'Cut Out Trees'
Avram KampfA flock of grazing sheep and the sky scrapers of Manhattan, dried and cracked soil and glass plates which support steel beams ~ birds nests and metal trees,- these are the two worlds Kadishman endeavours to bridge, two worlds in which he lives and which stir him.
They are images from the country in which he grew up with its myths about the shepherd and his flock, desert caravans which cross in his work the paths of the new art movements which gathered force since the second world war and of which he is part. This is an art which has broken regional and national boundaries, which is global in its scope, as world wide as today's technology and network of communication.
In his art, Kadishman draws on the organic world of natural growth and the images of technology, the world of cantalevered beams leaping into space, steel bridges hanging on invisible wires, - and on the pages of a telephone directory which connects him with friends.
In his attempt to unite the organic world and the world of metal, he searches for the metaphor which unites his distant past as a shepherd in a Kibbutz : scout of an expedition looking for copper deposits in the Negev, on the shares of the Dead Sea, - and his recent past : the years he spent in London and other metropolitan cities, all significant art centers. In these centers, artists confronted a host of new materials, new work processes, a constantly changing world picture and felt compelled to redefine art,
its domain, its essence and function.
Like theirs, his art erased the traditional separation between painting and sculpture, photography and etching, art and technology. Like theirs, his art obliterated the separation between itself and objects familiar from daily reality, between the object and its surrounding space and even harnessed different natural processes for the work of the artist. This art forever examined and redefined itself, for the art object today is an anxious object, the field in a state of flux and constant transformation. Art today constantly widens and narrows its areas, probes its limits and finds its freedom both exciting and frightening.
The desire to unite opposing elements which live in the artist most strongly characterizes his art; the pastoral scene, the world of innocence and simple faith of which the sheep is both a symbolic and archetypal image of the meek pure creature in need of help and in need of a shepherd, and the world of the engineer who dominates the world by mastering physical forces and by the use of scientific abstract calculations. The need to bridge the gap between the two worlds is the secret impulse which animates the delicate balance which his metal sculptures exhibit. They seem suspended in mid-air supported by unseen forces. This impulse is also at the basis of his attempt to clothe the trees in yellow metal sheets, to bring them into the realm of technology, to paint them blue, red or yellow to plant them on metal sheets, as if he would remove the them from the cycle of nature and root them in the world of factory and man-made objects.
The aim to bring unity into opposing worlds is most clearly evident in the rectangular metal sheets perforated in the shape of a cut-out tree, which he planted not far from the shore line into the sea near Caesarea and- in Long Island. They break the incoming waves, and let them flow through.
Again, a metaphor which unites the organic world of plant, the flow of the tide with the stubborn, man-made industrially produced metal sheet. Romantic attitudes nourished by the setting sun, the clouded sky, the distant horizon, the stormy sea focus on an industrial technological object. This work elicits different impressions. The iron sheet stands there as a firm barrier, the cut out tree, a window through which the sky and the sun can be seen, conveys a sense of freedom. This work firmly based on contemporary international artistic sensibilities exhibits even some romantic Zionist echoes. The hero who comes home from afar, aboard a battered ship, who plants trees, rejuvenates the country, protects it, and becomes a free man. The fact that the waters of the sea do not nourish the trees adds to the imagery a touch of the miraculous, the impossible and the pretentious, all well rooted in Israeli and Jewish mythology. To label Kadishman a minimal artist or conceptionalist does not explain
anything nor even hint at his work. Definite relations can be established between him and artists like Christo, Segal, Karo, Hacke, Andre and even Beauys as well as other internationally well-known artists. Like them he uses curtains; canvas, steel, glass, animals, grass, flowing water. Like them his work is not confined to the canvas or the self-contained sculpture alone, but moves into the surrounding space and environment; like theirs his art is rooted in a highly personal sensibility. Kadishman is the poet of volumes and masses suspended in mid-air and kept in a delicate equilibrium, of metal arches held by unseen forces, of lost sheep straying and bleating in the big city. He makes his love of sheep particularly evident by the flowers which he weaves into their woolen coats.
Doubtlessly Kadishman belongs to that generation of Israeli artists who knew the country intimately, and who use the archetype! images of the region and, who also knew the world of technology but could not or are not willing to trade one for the other. Danziger who preceded him and in whose footsteps he sometimes seems to follow closed the chasm between nature and technology with the ecological projects which engaged him in his last years. Kadishman looks for a synthesis which, aloof from practical concerns, remains in the field of art. He constructs pure, flat, geometric and cubic metal forms often connected with unseen transparent materials and he uses live sheep or renders on canvas or paper their likeness,- images of creatures which the human imagination endowed since ancient times with the attributes of innocence and purity.
Avram Kampf