'Autumn Leaves'
Dan MironIn The Divine Comedy, Dante, just after passing beneath the arched door of Hell (the one with the inscription "Abandon all hope, all you who enter here" engraved on the lintel), immediately finds himself standing, astounded, before the presence of death, different from anything he had imagined. Across a vast and seemingly boundless plain, lit in dark and dusky light, death reveals itself in dimensions that are not the stillness, immobility, petrification one might expect. On the contrary, countless multitudes march or run about all over the plain. Their principal signs — vulgarity, banality, and above all the numbers, which the imagination cannot cope with. In one place Dante notices a banner in the air, waving, flung forcefully from side to side as if it "scorned all respite," and following it, marching-running, so long a row of dead people that the poet says, "I never believed that Death had undone so many." In another place he is almost engulfed inside the great multitude that swarms around the banks of the Archeron, the river of death, waiting for the ancient boatman, Charon, to ferry them to Hell and its circles. Density, urgency, anonymity rule everything here. In this multitude Dante can barely make out a familiar face — the face of Pope Celestine V, who resigned from the papacy after five months in office in favor of Boniface VIII, and by virtue of this act, which was considered contemptible, still retains a trace of singularity as the man "who in his meanness scorned the vocation of greatness." All the others who had been special and particular individuals have become shades. All that remains of their singularity is the common denominator of sin and the punishment that comes in its wake.
I bring up this literary memory in the presence of Menashe Kadishman's new work, Autumn Leaves, to help me highlight what appears to me to be its underlying conceptual principle. The multitude of iron circles —perhaps skulls, perhaps masks —that lie like Stones in a dried riverbed, evoke the Dantesque image of death: multitudes of people, who were once unique individuals and have now become constituents of an anonymous, mass death: a death in heaps, a death that annuls not only the lives that have been stopped but also the memory of the living. Although no head is exactly identical to any other, there is also no head that stands out conspicuously among the others. Of all the uniqueness and diversity of life, all that remains is a slightly different curve of the gaping mouth, slightly different sounds of the one outcry.
Of course each viewer may interpret the work as he wishes. lt is only natural for us to connect any art work — and certainly this work — with particular personal and historical associations. Many will connect it associatively with the Holocaust and the extermination camps. Others will connect it with Israel's wars. These are correct connections, but they are no more legitimate than connecting the work with a memory of the casualties of the cavalry battles in the First World War, in which thousands of people were killed every day, or with the old picture of death that was familiar to everyone in Europe before the modern period, when after a brief burial the skull, the vertebrae and the bones of the limbs were stored in heaps in crammed death-houses next to the church — as we were able to see at the monastery of St.Catherine in Sinai. Those who want to can connect the work associatively with memories from art history, and see it as a kind of endless duplication of Edvard Munch's painting The Scream, the frame with the screaming woman in the stairway scene from Eisenstein's Potemkin, the gaping mouths of the popes in Francis Bacon's paintings. What Kadishman presents here is neither a historical illustration nor a symbol, but the concept of death in its quantitative, anonymous embodiment. Death as a place for the foot to trample, as a resting-place of rocks, as dust that cries out.
Here the artist arrives not only at an utterance that possesses a mighty emotional impact, but also at the roots of his art. In this work he unifies the two facets or two "periods" of his oeuvre: the abstract-conceptual facet or period of the sixties and seventies, and the expressionist-emotional facet or period of the eighties and nineties. On the one hand, he continues his "drawing" manner of sculpting, which rejects the idea of the "plasticity" of three-dimensional sculpture, and cuts the sculpture in flat iron like a drawing that is drawn on a sheet of paper. On the other hand, his focus on the anonymity and abstractness of this death that returns us to his abstract work with the circle, which is familiar toevery Tel-Avivian from the sculpture of the three circles standing diagonally upon one another outside the Habimah Theater and the Frederick Mann Auditorium — also a two-dimensional work. To a certain extent these two elements are present in each one of the heads, in the contrast between the abstract circle of the head and the expressionistic opening of the gaping mouth or also the angles of the eye—holes.
Likewise, in this work Kadishman takes the innovation which he was a partner in shaping, as part of English sculpture after Henry Moore — the elimination of the base, or the partition between the sculpture and the earth, which implies the elimination of the aesthetics of the sculpture as a separate, "other" object, differentiated from reality — to the limit of its internal logic. This time the artist wants to turn the sculpture into the earth itself. The viewer is asked to cease being a viewer and to step on the sculpture; to feel shaken and to step on it.
In his new work Kadishman unifies the percept with the concept, the expression with the abstraction. He presents an idea which can be read as a narrative, or a narrative which itself turns into an idea. The emotion crystallizes here in a form that repeats itself, a form that may be duplicated ad infinitum. Towards what is the outcry directed? This is not a remonstration, not an attempt to change reality by means of the artistic utterance. Kadishman's outcry is a thin, still voice. A weeping without tears or out-cries. The gaping mouths seem to be saying — we are content if someone hears our voice.