It is impossible to understand or experience the art of Etti Abergel
without recognizing the traumatic impact of the language of
modernism on her world. The modernist movement, which began
as a radical attempt to blur the boundary between art and life,
became, in the second half of the 20th Century, a purist, separatist
church with the art gallery as its sacred space. In a seminal article
published in Artforum in 1976, critic (and artist) Brian O’Doherty
described the art gallery as a “white cube,” a sterile space that
seals itself off from the external world:
Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the
source of light. The wooden floor is polished so
that you click along clinically, or carpeted so that
you pad soundlessly, resting the feet while the
eyes have at the wall… In this context a standing
ashtray becomes almost a sacred object, just as
the firehose in a modern museum looks not like a
firehose but an esthetic conundrum. Modernism’s
transposition of perception from life to formal
values is complete. This, of course, is one of
modernism’s fatal diseases.”1
Many artists from the 1950s on have turned the sacred space
of the gallery into the focal point of their work. In 1958, Yves
Klein invited the audience to an empty gallery; in 1964, Lucas
Samaras installed his bedroom, as is, in an art gallery, while in
1972, Vito Acconci built a double floor-ramp in a gallery, under
which he stayed throughout the exhibition and masturbated,
inspired by the presence of the spectators above. However, these
single conceptual events, for the most part overtly masculine,
did not signal a way out of the dead end Abergel found herself
in by the early 1980s. For her, the challenge did not lie in the
definition of the white cube, be it spiritual, political or erotic, but
in the question as to whether it is possible to transcend the self-
reflective discourse regarding the language of art and turn art
once again into a medium for the expression of the multilayered
complexity of people`s lives. In a long and tortuous process,
drawing on her private life alongside her art, Abergel has turned
the modernist white cube into a site of dynamic and continuous
negotiation. Unlike the entropic fatalism of Robert Smithson’s2
dualistic divide between the “site” of nature and the “non-site”
of art, Abergel seeks out a third, in-between space in which she
can physically and emotionally experience the divide, enter the
white cube with her body and dwell there, hoping to transform
the “non-site” into a space of intimacy.
In his history of the idea of “home,” Witold Rybczynski3 notes that
the concept of comfort is the crux of the critical tension between
modernity and its victims. He contrasts modern architecture’s
idealistic, empty spaces with our basic need to be surrounded by
familiar, comforting objects that bear the marks of our body and
our memories, objects which remain exactly where we left them,
whether in a measured line on the sideboard or scattered all over
the place. This is Abergel’s mode of action in an exhibition space:
she transforms it into a living space, dwelling in it for days and
weeks and filling it up with her objects. These objects, sculptural
inventions composed of discarded bric-a-brac, or low-cost items
carefully purchased at open air markets, are intuitive conductors
for her personal memories, but also are ritual reconstitutions
of the archetypical home carried in the collective unconscious.
The environments that she organizes look like the idiosyncratic
networks of signs a homeless vagrant squatting in an empty
white cube would leave behind her, the improvised practical and
symbolic furniture needed for her existence and for her sense
of comfort, deserted once she was forced to wander on to the
next makeshift shelter. This sense of temporariness arises not
only from the character of the objects that populate Abergel’s
environments, but from their mutual connections and modes of
“domestication” within the space. They cluster together, bound to
each other in dense webs of twine and sticky tape, hanging from
the ceiling in bunches and bundles, and all coated in liquid white
plaster.
In Abergel’s hands, white plaster becomes the most accurate
medium for this intermediate space in between art and life:
While it bears the modernist cultural code of alienated, industrial
casting, it is also close to the body, responds to the hands and
can be spread over the entire space like thick milk that conceals
the seams and binds the fragments together. Above all, plaster
is a medium of time: In its passage from liquid to solid it
“counts” the passing minutes, in its hardening it “photographs”
irretrievable moments in matter. Abergel’s sculptural work, in all
its physicality and materiality, is none other than a construction
in time, a transient trail of the endless quest for the lost home.
For Abergel, as for so many other first- and second-generation
immigrants, the trauma of the white cube is also the trauma
of the Israeli Makom.4 Like modernist architecture, so Zionist
architecture, be it the transit camp shack, the mass housing
apartment or the Jewish Agency house, loved the purity of
its planners but hated its residents.5 The Zionist “white cube”
demanded of its new immigrant tenants to banish their body
and their language, to forget their history and adopt a uniform
collective identity. When Abergel takes on the white cube, she is
addressing not only “one of the fatal diseases of modernism,” but
also the chronic ills of Israeli society. Indeed, it seems that at the
foundation of her total and holistic approach there lies not only
a deep wish for self-healing, but a desire for a transformation of
the entire social space and the creation of a new architecture of
adaptation. Like a homeopathic healer that seeks to overcome
the disease with a pinch of the poison itself, she embraces both
the void of western art language and the emptiness of the denied
and repressed cultural identity. Etti Abergel’s living space is not
an introverted private space; it is an open and adaptive home
that invites us to enter its hybrid space in which all are equally
alien and at home, at once insiders and outsiders. This is a space
which, in the words of Homi Bhabha, can serve as “the terrain for
elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that
initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration,
and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.”6
1. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube
(University of California Press, 1999), p. 15. First
published in Artforum, 1976.
2. Nancy Holt (ed.), The Writings of Robert
Smithson, (New York: New York University Press,
1979).
3. Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an
Idea (London: Penguin, 1986).
4. Makom, the Hebrew word for place carries connotations
beyond the geographical, social and architectural,
being also one of the names of God. [For an in-depth
discussion of Makom in the construction of Jewish and
Israeli identities, see Zali Gurevitch, The Double Site
o f I s r a e l , in Grasping Land, Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram
Bilu (eds.) (New York: State University of New York
Press, 1997)].
5. For a critique of the “guardianship strategy” of the
immigrant intake establishment, see Rahel Kalouche
and Hubert Lu-Yon, The National Homeland and
the Individual House: The role of Public Housing in
Shaping Space, in Space, Land, Home [Merhav,
Adama, Bayit] (Yehuda Shenhav, ed.), Van Leer
Institute, Jerusalem in cooperation with Hakibbutz
Hameuchad Publishing, Tel Aviv, 2003).
6. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture,
(London: Routledge Classics, 1994).
from: Installation Diary, Etti Abergel