The Artist as Disruptor

By Adam Leipzig

What do we know about Yoel Tordjman?
1. He is an artist.
2. He is wildly prolific.
3. His art resists category.
4. He is a disruptive event.

That he is an artist is glaringly self-evident. Who but an artist would consistently create visual imagery and share it so widely?​

Tordjman is also prolific. This is a recent development. His work burst into public view in 2011, as water bursts through a dam. Once broken, the dam cannot be restored. Similarly, Tordjman’s work gushes forth, and he often releases multiples images in a day. It seems as though by living in the midst of printmaking, art direction, and industrial design, which was his former life, he developed a deep creative impetus which lay unexpressed until he was 51 years old. Then he exploded with a series of galleries that now amount to hundreds of individual works.

His works resists category, or rather they appear in a variety of categories, which he collects in his many galleries, and they are widely different. All of them fall under the classification of “digital art,” although that says little about them, just as “watercolor” says nothing about the content of thousands of other artists’ works.

This is not to say there’s no common thread. There is. Tordjman possesses the ability to see things with eyes that are both spiritual and mystical. This thread pulls viewers in two directions. Each artwork seems to reveal something sacred, that hasn’t been revealed before: that’s one end of the thread, the spiritual end. Yet what precisely is revealed remains hidden; it’s a secret viewers must somehow engage and untangle for themselves: that’s the other end of the thread, its mystical aspect.

And Tordjman is a disruptor. Artists and entrepreneurs are cut from the same cloth, because they both envision a different reality and seek to bring it forth and share it with the world. In the arena of entrepreneurs, disruptive innovations are the innovations that matter, because they up-end traditional businesses and economies. Tordjman disrupts because of the way he approaches his audience and shares his work – he does it through the virtual world.

We might think of him as the world’s first Global Web Artist. Tordjman rejects the notion that an artist needs to go through the traditional “gatekeepers” – galleries and collectors – to become publically visible. Instead, he has built a massive following in less than a year though online social networks.

​Of course, Tordjman is a disruptor in the classical artist sense too, and that’s why his work has resonance with so many people. He disrupts us out of our daily lives and expectations. We look at his work. We see a book, a wave, a series of composed abstract colors. We know them, but we don’t. They are familiar to us, but they aren’t. When we encounter them, we’re shaken out of what we expect to find. That’s what real disruption, and real art, is all about.

Adam Leipzig (www.AdamLeipzig.com) is a cultural activist who trains artists and entrepreneurs to get transformative results; he is also the publisher of Cultural Weekly (www.CulturalWeekly.com).