'Menashe Kadishman'
Arturo Schwartz
Menashe and ArturoI soon found out that his overabundant physique mirrored a boundless enthusiasm, an exuberant vitality, and an extraordinary generous character- a 360" generosity: in his feelings for relatives, friends and fellow artists, in his artistic output, in his creative means. His is an inborn munificence and benevolence that I have rarely met in other people. We came into his three-room studio-deposit, crammed with paintings and almost stumbling over two sculptures. Thus started a friendship which, as far as I am concerned, is motivated as much by the admiration I have for the artist as by the appreciation I have for the man whose sense of humor and warmth is unequaled. The artist's "appropriation" of the outside reality may have many different motivations, with the New Realists - like Arman and Spoerri - or the "decollagistes" - Hains or Rotella for instance, it may be a formal technique, sublimated in the poetics of the action, with the intent to achieve an aesthetic result. With myriam Bat Yosef, as has just been seen, it is the expression of the wish to recreate the world in the image of her dreams, hopes and desires. With Kadishman, appropriation is the manifestation of a boundless love for nature and its off-springs whether animal- as is the case for the sheep - or vegetal - the trees. But Kadishman's appropriative outlook also reflects the holistic character of his ceuvre: he wishes to merge man and nature, the organic and the industrial, sculpture and painting. When Kadishman says: "I believe that art grows from feelings and not rational calculations alone" I think that he was too shy to substitute "feelings" with the word "love" since I suspect that what he really meant was that art grows from love.
Trees and sheep have a clear autobiographic origin and also a very special meaning in Kadishman's personal mythology. Concerning trees, his feeling for them started when, still a child, he was taught to plant trees to defeat the desert. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Israel Museum he painted a nearby tree, commenting later: "The tree is near to my heart ....
The 'Painted' Tree has been an act of love, a sort of personal declaration. A phase within a prolonged attempt to intermingle with nature."
And explaining the reason for this act of love as well as the place it occupies in his imagination: "There ls both an affinity and a certain equality between us: the tree is the Man of the silent world; our language is filled with trees: the tree of the field is man's life, the bramble allegory,the trees die standing, the cedars of Lebanon." Kadishman started making environmental work in the mid-sixties: he dug holes in the earth and filled them with Broken Glass "in order that they grow glass trees in your imagination."
He was thus reenacting the fertility rite of his childhood with broken glass in the shape of frozen water. He began working with actual trees in 1969, in the course of an international Sculpture Symposium in Uruguay's capital Montevideo. He had arrived with a finished sculpture with the intention to set it up there. However the atmosphere of silence and tranquility, the fact of being in a completely different world made him realize how extraneous to this new reality was the artifact he had brought, it "might have been 'untrue.' It gave some kind of a jar, impossible to ignore. It was a forest that lived by itself, and the sculpture was a european sculpture living a 'European life.' I wanted to work with the forest God had created, the organic forest, and to fit into it a mechanical forest, a man-made forest containing forms that would be a contrast to nature." Here the fusion of the organic and inorganic was achieved by nailing yellow-colored hard-edge steel plates onto eucalyptus trees scattered within the 2-3 acre Roosevelt park in the outskirts of Montevideo, creating thus a "Forest Within a Forest".
Kadishman explained: "The yellow plates reflected the shadows of the branches and stems that were changing together with the moving sun. Nature has thousands of forms which are changing as the sun moves. A yellow such as mine is not to be found in the color scale of the forest. The organic trees, the industrial plates, the changing shadows over the plates, all became one unit. It was beautiful. Almost like ritualistic magic." The following year, 1970, within the frame-work of an exhibition at New York's Jewish Museum, he set up in Central Park, along Fifth Avenue, his own Forest.
A completely different environment necessitated a fresh treatment: "The rhythms I have created were more related to my Glass-Metal sculptures. A block and a space, with a stain of color on the tree and a space extending up to the next tree. The passing yellow cabs of New York, the fixed plates. the shadows of trees and cabs, the lights of the changing traffic-lights - all these created a technological urbanistic forest. My yellow was very familiar here. The yellow plates moved from the stillness of the Montevideo forest to the turmoil of New York's Fifth Avenue." Still another approach was realized in 1971 at Krefeld, in the course of his solo-show at the Haus Lange Museum. On the trees of-the park surrounding the building he hung tall rectangular iron sheets painted yellow - offering a strong color contrast with the surrounding green and brown dominant tones - and square panes of glass which acted both as a reflecting surface and a deforming one: the time was mid-winter and, in accordance with the degree of moisture frozen on the glass, the reflection of the trees changed color and form and the stems appeared distorted. Kadishman recalls with pleasure that it looked like "a frozen glass forest. Like a legend. Now my forest had colorful trees, transparent plates, and shadows." From dry land to the water was Kadishmans next move. In 1975 he cut tree-shaped apertures in steel-plates which were then dipped into the sea of Caesarea: as the water passed through them, the waves generated the trees. From harnessing water to create elusive and dynamic trees to using air for the same purpose was the next logical step. It was taken that same year within the context of the Israel Museum's group show From Landscape to Abstraction.
From Abstraction to Nature, for which Kadishman created his Canvas Forest he cut the minimalist outline of trees into six meter-high sheets of gray canvas. As they were blown by the wind like sails on the sea, they gave visitors the impression of moving through an animated, enchanted forest. Today a small cluster of blue tree-shaped flat metallic sculptures can be seen in Jerusalem's rehov. Ultimately all the environmental work - which from the mid-sixties occupied his mind - reflects his desire to transcend the nature-culture polarity in a work of art and hence merge "the thousand forms of nature" with the limitless forms born of his imagination. Paul Wember pointed out: "Nature is also form. The plant-world produces new shapes constantly - according to a plan.They are not free. Constraint and freedom face each other here. Perhaps the tension between them is the core of Kadishman's intention. Constraint: the principle of nature; freedom: the principle of art. He tries to build a bridge between the two."
For Kadishman, the step from static vegetal "Readymades" to animal ones was as short as the one that took him from land art to body art, the bodies being those of the live sheep whose fleece he tinted blue and exhibited at the Venice Biennial in 1978 in honor of that year's theme "From Nature to Art - From Art to Nature." By color-marking the sheep, the ex-Kibbutz shepherd gave an artistic dimension to the customary practice of staining the wool of the animal's back with the color of the herd to mark its ownership. At the same time he composed an ever- changing "tachiste" painting, as Amnon Barzel remarked: "The blue painted stains are moving, drifting apart or coming together according to the sheep's movements and needs. The biology, the animals' behavior determine the form of the 'picture' which is composed of the total number of blue stains." To Barzel, Kadishman also said: "I want my work to exercise all the senses. Even those abandoned by art. Smell, sounds, touch. Now, in Venice, in the pavilion populated with sheep that move, chew and dung - the spectator exercises all of his senses, because I demonstrate a segment of real life. I do not want an ant with a capital A, with order and discipline, with 'correct and incorrect."' For Kadishman "sheep are not simply a part of nature, but unfold on a deeper existential level. They are a mirror and a memory." To Barzel, commenting also on the tree and the grave, he said, "The sheep, the cypress and the grave are actual memories of a beloved site, a place of intimacy in the land of Israel. All these have become a symbol because the reality which gave birth to the memories have disappeared.
The romantic reality becomes nostalgia, and a symbol. We need both nostalgia and symbols in times of loneliness, when the roots have gone from us and vanished." In the last analysis, sheep symbolize for Kadishman the unending quest for identity and belonging as well as the end of the wandering of the Jewish people. The BienniaI's live sheep gave birth to a countless progeny: in both painting and sculpture - of endless variations on the theme, the outline of the sheep's head even becoming his favorite logo.
In his canvases, Kadishman evidences the urge of a Spinozian's unitary urge which expresses itself in the refusal of established aesthetic categories: painting and sculpture are thus frequently invited to freely interact in his compositions. In the earlier large canvases of the sheep series - in which explode vibrant fauve colors - the picture continued on the gallery floor where small pieces of rock were stained and strewn in front of the canvas - sometimes even for six meters as in Sheep,1981 ~to transfer onto the pavement the colour patches seen on the backs of the Biennial's sheep. At times the paintings incorporated a small sculpture - as is the case for Prometheus' Dream, 1985-1991, where a small-scale metal version of the larger Prometheus sculpture is inserted. It may include a vegetal element, as in Autumn Tree, 1993, where a bunch of twigs thrusts outwards from the center of the canvas. As a matter of fact, a great number of his paintings do incorporate all kinds of odds and ends: artificial flowers or fruits, dress-hangers, straw, lace and other fabrics, etc. There is a striking characteristic of Kadishman's three-dimensional works which Lellouche singled out perfectly when he told me that "Kadishman sculpts as a painter." His flat airy compositions escape the volumetric weight of traditional sculpture to retain only an overwhelming expressiveness. A childhood reminiscence may have been the unconscious emulative drive which accounts for Kadishman's predilection for this formal solution: his father used to cut out metal figures for his shadow theater. On the other hand Kadishman's impelling urge to draw, wherever he is and on whichever support, underscores the intimate relationship that drawing and sculpting has for him.
Like the Renaissance artists for whom - as Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari, among others, inform us drawing was the essential prerequisite of artistic activity, Kadishman never separates from his sketch-book. Quite recently he has underscored the importance that the art of craftsmanship always had for him; "Lines have a magic power. . . drawing is not only lines: it is also the feelings underlying the lines and forms, and these are not defined .... When I draw, I arrest my thought, and I know and see what I think. A sheet of paper is like a world - the world of the painter. It may be empty, or full, if you have something to fill it with. This is the miracle of drawing, that with a number of lines something is produced which has always, or never, existed. A drawing has a value of its own in the world of art. It is, perhaps, more pregnant with content than any other form of visual expression (since) drawing is the wish to understand the form behind the form." lt is hence obvious that, for Kadishman too - as was the case for Modigliani and Danziger - a drawing has an autonomous aesthetic dignity: "Often a drawing starts as a preparation for a painting, a sketch for a sculpture, or an illustration to a story, and it finally turns out to be something parallel to the other creation, with a value of its own - freer and more direct, without makeup." Still more importantly, drawing is also a means to penetrate one's inner reality: "Drawing sometimes is the product of hours of contemplation of nature, and sometimes of never-ceasing inner contemplation." And Kadishman thus explains the relationship that exists for him between drawing and sculpting: "My drawing on paper becomes a line cut in iron." Marc Scheps remarked that Kadishman "thinks with his hands. . . drawing becomes a visual shorthand, a shortcut which does not take aesthetics into account .... During this creative process, Kadishman discovers the fundamental possibility of drawing, of creating with one line a form projected into space. Thereafter, he treats the sheet of metal like a simple sheet of paper ....
In the factories where he makes his large pieces, he has learned that sheets of metal even with a thickness of several centimeters, can be cut, folded, molded as though they were simple sheets of paper. lt is with an exuberant pleasure that he uses the heavy and powerful machines to transform the small pencil drawings from his imagination into monumental sculpture."
As from 1980, three great themes - to which personal events are not extraneous - alternate with logical continuity in Kadishman's reuvre. The first, The Sacrifice oflsaac, originates from the experience with the sheep exhibited in 1978 at the Venice Biennial. The second, Birth, follows as a reaction to the death connotation of lsaac is Sacrifice, while the third, Prometheus, expresses the defiant response to historic events and authoritarian impositions.
Amnon Barzel traces the ideological antecedent of The Sacrifice of lsaac in his stone altar of 1961 which later is transformed in a real stone grave which Kadishman would install among his paintings in 1983, in a gallery show. Several circumstances may have inspired this theme: the quite accidental event of roaming in the hills around Jerusalem looking for the sheep he was to exhibit at the Venice Biennial and the reminiscences of his 1956 experience when, as a 24-year-old soldier he took part, as a modern Isaac, in the Sinai campaign which he lived again as a new Abraham, when his son was recruited in the army and the Lebanese invasion started. To Mordechai Omer, Kadishman referred to his feelings while roaming on Mount Moriah: "lf I stand on Mount Moriah and look towards the Mount of Olives - I see all this marvelous pink light - there pass before me scenes from the events of the past; love and sacrifice, Abraham and Isaac, David and Abselom, kingdom and fall. The binding of Isaac occurs in our time, in fact, in every place to which we send our children to wars."
Elsewhere, Kadishman elaborated: "A man who sacrifices his son, sacrifices himself. Both are victims. The sacrifice of Isaac is not an abstract symbol for me. It is part and parcel of my own biography and that of my generation, and it may be the biography of my children after me. Neither do I consider the story of the sacrifice of Isaac as signifying a divine command or a decree of God. For me, it symbolizes the fear of the individual to defy the dictates of society and its conventions. When fear takes over, at the very moment one stands, hesitantly, knife in hand, unable to decide, struggling between the voice of one's conscience and the will to survive . . . The altars are waiting for human offerings. And what is most frightening of all is that in every generation Isaac returns once again, and is again sacrificed. . . An eighteen-year-old boy does not send himself to war." In that same text he also pointed out the ideal connection between the Sacrifice and the Prometheus cycle to which I shall soon revert: "The ram will triumph over Isaac; the raven over innocence; and the vulture over the fallen angel - all of them embodying the guiltless Isaac."`
As we may notice from Kadishman's interpretation of the biblical sacrifice, it is not the ram that is sacrificed but Isaac standing not only for the lsraelis fallen since the establishment of the State, but also for the victims of conflicts all over the world. Yigal Zalmona draws our attention to the fact that "pain and death have constituted an important component of his art from the early stone altars, through the shroud-covered soldiers' corpses that he made as small-sized Voodoo figures."
Although the optimistic cycle of the Birth sculptures was started as a reaction to the tragic contents of the Sacrifice theme, there exists a kind of awkward formal continuity between the two. Zalmona points out that in his first birth painting of 1984 the "composition recalls the image of the ram standing over lsaac's body." In some sculptures in the Birth cycle, a thematic continuity is also stressed, for instance in Sacrifice of Isaac II, 1986-87, where the ram of the sacrifice and the newborn are fused in a single image, or in the dramatic Mother Carrying her Sacrifice, 1983-84, in Birth and Sacrifice, 1988, or in even the more explicit Mourning. All this will appear less astonishing when we bear in mind that, for Kadishman, "life and death are joined together. He is a master of the unity of contrasts. Death gnaws at life while life surges from death, all in a continuing cyclical process. In an early drawing from 1963, the phoenix is born from a soIdier's body. In 1983 he painted a dead sheep from whose belly a human head is born."
What strikes us in all the sculptures of this cycle is the fact that the mother, here as in the Sacrifice cycle, is grieving and in pain. She experiences the birth as a tragic experience in two ways: the life that she has nurtured for nine months will be physically separated from her being, a separation that foreshadows the more painful and final one that all beings are doomed to experience. To Rappaport Kadishman he said; "Today, my need is to express emotions . . . What really troubles me is the miracle of birth- life, including the pain and will to survive." The expression of the woman's face, her head often thrown backward in dolorous surprise expresses the biblical curse "l will make most severe your pangs in childbearing" (Genesis, 3: 16). In other variations the arms are flung wide open in despair. What is also an almost constant feature is the telling detail that the child's birth is rarely completed: only his head is seen issuing from his mother's womb. Kadishman wants to preserve the primordial biological mother-children unity, and thus preserve the new existence from the blows of life's adversities. Yigal Zalmona pointed out the allegorical meaning of Kadishman's Mother figure and how here, although nature seems to prevail over culture, what triumphs finally is their dialectical unity in compliance with Kadishman's holistic outlook. Thus, in the sculptures of this cycle, the mother "is naked, all breast and womb, a large archetypal mother, the symbol of all mothers and all births, but perhaps also a threatening and castrating mother. This is all Nature, no longer Nature and Culture, those twin concepts that in the past governed many of Kadishman's works. The affinity of this birth to the image of the mother grieving over her dead child in Picasso's Guernica reinforces the dramatic aspect of the subject. lt is the birth of rupture, of an ecstatic experience, of severance, breaking, folding and separation, of violence - but also, as befit Kadishman's unity of contrasts, beauty, gentleness and compassion. It is the birth of love."
Kadishman's dramatic Pieta is the work that in conjugating the Sacrifice, Birth and Prometheus themes evidences the ethical concern underlying his asthetics. The visual memory of an Egyptian soldier's corpse devoured by jackals (or wild dogs) may have been the catalytic agent for the recurring image of the vulture (at times, jackal gnawing at Prometheus). In the Sacrifice and Prometheus themes we witness the victory of the beast (ram or vulture) over the human being, in other words, of the overpowering of rational consciousness by what the animal nature stands for: the violent and irrational component of one's personality. In Kadishman's words, "the ram will triumph over Isaac; the raven over innocence; and the vulture over the fallen angel - all of them embodying the guiltless Isaac."
Furthermore, what is also stressed in both cycles is the utter absurdity of the very notion of "sacrifice": indeed Jewish ethics exalt life, contrary to the sadomasochistic moral of the Christian religion - that exalts the sacrifice of a human being tortured and crucified - ours is based on a love convenant with a merciful God who enjoins His followers to "enjoy happiness. . . all the fleeting days of life" (Ecclesiastes, 9:9) and whose promise is that "our mouths shall be filled with laughter, our tongues, with songs of joy."
Edward Fry sees in a 1987 sculpture still another evidence of the persistence of Kadishman's inspirational sources: "In Shepherd Boy, 1987, the circle of metaphors which began in Venice in 1978 is completed. A figure lying on the ground is a shepherd, but he is also the sacrificed Isaac. The hooked rod is a shepherd's crook, but it is also the staff of a nomadic wanderer of the tribes of Israel who, having found a homeland and set their staffs into the ground, never more to wander, are nevertheless in danger of losing that homeland and becoming nomads once again if they do not learn the new significance of the sacrifice of Isaac." By the same token, we may perceive the continuity of the Birth theme into the Prometheus cycle of sculptures in a work like Howling, 1988-1990, where Prometheus is still in his mother's womb (here represented allegorically by mother earth) while he is attacked simultaneously by both a vulture and a howling wild dog. Kadishman's oeuvre is the desperate yet hopeful call for a better world: "I do not recall my life and my country without war. But l am allowed to dream of it." And I think he must share, with Bertolt Brecht, the thought that "unhappy the land that needs heroes."