While much important modern sculpture has been exploring the
space between sculpture and architecture, some recent Israeli
artists have produced work of considerable quality by locating
themselves someplace between sculpture and furniture. There
are serious precedents for this, most important for our present
purposes, that of Eva Hesse, from whom Etti Abergel, from the
beginning of her career, has drawn a sustaining sanction.
Eva Hesse can be said to have furniturized her art as a way
of personalizing it, and personalizing it as a way, perhaps less
consciously, of feminizing it. It is possible that the future might
see the rise of the women’s movement in the seventies and later as
a major factor in the lessening interest that Western art began to
show in the formal investigation of its own properties that began
roughly with Cezanne and dominated ambitious art through the
1960s. With the rise of the women’s movement and the large
growth in the number of women artists, certain concerns that had
been either suppressed or relegated to the secondary began to
emerge as paramount. Such concerns include intimacy, sexuality,
the relations between the sexes, childhood, memory and above
all, unresolved tensions rooted in certain ever-present dualities:
male/female, artist/wife, studio/home.
A piece which Eva Hesse had destroyed (but not before it
was photographed) and which she called Total Zero concisely
embodies this new art attitude. Total Zero is a worked-over
inner tube, to which a long, curling rod is attached. Immediate
associations with the imagery involve, of course, the penetration
of the ovum by a sperm cell. The larger idea of woman as a “hole”
also inflects the work. It would seem beyond doubt that Hesse had
the work destroyed because the imagery was simply too obvious,
even corny. Total Zero is (was) personal and feminine, and
it may not be out of place to quote here Hesse’s formulation of
her attack: in the same year, Hesse confided to her diaries that
she wished her work to be “…endless, totally encroaching, and
irrational.”
“Endless, totally encroaching and irrational” comprises
about the best description of the overall impression given by
Etti Abergel’s work that I can imagine, and that description,
moreover, is perfectly completed by Hesse’s afterthought: “With
its own rationale, even if it looks chaotic.”
A work of 1998 declares more explicitly than her later work a
major theme in Etti Abergel’s art: the theme of separation. The
piece is harshly divided into two sections. In one, some distance
from the other, a plain student’s desk, chair and lamp are installed
in a corner. In the other is a piled mass of objects, stiffened in a
plaster-of-Paris coating so as to create the impression of timefrozen
artifacts. The objects include baggage cases, shopping
baskets, pillows, stuffed sacks and bags. Leaving home to attend
art school is not usually a traumatic event, but in Abergel’s deeply
traditional Sephardic community it is simply unheard of for an
unmarried woman to leave home at all, and the idea of attending a
school of fine arts is close to incomprehensible. And, as expressed
in the piece, nothing in the world of art provided even a touch of
the sustaining warmth of the community from which she had so
bewilderingly estranged herself.
Although I have seen a great many so-called “site-specific”
works, I know of no artist who controls the given space with
the subtlety and ingenuity of Etti Abergel. In Untitled
(Fragments) shown in the Artists’ House in Jerusalem in
1999, the “site” was two rectangular rooms separated by a doorlike
opening connecting them. A neat “path” ran between the two
rooms and traversing this path led viewers back and forth, from
one site (and the powerful presence of its “non-site”: memory,
home, childhood, institutions, veiled and unspoken personal
experiences) to the other. The two areas were strikingly different:
one seemed coldly institutional, the central object being a surreal
bed/hammock with a stool or a chair beside it. It might as well
have been a recovery room as a bedroom: indeed, the merging
and submerging of different ambiences one into and out of the
other is of the very essence of Abergel’s art. That room had an
actual window in the wall behind and above the bed/hammock,
and a strip of “rug” or “carpet” ran from the head of the bed to
a small table, muzzled in a kind of stiffened gauze, beneath the
window. On the table lay piled pieces of a torn drawing – the only
element found in both rooms. The window had been carefully
“drawn” upon by the artist in a most uncareful-looking manner,
using scraps of torn brown paper, tape of various kinds, etc. It was
as if the window, the light of the mind, was damaged, blinded.
The room also symbolized, it became clear by comparison, the
isolation of leaving a traditional and loving community for the
incomprehensible and misunderstood life of a woman in art.
The adjoining room, by contrast, was crowded with more
open, more evocative pieces. If one entered from the front,
the first object one saw was a column, vaguely suggestive of
Brancusi’s Endless Column, but far less stable, less balanced
and more “haphazardly” worked upon. Further inspection led to
a typically Abergelian device: the melding of a distant illusion to
art with a much more concrete image of what, in this case, turned
out to be a stack of mixing bowls, formed from a mold. To the
left, a simple, narrow table-closet, on the surface of which lay the
torn fragments of a drawing, and within a neat pile of pillow-like
forms suggesting the comforts of home but stiffened by memory
into materials of a contradictory hardness. There were areas of
this room that demanded the viewer get down on all fours to take
in details or peer into enclosures in which forms were mosaiced
with bits and pieces of photographs (which, in Abergel’s work,
always seem connected with memory).
On one wall hung, like a traditional painting, a relief of what
looked like a cast of a round, Oriental-style pillow. Embedded
within it were circular strands of a bronze, or golden-colored
wire. The piece seemed to me somehow out of place, and when
I had a chance, I mentioned this to the artist. She considered my
question, and remarked that at the time, the room seemed to her
to need a “resting place,” a place, so to speak, “to lay your head.”
She drew my attention to several wiry clusters of the same golden
wire to be found here and there in the installation. She identified
the wire with the golden thread with which oriental women so
commonly sewed, and also, very consciously, with the golden
spool with which clever Ariadne led Theseus from the labyrinth.
She wasn’t sure, she said, if she would find the need for “a place
to lay the head” so necessary if she were to install that work
again. At the time, the pillow-form reminded her of the softness
of the belly, even, perhaps, the security of the womb. I thought
of Eva Hesse’s Total Zero and wondered if Etti would find a
reproduction of it interesting. She did, very.
Etti Abergel, like Jackson Pollock, had learned a lot from
Jungian analysis, and one has the impression that every line she
draws and every detail she constructs involves some Jung-like
evocation of the archetypes of a Sephardic childhood mingling
with images of a less certain, less comforting and fragmented
present in constant search for the mature integration of Self,
which Jung calls “individuation.” It is a dream: no artist has ever
achieved it. It is the forms that the search brings forth that make
an artist.
The many-meaninged archetype is the natural language of
Abergel’s art. When I mentioned to her my impression that she
seemed to work from “the inside out,” that her work needed
to be anchored in a kind of hut, the word “hut” was unclear to
her in English. I went to Sukkah for the closest word I knew in
Hebrew, and she, in turn, added the word Miklat [shelter], and
then “cell,” which she preferred. We had, in just a few seconds,
brought up three or four of the possible “meanings” attached to
the Jungian archetype “shelter” and all of them seemed to apply
to the enclosing structures in Etti’s work. Similarly, when I drew
her attention to certain weighted, Hesse-like forms that hang
from the top and sides of her No Way Out, shown at the Tel
Aviv Artists’ House in 2000, we quickly passed from “weight” to
“wait” to the idea of time itself, which, it turns out, Abergel often
thinks of as a “weight.” She spoke of the past as a “weight.”
One of the ways in which this sense of the past is literally
projected as a weight, is the seemingly random, lattice-like form
that hangs from above, covering the opening in the far wall of the
hut. That, it turns out, has its origins in the honeycombs which
the artist associates with her early, rural childhood, as well as the
complex, filigreed Mehitza [partition] which separates the sexes
in Sephardic synagogues, mazes all.
And, like an archetype, the form that exists in No Way Out
is all and at the same time none of these. There is little one can
do but admire the way in which, in the work of so many women
artists, interior pain and confusion is projected into works of art
of immense psychological depth and complexity.
Etti thinks of No Way Out as a kind of “interrupted” work,
one which was not completed to her satisfaction. Inspired basically
by her admiration for Giacometti’s Palace at 4 A.M. (1932-33),
she found herself not quite able to manage the extensions from
the hut-like enclosure into the surrounding space in the way she
would have wished, the proper relations between “felt” space
and “concrete” space not established as precisely as she wished.
The kernel of the work, the hut-like enclosure, is the only part of
the work with which she seemed totally at peace, and its various
components contained for her, the proper balance of immediate
and remembered, felt and concrete, real and imagined.
The theme of separation and growth also dominated the
most recent work of Abergel’s I have seen, a work installed at
the Nachshon Gallery in the Spring of 2001. One wall seemed
to be given over altogether to a swooping, curvilinear suggestion
of “origins,” centered in a kind of tangle of birth. The central
feature of this wall is a circular form much like the “place to rest
the head” in the Artists’ House installation two years before. The
entire image is anchored to the floor, in stone. A simple cord,
strung across the room connects this wall to the wall opposite,
just enough to suggest the idea of departure and estrangement.
The second wall, its forms more rigid and geometric, evokes
themes of “education” (a pencil that can be animated to scribble,
meaninglessly), assimilation, individuation. Further along the
same wall, toward the door, the “cell” of estrangement and isolation
is created yet again.
Perhaps the most brilliant aspect of this installation is a
column, which, at first notice, seems to be merely an unfortunate
“fact” of the exhibition space. It is only after examination that
the viewer realizes, first, that the column was made and placed
by the artist and second, that it obstructs virtually every view;
almost every step one takes in looking at the work. That single
form, encapsulates the conception of a “self” that sees itself as
“fitting” in no “place” in the world, as well as the embodiment of
all those obstructions, bars, impediments, real and psychological,
that constantly frustrate her attempts to find that place. In my
opinion, the work at Nachshon was the most successfully realized
of all the works of Etti Aberbel I knew, because, I think, of her
growing trust in formal control, her willingness to let placement,
composition and structure do more of the talking.
It seems to me important, in concluding, to stress that in
describing “furniturization,” I do not think of myself as describing
a “movement.” It is more as if what I have called the space
between sculpture and furniture is a resource for a strategy, a
strategy which some Israeli artists have devised as a way to draw
into Israeli art a quality of narrative that they seem unable to do
without. The strategy, at least in the work of Etti Abergel, seems,
so far at least, immune to the two infections which are fatal to
art made in Israel: sentimentality and corniness. When the gifted
artist, Dalit Sharon, asked me why I thought that Israeli artists
did so much more with the suggestions found in Artschwager,
Nauman and Hesse, than the Americans did, I could think of no
answer other than to remind her of Wittgenstein’s definition of the
verb “to understand.” To understand, he said, is to know how to go
on. For reasons that might require another essay, later Americans
simply did not know how to go on, and Israeli artists did.
Philip Leider was the editor in chief of Art Forum Magazine and is prof. Emeritus, Art History, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem.
This essay originally appeared in Eretz Acheret Magazine, 7, Nov./Dec. 2001.
from: Installation Diary, Etti Abergel