From art to nature-as-art
Amnon BarzelWithin the accelerated development to which the conception of art has been subjected, mainly in the wake of the activities of the avantguarde streams at the beginning of the century, and parallel to the open-mindedness of contemporary socio-cultural definitions - the artist's turning towards nature itself, while applying on it art concepts and adapting concepts of nature as art concepts, apparently constitutes the remarkable contribution of the art at the end of the seventies:
A flock of sheep is a work of art and its behaviour is a process of art. The complete abolition of illusion as a prerequisite of the art definition, and substituting it for an activity in nature with nature-materials are some of the traits that distinguish this contemporary trend.
The contemporary turn towards nature, the Art in Nature trend, is an outlet from the material-free conceptual that has constituted in the course of the recent decade one of the peaks of the highly sophisticated Duchampian thought.
Taking an extreme course within this trend, Menashe Kadishman introduces - through the presentation of a flock of living sheep – a segment of real life with the processes involved in it, as the realization of an idea in the realm of art-strategy which is in essence: Nature is a material, a theme and a process of art; art deals with nature itself in situ, while the artist is involved in the process of work which is intensely related to his personal mythology; the transmission from one material to another is abolished to a degree where the material becomes the theme itself. Namely, this is an art which points at, and delimits a situation of nature; a demonstrative rather than a descriptive art.
The application of << artistic sensations >> (beautiful, accurate, associative etc.) to a segment of nature and its processes seems to provoke the fundamental fact familiar to us from the world of human experiences and in the history of art., i.e., nature is the only model we know. The attempt to compete with a form of nature by imitating it and freezing it in another material seems hopeless. We have gone away from the innocence of the pictorial perspective and from the amazement at a metaphor. This is why the concepts of contemporary art try to compete with the concepts of nature as a basic model of reference.
In the landscape of information that surrounds civilized society, in the complexity of urbanistic data, art contends with nature and may even get the upper hand in establishing basic models for the aesthetic, the accurate and the appropriate. The mediating means between Man and his environment and origins, and his being << an item in nature within nature itself >> - as Paul Klee has put it - have set up a barrier between the individual that has become a receptive-responsive reservoir of << technological nature >>, and primary nature that is beyond the social-political-artistic strategies.
The tension between nature and art (the latter having grown out of the former, been intensified in the realm of the intellect to be reduced to the paradox of << nature imitates art >>) and the solution art = nature`constitute the tension and the proposition put forward in the project that Kadishman now presents at the Biennale: Sheep.
The significance of turning << from art to nature >> lies in the introduction of ex-artistic elements - which are in the case under discussion living sheep - into the art ritual.
<< Perhaps the tension between constraint and freedom is the core of Kadishman's intention >> wrote Paul Wember in his introduction to the artist's show ' Concepts and their realization ' in 1971 at the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, << Constraint: the principle of nature; freedom: the principle of art >>.
The sheep's behaviour and the biological processes occurring in them within the art ritual last as long as the exhibition runs in the present Biennale. lt constitutes an unchanging segment in a sequence that has been going on before the exhibition, and that will continue after it has been closed; a span of time during which they would be subjected to aesthetic observation. The choice of this piece of reality relates to Kadishman's personal mythologies, to his attempt to touch on personal memories, which is beyond any trend or style, to touch the material itself. It is an attempt that initiates an artistic treatment, a possible language in the art of the end of the `l970's. Here, this does not correspond to the neo-Duchampian usage of the ready-made, which is always a characteristic of art-as-consumer's-goods in the super-industrialized society, the skyscrapers of which have long ago hidden the almond trees of the impressionists who had tried to touch the reality of nature, yet had been unable to extricate themselves from the catch of the illusive canvas square. '
Kadishman's project of living sheep is the present result of a process within a thinking/creative sequence that can be traced throughout the works he has carried out during the last decade, a sequence that does not let go of the contact point with real nature. Kadishman, who experienced minimalist sculpture when he was one of St. Martin's group in the London of the beginning of the 1960's, has gone through conceptual activity and came to incorporate segments of nature into his works, is well aware of the linguistic syntax that questions and attacks the nature of art up to a point of perceiving art as a fact-of-nature in the contemporary cultural urbanistic society. And Leo Steinberg was undoubtedly right when he stated that << whatever else it may be, all (great) art is about art >>.
By choosing the sheep as the theme and the material of his art, Kadishman attempts to turn to the primary and the simplest, to make a junction between an aesthetic emotional form and personal experiences which are related to a time and a place, as reference points in one's own geography and biography. Hence, the presentation of the sheep does not serve as a political metaphor, as did the coyote in Joseph Beuys' New-York work - to mention but one of the precedents of presenting an animal within the frame of artistic definitions.
With the presentation of the sheep, Kadishman goes back to the time when he was a shepherd in an agricultural Kibbutz in the Valley of Jezreel, Israel. It was a pioneering settlement, according to the local definitions. I-le left the flock to become a sculptor; yet he left it in anticipation of meeting it again. This is where the project stems from, as a non-selective whole of the sheep, the sheepfolds, the straw and herbage, the sounds of bleating, the smells, the dung, the touching of thick wool (which for a farmer is a raw-material involving weight calculations, and for an artist - a material for soft sculpture). Kadishman says: "I want my work to exercise all the senses. Even those abandoned by art. Smell, sounds touch. Like in an opera - one is inclined to participate. I do not want an art with a capital A, with order and discipline, with ' correct and incorrect '. Without the ' fear of art' one may find it easier to dare, when one does not live in an art centre. I have grown up in an almost ascetic, an almost egalitarian society. A youth movement, excursions, sleeping outside in the fields.
The contact with nature started very early. The care of sheep is a permanent concern, like that of children; an emotional contact; giving them first names. Introducing smell into a plastic work is something that occurred to me many years ago, when I was watching the television in London. The pictures were reporting on Biafra, Vietnam. And against all this, the manifestation of indifference was going an: having dinner, going out. This was so because, except for the picture, there was no way of conveying the intense experience of smelling the scorched forests, the corpses. The selective information prevented a strong emotional contact with the reported facts. Now, in Venice, in the pavilion populated with sheep that move, chew and dung a the spectator exercises all of his senses, because I demonstrate a segment of real life ".
Kadishman's staining the wool on the sheep's backs with blue, puts an emphasis on the fact that flocks of sheep in the Middle-East are being stained with colour - as a code familiar to shepherds - as they had been marked with stars and crescents in ancient Assyria. In the caves of the Judean desert, confronting the Dead Sea, there have recently been discovered relics of texts and objects that had belonged to Jewish combatants against the Roman rule during one of the heroic and tragic periods in the history of Israel. Among these, there have been found blue-painted fleeces of sheep. They had served to mark the woven clothes, like mythical, ritualistic symbolization.
Kadishman recalls the marking of sheep with paint from the time he was a shepherd, and the selection of blue a apart from its significance in the context of the local ancient civilization – recalls the colour that stretches like a curtain along the shores of Israel, the dominant colour of the Mediterranean Sea. This is the blue that is found in the yards of the Cabalists' houses in Safad of the Galilee, and this is the colour with which the pilgrims returning from Mecca paint their doors in the Old City of Jerusalem.
Yet since the sheep are presented within the art ritual la pavilion of art in the Venice Biennale we relate to this stained colourful system with pictorial concepts, as to << tachisme >> whose support is a tactile organic material a the sheep's wool - even if such a treatment reduces the concept of traditional painting to an irony and an absurdity. The blue painted stains are moving, drifting apart or coming together according to the sheep's movements and needs. The biology, the animals' behaviour determine the form of the << picture >> which is composed of the total number of blue stains. It is like concrete poetry, like letters dispersing on running water while the movement of the water creates unexpected combinations of words, dictated by Nature's << will >>. The painting on the back of the sheep combines two disciplines, nature and art, the definitions of which are inherently different. The intellect, as an uncircumscribed super-discipline, makes it possible to combine them into one multi-contextual statement.
The painting in nature in situ, as Kadishman has painted here the back of the sheep (though only by way of emphasizing a fact of domesticated nature) falls within his painting of nature carried out in the past: On the surface of the brown earth of the Valley of the Cross in Jerusalem which lies at the foot of the hill where the Israel Museum is located, he painted in 1975 a square with a very strong yellow coIour. The brown clods of earth substituted in this << environmental painting >> the canvas of traditional painting, while the angle of view enabled the eye to incorporate into it also the rocks and the old olive trees that surround the stain in nature. Malevich's square has been extended here along tens of square meters.
Uphill, in the Museum garden, within the exhibition << Landscape-abstraction- nature >> in 1972, he painted a tree with yellow, as a landscape painting within landscape itself in nature, the natural growing place of the tree. The eternity of the product of art has been substituted here for the ephemerality determined by the power of the tree to assimilate the colour that had temporarily turned it into a painting.
The stain on the sheep follows the square stain on the earth, following the colour that painted the tree on the tree itself. All this extends the confrontation between a fact of nature and a fact of sculpture which Kadishman carried into effect in the first version of << The Forest >> project, which he set up as part of the International Symposium on Sculpture that took place in Montevideo at the end of the 1960's.
Kadishman attached rectangular yellow metal plates to stems of trees in order to create << a forest within a forest >>, as he has put it.
The organic forms, the eucalyptus trees and the man-made angular technological forms intermingled to define << an artistic space >> within the given space of nature. The straight-angled metal plates painted in industrially pigmented yellow, seemed as if they had come out of a Mondrian painting in order to hover in three dimensions within the colours of nature. The trees' branches and foliage were reflected as in a mirror on the surface of the shining plates and produced shadows that were changing constantly according to the angle of solar radiation. The yellow plates made the trees fall within the definition of art-products, and the laws of nature adopted the artist's intervention-marks and incorporated them into the shadow-system of the forest.
<< The Forest >>, which constitutes an environmental work of << corrected nature >>, is an ex-museum project par excellence and was presented in various versions on the trees of New-York's Central Park along the Fifth Avenue, as part of Kadishman's show that took place in The Jewish Museum in 1970 (Edward Fry wrote then on << The Forest >>: << Kadishman has established a perceptual and even pictorial situation in which his rectangular yellow planes act as disjunctive segments of an implicit, single picture plane >>), and in his exhibition <
In addition to the metal plates, Kadishman uses here transparent glass plates - a material that serves him to realize his ideas on the theme of nature-incorporation, which encompass the work within nature and incorporate it into the fact of art. Glass e a mass of frozen liquid 7 may be perceived by the eye as a non-material. When examining the strategy of involvement-in-nature, Kadishman makes the shining metal plates of his << Forest >> absorb the movement of the branches, so that the plates seem all of a sudden to transilluminate the << lungs >> of a vegetation, whereas on the transparent glass plates he accumulates the dew drops and the frozen fog, just as Marcel Duchamp's << Large glass >> accumulated the dust by the side of << The bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even >>.
The combination of transparent glass plates with masses of metal for the purpose of capturing the landscape, which can thereby be seen through the glass as a part of the sculpture, was used by Kadishman in as early as 1968, in his sculpture << Segments >> set up in New York's Museum of Modern Art, `and in 1970 in his sculpture << Acqueduct >> at East Hampton. The trickery on the eye makes one feel as if gravity had been obliterated through the hovering of a metallic body which is actually supported by the glass, substituted by the eye for landscape itself which is incorporated into the sculpture.
In Kadishman's work << In-Out >>, set up in the Krefeld Museum in 1971, the glass serves to remove the barrier between the exterior and the interior. A hollow metal pipe breaks out of the museum and makes the cold air penetrate into it. The transparency that removes the barrier between the exterior and the interior is strongly established by the sensation of the outside temperature penetrating inside and increasing the uncertainty of the spectator's eye.
The << Sheep >> project presented in the Biennale takes us back to the concept of exterior-interior within the context of the Museum: the sheep are moving along the wooden fence, from the pavilion into the open garden parallel to the movement of visitors-spectators. Yet the concept of aperture is further emphasized in the << Trees in negative >> projects which Kadishman has carried out during the last two years and which elaborate on the << forest >> theme.
In 1975, Kadishman set up << The Canvas Forest >> on the grounds of the Israel Museum situated on a hill exposed to the winds. Canvas sheets (tarpaulin), six metres high, were hung on a cable structure. In the sheets he cut shapes of trees, like silhouettes, i.e., apertures in the form of trees through which one could see other apertures-trees, through which the landscape was perceived. The white canvas sheets were moving in the wind and fluttering in harmony with its changing strength, like washing hung on the line. And indeed, Kadishman is aware of the affinity between his forest of washing and the memory of sensations pertaining to the period when, as a child in sunlit Tel-Aviv, he used to go astray amidst the labyrinth of moist clothes gleaming with a dazzling white.
Inside << The Canvas Forest >> (which is, if you wish, a white soft sculpture 7 sheep as white soft sculpture} that constituted a labyrinth in perpetual motion of white surfaces reflecting the sunlight and accentuated shadows, the visitors were moving inside apertures of non-existent trees in order to discover the landscape of Jerusalem cut in the shape of a tree, within the rustling movement of the huge canvas, similar to the rustle of tree branches in the wind. Kadishman has set up here a metaphorical forest having the proportions of real trees, so that the natural forces that work upon a forest will work also upon his forest of washing.
The treatment of the exterior-interior issue (the visitors are penetrating into the tree stems which are apertures from the exterior to the exterior) is included within this project as well as the introduction of remote landscape into the spaces cut in the canvas, just like in the << hovering >> glass sculptures where the background landscape had been incorporated into the sculpture.
In the wake of << The Canvas Forest >> and on the basis of the very same principle, Kadishman planted in 1977 << Trees in negative >> in Leehigh University, Penn., U.S.A., whose double is to be set up in Venice. Eight metal plates, each about 8 metres high, constitute his private forest through which one can see the landscape, the frame of which is the contour lines of the trees.
The metal trees within the landscape take us back to Kadishman's early works carried out in nature at the beginning of the 1960's, when he filled a square hole with glass splinters (<< in order >>, as he said, << that they grow glass trees, in your imagination >>), or when he buried, amidst clods of earth in a field, a photograph of land that was as dry and cracked as the land of the desert, as if in order to carry the Israeli desert - where he had traveled in his proto-scultural days - everywhere he went. It is the desert where he had discovered tombs of Nabateans, and whose red sandstone rocks influenced his early stone sculpture where a block that hangs by a single point is balanced on a heavy mass.
In his tendency towards the materialization of art by means of taking the metaphor back to its place in nature and applying artistic concepts to segments of real nature, Kadishman could not avoid pointing at a place and a form that are deeply rooted in his personal mythologies. The sheep that are presented in the Venice Biennale, with the blue stains on their woolen backs, are the realization of his tendency which is essentially a turning from metaphor and illusion towards observation and concrete contact with nature itself.