Menashe Kadishrnan. The narrator.
Ulrich Schneider
In Menashe Kadishman is extensive oeuvre metaphorical signs are prominent: the sheep as a creature needing protection, the donkey as an admirable monument of dogged survival, the dog as an instance of greed as bred by man. For decades Kadishman has modified, declined and paraphrased these symbols with enormous creativity in all genres of art. Every observer can understand this nonverbal language, which finds its climax in the thousands of heads in "Shalechet" (1997 - 2000) in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Here reactions extend from admiration to sheer horror.
However; Kadishman's private iconography contains still another component, namely; the stories of the victims. Again and again the highly dramatic testing of Abraham comes up, as told in Genesis 22. The Lord calls upon Abraham to offer up his only son, Isaac, whom he received only after unending troubles. Without doubting, Abraham sets off to the place of sacrifice that is pleasing to God together with the child, the servants and the donkey The last few yards father and son walk alone and together they erect the pyre for the burnt offering. Obediently Abraham is just about to pass the test, the killing of his son, when an angel commands him to stop and supplies a ram as the sacrifice. As a reward the Lord promises his blessing on Abrahams and Isaac's offspring.
Menashe Kadishman has, since 1982, persistently concerned himself with the theme of "The Sacrifice of Isaac" in sculpture. The use of sheet iron of different thickness ranging from millimetres to centimetres, which is characteristic of him, allows him to vary convincingly from the miniature to the monumental. The boy Isaac and the sacrificed ram merge into a double figure and culminate in what Lessing terms "the productive moment": Isaac's rescue is in no way yet guaranteed, when the ran appears shadow-like above the human sacrifice. To what extent Kadishman has internalized this theme is evident not only from the multitude of sculptures with the subject of "The Sacrifice of Isaac", but also from the fact, that he had himself and his son Benjamin modeled for an Abraham-Isaac group by George Segal as early as 1973. In contrast to Segal's narrative realism Kadishman merges symbols ~ Isaac as a head with its raised arms wide open and the ram's head with its horns spreading wide - into a synchronic world of images. In the steady pursuit of the subject over decades Kadishman arrives at a form of the picture which will here be called "intervening mediation". The productive moment in the text of the Bible is brought about by the appearance of the angel who stops the capital crime of child murder .
Menashe Kadishman achieves this miraculous intervention by inscribing meta-levels into the sculpture, An angel~bird springs from the ram's head so unexpectedly that he can save the fatal situation (v the catalogue of the Aachen exhibition 1999. p. 95). These intervening mediations are already inherent in the donkey sculptures of the mid-1990s (v Pierre Re-starry M. K., catalogue T994/95).The animal seems to graze peacefully in a landscape, but it bears the landscape, covered with palm trees and cypresses, in itself and occasionally even bears the attack of a dog threatening the animal out of its own hind quarters and producing a fearful look from its head. Menashe Kadishman is distinguished by his superabundant creativity and fantasy If there was a need for the allegorical presentation of a metaphysical bulimia, Kadishman Would offer the image. In his painting, too, one level only is not enough. The work "The Herd" (1995 - 1999), consisting of many hundreds of paintings – sheep heads as far as the eye can see a is inscribed - time and again with new images such as birth and sacrifice. So the peaceful basic melody is deliberately disturbed by atonality.
These insertions are also found with subjects of classical antiquity, which appear quite naturally in the work of an artist like Kadishman who is steeped in Mediterranean culture. "The Sacrifice of Narcissus" is based on the legend myth passed on by Ovid in his "Metamorphoses" (5, 559 - 510). The handsome young man rejects all his admirers (male and female) including the nymph Echo, who, in despair, dwindles to a mere voice.
Typically enough, the arrogant lad eventually falls in love with his own reflection which he catches sight of on the surface of a lake. He remains attached to this unattainable image and dissolves, as Echo did before. Kadishman blends Narcissus with his reflection and yet makes this unattainable for him. Echo, the nymph, sounds from an incision in his body (v Catalogue of the
Aachen exhibition, 1999, p. 121 ).
Menashe Kadishman bears both classical antiquity and Judaism in his memory. The wealth of this knowledge, which he wants to communicate to the observer, requires a new wealth of images. Kadishman convinces us as a narrator by playing with the modern system of insertion as an artist does, and needs no computer for it.