Over the years, Etti Abergel’s installations have undergone critical
change in terms of the objects they contain. The installations
from the late 1990s and early 2000s bounded architectonic
space based on separation and divisions by means of partitions
and lattices constructed from cardboard and cloth, but, despite
their temporary nature, created a single material whole. In her
installations from recent years, especially since the installation,
Salient: The Workshop of the Conch Shell Maker,
it seems that objects have been added all the time, objects
crumbling and fragmenting the architectonic structure. The
walls, curtains and temporary partitions became textured with a
tremendous mass of small objects woven into dense, wild sheets.
They are being built of crowded rows of strings grasping clusters
of treated, cast objects, hanging in the air: pens, pencils, whistles,
disposable cups, water bottles dipped and covered in plaster
solutions.
The installations became the embodiment of mobility
preserving both the whole and its traces simultaneously: the hair
contains the braid, while the windows, pots and cups contain the
street. The walls crumble into amorphous sculptural fragments.
The interior/exterior separation unravels to open up the space
for illusionary, surreal events. Useful daily objects are processed
until formless and useless. The process of dismantling and
deconstruction is the extreme form of transformation of the
object into an artifact. Objects that came into being by force of
the narrative have gradually been transformed into fictional,
invented objects. After dismantling, the object’s presence,
stripped of context and metamorphosed several times during the
work process, is both present and absent, forming the code and
legend of the entire piece. The objects function as visual stopsigns,
directing the gaze to hidden details in the installation’s
large physical space. They lead the eye towards the fragments that
provide orientation points and “handholds,” dictating a dispersed
view and longer duration, making the gaze more tolerant.
The object is the potential embodied in the overall
total of sculptural actions, while the installation
is the ‘super-object’ functioning as the condensed
metaphor of the cumulative images and hints in
the new body located in space. The search for the
subjective object is an excavation project, with
the upper layers the search for place, and the core
layers revealing the relics of preserved objects
which survived to play an important role in the
narrative.
Dialogue between space and object changes
as the chapters develop, creating a process
moving beyond the object’s spatial image towards
the objects installed in the space. Sometimes I
design and construct the objects in the studio in a
laboratory process of dismantling and reconnecting
objects from daily life; at other times, I form the
objects spontaneously on site, out of the need to
solve sculptural problems.
It is then that the object functions as a
gravitational weight holding the physical
stability of the temporary structure, like stones
or archaeological finds, the makeshift means
of a transitory architecture. The spontaneous
objects are made quickly and urgently to create
equilibrium. They may be amorphous bodies
resulting from an automatic process, generated by
the large sculptural actions, or pre-planned readymades,
reduced into sculpted bodies to provide a
lowered presence: industrial plastic, cold metal
and fragments of meaningless objects that lessen
the hermetic quality of the sculptural image.
The syntax of the installation is structured from varying rhythms
of density and dispersion, focus and blurring of the objects
relative to the architectonic space. Although the objects may
seem to be incidental structures, they are planned in an orderly
pattern. They may be towers, rising high and cutting through
space, or temporary walls or curtains blocking and partitioning
the space into sub-units. The small objects which contain the
interior and borders of the installations embody the artist’s body,
memories and accompanying physical and mental processes. In
their changing realization (covering, binding and stacking) they
express the way in which memory nourishes artistic creation. The
object serves as a transitional object between inside and outside:
it represents a body or an event, the essence of an experience.
The selected object is a ‘memory conductor’ for the artist and the
viewer, functioning differently for each, and operating differently
in every new look at a work of art.
My search for the object is a Proustian process
of remembering and seeking until the moment
the object locates itself in my consciousness with
a sculptural function. Such objects are usually
basic tools, writing implements, kitchen utensils,
containers, bowls and dishes of simple form,
material and color – objects ‘begging’ for sculptural
intervention. The object is transformed through
numerous processing, wrapping, cutting, repeated
deconstruction, assembly and hybridization with
other objects. The object is dipped and washed;
it tumbles and accumulates layers until I feel that
it transmits conflict, tension or paradox between
being built up and being used up. At the moment
the object reveals itself to me, I instinctively stop the
action. The spatial placement is also changed and
shaken up until the object settles down and fixes
itself in an unchangeable place. This is the moment
at which I am unable to move it around in space
any more, as it takes its place in the composition
and becomes a narrative marker.
Through the small objects, Abergel refers consistently to the
tradition of European painting and sculpture. She corresponds
with the familiar classical paradigms of composition, perspective
and iconography, in order to locate her narrative autobiography in
them, or to plant them in her fictional aesthetic spaces. Sometimes
her arrangement of the objects simulates the “laws” of the “Vanitas”
painting, while at other times they are arranged according to
the plan of a Cezannesque still life, organized asymmetrically,
creating equilibrium and shattering it. Sometimes she breaks the
classical compositional order consciously, diverting the picture’s
vanishing point to hidden corners.
My deep metaphor is linked to classical sculpture
and its need to extract the anima from matter.
The installation is the shell of a large object,
a negative sculpture, while modern painting,
particularly Abstraction, is the inspiration for the
drawing and sculpture actions. My placement
of objects in space may sometimes be homage,
quotation or hidden interpretation of classical
sources, such as Vermeer’s light, Caravaggio’s
shadows or the multilayered dioramic structure of
Velasquez’s Las Meninas. Part of Salient was
an ‘anti-Orientalist’ green room inspired by Ingres’
Odalisque.
When asked for an “inventory” of her objects, Etti listed the
following:
A comb holds a braid of twine between its teeth;
a ritual hand-washing cup is overturned, with a
dishwashing glove painted white hanging on its
handle; a red plastic funnel becomes a miniature
megaphone; a pillow edged with gilt curtain fringes;
a low wooden stool as pedestal for an object made
of clothespins; Moroccan slippers embroidered in
gold thread; one hundred Moroccan slippers made
of cardboard drenched in white gesso arranged in
a circle; a pair of Moroccan slippers tied together
making it impossible to walk in them; a pair of
inexpensive house slippers made of plastic, bought
in the open air market, with pointed tips from
which an antenna-like element protrudes to the
floor; a house inside a plastic market basket and a
house on a pillow; a plaster-cast soccer ball inside
a string-bag; a flat shopping basket made of plastic
cast in plaster with a black spot shape painted on
it; a plastic market basket loaded with pencils cast
in concrete; a small model ship tied to a dried-up
drawing pen; deep white porcelain dishes facing
each other; five flat porcelain plates glued in a stack;
a beer mug full of plaster with a knife sunken into
it; a wine carafe filled with broken pencils; a wine
carafe full of milk-like plaster; spools of gold thread
inside a plastic storage container; a “waterfall”
flowing with cut pencils coming from a turnedover
metal container hanging from the ceiling, as
if it were the whirling dervish’s tarboush; objects
growing out of the floor or hanging from high like
weights or bell-clappers; objects that blend into the
installation’s overall composition; a pole vaulter’s
pole wrapped in green velvet; gymnast’s rings
hanging from the ceiling; blue pens tied in a spiral
weave like a trampoline, with weights of concrete
at the edges; ropes and twine in abstract tangles
like a bundle of nerves; unraveled netting with
knots; a pair of plastic chairs combined to become a
cradle; a chair made into a pillow-cupboard; a two
compartment cabinet full of cylindrical pillows;
a desk lamp whose glow leads to a circular wall
drawing; a concrete-coated desk and chair, frozen
in space; mattresses solidified in plaster; a concrete
casting reminiscent of a sidewalk and street; a
lattice made of a hollow modular element; a mobile
staircase; a window blocked off by plywood pieces;
a standard metal bed frame, of the type issued
to new immigrants by the Jewish Agency, which
has become a loom; a confessional booth made of
curtains; an open clothes closet whose back wall is
a window; throw pillows as a modular sculptural
unit mobilized from one exhibition space to another
to settle down quickly into the space.
The objects in her list bear the spaces of time and place as well
as the autobiographical and fictional aspects of the narrative
unfolding through Abergel’s works. Their aesthetic and
metaphorical essence is preserved in the works even when they
change form and syntax. At the same time, it seems that each
object insists on pointing mainly to its absence, to the space it
leaves, as it opposes a sign fixing it in place. The objects nourish
the abstract conceptual level of the works simultaneously with
their poetics. As the artist stated, “They propose the tail end of
private memory to the viewer, which is realized as a journey
which is material, visual, emotional and associative, composed of
the fragments and relics of an unwritten book whose borders are
constantly redefined.”
Irena Gordon is a curator living in Tel Aviv.
from: Installation Diary, Etti Abergel