1989.39
Autonomous Engraving
Artist
Joshua Neustein
(Danzig, Poland, 1940 - )
Title
Autonomous Engraving
Creation Date
1974
Century
20th century
Dimensions
6 5/8 in. x 8 9/16 in. (16.9 cm. x 21.7 cm.)
Object Type
cut paper
Creation Place
Middle East
Medium and Support
paper construction and tissue on paper
Credit Line
Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Accession Number
1989.39
Joshua Neustein, who was born to Israeli parents in Poland and grew up in the United States, moved to Israel in 1964, where he lived and worked for seventeen years. There his art was concerned with safety, maps, territories, and a sense of place and belonging, referring at times to the artist’s memories of light and shadow on the architecture of his childhood home. This work is from the series Carbon Pieces and was produced in the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Executed on thin carbon paper, these torn, multilayered constructions are delicately scratched, cut, and marked with pencil, thereby conveying the artist’s sculptural and calligraphic gestures. The marks, not made on the paper but rather in or through the paper, read as wounds. The artist’s use of carbon paper, a distinctly non-art material and a now-obsolete technology of duplication and recording, alludes to a frustrated desire to represent the “real.”