Throughout the history of Jewish culture, the image has been inseparable from the word.
Question: What balance do
you strike between your teaching, writing, science, and art?
David Gelernter:
Nowadays, I spend my time mainly painting. I have
an exhibition coming up. Generally speaking, I
spend more time painting than doing
anything else, except for writing.
I've been writing pieces for—some pieces connected with DLD where
I got
to meet Frank Schumacher, who's been associated with the meeting for
some time, and
is an editor and publisher at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and a
remarkable guy. So, I agreed to write a series of
pieces for them and he's a wonderful guy and I think Europe is more
interested
in the implications as opposed to the immediate market meaning of
technology. I mean, I don't
think people are better educated or more thoughtful or any different,
they've
just got a somewhat different focus.
I think growing out of the nature of the European market and the
origin
of so much of the technology in the United States gives them one degree
of remove,
which I think is useful. There's a
lot of thoughtful people over there.
Question: What is the
focus of your new art exhibition?
David Gelernter:
Well, let's see, this is the latest of a series of exhibits at Yale,
which is a
good place for me to exhibit. I
like to sell paintings, not from galleries, but from a more informal,
one-on-one way, and so a non-commercial gallery space in which to
exhibit, is, for
me, very useful. I mainly—I've
been trying for many years, I should say for many decades at this point,
to
figure out what Jewish art is, if there is such a thing.
It's come to seem to me that Jewish art
is paintings of words. Not just
paintings in which words appear, or words on a wall, but paintings in
which the
words themselves have meaning and decorative significance and conceptual
weight. It's hard to describe an image,
especially one that is somewhat idiosyncratic, but anyway.
General idea.
Question: How does
Judaism shape your work?
David Gelernter:
Genetically, to begin with. When I
do think up pictures, my own job description is an image thinker, as
many
people have been, and what I do is a matter of the images that float
through my
head. Many people think in images,
it's hard to say how many.
Certainly many people think in images some of the time. Many people think in images virtually
all the time. When I'm working in
software, I'm thinking of the picture that needs to appear on the screen
or
that needs to appear in the user's head in order to make sense of the
software. In the studio, more directly, I try and
take as any painter does, as any artist does, tries to take what is in
his head
and make it concrete which is a constant—which is a struggle, which
isn't easy,
but is what art has always been about.
When I write, I tend to write vividly or try to
write
vividly, and it's also a matter of the images that drift through one's
head. So, this is the way I deal
with the world, picture-wise. Recorded on April 1, 2010.
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