KADISHMAN'S SACRIFICE
Natan Zach
King Saul went to seek the asses and found himself saddled with a kingdom. That's how the bible tells us the story, and we have no reason to doubt the bible cal account. Menashe Kadishman, a former shepherd in an Israeli Kibbutz and an artist of international renown, went in search of sheep only to find himself witnessing the Sacrifice of Isaac.
In the beginning there was/were the sheep. A furry, curly, rather disheveled bulky breed not entirely unlike Menashe Kadishman himself. That is, not a single isolated sheep, the Kantian `Sheep in Itself', but rather a whole herd of them. This was at the Biennale of Venice in 1978, where Kadishman's live stock attracted everybody's attention. They were white sheep of the Israeli variety, marked with the colours of ownership as is customary in the artist's country. They were also sheep representing A if sheep may do said to represent – something which is manifestly and pronouncedly Israeli. But at the same time something which is - in this as in many other countries ~endangered and on the verge of extinction. And sheep, as everybody knows, are neither an endangered species nor on the verge of extinction. Not so that other quality which Kadishman's sheep were intend to represent.
But there, in Venice that is, one could not see the sheep for the herd. Gradually, individual sheep began emerging, on paper, on canvas, individual traits and marks of their own. Just like Picasso's musketers. Suddenly there was a sheep that was a born jester, and one that was a poet at heart, and there was a sheepish sheep and a peevish one, and a princely lamb, and there were sheep that were merely following sheep and others born to lead - or mislead the masses. And now it was no longer a herd but society of sheep, including leaders and led, oppressors and oppressed, the ones who had no kick left in them and those who got a kick out of kicking others. And there were those who were merely cannon - or butcher's - fodder.
And having said that, one cannot help speaking of realities, and more specifics of Israeli realities and Jewish realities, and perhaps of fate and destiny and history, which is man-made fate. And there emerges already a process, a chain of events almost as inevitable as nature, as the nature of the land, its climate, its people - the law of the land. Like Saul forced to find a kingdom rather than his stray asses, Kadishman - akin to Samuel, also a seer - was forced to observe and react to the slaughter of his sheep, that is, the slaughter of the innocent.
"And, behold, it is my own blood that is on the leaves," exclaims the father, the biblical Abraham, to his son Isaac in a poem written by one of Israel's foremost poets, Amir Gilboa. Gilboa's account of two mythical stories is in reverse to that of the bible. Here, in the poem, we have a father setting out to offer his beloved son so that he might prove the extent of his faith in and obedience to his creator. But instead of offering, or proposing to offer his son, he himself becomes the victim and sacrifice. Thus, Abraham, rather than Isaac or the ram, is victim. Recent Jewish history makes Gilboa's nightmare-poem intelligible for us. The long Jewish history, and even the shorter Israeli one, have both known similar situations.
But there are others, too. Thus, there is the one in which the ram - a blood-relation of the lamb - becomes the sacrifice or offering, a victim of events. And of course there is and has always been - what could be more natural to a history that has transgressed against all laws of nature almost? - the Sacrifice of offering of Isaac, perhaps the most terrible of them all.
In the beginning there was the monument, parented by the aspiration to the vast, the boundless, for that for which "only the sky is the limit", as men say, or that which the book of books, always more realistic, describes as "to the half (of) the kingdom". And alongside the monument there came to be the miniature, the monument in its microscopic or merely reduced, demystified dimensions. And there were Periods.
Thus, there was Kadishman's London Minimalist period, and the period of metal and glass, sheets and interactions, and the period of trees which later stepped into the sea, and the works on pages of telephone directories, and the sculptures in the landscape, and the works centering round a remembered and recorded image of a horrible, putrid corpse of a dead Egyptian soldier, assuming death the elephantine, dehumanized dimensions of futile human sacrifice.
Most of the major museums throughout the world, and all of Israel's museums and major galleries and collections, possess momentos and reminders of Kadishman's periods. Gradually, before our own eyes, he himself has nearly become a period.
And a period is just that. It is under no obligation to explain or interpret itself to us. It speaks to us in its own language which is that of its characters and signs, facts and omens. Kadishman's language or alphabet today consists of a ram, sheep, the head of a soldier decapitated in battle or his body lying there, cocoon-like, wrapped in its web like Cocoon in his snakes, a mother's head, a heap or an arrangement of stones or splintered glass, a dog devouring a corpse and an altar, and yet another altar, and another. There are almost as many of them as there are homes in this country, And in every home ~ throughout the country and perhaps throughout the entire world - there sits now, right now, yet another Isaac at his breakfast table, waiting for yet another father awaiting yet another voice that will decree: let's go.
The voice of the Lord for merely that big Brother, or perhaps that of the figure with two scythe? Who are we to say. In the region in which art speaks - art alone has the word.
The voice of Menashe Kadishman, in any case, reaches us loud and clear. And it is his own personal voice as much as that of his generation, and that of the many - in this country and elsewhere - who have a voice no longer and thus are mute. And it, this voice, is crying to us from the ground, and from the stones, and from the altars, the all-too-many altars to the all- too-many gods, and from wherever a human sacrifice has or is about to be made.