drawing itself takes up the performance at the point where the drawer has left off.

That drawing for Samocha is first and foremost a tactile, embodied experience links his work with graffiti art as gestural statement. Making a mark says “I am here”. Graffiti’s meshing of word and image into one indivisible sign also connects with Samocha’s long standing interest in orthography. Every line tells a story. The Cursive Hebrew Alphabet drawings (2010-11) were partially inspired by observing his daughter Alma‘s first attempts at writing through repetitious drawing of Hebrew and English letters. The accumulation of gesture and effort with metalpoint, in contrast to most drawing media, does not result in an increasing shift to darkness. The silverpoint lines obsessively tracing out the same shapes in Cursive Hebrew Alphabet remain stubbornly grey. This grey alphabet brings to mind Jasper Johns’ repeated use of alphabets and numbers (often grey), a connection made again with the numbers in Samocha’s most recent video Body Count (2011), in which he performs the drawing of 0 through 9 and 9 through 0.

One of Samocha’s favourite art works is Rembrandt’s etching The Shell (1650), a copy of which he has on his studio wall. This small print is one of the very few still-life works Rembrandt ever did. In 1998, Samocha produced a painting based on The Shell, employing the flat, clearly- delineated, precise manner of his work at the time. The painting, titled Home, emphasizes the graphic shapes and pattern of the mollusc shell, omitting any reference to the gestural lines of the original. Now, in Samocha’s new metalpoint drawings, the vocabulary of Rembrandt’s etching- scratches and incisions on a copper plate- have found a home.

The expression “from scratch” was new to Samocha, something he learned in Canada. “From scratch” brings to mind both “starting from scratch and “made from scratch”, pertinent references to Samocha’s experiences of starting a new life in a new country as an immigrant and as well as to the births of his two daughters . From Scratch offers poignant meditations on time, identity and signification. Samocha has created a powerful synthesis of material, form and gesture in his ongoing, restless search for the point of balance between order and chaos, strength and vulnerability, effort and acceptance.

[i] “Recent Abstract Art” in Selected Papers: Modern Art, 19th and 20th centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1978). P. 219

[ii] Richard Serra: Writings, Interviews (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press,1994). P. 51. Quoted in Afterimage: Drawing Through Process (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999) P. 25

Red Roots, 2010

A wall drawing which was made by Ram Samocha during the opening of the group show Time Shift at the Red Head Gallery, Toronto, April 3, 2010.

Time Shift

Peter Dykhuis, Jane Martin, Sam Mogelonshy,
Bill Ralph, Lynn Kelly, and Ram Samocha


March 31 – April 24, 2010

Red Head Gallery
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 115, Toronto, Canada, M5V 3A8
Tel: 416-504-5654 http://www.redheadgallery.org/

Hours: Wed – Sat 12 - 5pm
Opening: Saturday, Saturday, April 3, 2:00 and 5:00pm
Drawing Performance by Ram Samocha: Saturday, April 3, between 3:00 and 4:00pm

The Red Head Gallery's new group show Time Shift plays with our perception of time by reiterating and re-establishing moments within a continuum of styles, perspectives and artists. Jane Martin's eight colour photographs, Jane's Nose, are portraits of the artist pivoting around her nose, resetting and shifting time for the viewer; while Peter Dykhuis, in Time and Money, collages together the "to do" lists from his domestic and professional life with envelopes addressed to him from financial institutions that are overpainted with pertinent Google Earth maps. In this, time is a memory that is shifted by reassembling these written reminders and reiterating them. Sam Mogelonshy's shifts our perceptions of time in a series of sculptures, My Second Archipelago, in which hypothetical stories evolve from disused typewriters to become both utopian and dystopian islands; while Bill Ralph alters chaotic dynamical systems in Encosion to shift and re-shift our perceptions of a mathematical and metaphysical world through time and space. Time shifting allows us to experience events outside the constraints of time as in Ram Samocha's Red Drawings series which are made with layers of red transparent tape on gray paper. Created in Israel they are a reflection of the intense reality of ongoing conflict and struggle. In Life Cycles, Lynn Kelly uses various elements of trees to reference the cycles of life; biological concepts of growth and decay, re-growth and rebirth are juxtaposed with birth, death, migration, and relocation on our quickly evolving planet. Time Shift grapples with the momentous and fractious elements of repetition and time, recorded events that can be forgotten easily if they are not observed, transcribed, and transformed by these artists.

Blood Work



Review by Valerie Wong

Ongoing drawing performance by Ram Samocha
Saturdays (January 9, 16, 23, 30) between 3:00 and 4:00pm
Red Head Gallery
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 115, Toronto


Ram Samocha began his performance with a clean white wall. The artist dipped his brush in bright red paint and started painting at an arbitrary height. He painted horizontal strokes, one after another, and when he got to the end of a row, he would repeat the same act on the next row, with the fresh red paint dripping down the surface of the wall and blending into the new row that he was painting. While painting the first few rows, he made some sighs, groans, and grunts. Later, he hummed the national anthem of Israel. Towards the end, he sang individual notes that came together like a musical scale. When he was close to the bottom of the wall, his daughter came forward to ask him what he was doing. He kissed her, and then continued painting to the uttermost bottom of the wall.

His whole performance was a pessimistic, but moving, representation of the history of humanity. His choice of material, fake blood, set the tone for the performance. The white wall implied that, in the absence of humans, all was pure and sinless; a tabula rasa in the absence of humanity. The bold, red strokes seemed to represent humanity with the artist telling the story of how humans raped the pureness and permanently stained it with their history. The repeating uniform red strokes, were indicative of how history repeats itself, as humans mindlessly engage in war after war. As the paint from higher lines dripped down the surface of the wall and coalesced with the new stroke beneath it, the audience was reminded that hatred was passed on from one generation to another, and that the vulnerable new generation often had no choice but to inherit what was given to it. Whenever the artist arrived at the end of the wall, there was a moment of suspense as to whether he would continue. This moment, during which there was a mild sense of hope for the redemption of humanity, was invariably followed by another row of red strokes. Most of the time, the artist just robotically painted, marring the pure whiteness of the wall. There were moments, though, when he stood back and pondered what to do next. However, these moments of self-reflection never led to any deviation from the main theme.




The audio component was more difficult to interpret. The initial sighs and groans were primitive sounds that could have represented early human history. Some gave a sense of innocence, others aggression. One was forced to think that, perhaps, during humanity’s early development, there were actually two destinies we could have chosen. Humans could have chosen peace, but evidently opted for conflict. The artist then started humming the national anthem of Israel. Did he mean to convey the idea of nationalism? In terms of progression of the work, however, the audience was compelled to feel a sense of construction here, given that the pleasant-sounding melody was following the previous bouts of primitive grunts. Then, the audio turned into some sort of a broken musical scale. One expected it to turn more dissonant, but it never did. There was always a discernible harmony. The artist used the tonic, subdominant, and dominant frequently, and almost always returned to the tonic at the end of a phrase. The audience held their breath and hoped for that moment when the artist would finally broke away from tonal music and attempt to create something extraordinary of his own (even if it meant some futile cacophonies akin to atonal music). It never happened. It was very dissatisfying, but more than likely appropriate, if the artist’s goal was to suggest our failure to stop repeating our history.

Was there any hope for humanity at all? That was the question the audience was confronted with towards the end of the performance. As the artist came close to the bottom of the wall and the audience was thinking there was no hope to humanity, the artist’s daughter came over and asked the artist what he was doing. (She actually came over twice.) It was an extraordinary moment. The audience was reminded that, after all, each generation is a tabula rasa, and will only inherit its predecessors’ hatreds and conflicts if directed to do so. So, at that moment, when the audience was almost convinced that the world would never change, hope was renewed by the youthful innocence that the artists’ daughter instilled in the performance. Yet, what happened next? The artist continued to draw his bloody strokes until he ran out of room. So, the audience was left with this feeling that there is no way out. There is no hope for humanity.

The artist is planning to repaint the wall. It would be marvelous if we could collectively erase our historical conflicts just like that.








Photos by Tobi Asmoucha