Menashe Kadishman

'Concepts and their realization'

Paul Wember

Iron sheets and panes of glass in a wood, in the landscape. Objects made of glass and metal, glass and stone or simply broken glass. Pages out of telephone directories from various cities and from different lands, 'treated' in strange ways. These are the things we come upon, discover and observe in the exhibition of Menashe Kadishman, 'Concepts and their Realization'.

A great deal of this may startle us. Save for the screen—prints almost everything is new. From what kind of a mental background does it all spring? What are the problems, what the conceptions and what does their realizing signify? Obviously the most conspicuous piece is the collective object called 'The Wood'. Tall rectangles, cut out of sheet iron and painted yellow stand in the landscape, with square panes of glass. Their presence is unexpected, yet indirectly they heighten our perception of nature. For a moment we see nothing but the brilliance of the colour and glass glittering. But then a tree or bush or group of trees advances into our field of vision, new and strange, as though for the first time.

One forest path is plainly marked. We follow it with our eyes from the woodland side until it finds its way through a great tube 9 meters long into the house. This tube or tunnel, of iron sheet and with a pane of glass, makes up a piece of sculpture on its own, the complimentary effect of the materials functioning inside their architecture of the whole. At the same time, both optically and physically, it draws Nature into the house. Outdoors and indoor interpenetrate each other, on the one hand in the thrust of the hard metal through the soft glass, on the other in the air—connection of the tube. The double problem, of drawing in the outside and at the same time projecting the house-interior into the landscape, reactive here a double solution.

Such are the conceptions of the artist and the background against which he realizes them, one with a specifically human reference. Problems of form and colour, though, play an equally strong part.

The yellow here is in 'the sharpest contrast to the dull green of the mossy trees and of the grass. The muddy colour of the paths, the grey and brown tones of the earth and fallen leaves give a dull background for the shine and glitter of the plates and glass. In return, the colours of the winter forest wake to life. So too with form. The irregular contours of a tree or bush contrast with the straight lines and right angles of glass and metal sheets.

So realized the opposition between natural and man-made forms becomes a visual problem and in a certain sense more understandable. But questions always will remain, to be pushed off into the sphere of myth and legend. However recognizable the glasses in the wood may be to rational, mends, they still lead us into another, magic wood, where glass hills, glass trees and glass castles can be found. The danger which lies hidden in the fragility of glass leads to the fairytale-figure of the princess with the glass heart. The glitter of the glasses in the park can conjure up such fantasies in a way both simple and magical. The fascination of this man-made stuff is, after all, that one can see-but not go through it.

So the big glass—project not only demonstrates again the interpenetration we have seen, it leads on to the vision of the mountain of broken glass. The entrance to one of the exhibition rooms is blocked off with the same material. This glassy wall is quite impenetrable even for the eye. The only way of seeing in is from outside, where the big window affords a vague view. But still the interior remains hidden, obscure and mysterious, like the glass mountain in the fairy-story. This brings us back into the land of legend, where the hero must climb a glass mountain to attain his goal, maybe to release a man under an evil spell. To win the hand of the king's daughter he must manage it three times. Again and again either the hero or the princess breaks through the glass and falls into the darkness of the mountain. This work, then, is a metaphor for the achievement of the impossible.

It is no accident that Concept and Process artists especially favour this material. Don't forget that glass, in a physical sense, is not a solid but a fluid material, a frozen liquid, if you like.

Historically, delight in glass led to the hindering of its transparency with colour. The purpose of stained glass was, once again, to deal with the problem of outside and inside, though this time with a metaphysical intention. When Christo pasted-up the windows of Museum Haus Lange with pack—paper, the visual problem was no different. Now Kadishman is dealing with glass in his own way. The contrast of man-made and natural form, to which I have referred, dominates too his works in broken glass, especially in those where he combines it with photography.

He photographs the dried-out desert with its fissured surfaces. Then he lays broken up fragments of a thick glass upon the photograph, following as far as possible the
contours of the split-up earth. The contrast of natural and art-form repeats itself, this time inside the house. Again it is the play of forms which injects foreign elements into nature and so changes the latter and clarifies it at the same time.

It is striking by how many paths Menashe Kadishman reaches his goal, always the same. It is always the confrontation of natural and art-forms of the unruly forms of growth with those directed by the intellect. He attacks our everyday environment, ripping, smashing, destroying, but transforming and clarifying too and thereby giving us a new experience.
Kadishman designs his sculptures to stand in the landscape or in front of massive buildings. In different fashion, naturally, the smaller pieces can also suggest that confrontation with the outside world which is his aim. The contrast is established, so to speak in two degrees. First, put together out of stone and glass or glass and metal, the sculpture itself is a material contradiction. Exactly this lends it a high degree of inner tension. Second, the degree of contradiction and of tension is increased when such a sculpture is set up in the landscape, or else when its eccentric forms can play against the repetitive forms of the building. In both cases it is the sculpture which determines the transformation. This would seem to justify what sculptors from the beginning down to a Lardera or to a Beuys believed: that sculpture is the primary form brought forth by creative man. The screen-prints deal with the same set of problems in a more familiar medium. Everything could be subsumed here as Nature and Construction.


The pages and the tables out of telephone-directories are like a dairy of a journey round the world.

Kadishman brings page on page from every city which he visits. He works them over with coloured chalks, with indian ink or watercolour. On a page from New York he crosses out the names, except for one or two he knows. The same with other pages, from Cologne or Tokyo. The graphic rhythm changes constantly. Sometimes he rings gaps in the lines of print, at other he makes a contour-line along the endings of the sentences. This produces a stimulating graphic work, but it also leads on to a confrontation of the forms, as in 'The Wood'. Some pages are severely linear, some gesture as a tachist drawing. One is attractive for its lively colour, another looks much like a cardiogram. One resembles a musical score, another a co-ordinate system. Occasionally the artist leaves all names intact and only rings the gaps between the sentences in various colours. This is the opposite process to that in 'The Wood'. The given form there was organic, restless, irregular; and the geometrical constructions were set up against it. Here it is the printed and spaced text, which Kadishman enlivens with the restless, free forms flowing from his pencil. 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. Man has the ability by his own attitude to modify a little nature's scope. That is, I think, is what Kadishman hints at, exemplifies and sometimes reveals in his objects, the realized concepts he has exhibited.
Paul Wember
(Trans. J. A. Thwaites)