SIGALIT LANDAU
One man's floor is another man's feelings
Israeli Pavilion
54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
June 4 - November 27, 2011.
Sigalit Landau's committed and poetic approach turns personal questions, be they philosophical or political, into universal quests. To achieve this, the artist combines installation, sculpture and objects, videos and performance. Her work crystallizes
a collection of ideas through a single image, object or action, rendering them symbolic, much like in her “Barbed Hula” video, where she appears on a beach in Israel naked, performing a hula hoop dance using a ring of barbed wire.
For several years, Sigalit Landau has been involved in a deep relationship with the lowest place on earth, the Dead Sea (456m below sea level). She reacts, as an artist, to the peculiarities of this site; this damaged place which holds within it the region's geopolitical history, and is the scene of an ongoing ecological disaster. This is the place she has chosen to stage her unique oeuvre, inspired by her continual attraction to embody the ritual linked to memory. This is also where she orchestrates her exploration of the archaeology of the present. The key themes of Sigalit Landau's exhibition will be water, soil, and salt. Through these basic elements the artist will explore issues of existence and survival: the interdependence of people and nations in her native region, and their common interlinked future.
Landau, notorious for her complex site-specific installations, like those presented at the Tel Aviv Museum and Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, is planning a poetic and multilayered installation for the Israeli Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition is yet another step in Landau's ongoing exploration of the tensions between public and personal issues and space.
Based on Landau's historical research, the launching point for the installation is the small three-tiered Pavilion building in which her exhibit will take place – a structure designed in the modernist style. The title the artist has given to her work for
the pavilion, “One man's floor is another man's feelings” is a variation on the familiar saying “One man's floor is another man's
ceiling”, Through this title, the installation will evoke the interdependence of human beings and the sharing of riches. The presence of water in the piece symbolizes blood irrigating the body and this liquid so scarce for billions of people, becomes
a metaphor for the knowledge and feelings that connect us and organize our common destiny. Like salt deposited on an object or penetrating a wound, the journey that Sigalit Landau is plotting for the 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, crystallize the fears and hopes of these uncertain times.
The commissioning of the Israeli Pavilion is directed by Jean de Loisy and Ilan Wizgan.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, designed by Noam Schechter that presents the latest works and combines discussions about some of Sigalit Landau's previous work.
The catalogue includes some of the artist's research process for this upcoming exhibition and also includes four essays (Jean de Loisy, Chantal Pontbriand, Matanya Sack and Ilan Wizgan) and is edited by kamel mennour and distributed by Les Presses du réel.4
“The Freezing and Melting Point”
by Ilan Wizgan
The Israeli pavilion in the Giardini of the Venice Biennale, with its distinctive history, geography and morphology, is the stepping-stone for Sigalit Landau's project. The pavilion, first conceived in the late 1940s, was designed by Israeli architect Zeev Rechter, and unveiled in the mid 1950s. Venetian authorities allocated a site for the pavilion on the banks of the
Giardini Canal, next to the US pavilion. Among the varied architectural styles of the national pavilions in the Biennale Gardens, between neo-Gothic and neo-Classical structures, Rechter chose to design a Modernist pavilion in the spirit of the Bauhaus and the International Style that characterized pre-State construction in Israel.
(…)
(As part of her preliminary preparations, Landau researched the circumstances of the pavilion's construction, burrowed in the archives of its architect, and dug up every yellowing piece of paper that could possibly shed light on the process, from the stage of the initial concept (prior to the establishment of the State of Israel) to the final design. (…) In her typical fashion, Landau does not view the structure as a self-evident reality to which she is obliged to conform. She believes that it is the space that should serve the work, building for compromises and changes that sometimes include tearing down walls, sealing windows, making holes, digging, and the like.
Ground Floor
Upon entering the exhibition, the visitor finds himself in a space reminiscent of a machine room. On one side, between the two stairwells, a video work is projected onto the floor. The work depicts a group of men playing the Countries game – marking a circle in the sand, throwing knives into it, and dividing the territory between them. Their shouts slice the air,
spreading throughout a space interlaced with an extensive system of water clocks and pipes leading from one to another, rising and falling, to converge at the other end of the space; there, they cross its borders and disappear into an aperture in the wall, while crossing another space that is caged between the pavilion's floors, where they end – or perhaps begin – their journey in the large canal of water adjacent to the pavilion. Concealed in the caged space is a pump, the beating heart of the system, which propels the water through the pipes like blood through the body's arteries. The water flows in a closed circle, incessantly originating from and returning to the canal, leaving faint sounds inside the space, the only evidence of the water's hidden movement.
(…)
(…)Typically, a machine room is a concealed space in a structure, an area responsible for the functioning of the entire system but, as long as it continues to operate properly, we are neither aware of it nor exposed to it. Attention is directed to it when there is a fault or breakdown, just as we become aware of our bodies, our internal organs, only when they transmit pain or do not function. The exposed machine room, therefore, hints at the need for catheterization, or even real open heart surgery, in order to bring relief and resolve the problems addressed by the exhibition, including inequality between people, violation of the ecological equilibrium, and the distribution of resources and wealth among nations.
(…)
Upper floor
The spiral staircase leads the visitor directly to the upper floor. Unlike the bottom floor, this one is nearly empty. The relatively large space is entirely dedicated to a video film that is screened on a diagonal wall. In the film, cinematic in size and quality, a pair of shoes is shown in close up, covered with salt crystals, lying on a layer of ice. The shoes, which Landau
previously dipped in salt water, underwent a process of natural crystallization until they were covered with a thick layer of salt. Next, the shoes were flown to a frozen lake in Gdansk (Danzig), Poland – an area that in the not too distant past was the focus of a feud for possession between Germany and Poland – and placed on ice and, in a slow process, the shoes melted the ice until they fell into the hole they created. The sinking of the shoes is connected with a sense of melancholy, loss of control and even physical collapse, a condition in which "the ground plummets underfoot". The size of the screen is significant since it embraces the viewer and sharpens and heightens the experience of being part of the installation.
(…)
Middle floor and courtyard
The middle floor was deliberately selected as the site for the exhibition's central installation; the middle is both the average and the place where opposites can meet. This is also the floor that connects the two other floors into one entity, which here receives its full significance and meaning. Erected on this floor is an installation consisting of a round conference table with a wide-open gap in the middle and chairs around it. Scattered on the table are laptops and shown on their screens are scenes from a movie depicting a little girl hiding under the same table and tying together the shoelaces of the people engaged in debate; perhaps a prank, perhaps an innocent act intended to force the debaters to remain seated until they find a solution to the issue they are discussing. But it turns out that despite this, the debaters desert the conference table and flee barefoot, leaving their shoes behind them. From the loudspeakers concealed in the walls, the voices of the absent debaters are heard, speaking in Hebrew and Arabic, or in English with typical accents. The topic of the debate is the
construction of a salt bridge that will connect the Israeli side of the Dead Sea to the Jordanian side. The discussion centers 5 on practical and technical aspects of the concept of the bridge. Several white flags are propped against one of the walls, objects that Landau dipped in the Dead Sea until they were covered with salt crystals. An echo of the tied circle of shoes is also found in the courtyard, where a circle of bronze shoes, tied to one another, is located.
(…)
(…) shoes are the motif with the greatest presence in the exhibition and their location in the conference room increases their presence tenfold – twelve pairs of shoes (the number of the tribes of Israel). The circle of shoes tied to one another emphasizes the circle in which the debaters are trapped, unable to untie or open the knots. The shoes are also a metaphor for a state of wandering and being a refugee, subjects frequently addressed by Landau. Abandoned or grouped shoes are linked to the Holocaust in Israeli consciousness, as well as in Landau's consciousness, and she explicitly referred to this subject in The Endless Solution exhibition. There, we also saw the presence of many boxes of shoes numbered 39-45, the years of World War II, as well as pairs of clogs scattered around the space. The most notable work dealing with shoes in the context of the Holocaust was created by Joshua Neustein, Georgette Bélier and Gérard Marks, and exhibited at the Jerusalem Artists House in 1969. This work made a very direct statement; thousands of pairs of shoes were placed in piles throughout the spaces of the House in a manner reminiscent of the piles of shoes found in the extermination camps, and even the manner in which such piles are displayed in various Holocaust history museums. Additionally, a row of bronze shoes (by Giola Pauer) was
installed on the banks of the Danube River in Budapest (shoes of all types – men, women and children) in memory of Jews shot and thrown into the river by Nazi collaborators after being ordered to remove their shoes. In other contexts, the most famous shoe paintings are Van Gogh's; some of these are reminiscent of the pair of shoes that Landau chose for her video work on the upper floor. Other well-known shoes are Andy Warhol's, who repeatedly referred to shoes in the context of mass culture, and even as a type of self-portrait, in a manner similar to Van Gogh. One piece that Warhol entitled My Shoe Is Your Shoe even recalls the title of the current exhibition.
(…)
Without being overtly political, the exhibition (also) deals with the political in life and in art and, inherent in it, is criticism of nationalism and national ego, which always undermine rationalism and the positive potential inherent in cooperation and a just distribution of resources and wealth. Landau's perspective is dialectic; from below, through the eyes of the little girl hiding under the table, as well as from above, over the heads of the men playing the Countries game. The exhibition attempts to bridge the gap between the childlike, innocent, ideal perception, and the world of adults, the estranged, calculated work of policymakers (political, social and economic), in a search for synthesis and unity of opposites.6
Sigalit Landau's interview
by Jean de Loisy
The Pavilion is composed of stories, things and gestures that are juxtaposed. Among them, I weave very open meanings that may be read together as a poem or a metaphor for our common destiny. But above all, the situations I have juxtaposed, which together find their unity, allow for an experience. That is to say, I have combined emotional, political and aesthetical sensations and circumstances that turn or appeal directly to our consciousness.
Politics and poetry exist in my works mix and clash. When I look ‘the ugliness and pain of life in the eye', I know reasons for everything ... whatever I feel is political. This is the force, the coercion of the place in which I live, But, the materials I use are constructive.
I blocked day light out from the ground floor of the pavilion, and kept out the Giardini ambience by turning the entrances glass walls into ordinary walls. The pavilion is no longer ‘floating' on air and on light - merely supported by thin white pillars. I installed a heavy iron sliding entrance door, a door into an industrial space. The façade no longer looks like an entrance to a culture-house but rather like a back door of a huge university or factory.
I knew from my previous work in this pavilion, that in order to support the middle level of the building leading the visitor from the “transitional” lower level to the spacious 3rd level, architect Rechter, created a sealed out space.
I am attracted to places that are disregarded, hide outs, architectural ‘pockets', informal and ‘in-between' spaces; I made a hole in the wall of this hidden space and re-invented it so that I could place the heart of my installation [the pump] in the ‘intestine of the building' which was full of earth and debris. I worked as much as I could to take out this earth… It felt like an escape, and a search, and a search for water… also like a release from ‘territorial constipation'.
This ‘room' is the heart of this 50's Pavilion, its subconscious. A room that has been secret for a long time filled with black earth, obscure like our intestines or like other concealed parts of the body. I want it to have a status that is equal to the other parts, like everything that has been neglected and that the art must reveal.
A sculpture made of pipes runs across the pavilion's ground floor. This is ‘a thirst' as the prolog to the exhibition, a thirsty existence that tries to draw water from the earth. Having used water metaphorically for years, this time I use it in an absolutely concrete manner. And the fact that this exhibition is being held in Venice, a city irrigated by water on all sides, is also a reason, an unconscious and unreal reason, [as the Adriatic sea is salty].
In the south of Israel, one can see kilometers of pipes for channeling water that does not quite exist. This is why the country is covered with these pumps that suck at the earth in search of confined aquifer and ground water from deep below. This is a part of a familiar esthetics in my region.
In the dessert they are more visible than in the greener north of Israel. Sealed cages in the middle of nowhere -with intricate combinations and variations of pipe systems, thick and white [like the pillars used to support the pavilion], they are constantly pumping slowly to bring water from hundreds of meters below ground level.
I set up a system to pump the “aqua alta”, of the Venetian lagoon … into and out of my “thirsty” installation. But after doing so – I preferred to waste less electricity and I let the water circulate in a cycle throughout the various pipe sculptures. The pipes tremble slightly, and are cooled by the water flow. The space resembles a machine room. The machine room exposes and demystifies functions on the one hand, but also supports and enables the illusion and esthetic world above it … Water is a metaphor for knowledge, truth, and love – Real water, and absent water, poison water, frozen water and sweat are mirroring each other in the show.
“Building a Different World: An Aesthetics of Fluidity”
by Chantal Pontbriand
The community is not the site of Sovereignty. It is what shows itself by being shown. It includes the exteriority of being that excludes it.1
Maurice Blanchot
This definition of the question, set out on page twenty-five of the booklet that Maurice Blanchot devoted to the idea of community, will guide us through the work of Sigalit Landau, an Israel artist whose work appears in her country's pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. The unavowable community—la communauté inavouable is the title of Blanchot's book—is a perpetual beginning and requires that one pay constant attention to the question of what brings people together and can potentially ensure the existence of a community or the (co)existence of its members.
(…)
The Dead Sea and Water as the Substrate of An Aesthetics
Sigalit Landau is fascinated by the Dead Sea, which is threatened by both climate change and the direct intervention of human hands. This immense lake separates Israel, Jordan and the territories of the Palestinian Authority. Each year, the level of this watery expanse drops by a metre. At this rate, the Dead Sea is greatly endangered. This is an extraordinary natural phenomenon caused by the salt content of the water, which is at 33% (compared with the ocean's 2.5%). Few organisms can live in such a medium, which nonetheless contains large quantities of minerals such as magnesium and sodium chloride. These are much sought-after by industrial concerns whose operations have boosted the wealth of the countries in question. The ecological risks consequently entail major economic and geostrategic issues. Many solutions have been considered but to date nothing conclusive seems forthcoming.
Sigalit's works incorporate what can be called a reflection on the Dead Sea and on what it represents for humanity, and this apart from the major issues, what it suggests about human life and the perils facing it on both the personal and communal levels. This body of water, remarkable in so many ways (as a natural and economic resource, a tourist attraction, a site of political partition) is a space to be reinvented in the eyes and mind of the artist. Through her gaze and interventions, the real becomes a place of sensitive investment and transformation. She has elaborated a different perspective on the issues in question, a difference affirmed by a logic that eschews the usual solutions.2
(…)
The Pavilionas Apparatus
The title One Man's Floor is Another Man's Feelings is a play on the aphorism “One man's ceiling is another man's floor,” popularized by the Paul Simon song of the same name. Using the architecture of the Pavilion, this installation consists of an apparatus that manufactures emotions and sensations. Sigalit imbues this place with the vestiges of another time, her own, which is no longer that of the utopian and modernist 1950s, one in which the new architectural trends gained a strong foothold in the city of Tel Aviv, that emblem of a new country. Already in the 1930s and 1940s, a strong Bauhaus influence had left its mark on what would become the white city. Zeev Rechter was one of its principal exegetes. The Venice Pavilion pushes the aesthetic typical of the Israeli Bauhaus (a reduced number of apertures due to the climate) farther still.
The building is windowless and its façade is a blind wall, features that may well call to mind the Brutalist trend. In those modernist years dominated by the spirit of the White Cube advanced by the director of MOMA, Alfred Barr, an exhibition venue was not supposed to receive any natural light, insofar as this was possible. This precept was intended to conserve art works and to better control the conditions in which they could be viewed. One might also suppose that it only helped to build the aura around art works, to push their exceptional and quasi-sacred character to its limits, something that still increases the cachet of artists in the art market. MOMA therefore helped to create the phenomenon that glorified American abstraction and sanctioned its victory. This was a period in which art was esteemed for its transcendence and virility, values that, while still alive today, no longer represent the only voice or path (voix / voie) in the field of art.
Sigalit's work is in sync with these major changes. It creates a dialogue with the architecture of the Pavilion and the ideas it conveys about both modernism and the geopolitical situation of Israel. Sigalit addresses these issues not as a feminist, but certainly with a feminine slant, such as we find in the writings of Luce Irigaray. She introduces fluidity and sensitivity into the Pavilion, along with openness to the senses and their polyphony. Using an approach analogous to the one she developed with regard to the Dead Sea, she treats the Pavilion as a sexed space (Irigaray). She speaks to the senses of the viewer, who becomes a stroller through a territory that she reinvests with her presence as a woman and as a contemporary Israeli artist.
She plays with the senses because these give greater complexity to what is submitted to the visitor's understanding by the apparatus she has put in place. The senses lend additional meaning, even a polyphony, to this monolithic, rational and (more or less) effective architecture, neither villa nor exhibition space.
(…)
Sigalit has taken this space, which is so unwelcoming as an “exhibition venue,” and used it for what it is, a place that is in the nature of an infrastructure, a place of connectedness with urban life, the collective network that forms the urban fabric or the space of communal living.
(…)
What I son the Horizon
The exit leads out onto a terrace where viewers—who upon entering the Pavilion were transformed into “strollers” (I am thinking here of Walter Benjamin and of his fondness for the “arcades” as sites of multifaceted and unusual experiences)— find themselves, along with others, before a circle of bronze shoes. This circle evokes the community or the chorus, this gathering that makes a variety of paths converge into one single path that exists only in the present moment, and a continually renewed and reinvented present at that. This path (voie) is the voice (voix) of the event, which exists but once and under certain conditions that must constantly be recreated. The bronze circle clearly evokes this moment of moments, transforms it into a “monument” and, in a double movement, points as much to its importance as to its absence. The shoes, in blackened bronze, were cast from moulds made from shoes worn down by men and women, the young and old, the employed and the unemployed—people, in short, from different spheres of life.
We find ourselves here, beneath this sky that this terrace opens up for us, in a moment of community without community, the horizon of which is suspended between reality and desire. Placed on the ground, the twelve pairs of shoes (twelve like the twelve Apostles or the twelve tribes of Israel) “speak” of territory, of rallying points and appropriation, and allude to the in-common of all people, the wearing of shoes, an element of life. Walkers recognize themselves here, those who wear shoes from day to day and who wear them in the same space occupied by those produced and given by the artist. All move within the same territory, in the same common—or potentially common—space.9
Biographies
SIGALIT LANDAU was born in Jerusalem. She lives and works in Tel Aviv. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; at the Gallery kamel mennour, Paris, at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. Sigalit Landau's work figures in important public collections: Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, Magdeburg, Deutschland; Pompidou Center, Paris; The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; The Jewish Museum, New York City; The Brooklyn Museum, New York City; Magazine 3, Stockholm; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon, Musak, Leon, Spain; Museos Archivos Y bibliotecas City of Madrid, Spain; Museum of Modern Art, New York.
JEAN DE LOISY is preparing as an independent curator the exhibition Monumenta with Anish Kapoor, at the Grand Palais in May 2011, and an exhibition on Shamanism for April 2012 at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. Jean de Loisy has occupied positions in key cultural institutions and curated major exhibitions such as "Hors Limites – l'Art et la Vie" in 1995 or "Traces du Sacré" at the Georges Pompidou Center, Paris in 2008 and as "A Visage Découvert" at the Cartier Foundation, Paris in 1992 and La Beauté in Avignon in 2000.
ILAN WIZGAN is an independent curator who lives and works in Tel Aviv. He is preparing a traveling exhibition showcasing 15 Israeli contemporary artists to be shown in several museums in the United states in 2013, as well as two solo exhibitions of Israeli artists for the Ein Harod Museum (2012) and Baram Museum (2013), both in Israel. Ilan Wizgan has occupied positions in key cultural institutions in Israel, such as the Israel Museum, Jerusalem and the Art Focus Biennial, Jerusalem. He was artistic director of the first Jerusalem Biennial of Works on Paper (2002) in Jerusalem, has curated exhibitions such as Urban Tales (2006), outdoor video installations in Tel Aviv, The Cyprus Case, in 2005 at the Artists' Residence Gallery, in Herzliya, In the Name of the Land, in 1998 at the Artists' House, Jerusalem, and was commissioner for several Israeli exhibitions in the biennials of Venice and Sao Paolo.
CHANTAL PONTBRIAND is an art critic and curator, until recently Head of Research and Development at the Tate Modern in London, she is the director and founder of the contemporary art magazine PARACHUTE (1975-2007). From 1982 to 2003, she was the director of the FIND (Festival international de nouvelle danse)- (International Festival of New Dance) in Montreal.In 2009, she was the curator invited to the Jeu de Paume in Paris for HF| RG [Harun Farocki | Rodney Graham] and in 2010, she organized the Higher Powers Command exhibitions (fromone of Sigmar Polke works, 1968)- Lhoist Collection, Belgium, and The Yvonne Rainer Project, BFI Gallery, London. She has been a consultant for: museology, cultural policies, international juries, Acquisition committees, bursaries and government grant awarding.
She has received many bursaries and prizes like le Grand Prix de la Ville de Montréal for the Festival international de nouvelle danse. Her publications include: Fragments critiques, 1998, Communauté et gestes, 2000, Contemporanéité et communauté (to be published), Jeff Wall (to be published), adding up to over 200 reviews and catalogues.
MATANYA SACK is a partner in Sack-Reicher Architecture and Landscape, based in Tel Aviv and London. She is teaching at the Architecture Department in Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, and at the Landscape Architecture Department in the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. She was co-curator of the exhibition Zeev, on the early work and thought of the architect Zeev Rechter (1899-1960), in 2009. Her work at the ETH Zurich received Award of Excellence from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA 2009). Her recent built work includes "Green to Blue: Street Production" - an ecological infrastructure on the Mediterranean coast in Bat Yam, as part of the International Biennale of Landscape Urbanism 2010
Notes
1 Maurice Blanchot, La Communauté inavouable (Éditions du Minuit, 1983), p.25.
2 The Dead Sea could be classified as one of the New Seven Wonders, by the organization of the same name, recognized by the United Nations. This decision will be ratified in the fall of 2011 and will generate discussion on both ecological and economic fronts.
