Living in a Playful Collage: Hanoch Piven at TEDxJerusalem

Piven's art is about communicating through fun and playfulness by reinventing the meaning of regular objects. Piven has been conducting workshops internationally for the last 10 years employing the principles of his own collage technique using common objects to stimulate play, creativity and communication.

My name is Hanoch and I play.

I play with objects.

I've been making portraits with objects
for a long, long time,

and the portraits are published
in different magazines

all over the world,

and of course, in Israel as well.

Here is Mrs. Netanyahu,
the wife of the Prime Minister

who happens to have a slight,

special way of dealing with cleaning.

(Laughter)

And here is President Peres.

So, I also play with my food.
(Laughter)

So after having been doing this
for so many years,

I want to share with you,
what did I learn

of 20 years of playing with bananas.

(Laughter)

So, I learned that all artists play:

Picasso played with food,

(Laughter)
Picasso played with objects,

because artists know that playfulness

is a fertile ground for creativity.

When Picasso made this head of a bull,

he wasn't using his amazing talent
in drawing,

he was just using his ability
to look at the world

in a playful way, in a different way.

And perhaps we can not learn
to draw like Picasso,

but we can learn, perhaps,
to look at the world

in a little bit different way —

the way Picasso did
when he created this sculpture.

So let's look at the definition
of seeing:

I like what Paul Valery wrote,

"To see is to forget the name
of what we are looking at."

What Valery is talking about,
is forgetting a label.

To name something, is a direct path.

Once we understand it, we move on.

But what if we refrain from naming,
we stay with it,

we explore it, we take the winding road,
we wonder around?

We might then discover something new,

which we haven't seen before.

Maybe we will make some
playful new association.

A good way to practice this,
is to look for faces —

I don't mean faces like this,
I mean faces like that!

The world is filled with faces.

(Laughter)

This is the bathroom in my house.

And once we see faces,
we are forgetting for a millisecond,

the name of that
which we are looking at.

So, by now you can tell
that I am a sucker for playfulness.

And it's true, and it is because

playfulness made a big change
in my own life.

I was born and grew up
in Uruguay, South America,

and I always drew.

This is my 4th grade teacher
whom I drew.

It's probably the oldest caricature
I have.

In Uruguay there are many cows,
so I drew cows.

I even drew steaks,
(Laughter)

and Gauchos on horses,

and when I was 11,
we came to live in Israel —

So the subject matter slightly changed.

(Laughter)

But not my passion —
I wanted to be a caricaturist.

I looked at the newspapers,
I copied what other people were doing.

But life has a way of happening to you,

so when I finally wanted
to go and study,

I was already in my mid-20s

and my talent was kind of iffy.

I missed many hours of practice

because I'd been doing other things.

As a matter a fact, I was rejected from
the Bezalel Art School, not far from here.

And I had to go and study in New York.

When I arrived in New York,
(Laughter)

I realized that I did suck!

(Laughter)

Most of the people around me
drew much better than me.

I was doing this kind of lame cartoons,
while the real pros,

what I was seeing in the newspapers

were amazing pieces of art,

by wonderful artists like:
Steve Brodner, like Philip Berk.

And that made me feel like this:

This is me, depressed in New York.

So, I was frustrated, I was pesimistic,

I had hit a wall.

Now, if you remember the diagram
from before,

the direct path was not working
for me anymore.

I had to take a different path —
I had to start wandering around,

looking for other ways to find
my own way of making caricatures.

And as we all know,
when we get off the main road,

this is where some treasures might be.

And I did find some treasures.

The first treasure that I found —

I found it in the picture collection
of the Mid-Manhattan Library.

It was an old poster for the movie
"The Great Dictator" by Charlie Chaplin.

And I don't know who the artist was —

"designer unknown" it said,

but it was amazing to me, how the designer
with so little said so much —

both a portrait of Adolf Hilter
and of Charlie Chaplin.

So, I needed to see this,

because that made me understand
that it wasn't about technique —

it was about communication,
and it was about

finding your own way of doing things.

The second treasure that I found,

as I was drawing Saddam Hussein,

it was the first Gulf War, 1990,

and I was living at the time with a girlfriend
who was a heavy smoker,

and there were matches
all around the house.

And suddenly, I picked up those matches

and I put it on the face
of Saddam Hussein,

and I made the mustache with it.

Now, I did it because I thought
the form was the correct one,

but only later I realized
that there was an idea —

the matches where basically explaining

that this man had just started a war.

I wouldn't have found
the poster or the matches

if everything would've been well
with my road,

If I would've stayed in the direct road.

So, looking back
twenty something years,

I know now that I was blessed
by hardships.

By the way, Edward de Bono
who coined the phrase "Lateral Thinking",

he calls the opposite of this,

to be "Blocked by Adequacy".

When everything is sort of adequate,

maybe not great, but not bad,

you don't have an urge
to look for other solutions.

So in my case, being blessed by hardships
made me look outside.

So I made a collage.

I started making collages,

and I realized that collage
is the ultimate playful technique.

You can not make a collage
on a direct path.

You need to wander around –

to find something here,
to find something there,

and when you put it all together,
you create something new.

And I realized that this way of working,
really, really suited me.

I felt very comfortable
in this way of working.

It was really about trial and error —

about trying things,

and about allowing myself
to make mistakes.

Most of the objects that I try
do not work,

but I need to go through
like twenty or thirty

in order to find the right one.

Just as in the eyes of Einstein,

I used twenty gears
until I found the really good ones.

So, it's really about forgiving yourself
when you make mistakes.

And playfulness lets you do that.
(Laughter)

When I made the portrait
of Homer Simpson,

all the sketches that I made
weren't working very well.

So I threw them to the garbage can.

And then I look at the garbage can
in my studio,

and I realize that it was exactly
the mouth of Homer Simpson!

(Laughter) (Applause)

Thank you.

So sometimes those happy accidents
come to save you.

The happy accidents are always there,

and when we play,
and when I make collages,

I notice them.

And sometimes is about
helping them arrive.

So, sometimes it's about going out
to look for something,

which I even don't know what it is.

When I made the portrait
of Hafez al-Assad,

I went out in the flea market in Yaffo
to look for some metal stuff,

and I came upon this object –

And I said, "I don't know what this is,
but I am sure Assad had one of those at home!"

(Laughter)

It just felt right.

When I make a collage,
I only see what's in front of me.

It's very easy to forget
all the preconceptions

about how one thing should be.

It's easy to challenge
those preconceptions.

So for example, when I was making
the portrait of Fidel Castro,

I realized that
it just didn't need a face,

and it still looked like Fidel Castro.

Well, who said that a caricature
should have a face —

So once I realized that,

it was easier for me
to use other objects,

just about anything I wanted.

Like a stretched rubber ballon
for Michel Jackson,

because it's obvious
that's what his skin was made of,

(Laughter)

or sausage for Yeltzin,
(Laughter)

or bread for Karl Marx,
(Laughter)

a drum stick for Golda Meir,
(Laughter)

or Gefilte Fish.

But perhaps the most important thing
I learned from making collages,

is about adaptation,
about being flexible.

And, because really,
any new object that arrives,

can change totally what I am making

because things are not glued.

And slowly, I realized that I was starting
to live my life in that way,

not just to make my work in that way.

College really taught me how to live
my life in a more flexible way.

And I started to notice treasures
which appeared in my life.

The first one happened after
I made my first book for children:

"Notza Segula" in Hebrew,

or "The Perfect Purple Feather"
in English.

And what happened was,
after I made that book,

kids, started sending me
all these innocent drawings,

with objects, or with food
which they made,

(Laughter)

some were less innocent,
like this portrait of Monica Lewinsky.

(Laughter)

Liol Zamil, who was twelve at the time,

sent it to me with a letter saying,
"And I also put the stain".

(Laughter)

(Applause)

People develop fast here.
(Laughter)

But that lead for me
to start visiting schools,

and doing workshops with children,

first in Israel, and then I started to travel

to other places: like Brazil, like China.

And slowly, the kids participating
in my workshops grew older,

and I realized that even adults could make
the most amazing work with objects.

Look at this self-portrait
that this guy made —

and he's no artist,
he's an x-ray technician.

(Laughter)

So, I realized that if I were to give
those people a pencil,

and white paper, they probably all
would've made something like this.

But because they were playing,

they could really go around
those hardships,

and they really even didn't know
they were creating art,

they were just playing —

and then they were happy
with what was coming out.

It was actually sort of the same process

that happened to me
twenty something years earlier.

But then another treasure
came my way —

I was contacted by a group
of art therapists

in a hospital in Israel
to come and work

with the children
in the oncology department.

And we spent three days together

making the most amazing workshops
with those kids.

And the kids really did amazing work.

This kid, for example,
made a portrait of the doctor

who conducted the procedure
of bone marrow transplant on him.

And the syringe that he used for the nose
is the actual one that the doctor used.

And then we went on to work with adults,

cancer patients as well,

which again made
amazing pieces of art.

And then we moved on,
and we worked with army veterans,

and army veterans
suffering from PTSD.

And you should've seen these men
in their fifties

creating the most amazing artworks —

just by playing with objects.

Look at this one.

Is it a self portrait?
Is the small fish a self portrait,

or perhaps the large fish.

So. then I understood that it wasn't
really about creating art —

It was about telling stories.

It was about communicating.

Playfulness through the use of collage

was allowing people
to tell a story through art,

which perhaps would've been too difficult
to say in words.

So, I want to end with this guy,
this picture of this kid.

He participated in one of my workshops
in Tel Aviv, in the Bialik Rugozin School.

And supposedly he didn't get it —

You're supposed to glue the stuff
on the board, not on yourself.

(Laughter)

But because he didn't listen to me,

he didn't listen to the preconceptions,
he was playing.

He only listened to his inner voice

and to what was in front of him,

he created a really special image,

which we are showing here today.

When we play, we are free!

Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Thank you.