Should we try first to dispel the fog as curators love so much to do? The Black Square is a painting by the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich. He painted the first of several versions in 1915. A black square, however, appeared earlier in Malevich's stage design for Victory over the Sun by Aleksei Kruchonykh, Mikhail Matyushin, and Velimir Khlebnikov. The opera tells the story of a group that attempts to destroy reason by disrupting time and capturing the sun. Malevich saw this work as the first painting of Suprematism – his coinage for a style that abandoned representation in favor of shapes and colors. Although in 2015 researchers from Russia’s State Tretyakov Gallery found a handwritten inscription underneath the painting saying what they believed to be: “Battle of negroes in a dark cave.”
The story of this exhibition’s adventure with art begins as we capture the sun and destroy reason. Are we looking for something that can only be unlearned in the absence of light?
What is painted here?
It hurts not to understand how to explain what we want to say.
Horodi created this work as part of her job at “Net.Haver” (net.friend), a social internet platform for adults with “intellectual disabilities”. It is part of a series of videos mediating canonical artworks. Horodi speaks about this work :“The world of people with intellectual disabilities is artificially limited by their environment, often out of a belief that they should be protected from certain thoughts… In working with people with intellectual disabilities and talking to them about the same issues that they were prevented from discussing elsewhere, we get to fight alienation with them, theirs, and ours.” (-Shai Lee Horodi translated from Dvarim Baolam podcast, as all her other quotes in this section)
But Horodi’s Mediating Videos circulate beyond Net.Haver. Alienation is in every corner. Listening to Horodi’s voice-over I notice an invitation to linger in the shade with Malevich and her. Perhaps an invitation I can only follow when I trick myself or am tricked by the artist to believe I am not this work’s target. I jump beyond symptoms and join Malevich’s fight against reason to find empathy for our lack of understanding. But is art mediation the gateway to allowing everyone to enter the convoluted realms of contemporary art, or what distances them with the lesson that they can only experience art through the mediator’s words? And who is them? The French philosopher Jacques Rancière taught me that “to explain something to someone is, first of all, to show him he cannot understand it by himself.” (-Jacques Rancière, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation )
Horodi herself is not surprised by art that is engaged in the segregation of people. After all, in her words,“It is impossible to produce art that will not express social relations. And if the social relations are indeed relations of exploitation as they are in our society, then that is what artists will express.” I can identify in this work a crack between explanation and exploitation It brings the pain of distinction and the frustration of not understanding into light.“It enhances a painful moment where a viewer sees something taken from him.” Or her.
Get hit or drop something and break it
Horodi: "When I want to take a break without interrupting my concentration, I do juggling. If you are ambitious, try learning to juggle three balls. If less, then you can practice throwing a ball behind your back with your right hand and grabbing from the front with your left and vice versa until you do it steadily, without too much effort".
That's how you can make balls.
I only made two balloons, yet I managed to keep dropping them on the floor. The juggling balls are a recurring motif in Horodi’s practice. In 2020 she created the work Three Balls in Two in which her hands do the actions required to do three-ball juggling, but the third ball is missing. “Juggling is done when there are too many balls,” Horodi tells the artist Yonatan Zofy. “I thought of it in the context of The 20th Seminar by Lacan. It talks about the indulgence of man and woman as fundamentally different. For the man, it is a pleasure of the phallus; he can point to pleasure and find it in everything. And the woman says, ‘it is not everything,’ and that is her pleasure, to say that it is not everything, ‘you did not point for everything,’ ‘you could not catch all pleasure. Juggling is the answer to the woman who said it. It’s the masculine thought of a solution, the omnipotence of potency. There are two balls, and then the woman says ‘no, that's not all,’ then the man says ‘oh! Is there another ball? No problem! 'And the juggling movement begins. But it is clear that what the woman means is not that there is another ball; there is something else that cannot be named.”
--Shai Lee Horodi translated from Marbe Einaim
I have heard that Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish thought said that a good Talmudic Sugia (issue) is one that succeeds in holding as many balls in the air as possible. The dispute culture of the Talmud, one of the central texts of Rabbinic Judaism inspired the layout of this exhibition. The original polysemic text (here the artwork) is placed in the center, surrounded by different literature responding and interpreting it from various languages, traditions, and perspectives.
Juggling between points of view, there is always something that refuses to be written.
Get hit or drop something and break it
It hurts not to understand how to explain what we want to say.
HOW
TO BE
WITH
ART ?
Curator: Maya Bamberger
SHAI LEE HORODI
Retractive
The title of the artist’s book breaks the word “understanding” into its two compounds: under + standing. The word under is equivalent in old English to among or between. So, to understand something is to stand among it. In order to stand between Aviv’s words, one doesn’t have to cohere them, as usually happens with those standing outside the work – either curator who explains it or a viewer that fails to understand.
Retractive
What is painted here?
The ordinary response
The response to atrocities
The response to is to banish them from consciousness. Violations of art too terrible to utter aloud. The meaning word unspeakable. , refuse
Denial does not work ghosts refuse their graves. Stories are told. Remembering truth restoration of social order healing
Individual victims
Trauma.
Emotional contradictory, and fragmented undermines credibility
The story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.
I imitate the perforated way Roni Aviv traces the opening lines of ״Trauma and Recovery” by Judith Lewis Herman, but choose to omit other words. Each hole in the text can be filled to tell a different story. How can a text about her work speak the banished unspeakable knowledge that surfaces as a symptom? How can the viewer internalize disintegrated knowledge? Lewis Herman writes that witnesses are also subject to the same forces of trauma. It isn’t easy to bring the pieces together and put them in (linear) words.
Contained
Aviv: Choose a corner or an object in the house and photograph it at least 10 times. Examine what you are able to extract from this object through observation. Experience different angles, different times of the day, different lighting, close-up versus an entire scene.
As part of the selection of pieces of text that Aviv incorporates into her book by tracing over a light table, she also copies parts of the Wikipedia entry for “floor”: “Floors may be stone, wood, bamboo, metal or any other material that can support the expected load.”
Responding to her prompt, I have taken ten pictures of my floor at home. Positioning my body in relation to a floor that can support the expected load, I took the first step toward her work. Towards supporting the unspeakable. Towards recovery. Towards being with it/her.
“A photograph shows something in relation to its position or lack of position in a world I find myself on the floor for many occasions I slide around looking for all the things I've misplace hoping the floor will reveal them. It usually doesn't.” (-Roni Aviv)
Contained
Spaced
“The closer you get,” she writes, “the clearer you see, until the switching point where it becomes harder and harder, until all that you see is blurry fuzzy outlines.” The closer I get to her work, I only see those blurry fuzzy outlines.
I try to illuminate the meaning behind Aviv’s work. I read the surfaces of Aviv’s photographs and turn them into lines that can be read consecutively.
What's under the photo? Under the written word? Is it what ignited it all? Does it have a source? At what timeframe does it occur? And occur? And occur? Is it possible to distinguish between the time when the trauma occurred, the time when the work was created, the time of writing this text, and the time it is displayed in the exhibition? The trauma leaks through the holes between the words, behind the order of the language, it leaks leaks leaks from Aviv’s body into the paper. Sometimes she uses her body weight to emboss the words deep into the paper. Sometimes she leaves behind only the punctuation marks.
“The linear responsibility weighs me down.” Aviv writes.
So, Write in
fragmentation, in a
plurality of voices, write
like women before you have written.
Write like Roni Aviv.
Write down what your head cannot
understand, but your hands are already writing.
Write the perspective of the object, of the floor, of the artist, of those who are looking for
words and couldn’t find any. Write to host the
trauma. Write when the words themselves
d i v e r g e. Write what still has no language.
Write when the encounter with an artwork
brings with it words for what you had no words before.
Looped
While relating to the practice of using sourced written material, Roni Aviv differentiates between five ways of “finding or pouring” meaning: additive, looped, retractive, spaced, and contained. I offer these five words as titles for five paths of “finding or pouring” meaning in relation to her artist book Under Standing:
Retractive
Introduction
While searching for an entry point to the work Scream by Vanessa Sandoval, I came across an essay she had written titled “Astronauts in the Jungle.” By theoretically placing astronauts in the jungle and shamans in the cosmos, Vanessa Sandoval calls us to encounter otherness through transformative actions rather than observe it from the outside. I suggest encountering the otherness in her artwork scream, through some of the points of view she offers:
I don’t know what this woman wants or how can I help her to speak up. I Open my mouth to digest the work. I open my lips wide for five minutes and 33 seconds, and the air molecules flow out of my mouth and condense on the screen. Does she want to remain silent? After all, words will chain her body and work into the cage of my or your interpretation nurtured by patriarchic and other orders. But Hélène Cixous once wrote that “by writing, from and toward women… women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence. Women should break out of the snare of silence.” (- Hélène Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medusa”)
Wouldn’t she remain voiceless even if I wrote all around her? I am desperate to talk with her. Maybe instead of putting words in her mouth, I can just gently describe even the slightest of her vibrations?
A black rectangle and within it a woman looking down. Then, she looks up at me –at the camera - and begins opening her mouth. She blinks a lot and her lips tremble - she is obviously straining. The title of the work implies that she is screaming at me, but her voice is inaudible. Playing with the volume buttons also doesn’t do much. I am with her. “Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away-that's how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak-even just open her mouth-in public.” (-Cixous)
The Alien
Shamans in the Cosmos
In the essay “Astronauts in the Jungle” Sandoval writes that by wearing animals’ skin, Shamans become animals themselves and “access a change of position, occupy another point of reference, expand, find otherness and thus understand that our projected gaze is also part of the landscape—that there is another who watches us.”
Wear her skin, change positions, get into her mouth absorb in the visual syntax! Adopt the artist’s discourse and invade her language! But alas! Isn’t it the definition of perversion, born as a survival mechanism when a “mother tongue” to speak could not develop?
In ancestral communities in the Amazonian, everything has a consciousness. Therefore, when eating plants in ayahuasca rituals or eating humans, this other consciousness is digested and alters our point of view. But Astronauts are colonizers of space, Sandoval reminds me. I think that curators are rational colonizers of the visual jungle or visual outer space. I don’t want to do that! Sandoval suggests that the overview effect that astronauts experience when they look at earth from space can be seen as the intersection of an extreme outside perspective with the sublime understanding that their gaze is inseparable from the earth they see.
*
Amelia Jones taught me in “Body Art/Performing the Subject,” that bodies could reject predetermined values and meanings more effectively than silent objects. Bodies absorb what is happening around them, disrupt the relationships between observed and spectators, and encourage performative interpretive acts. In this project, aiming to reduce the distance from the artist I only met virtually, I developed an embodied curatorial practice: I asked each artist to give me a task from their daily studio routine that I could inhabit myself. These are also offered as a first key or animal skin for you to wear.
Sandoval: Open your mouth without closing it or swallowing until you feel that your body can no longer bear the imposition.
Shamans in the Cosmos
The Suit
The opened-mouth woman is not the artist herself. Sandoval herself only opens her mouth in her art while wearing a beard.
In a series of videos-performances Sandoval realizes these days, she invites scholars to discuss the notions of communication, interpretation, and language when they intersect with the dominant scientific paradigm. The artist performs in these interviews wearing a historical symbol of male wisdom, which gave the series its title: “The Jungle of the Bearded Lady.” What does this masculine alter-ego of the bearded lady allow her to say? How would I write wearing a beard? How would you read bearded?
The Suit
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The open-mouthed woman is not the artist herself. Sandoval only opens her own mouth in her art while wearing a beard.
In a series of recent video-performances created by Sandoval, she invites scholars to discuss the practice of communication, interpretation, and language under the scientific paradigm that dominates the academic and cultural worlds. In these interviews, the artist performs while wearing a beard, a historical symbol of male wisdom, giving the series its title: “The Jungle of the Bearded Lady.” What does this masculine alter-ego, a bearded lady, allow Sandoval to say that she otherwise would not be able to say? How would I write with a beard? How would you read with a beard?
The Suit
A woman looking down from within a black rectangle. Then, she looks up at me—at the camera—and begins to open her mouth. She blinks a lot and her lips tremble - she is obviously straining. The title of the work implies that she is screaming at me, but her voice is not audible. Playing with the volume buttons also doesn’t do much. I am with her. “Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away-that's how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak-even just open her mouth-in public.” (-Cixous)
I don’t know what this woman wants or how I can help her to speak up. I open my mouth to digest the work. I open my lips wide for five minutes and 33 seconds, and the air molecules flow out of my mouth and condense on the screen. Does she want to remain silent? After all, words will chain her body and work into the cage of my or your interpretation, nurtured by patriarchal and other orders. But Hélène Cixous once wrote that “by writing, from and toward women… women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence. Women should break out of the snare of silence.” ( -Hélène Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medusa”)
Wouldn’t she remain voiceless even if I wrote all around her? I am desperate to talk to her.
The Alien
Sandoval:
Open your mouth without closing it or swallowing until you feel that your body can no longer bear the imposition.
Vanessa Sandoval, The Scream, 2016, video, 7:22 min (performed by Nataly Vargas)
In her essay, “Astronauts in the Jungle,” Sandoval writes that by wearing animal skin, Shamans become animals themselves and “access a change of position, occupy another point of reference, expand, find otherness and thus understand that our projected gaze is also part of the landscape—that there is another who watches us.”
Wear her skin, change positions, get into her mouth, absorb the visual syntax! Adopt the artist’s discourse and language! But alas! Isn’t that the definition of perversion?
In indigenous communities in the Amazon, every thing on earth has a consciousness. Therefore, they believe that when eating plants, animals, or humans during spiritual ceremonies, another form of consciousness is digested that subsequently alters our own point of view. When astronauts move away from the earth towards the stars, they also experience a change of perspective, a term which is known as the overview effect. Sandoval suggests that the overview effect that astronauts experience when they look at earth from space is the intersection of an extreme outside perspective with the sublime understanding that their gaze is inseparable from the earth they see.
Astronauts are colonizers of space, Sandoval reminds me. I think that curators are rational colonizers of the visual jungle or visual outer space. I refuse to do that! Can perspectives change while maintaining sensitivities to otherness, without a full takeover?
Shamans in the Cosmos
Amelia Jones taught me in “Body Art/Performing the Subject,” that bodies can reject predetermined values and meanings more effectively than silent objects. Bodies absorb what is happening around them, disrupt the relationships between spectators and the observed, and encourage performative and interpretive actions. In this project, aiming to reduce the distance between the artist and curator (with the added challenge that we only met virtually), I developed an embodied curatorial practice: I asked each artist to provide me with a prompt or task from their daily studio routine that I could practice and inhabit myself. These can be understood as a first key or animal skin to wear.
Dioramas
While searching for an entry point to the work, Scream, by Vanessa Sandoval, I came across an essay she had written, titled “Astronauts in the Jungle.” Theoretically placing astronauts in the jungle and shamans in the cosmos, Vanessa Sandoval calls on us to interact with otherness through transformative actions rather than observing it from the outside. Here I suggest engaging with the otherness in her artwork Scream through the points of view that she herself offers:
