'Falling Leaves as Dialogue'
Marc ScheppsWe are standing here on the ruins of our common past and our future destiny.
We, who are present here, are the living proof of our own affiliation with the endless chain of life and death. We here, carry in our memories the remembrance of all the joys and pains of human existence. Being aware of this and with this mixture of optimism and hopelessness we try to survive and at the same time to give meaning to our existence.
Menashe Kadishman looks back on a long career and like all of us, has frequently encountered death: be it the death of a beloved member of the family, or that of a victim of war and violence, which are pan and parcel of his country, Israel's destiny. Not only the personally experienced death has shocked him, but especially the remembered, violent death of innocent people, who, though heroes or victims remain as a historical memory.
Death as a natural phenomenon, as the biological termination of life, has repeatedly and deeply affected Kadishman the man and made him contemplative, occasionally even throwing him into crisis. Nevertheless, not the natural form of death led him to deal with it in his art, but rather the death of innocent victims of violence, which stayed in his mind and which he made the central theme of his artistic vision.
Let us hark back to the end of the seventies, when Kadishman was again searching for a close relationship to nature and also for the roots of his own life. Kadishman painted heads of sheep – innocent lambs — as a metaphor for human impotence, but at the same time he was touched by their obvious association with nature. During this intense period of creativity, he turned to painting. Full of energy and love of life he painted as if possessed and this extraordinary vitality continues to this day: this month he opens in the Museum Ludwig of the Chinese National Museum in Beijing, an installation with five hundred identically sized sheep paintings standing in line on the floor, emitting explosive waves of color and form.
Kadishman's joy and love of life was time and again confronted with traumatic events to which he had to react as an artist. This he did both in painting and in his drawings; and yet it was forced again into work which needed space and a harder material. He enlarged his drawings onto thick steel plates and through cut-outs he was able to transfer his ideas into space.. In these new sculptures, the themes of death and life are inseparably interwoven.
Towards the middle of the Eighties, Kadishman came to the conclusion that he could not tackle themes like violence and sacrifice directly and for this reason he went back to the biblical myth of the Sacrifice of Isaac.
In a reversal of the biblical myth, he developed a modern and personal myth based on the tragedy and cruelty of present-day life, which is sorely lacking in any hopeful or instructive character. The ram, which in the biblical text is sacrificed instead of Isaac, is, according to Kadishman, a symbol of blindand cruel brutishness. The absence of Abraham illustrates in this work human weakness, the escape from responsibility, the failure of ethics versus power.
The group of crying women, another invention of Kadishman, represents the universal grief of all mothers who mourn the innocence of their sacrificed children. Isaac's head, with its mouth closed, is lying on the ground and symbolizes the powerlessness of all the children of the world who became victims of violence and ruthlessness.
Kadishman reveals his despair in this work and defines his fear that man will never have the strength to break the chain of violence and that the line of victims will never end. His monumental sculpture Sacrifice of Isaac, which found its permanent site at the entrance of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, is a memorial against violence and inhumanity.
After Kadishman had created, out of his inner-most despair, a modern version of the biblical myth, he succeeded in imparting an artistic form to the greatest of all human hopes, the birth of a child. Again and again we experience in these births the moment in which the head of the newborn has to separate from the body of its mother by force. The birth of the innocent as counterpart of the death of the innocent. Appearance against disappearance, life against death, the eternal cycle of future and past.
Never before has an artist dealt with the symbol of fertility so intensively and directly. From Kadishman's point of view, birth is the only power which confronts death, birth as a natural way to counterbalance death, our only hope to continue our common life.
Now we are gathered in this room and are standing a little insecure and with mixed feelings on a work of art by Kadishman which bears the metaphoric name of "shalechet" in Hebrew, "falling leaves" in English.
The name is full of hope: the dead leaves belong to the past, but the tree will bloom again in the coming spring and new leaves will sprout.
The metaphor is right as long as it stands for the cycle of death and life. It connects the work with Kadishman's oeuvre of the last years. But the work itself has entirely different dimensions; we are standing on a dense pile of 10,000 irregular, round, large and small, thick and thin metal disks. Every disk is pierced four times; and so a face appears with an open mouth, with two eyes and a nose. One cannot sketch a face in a more reduced, one might almost say, in a more primitive way. And yet — or
maybe just because of this — every face, every metal disk has an enormous power of its own. One really feels the energy needed to cut and pierce the material; one feels the incredible energy of the artists, in creating ten thousand practically identical forms.
When l saw this work for the first time and was standing on it, I knew immediately that Kadishman had created something which he had carried in himself for years, perhaps already when he was still a shepherd in kibbutz Yesreel, at the foot of Mount Tabor.
In the series of pictures The Shepherdesses, which have their origin in a painting of Van Gogh dealing with the same theme and which can be found in the Tel Aviv Museum, there is a work from 1985 with the title Valley of Sorrow. The shepherdess, an old and apparently sad woman, crouches in a landscape and is holding a stick in her hand. The valley, an almost untouched canvas, a blue sky above and round faces floating all over the painting. This is where the metal disks were sketched for the first time. Yellow-painted stones are scattered on the ground in front of the painting. What is the meaning of this painting?
The innocent sheep have disappeared from the painting. In their absence they are a metaphor of the transistoriness of the human, for whom there is no more hope in the valley of sorrow. The stones are perhaps the graves of the dead and the grimacing faces symbolize their souls. The shepherdess represents on the one hand the artist himself and on the other the mothers at the graves of their sacrificed children. The painting was created in the same year as the Sacrifice of Isaac; l see it as a kind of connection between the biblical myth, art and tragic reality, which finds its most radical and latest expression in "shalechet."
There is no longer any place for myth, for symbols or for formal aesthetics. Even feelings lose their meaning here. We find ourselves in the area of the absolute, the unspeakable. We see the last cry of all the victims, all the innocents of yesterday, today and tomorrow. They have no name, we do not know them and perhaps we do not want to know them, because they might burden our consciences. These faces cry ten thousand times in the name of millions. What does their cry mean? Sorrow? Fear? Protest? Despair? All this and perhaps much more.
But first and foremost these mouths are crying: we are innocent! Kadishman's cry is against the inhuman and for the right to live. His cry concerns all people who innocently became victims. His faces without bodies, his open mouths, his hopeless masks all cry the same: there is no future for us any more! We are the silent voices from the hereafter.
As such their cry sounds like an accusation, they do not ask for help, they do not need any pity, they warn: do not forget us, we are the victims of evil. We are the Isaacs who were not saved, neither by God nor by the people! We are innocent! Do not forget us; otherwise you yourself will become victims!
The ten-thousand-voice choir of the crying is scary in its silence, its harshness, its bareness. A chaos of faces without gender, they are pale, deaf and their empty eyes give the impression of extinguished planets. This cry, which we see but do not hear, penetrates our inner self, we shall never forget it, because it touches something deep inside us, the desire for a better life.
When we recall our century, there is only one historic event we can connect to this work: the Holocaust. Nevertheless, I have to emphasize: the work of Kadishman does not deal with the Holocaust, because the artist is working mainly with the material of his personal knowledge, his individual experiences and memories, but also because the Holocaust is unimaginable. The Holocaust is the most terrible collective memory of this century. It questions the humanity of our civilization, even its continuity.
Kadishman carries the Holocaust in himself like every person of his generation with human feelings. Only the one who sees the Holocaust as the greatest danger for humanity as a whole can deal with this theme in such an innermost and radical way.
The art of Kadishman has an ethical message. On German soil it most certainly has a special meaning. But the artist, born in Tel Aviv in 1932, addresses all people of good will and he gives every single one the possibility of conducting an open dialogue with his work. A dialogue about humanity, about despair and hope, about life and death, a dialogue about ourselves.