A MONUMENT IN THE EXPANDED FIELD OF MINI

Monuments and
Site-Specific
Sculpture in Urban
and Rural Space
Monuments and
Site-Specific
Sculpture in Urban
and Rural Space
Edited by
Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler
Monuments and Site-Specific Sculpture in Urban and Rural Space
Edited by Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler
This book first published 2017
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2017 by Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-5179-5
ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5179-4
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... vii
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler
Section I:
Site-Specific Artworks: Monuments and Counter-Monuments
Processing Memory: The Spectator as Archaeologist ............................... 12
Moran Pearl
A Ubiquitous Memorial ............................................................................. 41
Adachiara Zevi
Thomas Hirschhorn’s Monuments and the Politics of Public Space ......... 68
Vincent Marquis
Section II:
Reflections on the Modernist Monument
The Monument in the Expanded Field of Minimalism –
The Case of Dani Karavan's Monument to the Negev Brigade ................ 104
Katya Evan
Formal autonomy versus public participation:
The Modernist Monument in Costantino Nivola’s Work ........................ 134
Giuliana Altea and Antonella Camarda
Section III:
Site-Specific Artworks: Between Physical and Virtual Space
Reassessing Spatial Theory of Permanent Site-Specific Artworks
of the American Southwest, in the Information Age ............................... 164
Mira Banay
vi
Table of Contents
Overfed and Undernourished: Cultural Cartographies of Memory ......... 193
Shelley Hornstein
Epilogue................................................................................................... 215
Where Memories Meet: The Monument as a Site of Private
and Collective Memory
Dalia Manor
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume and the symposium that inspired it were made possible by
a grant from the president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Prof.
Rivka Karmi. The book itself was also generously supported by a further
grant from Sapir Academic College.
I would like to thank Dalia Manor, Adi Engleman, Tamar Dekel, and
Noa Karavan, who conceived the idea of celebrating 50 years of the Negev
Monument and honoring its creator, Dani Karavan, with a symposium, an
exhibition, and public tours, which made this a citywide, rather than
simply an academic, event.
Deep gratitude is extended to Dani Karvan, whose creations worldwide
inspired this project, and whose intellectual and artistic revisitation of the
Negev Monument during the Jubilee events provided all of us with food for
thought about monuments and site-specific sculpture in urban and rural
space.
I am also grateful for the advice and assistance of the authors
themselves – Giuliana Altea, Antonella Camarda, Mira Banay, Katya
Evan, Shelley Hornstein, Dalia Manor, Vincent Marquis, Moran Pearl, and
Adachiara Zevi. Over and above their presentations, their ideas and their
cooperation were of major import in bringing this volume to fruition.
I would also like to thank Danny Unger, head of the Department of the
Arts at Ben-Gurion University, for bringing me on board for this project,
and for his constant support and advice. Thanks also to my colleague and
friend Merav Yerushalmy for her work on the symposium. I am grateful
for the patient administrative assistance I have received from Ben-Gurion
University and Sapir Academic College, particularly from Ainav Omer,
Carmelit Manor, Or Barzani, Nelly Pakhladjan, Rosalin Mamman, and
Michal Dvir. At Cambridge Scholars Publishers I would like to thank
Victoria Carruthers and Sam Baker for their excellent work and help.
Evelyn Grossberg, our language editor, has done a wonderful job in
bringing the essays to their final form, and I wish to thank her for her
comments and meticulous attention to every aspect of the written work.
My family, as always, is a part of this project, and I thank them for
their patience and their love.
Finally, I am most indebted and wish to express my gratitude to Shira
Gottlieb, who was my research assistant for this project. This book would
viii
Acknowledgments
not have been possible without her thorough reading, insightful comments,
and the wonderful and participatory working atmosphere that she creates.
Be’er-Sheva, December 2016
INTRODUCTION
INBAL BEN-ASHER GITLER
I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways,
and the degree of the arcades’ curves and what kind of zinc scales cover
the roofs; But I already know this would be the same thing as telling you
nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the
measurements of its space and the events of its past…”
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities1
A war memorial is perched on a hill on the outskirts of Be’er-Sheva, a city
in the (relatively) vast desert region of Israel known as the Negev.
Officially named the Monument to the Negev Brigade, it is usually referred
to as the Negev Monument, while the locals call it simply the Monument
(Ch. 4, Figures 1–4). The monument was created by the renowned Israeli
sculptor, Dani Karavan, between 1962 and 1968.2 It commemorates the
fallen soldiers of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, who lost their lives
in battles in the Negev region. At the time of its completion, the Negev
Monument was one of the first site-specific sculptures created in Israel,
and has since become a landmark of Israeli art and of the city of Be’erSheva.
Italo Calvino’s opening lines echo the crucial role that the past and its
memorialization have in the construction of space itself. Site-specific
sculpture and monuments can be seen as artistic interventions in their
surroundings – interventions that inscribe, reveal, and shape memory and
its perception. They reflect specific historical events, the cultural and
ideological circumstances of their times, and the relation of those events or
circumstances to the space in which they are erected. The Negev
Monument is just such a memorial as it relates the battles that it
1
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (Orlando: Harcourt Brace
& Company, 1974), 10.
2
The monument was planned between 1962 and 1964 and built in 1968. See Adi
Englman (ed.), Dani Karavan: The Negev Monument (Tel Aviv: Marcel Arts
Project, 2016), 113, 160.
2
Introduction
commemorates to the space of the city and the desert in which they took
place.
In honor of the Jubilee of the Negev Monument and in honor of Dani
Karavan, the Negev Museum of Art in Be'er Sheva initiated a series of
programs and activities for the winter of 2014 that included an exhibition,
a symposium, and public events at the monument itself. The museum
mounted an exhibition entitled “50 Years to the Negev Monument/50
Years to Dani Karavan’s Public Art,” curated by Adi Englman, and the
Department of the Arts in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in
cooperation with the exhibition team, organized an international
symposium entitled “Monuments, Site-Specific Sculpture, and Urban
Space.” The present volume is a collection of essays presented at the
symposium and additional papers that relate to its theme.
Daniel Unger, the then head of Ben-Gurion’s Department of the Arts,
brought me on board for this symposium and constantly reminded me that
site-specificity is not a twentieth-century invention. As an art historian of
the early modern period, he pointed out that Baroque-era sculptors and
architects thought no less about potential sites for their works than their
more recent counterparts. This was also true, of course, for many ancient
projects and locales. So what has changed? The relationship between the
artist and society, as well as the perception of his or her role and authority
when planning and creating a monument, has undergone significant
transformation, as have the formal language and the theoretical premises
of our times with regard to historical narrative, memory, and art. The
essays presented here discuss these aspects of twentieth and twenty-first
century monuments and site-specific sculpture. The subjects of the various
chapters range from war memorials in Europe and Israel to
commemorations of individuals and other large-scale projects.
Within this rich assemblage we also find discussions of theories of art
as a producer of collective or individual memory, historical narrative, and
cultural meaning. The scholars contributing to this volume open up new
perspectives and propose novel frameworks for approaching and analyzing
these artworks. They look at their relationship to urban, semiurban, and
rural space, such as public parks or privately owned land, where art is not
an intervention in purely natural arenas. They address formalistic aspects,
as well as issues of memory and commemoration in light of changing
environments and spatial transformations. Moreover, these essays develop
in-depth consideration of the discourse between site-specific sculpture and
its viewers.
With a view toward the individuals, communities, and tourists that
experience these creations, both physically and virtually, researchers in
Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler
3
recent years have been addressing the complex interactions between
monuments and their publics. Monuments are not only viewed, but are
often discovered actively, creating an interaction wherein the viewer is
also a visitor and, at times, even a user. Moreover, these new experiences
are suggested by the immense impact that media processing in the
Information Age, and more specifically in the Internet era, has had upon
public perceptions of sculpture and monuments. All of these aspects are
discussed in depth in the essays presented here.
The interrelationships among site, public space, and architecture have
come under much scrutiny in recent years.3 The modern, postmodern, and
contemporary engagement with works that are planned or born out of a
specific space and have been created and themed with relationship to that
space has grown. In her seminal essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,”
Rosalind Krauss discusses these changes and attempts to formulate the
new relationship among architecture, landscape, and sculpture in the
works of artists who worked in the 1960s and 1970s.4 In ‘expanding’ the
definition of sculpture, Krauss considers the ways in which what we
traditionally refer to as sculpture has developed to include earthwork,
constructions in predefined architectural spaces or in relation to such
spaces, and more. These creations, Krauss claims, are made “in relation to
the logical operations on a set of cultural terms.”5
One such ‘operation’ that has developed as a consequence of new
cultural circumstances is the public, academic, and intellectual discussion
of monuments and counter-monuments. This development was engendered
by memory studies and the postmodern methodological investigation into
how public memory is formed and how history is told.6 This discourse is
especially relevant to monuments of commemoration, including those that
evoke loss, such as war memorials and memorials to victims of the
Holocaust.
James Young’s work on these subjects has been groundbreaking and
has provided important perspectives on the relationship among
3
Miwon Kwon, “Approaching Architecture: the Cases of Richard Serra and
Michael Asher,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, State of the Art:
Contemporary Sculpture (2009): 44.
4
Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979):
30–44.
5
Ibid., 42.
6
Natasha Lehrer, “Working through the Memories” (Review of At Memory’s Edge
by James Young), Jewish Quarterly 47/ (2000): 81–83.
4
Introduction
monuments, sites, and memory.7 In his discussion of Holocaust memorials,
Young exposes the unsolved dilemmas that characterize the processes of
memorializing through architecture, sculpture, and monuments. He
addresses the ways in which new approaches to memory, specifically
approaches that evolved in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, countered
established notions of monuments as the preferred form of
memorialization. He argues that these counter-monuments have the
capacity to express loss and evoke memory by using voids and the
sensation of emptiness in architecture, by abstraction, and by working
below ground rather than above it. Such architecture and countermonuments evolved as a response to public debates about what
monuments should look like, as well as from the modern incentive to
better accommodate individual as opposed to collective memories.
Young’s discussion and certain other studies conducted at the turn of the
twenty-first century have contributed to our perspectives on, and
understanding of, the role of counter-monuments, which more often than
not are site-specific and indeed more strongly reflect the interplay between
private and public memory.8
An additional aspect central to the discourse on monuments and sitespecific sculpture is that of everyday life, which can perhaps be extended
or explained by the centrality placed upon the visitors’ experience by the
artists themselves as well as by art historians. As Miwon Kwon has
observed, architecture and site have become pivotal for an increasing
number of artists as “a source of visual/formal vocabulary, models of
production and an avenue for accessing a sociality of ‘everyday life’”9 In
her research of commemorative site-specific sculptures/monuments
created during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Kwon has shown that
elements of architecture and site-specificity are perceived as aiding the
process of the socialization of sculptures and memorials. The use of
architecture, site, and landscape is seen as an appropriate and efficient
means of mediating both the event or the individual memorialized and the
work of art to its publics.
7
James Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in
Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2000).
8
Tim Cole, “Review Article: Scales of Memory, Layers of Memory: Recent
Works on Memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust,” Journal of
Contemporary History 37, no. 1 (2002): 129–138.
9
Krauss, “Sculpture in Expanded Field,” 42; Miwon Kwon, One Place after
Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004),
156.
Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler
5
Architectural elements were used for the creation of modern and
postmodern monuments in many of the works discussed in this volume.
These elements enhance visitors’ sense of space or counter-space: pillars
or a partial ceiling delineate the sky; walls create passages or voids;
primitive or temporary dwelling spaces – such as tents or caves – mediate
transience or relate to death. Industrial construction materials also
constitute a central aspect of this architectural vocabulary: glass, steel,
concrete, and lumber, appropriated from architecture, have either replaced
or supplemented traditional sculptural materials such as marble, granite,
and bronze. Elements relating to the urban realm, such as stepping-stones
and street signs, have also been enlisted for monuments and memorials, as
has nature in the form of water, trees, and earth. All of these have become
key elements in monuments and site-specific sculptures since the midtwentieth century. When conceiving the Negev Monument, Karavan
incorporated architectural elements, as well as concrete, water, trees, and
the desert sand to create the memorial. The integration of these elements in
the 1960s locates this monument at the forefront of these novel ideas in
site-specific sculpture and memory making through art.
An important issue that relates to memory making through site-specific
sculpture, as well as architecture, is that of historical context. As Richard
Crownshaw has observed, the predominance of memory in postmodern
discussions of history, which deconstruct the “grand” historical narratives,
runs the risk of decontextualizing sculpture and architecture from their
historical moment.10 In continuing this critical stance, a memorial such as
the Negev Monument can be perceived as constructing both collective and
private memory, but it should not be discussed solely in these terms. It
must also be interpreted in the context of its sculptural and architectural
moment – a moment of an Israeli artist’s adoption of an evolving abstract
vocabulary, a moment of embracing site-specificity, at a time when
architecture and sculpture were connecting in new ways. The Negev
Monument’s cultural framework should also be considered and explained
by investigating Israeli cultural production of the time. In the context of
the Negev Monument, the desert, perceived as a no-man's land and a
wilderness to be settled territorially and culturally, became the backdrop
for commemorating those who have set out to conquer it (militarily). The
architecture of the town of Be’er-Sheva, which embodies the aspirations of
nation building in the recently nascent state, prominently exhibited
exposed concrete. The gray, bare, pliable material used for constructing
10
Richard Crownshaw, "The German Counter-monument: Conceptual
Indeterminacies and the Retheorisaton of the Arts of Vicarious Memory,” Forum
for Modern Language Studies, 44, no. 2 (2008): 212–214.
6
Introduction
Be’er-Sheva’s new neighborhoods, built during the 1960s and 1970s, was
thus also used for the town’s memory making in the construction of the
Negev Monument. The town – and Karavan’s – material of choice was
very much present in all of Israel’s built environment at the time.11
Today, Israeli architecture, urban elements, and sculptures executed in
exposed concrete are receiving their overdue historical analysis and
assessment. Concrete’s cultural and structural connections to, for example,
béton brut and New Brutalism are revealed. Moreover, in the spirit of
current ideas regarding place-making and the fostering of local identity,
Be’er-Sheva is recognized as a place where exposed concrete has had a
significant impact on urban space. As a result, the material is now revisited
both structurally and culturally, so as to solidify and suggest a distinct
urban identity.12
While planning the jubilee symposium, the small committee formed
for its organization discussed what it means to commemorate, and even in
this small assembly the answers varied, probing issues such as: How does
the current use and negotiation of a monument affect its meaning? How
did different monuments’ relations to architecture and urban space propel
modernism into new directions? Do monuments and site-specific sculpture
construct or deconstruct their surrounding space? To what extent do
monuments created decades ago, such as the Negev Monument, remain a
part of a national narrative? Does this aspect wane over time?
These questions can perhaps be sifted through by applying three
paradigms for site-specificity, which were identified by Miwon Kwon: the
physical, or phenomenological paradigm, which relates to the physical site
itself and its relation to the work, the artist, and the viewer; the
social/institutional paradigm, which relates to the cultural sphere in which
the sculpture is conceived; and the discursive paradigm, wherein sitespecific sculptures are ‘expanded’ beyond their physical and cultural
11
In Karavan’s work, the adoption of concrete could be detected in a slightly
earlier nation- and town-building project – the Tel-Aviv courthouse, built in 1965.
There, Karavan used white exposed concrete in square slabs for wall reliefs and
placed a three-element sculpture of pure geometric forms in the courtyard. The
Tel-Aviv courthouse was built by architect Ya’acov Rechter (1924–2001), who
was among the most prominent architects working in Israel from the 1960s. See:
Dani Karavan, “The Art Within: The Tel Aviv Courts,” in Ya’acov Rechter:
Architect, ed. Osnat Rechter, Exh. Cat., Herzeliya Museum of Art (Herzeliya:
Herzeliya Museum of Art and Tel Aviv: Hakkibutz Hameuhad Publishers, 2003),
84–91.
12
Kwon discusses the creation of urban identity as part of the discursive process of
negotiating site-specific sculpture. See Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another:
Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (Spring 1997), 105–109.
Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler
7
circumstances and are distributed through various media, becoming part of
critical and historical discussion, investigation, etc. 13 These artistic,
cultural, and theoretical aspects are explored and analyzed in the essays
presented here.
The first section of this volume is devoted to counter-monuments.
Moran Pearl researches Holocaust monuments in Germany. She analyzes
the differences in monument making between East and West Germany
prior to their reunification and discusses the emergence of the countermonument, posing new questions pertaining to the works she studies. She
traces what she terms “site processing” to analyze the way in which
counter-monuments induce a complex and multifaceted reaction on the
part of visitors in an extended space and time, rather than at a single,
isolated moment of remembrance.
In “A Ubiquitous Memorial,” Adachiara Zevi discusses Gunther
Demnig’s Stolperstein project, an ongoing counter-monument that consists
of placing memorial stepping-stones all over Europe. She analyzes the
unique phenomenon of ubiquitousness that underlies the project, adding an
additional dimension to the concept of counter-monument. In this
framework, she also provides a succinct account of the discursive aspects
of site-specific monuments, as seen in the Italian discourse surrounding
Demnig’s project, as well as other Holocaust memorials that have been the
subject of public debate in Italy.
Vincent Marquis’s essay takes us through a different memorial lane –
that of Thomas Hirschhorn’s commemoration of philosophers. Marquis
studies the role of traditional monuments in creating collective memory
within the cultural contexts of nations and shows how Hirschhorn’s
monuments to philosophers reject these on multiple levels. Although, as
Marquis points out, Hirschhorn has not used the term counter-monument
to describe his works, their temporality, location, and function, which
constitute an ongoing invitation to social interaction and contemplation,
create one of the clearest inversions of the idea of the monument and are
among the most prolific forms of resistance to traditional memorials.
The second section includes two essays that discuss monuments of the
modern period and deal with some of the most important precedents for
the monuments and counter-monuments of the past three decades. Katya
Evan explores the art-historical roots of the connection between
Minimalism and memorials, a connection that today seems almost inherent
and taken for granted. Evan relates to Dani Karavan’s Negev Monument in
light of the art-historical discourse on the sculptor’s site-specific works as
13
Ibid., 95.
8
Introduction
well as new research on Minimalism as an art movement of the 1960s and
1970s. She shows that Minimalism’s heightened engagement with the
viewer/visitor experience is a central aspect of the Negev Monument and is
a key component of its innovative approach, which launched novel
directions in memorial design not only in Israel, but worldwide. This
engagement, when interpreted culturally both as an exponent of the
modernist art of its time and in the context of its national meaning as a
memorial, exemplifies the breadth of content and interpretations that can
be created by abstract memorials.
Giuliana Altea and Antonella Camarda present one of the few essays
written about Sardinian sculptor Costantino Nivola in the English
language. They discuss the unrealized projects of this major Italian artist,
who also worked in the United States for many years. The monuments he
planned in the 1950s and early 1960s, such as the memorial to Antonio
Gramsci and World War I and II memorials, anticipated the turn to the
renewed emphasis on site-specificity, on integrating architectural elements
in memorials, and on concern with the visitor’s experience. Although they
remain only in the form of drawings and models, Nivola’s projects were
publicized and known through his involvement in the international milieu
of modern sculptors. Altea and Camarda show that the interaction between
Nivola and his more famous colleagues was mutually influential. The
similarities between Nivola’s work and Karavan’s Negev Monument are
striking: Both artists were deeply involved in working with the physical
site and embedding their sculptures within it; both made use of tunnels and
enclosed voids; both possessed a vision of their monuments’ role in the
daily life of the communities where they were placed. Such similarities in
idea and form call for further reflection upon the broader issue of how
modern artists interacted internationally and how they defined their role in
society.
The final section deals with the way site-specific sculpture functions
within the cultural and institutional sphere and the changing approaches to
producing memory in physical sites with the advent of cyberspace. In
“Reassessing Site-Specific Artworks of the American Southwest in the
Information Age,” Mira Banay studies Land art as a social product of
American culture and its institutions, analyzing the transformations and
developments in the discourse surrounding these works. She argues that
the physical spaces of site-specific artworks, being ideological products in
their own merit, remain of crucial importance in our time. Not only has
their centrality not diminished, but specific cultural content can never be
fully comprehended through communication media, and the proliferation
of publicizing site-specific artworks through these channels makes this all
Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler
9
the more clear. In her reassessment of the cultural and discursive “sites”
that the famous Land art creations of the Southwest have become, Banay
also unearths what these sites conceal – the displacement of Native
Americans, economic and military interests, and more.
Shelly Hornstein analyzes the new phenomenon of digitally or
virtually enhanced memorials. She asks the very timely question of how
new digital environments can enhance memory processes and the
remembrance of events that site-specific memorials seeks to
commemorate? She provides answers through her case study, Mapping
Ararat, which is a mediatized and transmedial memorial dedicated to a
place in New York State that was proposed as a site for a Jewish
Homeland nearly two centuries ago. In analyzing virtual augmentation as
an apparatus that can expand memory and create more layers of cultural
heritage for the user/viewer/visitor, Hornstein presents the other side of
Banay’s advocacy of the physical: she argues that digital interactions can
function as a revelatory apparatus for constructing the cultural context and
memory of architecture, sculpture, and their in-betweens and connects
these recent developments to Krauss’s idea of an “expanded field.”
Finally, Dalia Manor’s epilogue discusses how the Negev Monument
has acquired significance in the individual memories of its visitors – a
significance that is remarkably different from its commemorative function.
Manor addresses these differences and shows how personal and private
memories have been reflected in drawings, photography, and video art
inspired by Karavan’s creation.
The very diverse case studies presented here elicit further discussion
on the differentiation and specification of sites and the events that they
commemorate, as well as about what makes them geographic, cultural, and
discursive products that embody the similarities engendered by the mutual
flow of histories, events, ideas, and human invention. Whether intended as
commemorative monuments or as a site-specific artworks, these creations
should be considered as embodying both a presence – of ideas or of
history – and an absence – of cultures and individuals that are gone.
Whatever the case, these artworks, which indeed reside between art,
architecture, sculpture, and human interaction with nature affect and
construct our past, present, and future and lend themselves to both
individual and personal contemplation, as well as collective interpretation.
A friend recently sought my advice regarding a personalized way of
conveying the historical import of the memory of the Holocaust to her son.
He was joining a Masa, the Israeli youth voyage to Poland, made by
thousands of Israeli high school students every year so as to preserve the
10
Introduction
memory of the Holocaust and transmit it to future generations.14 Before
entering Auschwitz, my friend explained, the young students get a gift
from their parents as a token of their participation in the voyage from afar.
Most parents, she continued, give their son or daughter a necklace with a
Star of David. Her 16-year-old son had already heard of this and blatantly
rejected the idea of jewelry.
The gift that I suggested to my friend instead, and which she indeed
gave her son, was derived directly from my engagement with the
monuments, the counter-monuments, and site-specific art discussed in this
volume with all their richness and multilayered meanings; thinking about
Jewish burial traditions and Demnig’s Stolperstein, I said to her: “Give
your son a stone from home, to place upon the earth or on one of the
monuments, so as to leave a part of his everyday physical space in that
distant site of memory and absence.”
14
There is extensive discussion pertaining to the youth trips to Poland, and they
have been subject to much critical debate. See, for example, Jackie Feldman,
Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the
Performance of Israeli National Identity (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books,
2008).
SECTION II:
REFLECTIONS ON THE
MODERNIST MONUMENT
A MONUMENT IN THE EXPANDED
FIELD OF MINIMALISM:
THE CASE OF DANI KARAVAN’S
MONUMENT TO THE NEGEV BRIGADE
KATYA EVAN
Introduction
The interface between memorial art and Minimalism offers the
opportunity for a fascinating encounter in the context of the recent
discourse on monumental sculpture and on Minimalism itself.1 In this
chapter I seek a deeper understanding of this interface through an analysis
of Dani Karavan’s Monument to the Negev Brigade (1963–1968).
Examination of the monument in the context of Minimalism has become
possible owing to the recent expanding discussion on Minimalism, which
challenges the canonical conventions in regard to the movement. As this
chapter further demonstrates, placing Karavan’s monument in the
expanded field of Minimalism serves to reveal its complex expression of
personal memory and bereavement.
Minimalism is generally perceived as supporting autonomy of form,
rejecting all content and context, and demanding to be studied solely on
the basis of what is seen, whereas monumental sculpture is loaded with
historical and political content, which is often particularly complex. Yet
many of the memorial sites erected in the last few decades are
characterized by an abstract geometrical language and an inclination
toward austerity and simplicity, and for this reason have come to be called
1
I base my use of the terms “memorial” and “monument” on the generic
distinction proposed by James Young, wherein “memorial” is a broad expression
of commemoration: memorial books, memorial activities, memorial days,
memorial sculptures. etc., and “monument” is “a subset of memorials: the material
object, sculptures, and installations used to memorialize a person or thing.” James
E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 4.
Katya Evan
105
“minimalist.”2 The most prominent of these are the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial (1982) by Maya Lin, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
(2005) by Peter Eisenman, and The National September 11 Memorial
(2011) by Michael Arad and Peter Walker. These are national
commemoration sites that have an ascetic and appearance and thus evoke
mixed responses and vivid discussions that make a clear connection
between their visual practice and Minimalism, mainly in the popular press.
For instance, in 2002, the New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman
pointed out that “[a] memorial, as part of a mixed-use project, will in some
way turn out to look Minimalist, Minimalism, of all improbable art
movements of the last 50 years, having become the unofficial language of
memorial art.”3
Similar contentions can be found in the work of many researchers,
critics, and professionals, who see Minimalism as a universal language to
be used for commemoration in the present era of multiculturalism.4 The
discussion that takes place on newspaper pages does not, of course, aspire
to thoroughly analyze the complex connection that was suggested several
decades ago between memorial sites and minimalist aesthetics, nor does it
look deeply into the complex problems implicit in the very definition of
Minimalism. However, the frequent references to the relationship between
Minimalism and commemorative art create a discourse in which this
connection is presupposed. There has not been much relevant research but
two major books concerned with the post-World War II commemoration
of the Holocaust – James E. Young’s The Texture of Memory: Holocaust
2
It is probably necessary to identify Minimalism as an American art movement of
the 1960s and to distinguish it from the expansive reductive aesthetics and
tendencies that prompted widespread, sometimes jargonish, use of the term
“minimalist.” Yet, it is also important to keep in mind that Minimalism is “neither
a clearly defined style nor a coherent movement.” I adhere to James Meyer’s view,
i.e., that the entire range of distinctions and definitions of the Minimalist
movement is its main polemic. According to Meyer, “We come closer to the truth
in viewing minimalism not as a movement with a coherent platform, but as a field
of contiguity and conflict, of proximity and difference.” James Meyer,
Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2001), 3–4.
3
Michael Kimmelman, “Art/Architecture: Out of Minimalism, Monuments to
Memory,” The New York Times, January 13, 2002.
4
See, e.g., Julie V. Iovin, “Are Memorial Designs Too Complex to Last?,” The
New York Times, November 22, 2003; John Zeaman, “WTC Memorial Is
Minimalism with Flourishes,” The Record (Bergen County, NJ), January 15, 2004;
Harris Dimitropoulos, “The Character of Contemporary Memorials,” Places
Journal 21, no. 1 (May 2009): 52–55.
106
A Monument in the Expanded Field of Minimalism
Memorials and Meaning (1993) , and Mark Godfrey’s Abstraction and the
Holocaust (2007) – highlight important insights in regard to the transition
from the figurative to the abstract in the language of commemoration and
the impact of abstract monuments on memorial art.
According to Young, artists who were commissioned to commemorate
the events of World War II rejected figurative language so as not to fall
into the trap of glorification or mythologization of the horror. In their turn
to the abstract they were able to confront the harsh reality and open up
meaning, thus creating a private sensation for the viewer and a range of
expressive modes for the artists.5 Godfrey also focuses on understanding
the interaction between the abstract language and the idea of
commemoration. He discusses the different ways in which the abstract
language creates historical and public meaning and shows how the artist
copes with the memory and the trauma by way of the abstract.6 Still, when
dealing with the manifestly minimalist projects by Sol Le’Witt, Richard
Serra, Frank Stella, and others, Young and Godfrey do not develop a
specific discussion of the minimalist practice.7 Minimalism in their studies
is implicit in the wider field of the abstract and receives little discussion
either in its own right or in its historical and national contexts.
Attempts to treat Minimalism as a distinct category in commemoration
research are rare and somewhat hesitant, not only in the work of Young
and Godfrey. The most widespread approach sees Minimalism, similarly
to the abstract in general, as a reserved and universal language that is most
suitable today for addressing painful and charged topics.8 One example of
such an argument can be found in the article by Harris Dimitropoulos,
“The Character of Contemporary Memorials,” where he points out the
reflective component of the minimalist language, which makes
Minimalism an “effective strategy for contemporary memorials.”9 Using
psychoanalytic tools, but not examining Minimalism as such, he argues
5
Young, The Texture of Memory, 9–11.
Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2007), 4–9.
7
Thus Godfrey discusses the problematics of reception in Stella’s commemorative
work in light of the artist’s avoidance of content and contexts external to art, yet
does not examine this escape as part of the problematics of Minimalism in general:
Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust, 95–98.
8
See also Carolyn J. Dean, “Minimalism and Victim Testimony,” History and
Theory 49 (December 2010): 85–99. Dean examines the contribution of the
minimalist language of victims’ testimonies in fiction to descriptions of horror and
suffering in a historical context.
9
Dimitropoulos, “The Character of Contemporary Memorials,” 52.
6
Katya Evan
107
that contemporary (abstract-minimalist) memorials, as opposed to
representational ones, “provide a perfect surface for the projection of our
egos and desires,” and can “teach us something about ourselves without
having to be didactic.” In this way, he maintains, contemporary memorials
manage to “play the double and contradicting role of addressing both
loosely defined collectivity and the needs and desires of diverse
individuals at the same time,” and in the era of late capitalism and
globalization “to sacrifice specificity.”10 In other words, Dimitropoulos
perceives the minimalist language of memorials as emphasizing the
individual and de-emphasizing the collective, an approach that avoids the
conflict between memory and identity that can arise in the context of
commemoration among different social groups.
Nearly the only example of a specific analysis of connections between
Minimalism and a memorial site is provided by Daniel Abramson in his
discussion of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial.11 On the one hand,
Abramson considers that Lin’s memorial “was insulted by populist critics
as minimalist” and that the connection between this work and Minimalism
is no more than perfunctory. He argues:
Instead of using the alienating, nonart, industrial materials of Minimalism
– steel, aluminum, or concrete – Lin used luxurious, polished, artful
granite. Instead of being emptied of extrinsic, referential meaning, Lin’s
monument clearly possessed a subject outside of itself. Instead of being in
conflict with its environment, Lin’s monument gently worked with the
earth and paid respect to its neighbors.12
On the other hand, Abramson reveals the complex affinity between the
memorial and Minimalism, which, in his opinion, lies in the
“depersonalized, industrial information presented by the monument.” In
the endless list of tens of thousands of names of the fallen, carved on the
walls of the memorial and presenting the “present facts” of the loss in an
almost bureaucratic sequence, Abramson recognizes “rawness, seriality,
objectivity and neutrality: the formal vocabulary of Minimalism.” In light
of the minimalist reading, he notes “a strong sense of alienation from the
information” and suggests that it contains an element of politicalideological critique.13
10
Ibid., 52–55.
Daniel Abramson, “Maya Lin and the 1960s: Monuments, Time Lines, and
Minimalism,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 4 (Summer 1996).
12
Ibid., 703–704.
13
Ibid., 705–709.
11
108
A Monument in the Expanded Field of Minimalism
The approaches proposed by Abramson, Dimitropoulos, and Godfrey
cause me to think of similar contexts for the Monument to the Negev
Brigade (1963–1968) by Dani Karavan, which, being an abstract
sculptural site, marks a turning point in the notions of commemoration in
Israel and even in the world. Following Abramson’s reading of
Minimalism for its conceptual content, I study Karavan’s memorial in
minimalist contexts and ask whether certain aspects of Minimalism can
help expose new content in this memorial and contribute to an
understanding its abstract language. Following Dimitropoulos’s analysis
of the reflexive aspect of monuments, I deal with the prompts for
reflection that the Negev Monument provides and focus on the viewer’s
subjective experience of the site. In accord with Godfrey’s model of
abstract language creating historical and public meaning, I examine the
charged encounter of Minimalism with history and memory and
investigate their mutual challenge. I would like to point out that this
discussion has only become possible owing to the renewed research
evaluation of the discourse and practice of Minimalism, which broadens
the minimalist field beyond its formalistic definitions and allows narrative
and subjective examination of the field.
Figure 1
The Negev Monument – History of Creation and Reception
The Monument to the Negev Brigade (generally referred to as the Negev
Monument) by Dani Karavan (Figs. 1–4) is dedicated to the role of the
Katya Evan
109
Palmach’s Negev Brigade14 in the war of 1948 (termed in Israel the “War
of Independence”) and is approached in the professional literature as
marking a turning point in monumental sculpture in Israel. The monument
was built as a complex of abstract architectonic structures spread out over
an area of 100 × 100 meters in a desert landscape on the outskirts of the
city of Be’er Sheva. The elements that make up the monument are cast
from concrete, and some of them have inscribed texts commemorating the
story of the battles and the names of the fallen. The elements are halved,
pierced, twisted, and tilted, and the conditions and phenomena inherent in
their environment, such as the shadows created by the rays of the sun, the
sounds made by the wind blowing through the pieces, the desert sand that
covers them, the desert acacias planted in their vicinity, are all officially
listed in catalogue descriptions as materials of the monument.15 Water
flowing in an aqueduct and a continually burning fire in the memorial
dome were also planned for in the complex, but for various reasons,
mostly technical, they could not be implemented and were given up with
the artist’s consent.
Figure 2
14
A military force before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Mordechai Omer, ed., Dani Karavan: Retrospective, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv
Museum of Art, 2008), 573.
15
110
A Monument in the Expanded Field of Minimalism
Figure 3
When Karavan began planning the Negev Monument in 1963, a
figurative language of commemoration, combining classicism with
primitivistic tendencies of ancient Eastern origin, still prevailed in Israel.
As Esther Levinger explains in her book War Memorials in Israel (1993),
the conventional style of memorials in Israel stood in contradiction to the
up-to-date trend of modernist sculpture in Israel, which was mainly
abstract, a contradiction that was an expression of values and an
ideological choice of a period that consecrated the human figure and the
collective.16 She notes that from the late 1950s on, there was a tendency
toward abstraction in memorial sculptures in Israel, although they still
retained a reference to the human body or some narrative figure, as one
can see, for example, in Munio Gitai’s and Alfres Mansfeld’s Memorial to
Fallen Soldiers at Beit Shean.17 The reception of these semi-abstract
sculptures was ridden with problems, primarily owing to the openness of
interpretation.18 According to Levinger, early models and attempts to plan
an abstract memorial that would emphasize the connection among its
forms, materials, and environment started appearing at the end of the
16
Esther Levinger, War Memorials in Israel (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad
Publishing House, Ltd., 1993) (Hebrew), 81–84.
17
http://paxisraeliana.tumblr.com/post/51711496671/memorial-at-beit-shean-bymunio-gitai-and-alfred
18
Esther Levinger, War Memorials in Israel, 85.
Katya Evan
111
1950s and the early 1960s, as, for example, in Yigael Tumarkin’s model
Little Monument (1958) and Yitzhak Danziger’s proposal for the
Jerusalem Road Memorial (1960).19 Yet Karavan’s proposal for the
Monument to the Negev Brigade was among the first to be accepted and
finally realized.20
Figure 4
Since it was erected, the innovation of the Negev Monument seems to
have deterred contemporary critics from discussing it in depth. According
to Manfred Schneckenburger, contemporary art critics in Israel “remain
silent…because they have failed to identify the pioneering act [of
Karavan’s monument] which…located itself at the forefront of the
development of international art.21 More recent scholars do not hesitate to
refer to the monument as a groundbreaking modernist work in the field of
commemoration and public sculpture. Idith Zertal describes it as a
“groundbreaking work of landscape design and architecture…a new
19
Yigael Tumarkin, Tumarkin: In the Centre of the Margins (Tel Aviv: Massada
and Y. Tumarkin, 1986), 9, 55; Mordechai Omer, Itzhak Danziger (Tel Aviv: Tel
Aviv Museum of Art, 1996), 406.
20
Esther Levinger, War Memorials in Israel, 95.
21
Manfred Schneckenburger, “An Israeli as a World Citizen in Art,” In Dani
Karavan: Winter 97, Ramat Gan, Israel (Ramat Gan: The Museum of Israeli Art,
1997), 96.
112
A Monument in the Expanded Field of Minimalism
language of memorial sites and of public art.”22 Mordechai Omer defines it
as a “masterpiece of Israeli art, the first site-specific Israeli artwork.”23
Levinger argues:
The Negev Monument by Karavan marks a turning point in the perception
of a memorial site, because of its dimensions…and because it presents a
sculptural reconstruction of a battlefield, in which the viewer is invited, as
it were, into the experience of war. It is also the first one to be built with a
deep consideration of its environment.… In addition, Karavan integrated
into the sculptured environment the blinding sun, the whistling wind, the
scarce vegetation of the desert.24
These descriptions point to a range of features that matured in the Negev
Monument and have been elements in Karavan’s public works ever since:
creating a sculptural site adhering to architectural principles, with an
attention to spatial and environmental conditions, taking into consideration
the human body and the way it moves within the site.
In spite of the innovation that the Negev Monument represents, it is
discussed in the literature primarily in connection with the modernist
sculptural heritage of the early twentieth century and in light of the
figurative commemorative tradition in Israel. Marc Scheps expresses the
conventional point of view about Karavan’s sources of inspiration, saying
that the artist was inspired by “the new definition of sculptural space
undertaken by Brancusi, Giacometti and Noguchi.”25 Furthermore it is
clear to Scheps that Karavan “assumes consequently this historical
heritage while questioning it and opening it to new perspectives.”26
Scheps’s argument, which seems to hint at the new categories of sculptural
practice as site-specific, earth, and environmental art, is clarified in
Schneckenburger’s descriptions of the Negev Monument as “an original
expression of Land Art.”27 However, these new categories have not yet
been perceived as constituting an important enough context in which to
22
Idith Zertal, “Tikkun Olam – Mending the World: On Art and Politics in the
Work of Dani Karavan,” in Dani Karavan: Retrospective, vol. 1, ed. Mordechai
Omer (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2008), 390.
23
Mordechai Omer, “Early and Late in Dani Karavan’s Oeuvre,” in Dani
Karavan: Retrospective, vol. 1, ed. Mordechai Omer (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum
of Art, 2008), 404–405.
24
Levinger, War Memorials in Israel, 95–96.
25
Marc Scheps, “An Axis for the Future,” in Dani Karavan: Winter 97, Ramat
Gan Israel (Ramat Gan: The Museum of Israeli Art 1997), 107.
26
Ibid.
27
Schneckenburger, “An Israeli as a World Citizen in Art,” 95.
Katya Evan
113
examine the Negev Monument, but were only mentioned to emphasize its
innovative spirit. In the commemorative perspective, it is also
conventional to examine the monument in the historical context of local
monuments and as a step in their development. Zertal recognizes in the
monument’s concepts and figurative shapes a reference “to some key
conceptual and formal images of the Zionist-Israeli narrative” and a
correspondence to the “most branded sites of the hegemonic Zionist metanarrative of Holocaust and redressing, destruction and redemption.”28
Levinger also notes that “in spite of its abstraction, the memorial tells the
stories of the fights and the victory,”29 which suggests that the narrativity
of the monument brings it closer to the traditional figurative sculpture.
Minimalism as a Relevant Context
for Interpreting the Negev Monument
The conventional readings of the Negev Monument are rooted mainly in
the history that preceded it – in sculptural modernism and in the
ideological patterns of the early, formative years of the state. The
innovations it introduced in terms of the artistic language and the way of
commemoration, which are definitely surprising in light of the early year
in which it was first planned (1963), were barely looked at in terms of the
relevant context of the period, nor have they been examined in retrospect.
Moreover, many writers insist on emphasizing the hermetic and unique
character of Karavan’s work, radically detaching it from all the trends of
the period: “Karavan’s work has been misleadingly pigeonholed in terms
of international art categories. He is neither a practitioner of Arte Povera
nor of Land Art, neither a conceptualist nor a minimalist. He is neither a
photo artist nor a light-and-video artist,” writes Cristoph Brockhaus.30 Yet
the noticeable echoes of the international artistic trends of the 1960s in the
innovative features of the Negev Monument (which can be summed up as
acting upon the interrelations among the sculptural site, the environment,
and the viewer) highlight the need for new perspectives on the ways in
which Karavan’s sculptural complex works. In the 1960s, when the
monument was designed and built, far-reaching changes were taking place
28
Zertal, “Tikkun Olam,” 388.
Levinger, War Memorials in Israel, 96.
30
Cristoph Brockhaus, “Public Commissions: Dani Karvan’s Site-Specific
Environments,” in Dani Karavan: Retrospective, vol. 2, ed. Mordechai Omer (Tel
Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2007), 838. Given his cautious avoidance of
pigeonholing Karavan’s art, Brockhaus’s title is surprising.
29
114
A Monument in the Expanded Field of Minimalism
in the centers of artistic activity in Europe and especially in the United
States, principally in the sculptural medium, which was being redefined by
minimalist practices on the basis of the triangle of relationships among the
artistic object, the space, and the viewer.
The concept of “Minimalism,” which sets the framework for
discussion in the present chapter, is mentioned more than once in
theorizing about the Negev Monument, yet it is almost immediately hedged
or denied, or, as Michael Gibson declares, “The paradox of Dani
Karavan’s art is that it often enlists a minimalist form to achieve
something that is in fact quite incompatible with the minimalist
perspective.”31 Many critics, including Mordechai Omer, Christoph
Brockhaus, and Michael Gibson, agree that in spite of the reductive
language of the Negev Monument, it is wrong and misleading to view it in
minimalist contexts, since its sensitive treatment of the human being, the
environment, history, and memory is completely opposed to the
minimalist nihilism, which produces primary, hermetic shapes devoid of
all context. This convention clearly rests on the orthodox readings of
Minimalism that were crystallized in the 1960s by the artists themselves
and the circle of writers who were close to them. In early research on
Minimalism, such core minimalist artists as Robert Morris, Frank Stella,
and Donald Judd, as well as key scholars, including Lawrence Alloway,
Lucy Lippard, Barbara Rose, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krauss, shaped
the traditional interpretation of Minimalism as a formalist practice
concerned exclusively with form devoid of content and context, objective
and hermetic.32 This interpretation continues to underlie many arthistorical analyses and is echoed in the reception of the Negev Monument.
The rejection of Minimalism by scholars studying Karavan’s
monument is explained by what they see as an unnatural connection
between the formalist practice apparently proposed by Minimalism and the
historical and emotional baggage that any monument carries. Yet the
relevance of this line of reasoning fades in light of more recent readings of
Minimalism. The later literature, that published since the 1990s by such
researchers as Anna Chave, Briony Fer, Hal Foster, and James Mayer,
offers a new way of thinking about Minimalism and aspires to gauge its
scope and character.33 According to these authors, the minimalist field
31
Gibson, “Time and Space, Memory and Identity.”
For instance, see Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
33
Anna Chave, “Minimalism and Biography,” The Art Bulletin 82, no. 1 (March
2000): 149–63; Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2000); Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of
32
Katya Evan
115
raises a series of questions and definitions that reveal that, in contrast to
the previous assumptions that used to be common in research and
discussion, Minimalism does not offer a clear-cut practice that follows a
certain set of rules, but presents a wide and dynamic field of diverse
praxes. Among other things, recent studies uncover the subjective,
biographical, political, and gender contexts within Minimalism; they
discuss the experience of the viewer, psychological aspects, the rhetoric of
power, and the spatial impact of the works, thus diverging from the
formalist approach and undermining the canonical reading of Minimalism.
As I pointed out above and will further demonstrate, certain issues (such
as the viewer’s experience and spatial and psychological aspects of the
work) that were raised in the second wave of research on Minimalism have
also been discussed in relation to the Negev Monument, so it definitely
appears that Minimalism is a highly relevant frame of reference for
understanding the monument,
The object-space-viewer relations were elevated to the utmost
significance by American minimalist artists in their practice and discourse,
which constituted one of their most original moves – turning the art object
into a phenomenological source. Phenomenology of Minimalism examines
the physical and perceptual responses of the viewer to the formal and
material aspects of the work and the conditions of the environment in
which the encounter between the two is taking place. According to this
notion, the bodily response of the viewer serves as the exclusive source
from which the work’s meaning can be extracted. The phenomenological
idea is embodied, for instance, in the well-known work by Robert Morris
Mirrored Cubes (1965), in which a number of wooden cubes plated with
mirrors are installed indoors as well as outdoors.34 The cubes reflect the
surroundings (the space of the gallery or the landscape on different
occasions) and partly merge into them, so that the viewer experiences a
situation of reciprocal invasion between him/herself and the object and the
space, and perceives the material, the light, and the space and even
him/herself reflected in the cubes in a particularly confusing way. By
using mirrors, Morris exemplifies in an almost didactic way how vital the
spatial conditions are for experiencing the work of art. He contends that
the relationship among the object, the space, and the viewer inform the
the Real (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 35–71; James Meyer,
Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2001).
34
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/morris-untitled-t01532
116
A Monument in the Expanded Field of Minimalism
entire meaning of the work.35 The phenomenological thrust of Minimalism
turns out to be a significant framework for examining the complex
relationship that exists in the Negev Monument among the sculptural site,
the environment, and the viewer, and it is likely to contribute a fruitful
reading of this relationship in the context of commemoration. It is
reasonable to assume that the minimalist phenomenology, on which I base
what follows, is only one example of a relevant reading that arises from
the artistic and historical background of the monument.
Karavan was certainly aware of the minimalist aesthetics that began to
appear in American art during the period in which he created the
monument. It is possible that designing the scenery for the ballet The
Legend of Judith by renowned dancer and choreographer Martha Graham
in 1962 contributed to this awareness, as he visited Graham in New York
and they became friends. Karavan’s involvement in performance arts is
interesting in its own right, in light of the mutuality and close cooperation
that developed in those years between the American minimalist artists and
performing artists and dancers.36 Thus, the choreography and
performances of the dancer Yvonne Rainer (who studied in the Martha
Graham School in 1959–1960) clearly expressed her close acquaintance
with the minimalist milieu and the aesthetic principles of Minimalism.37
For example, in the course of her performance Carriage Discreetness
(1966), minimalist objects designed by Carl Andre appeared on stage,
while Robert Morris played the role of a dancer receiving instructions
from Rainer.38 For Morris, participating in the dance performance and
creating stage designs with minimalist objects represented an important
additional avenue of phenomenological exploration of the relationship
among the body, the object, and the space. For Karavan as well, the
conceptualization of the sculptural site, which began with the Negev
Monument and continued throughout his public work, matured to a great
extent owing to his involvement in stage design between 1960 and 1973.39
35
Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed.
Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1966] 1995), 232.
36
For instance, on Morris’s cooperation with dancing troupes, see James Meyer,
Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 39, 51.
37
Yvonne Rainer, “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the
Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio
A,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), 263–73.
38
http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=626
39
An early example of a public work is Courtyard (1963–1967), Tel Aviv, Israel,
and a later one is Mizrach (1997–2005), Regensburg, Germany.
Katya Evan
117
As Brockhaus points out, “Karavan has increasingly been taking the stage
set outdoors and transferring the role of actor or dancer to members of the
public.”40 These connections are additional evidence that planning a
sculptural environment to serve as a spatial context and to give rise to
bodily and sensory response in the viewer is a fascinating and powerful
interface between Karavan’s sculptural practice and the minimalist field.
#
Figure 5
40
Brockhaus, “Public Commissions,” 840.
118
A Monument in the Expanded Field of Minimalism
Karavan himself conceded, over the course of years, that he always
functioned in an “artistic no-man’s land”: “I moved across borders and
disciplines and between Minimalism and Conceptualism, narration and
abstraction, sculpture and architecture, earth art and landscape design.”41
This formulation indicates several artistic affiliations and traces certain
boundaries of creative action, which, even if they were supposed to be
crossed from the start, left their imprint on Karavan’s art and thus merit
scholarly attention. If, as many suppose, the Negev Monument “serves as
the primary reference for all analyses of…[Karavan’s] work,”42 then the
strengthening of the minimalist turn in his late commemorative project
Passages: Homage to Walter Benjamin (1990–1994; Fig. 5) is an
additional justification for exploring the minimalist affinities of the Negev
Monument. Homage to Walter Benjamin is not only reduced to minimalist
austerity through form and material, but also conveys a single motif, a
markedly minimalistic one, already present in the Negev Monument: that
of the passage. Sculptures of the passage, embracing and imprisoning the
viewer within them, are very common in the praxes of minimalist artists
and their followers, including Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Bruce
Nauman, and Michael Heizer; Rosalind Krauss saw in them the last stage
in the genealogy of the modernist sculpture and the pinnacle of the
phenomenological move that Minimalism had led.43
Architecture and the Viewer’s Experience
in the Expanded Field of Minimalism
As I show further on, specific discussion of the major components and
motifs of the Negev Monument in light of Minimalism reveals interesting
modes of action and the influence of the sculptural complex on the viewer
and offers something new about the viewer’s experience of this site. The
monument is built from a number of autonomous sculptural bodies
identified on the basis of explanations provided by Karavan himself as
architectonic elements: tent, dome, bunker, watchtower, tunnel, aqueduct,
and square. These elements are described in the literature as components
that have an expressive character and a narrative-symbolic baggage,
which, along with the names of the dead, dedications, and documentaries
41
Dani Karavan, “Thoughts about a Path.”
Scheps, “An Axis for the Future,” 106.
43
Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge and London: The
MIT Press, 1977), 282–87.
42
Katya Evan
119
from the battle journals, commemorate the story of the battles, the
heroism, and the fallen.44
The combination of the sculptural and the architectural in the
monument has been viewed in research not only as assigning meaning to
abstract shapes but also as an act that cancels their alienated minimalist
quality. Brockhaus writes: “In the period of art history characterized by
minimalist and conceptualist purism Karavan was building bridges
between architecture and sculpture…in order to reconcile art with its
environment, to see the beholder as a user, to facilitate dialogue,
communication and action.”45 In Brockhaus’s view, Minimalism rejects
every possibility of dialogue and cooperation with the viewer, goals that
Karavan accomplishes through the connection to architecture. However,
not only does the affinity to architecture exist in minimalist practice, but it
also acts and becomes manifest precisely with regard to the viewer.
Early works of Robert Morris, such as Column (1961), Portals (1961),
Steles (1961), were inspired by the ancient Egyptian architecture the artist
admired as a child, and they remind one of the square components of the
Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara.46 As James Meyer writes, “Morris was
attracted to these references because, like architecture, his sculpture was
built to bodily scale.”47 The fact that Column was created for a
performance of La Monte Young’s Living Theater in New York in 1962
and designed to contain an actor inside, who had to make it fall in the
course of the performance by means of his body’s weight, indicates a close
connection among architecture, the minimalist object, and the human
body. An additional instance of manifest connection to architecture is
provided by the sculptures of Richard Serra. Hal Foster explains that the
monumental curves and labyrinths in Serra’s sculptures have a dramatic
effect upon the viewer, an effect that owes its inspiration to Baroque
architecture.48 One can confidently say that in Morris’s and Serra’s work,
the reference to architecture as an environment designed for human use is
made to provide and ensure the understanding that in spite of its hermetic
appearance, the sculpture does not stand on its own but “looks out” for the
viewer and seeks to evoke his/her response. As Brockhaus points out, the
reliance of the sculptural forms of the Negev Monument on architectural
44
Eran Neuman, “The Dialectical Meaning of Form,” in Dani Karavan:
Retrospective, vol. 2, 849; Scheps, “An Axis for the Future,” 106.
45
Brockhaus, “Public Commissions,” 841.
46
Meyer, Minimalism, 50.
47
Ibid., 51.
48
Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex (London and New York: Verso,
2011), 160–65.
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language ensures preservation of the human dimension in the monument’s
array and strengthens the reference of the forms to the human body. Such
an approach does not pose any contradiction to Minimalist experience;
moreover, it is intrinsic in this practice.
In her article “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power” (1990), Anna
Chave expands on this issue while pointing out illuminating connections
between minimalist sculpture and classical architecture. She writes:
Formally, Minimalism is simple in many of the same ways as classical
architecture and complex in some similar ways as well: both are
distinguished by the use of plain, lucid forms that tend to reveal themselves
in their entirety from any viewpoint…a pleasing sense of proportion and
scale coupled with a clarity and austerity of design.49
Chave marks the fact that classical orders were reproduced by modern
democratic and liberal societies as concepts of balance, wholeness, and
authority (as, for instance, in public buildings across the United States),
but were also borrowed by the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy and
became symbols of absolute power (autarchy). She notes that the same
characteristics of classical architecture traced back to the minimalist
practice allude to this history of authority and power in order to evoke in
the viewer a sense of estrangement, detachment, and reluctance, and thus
make the disturbing reality of their lives tangible.50 The comparison
between minimalist sculpture and classical architectural modes supports
the main thesis of Chave’s paper: in the minimalist practice there exists an
irreducible domain of violence, negation, authority, and power that points
to the political-critical response of Minimalism to the current events of its
time.51
It is quite clear that, as opposed to classical and minimalist rigor, the
general appearance of the Negev Monument is rich in elements and
characterized by an almost expressive complexity. Yet each element
separately, as well as the entire complex, adheres to the internal logic of
symmetry, rhythm, and balance. Moreover, the principal components of
the monument embody archetypes of a pyramid, a column, a dome, an arc,
and a colonnade. It is intriguing to look deeper into the combination of
sculpture and architecture in the Negev Monument in light of Chave’s
49
Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine (January
1990): 53.
50
Ibid., 53–54.
51
As an example, Chave mentions only the events of 1965: America’s intervention
in Vietnam, the Watts riots, and assassination of Malcolm X: Chave, “Minimalism
and the Rhetoric of Power,” 53.
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121
ideas. In order to connect Chave’s reading of Minimalism with the
monument and understand how drawing inspiration from architecture
imparts its immanent authority, I turn to Ronald Bladen’s minimalist work
Three Elements (1965).52
Bladen’s work comprises three tilted rectangular elements each about 3
meters high, installed separate from each other and tilted at an angle of 65
degrees. The elements are made of plywood and their outer sides are faced
with black enamel, whereas those turning inside toward each other are
aluminum-plated. When the viewer stands between the tilted elements, it is
as if the sculpture itself disappears and the viewer is reflected in the dim
weightless aluminum surfaces and experiences an enveloping and
containing environment. Yet when one leaves the internal space of the
sculpture and is exposed to the mass, the height, and the threatening tilt of
the three elements, one finds him/herself in a tense and deterring
environment, under the authoritative power of the sculpture. The tension
between the internal and the external space in the work is architectonic in
nature: the autonomous structure does not exist for the person who is
inside it, and is only revealed when the person goes outside. Thus Bladen
uses the architectural language in order to create sculptural elements that
combine the human and the subjective with the monumental and the
autonomous.53
Juxtaposing Bladen’s Three Elements with the components of the
Negev Monument highlights a similar tension between the object and the
observer: massive elements comprising structures such as the tent and the
bunker gradually rise up from the ground and surround and envelop the
viewer till they overwhelm, break in, threaten to fall, block, and change in
a continuous interplay between the inside and the outside. In fact, these are
the elements that maintain a dialectical relationship with each other and
create a dynamic of closeness and remoteness at the same time. On the one
hand, they offer themselves to the viewer as containing spaces and as sites
for action, and many visitors (especially children) enjoy climbing,
crawling, and jumping among them. On the other hand, it is impossible to
ignore the disturbing apprehensiveness that arises in the presence of an
array of massive forms and the ever-changing perspectives, which surprise
the visitor making progress through the site. A lonely person visiting the
52
http://www.wikiart.org/en/ronald-bladen/three-elements-1965
Daniel Marzona, Minimal Art (Cologne: Taschen, 2004), 40. Marzona explains
that Bladen attempted to show in his sculpture the architectural tension that he
looked for but did not find at Stonehenge in England: “His disappointment lay in
what he felt was a lack of tension between the standing architectural forms.”
53
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site may feel especially strongly the deterring aspect of the authoritative
power present almost in every structural element of the monument.
This encounter unfolds through Oz Almog’s analysis of sculptural
memorials as bearing a significant symbolic role in “civil religion” and
serving the cult of the nation.54 According to Almog, Zionist ideology
became the “civil religion” of the Israeli State; therefore the monuments
throughout Israel, among their other missions, mark the national identity
and strengthen the collective values of the Zionist State. Regarding
Almog’s view, I argue that the authoritative power of the Negev
Monument has to be considered (also) as an expression of sovereign power
and, as such, marks a new climax in this approach.
The dialectical character of the architectural elements of the Negev
Monument is increased by their being part of an array that in its turn
produces a complex effect on the viewer. As Eran Neuman explains, the
structures of the monument are ostensibly independent objects, but their
exact placement in the overall composition was chosen by Karavan based
on a meticulous examination of the relationship among its various
components. Moreover, according to Neuman, the establishment of those
relationships creates not only the visual but also the narrative syntax of the
site, which he describes as a political meaning of memory and history55:
While conceiving of the composition and lending meaning to the various
components, Karavan forms a political narrative which is offered to
viewers through the use of the work: wandering amongst its various
sections, climbing on its constituent elements, the visitors’ location in
relation to its various parts – all these generate intricate interrelations
between the subjects, the audience, and Karavan’s artistic text. This
relationship exposes users to the political dimension taking place through
the physical experience.56
The central idea of Karavan’s monument is an insistence that its
meaning is revealed to the viewer not only through passive contemplation,
but mainly through physical use of its components or, as minimalist
phenomenology has it, the bodily experience of the viewer that serves as
the main channel for understanding the monument. Karavan makes a
radical move, which is most closely associated with minimalist practice:
transferring the emphasis from the work itself to the viewer and thereby
changing the traditional paradigm, which made Hal Foster see Minimalism
54
For more details, see Oz Almog, “Israeli War Memorials: A Semiological
Analysis” (Hebrew), Megamot, no. 2 (1992): 179–210.
55
Neuman, “The Dialectical Meaning of Form,” 848–47.
56
Ibid., 850.
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as “an apogee of modernism, but…no less a break with it.”57 The issue of
the viewer was the basis of the famous critique of Minimalism by Michael
Fried, a critique that succeeded in clearly (although sarcastically)
conceptualizing the minimalist practice and expressing the tension at the
end of the modernist era. In his seminal article “Art and Objecthood”
(1967), Fried refuses to see Minimalism as a movement in art and defines
it instead as a new genre of theater, because of what he sees as the
exaggerated need of the minimalist object for the viewer and because of
Minimalism’s aspiration to create a site that unites the object with the
viewer. He sees the shift in emphasis from the artistic object or art itself to
the viewer and turning contemplation of the work into an active and
temporally continuous experience as an existential threat to art.58
Indeed, as is clear today, Minimalism’s heightened engagement with
the viewers’ experience has prompted dramatic changes in the artistic field
since the 1960s.59 This is especially true in the sculptural medium, in
which new categories arose that challenge the passive spectatorship
required by the traditional work of art. Among these categories, defined by
Krauss in her article “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979), there is
one known as “site-construction” – a sculptural work connecting to its
environment and creating an array defined by two domains outside of art:
architecture and landscape – a fitting definition for the Negev Monument.60
According to Morris, the array of relationships between the object and
the viewer has to involve “actual circumstances” of the space, and thus the
minimalist work aspires to create “the entire situation” and “spatial
context” where everything present in the viewer’s field of vision is taken
into account by the artist.61 Spatial context, which Morris bases on Gestalt
theory, strengthens the phenomenological experience of the viewer, who
responds not only to the object but also to the fact of its situatedness in
space, and to the space as a whole. In the Negev Monument, the spatial
context is extended significantly beyond Morris’s idea and presents an
57
Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 42.
58
Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 10 (June 1967): 12–23.
59
In “The Crux of Minimalism,” Foster claims that Minimalism marks a decisive
crossroad in the genealogy of art since the 1960s and until today. See an example
of an interesting affinity between minimalist sculpture and video art and
performance in Anne M. Wagner, “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of
Presence,” October 91 (Winter 2000): 73–74.
60
Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–
44.
61
Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” 232–33.
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absolute model of Morris’s concept that “everything counts.” The way in
which the materials of the monument are listed – “wind, sunlight, water,
fire, desert acacias, grey concrete, text” – indicates Karavan’s detailed
interest in the visitor’s maximal sensual stimulation, created by means of
spatial components and the conditions of the environment in which the
monument is placed and set to work. All these create the experience of
visiting the monument and emphasize the active nature of that experience,
and perhaps even more importantly – its duration in time.
The dimension of time or the “duration of the experience” receives an
interesting treatment in Fried’s article. He believes that the experience
acquires duration because the minimalist work is “inexhaustible” for the
viewer, not because of the “fullness,” which is a basic characteristic of art,
but because of the literality – because “there is nothing to exhaust. It is
endless the way a road might be: if it is circular for example.”62 Fried
describes something like a shock response to a hermetic and literal object
in which there is nothing, a shock that does not allow the viewer to stop
wondering and deciphering the object (also physically). However, as
opposed to the fullness of a “good” modernist work, the minimalist work
is not exactly “empty” but has a dimension of gradualness (or something
like a delay), and this becomes clear when Fried points out that in
“modernist painting and sculpture, at every moment the work itself is
wholly manifest.”63 In other words, the modernist work declares itself all
at once in its entirety, and because it is completely autonomous and
separated from the viewer, it requires from him/her only contemplation, in
other words, a static, passive, and isolated kind of response.
As opposed to this, the minimalist work is not complete, not
autonomous, and contemplation alone does not suffice. In fact, it is a
trigger that engenders the spatial context and “inexhaustible” environment
of the viewer, which move him/her to action. Furthermore, how does Fried
explain the relationship between the viewer and this minimalist
environment? “ [O]nce he [the beholder] is in the room, the work refuses,
obstinately, to let him alone – which is to say, it refuses to stop
confronting him, distancing him, isolating him.”64 Why does minimalist
work contend with the viewer in such a way? Because it evokes “a sense
of temporality, of time both passing and to come, simultaneously
approaching and receding, as if apprehended in an infinite perspective.”65
In spite of the interaction with the viewer, the experience of a work that
62
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 143–44.
Ibid., 145.
64
Ibid., 140.
65
Ibid., 145.
63
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requires time and is not received immediately in its entirety is fraught with
a sensation that cannot be realized or completed, a sensation that by being
delayed and ever-receding creates a dimension of detachment and
remoteness.
The Negev Monument certainly provides the “fullness” that Fried
values in “good” modernist works, yet by being a site-construction it
cannot “wholly manifest” itself and exist autonomously from the viewer.
The dimensions and components of the monument create an inexhaustible
space of a continuous and changing experience. The composition of the
monument is characterized by the absence of a route, by the countless
circular and labyrinthine tracks, and the shapes themselves, which are
strewn around, halved, mutilated, fragmented, and multilayered, provide
innumerable angles and combinations at any particular moment and create
a powerful sense of duration to the experience. It is a duration that
emphasizes infiniteness as well as temporality and evokes a sensation that
in many senses is, according to Fried, “incomplete and inconclusive.”
The freedom of action at the monument is in a sense also a burdened
freedom – it involves a sense that these forms and structures will never
give themselves to complete knowledge and exhaustive understanding. By
continuously acting in the monument’s space, the viewer discovers
sculptural objects that arouse great interest and curiosity and make one
want to become acquainted with them, but at the same time, they also
create estrangement by their surprising complexity. The dialectical array
of the monument acts in such a way that the dimension of time, which
produces remoteness and delay, counterbalances and completes the
closeness and belonging that also exist in its spatial structure. In these
senses, Karavan’s monument relies on the minimalist viewer’s experience,
which involves the viewer in the same array with the object, space, and
time.
In analyzing the Negev Monument within the framework of Fried’s
minimalist reading, I posit an additional dimension and a clearer
formulation of the viewer’s experience of the work. The place of the
viewer at the monument is discussed mainly in didactic terms of memory
and commemoration: texts that tell about the course of the battles,
documenting the names of the fallen, running water and an ever-burning
fire, along with the active presence of the viewer in the narrative-historical
space, serve to commemorate and impart the memory to future
generations. In light of these readings, Neuman’s interpretation provides a
more complex understanding of the viewer’s experience and promotes a
more in-depth examination of this issue. Neuman claims that the very
action of the viewer in the space of the monument is a protest against
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separation between the private and the public, between life and death,
whereas “the link between memory as a historical act and its mythification
is dissolved, and memory is brought into the present.”66 In other words,
the visitor, acting in the innermost heart of the site, experiences memory as
an inseparable part of his/her “here and now,” and the idea of
commemoration exceeds the narrative-didactic domain and becomes part
of the experiential level. The important turn in understanding the
experience of the visitor that Neuman proposes gives rise to the question,
What is the memory that is brought to the immediate experience of the
viewer? I now proceed to explore the idea of what it might be from the
minimalist point of view.
The Psychology of the Viewer’s Bodily Experience
of the Negev Monument
Recent studies on Minimalism are discovering a great research potential in
the phenomenological body of the viewer and interpret it by means of
sociological, gender, psychological, and other approaches.67 In Fried’s
very early accounts, one clearly sees his intuitive interest in the viewer as a
psychological body. He wrote about Morris’s work that “the largeness of
the piece, in conjunction with its nonrelational, unitary character, distances
the beholder – not just physically but psychically.”68 Krauss in her seminal
book Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977) presented tentative
explorations regarding the psychological domain in minimalist
phenomenology. With regard to the earth-work sculpture by Michael
Heizer, she wrote:
Because of its enormous size, and its location, the only means of
experiencing this work is to be in it – to inhabit it the way we think of
ourselves as inhabiting the space of our bodies. Yet the image we have of
our own relation to our bodies is that we are centered inside them: we have
knowledge of ourselves that places us… at our own absolute core.69
Further on, Krauss points to the fact that in the extended categories of
sculpture the body of the viewer becomes the heart of the work, so that
66
Neuman, “The Dialectical Meaning of Form,” 847–46.
Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power”; Chave, “Minimalism and
Biography”
68
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 126.
69
Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 280.
67
Katya Evan
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one experiences the work as his/her own body.70 This claim lays a
significant foundation for psychological analysis. Subsequently, Fer, in her
analysis of minimalist practice, clearly distinguishes the psychologicalemotional body (internal body) of the viewer as distinct from his/her
physical and sensory body (external body). In light of that, it is clear that
the discussion of the phenomenology of the Negev Monument requires
dealing with the psychological body of the viewer. Even if the framework
of this chapter does not allow an in-depth survey of psychoanalytic
research and the concept of the “psychological” has to be used in its
general sense, it is important to point out certain mental aspects of the
Negev Monument by way of a primary probing that needs further research.
The psychological aspects of Karavan’s work still have not been
thoroughly discussed, although their indirect treatment in some studies can
serve as a springboard for a fruitful reading. Thus, in relation to a later
project by Karavan, Homage to the Prisoners of Gurs (1993–1994), Zertal
recognizes that by placing railroad tracks in the former internment camp in
Gurs,71 Karavan made the “final destination,” which was still unknown in
the late 1930s, tangible: “to retrieve from the sub-conscious and bring to
awareness the threatening repressed, the Freudian uncanny (das
Unheimliche), and to transport the final horror to its most remote and
distant point of origin, to the beginnings of the process at which
Auschwitz was still an unknown.”72 Zertal hints at the sense of a split
among the physical, the conscious, and the sensory, which the viewer feels
when being returned by the power of art to the past about which he/she
holds a complete knowledge of its horrible future, a future that, although it
is already a historical past, is still alien and incomprehensible.
The approximation to a psychoanalytic reading of the Negev
Monument can be seen in one of its interesting artistic affinities – the one
that connects it to Surrealism. One of the experiences that contributed to
Karavan’s work on the monument, according to the artist and the
researchers, was his visit to an exhibition of Giacometti in a private gallery
in Basel a short time before he started the project.73 Models of the
monument, as well as the small sculptures that Karavan made after it was
erected (Fig. 6), reveal an evident similarity of plan and form to
70
Krauss, “Sculpture in Expanded Field.”
Gurs internment camp became one of the early Nazi concentration camps.
72
Zertal, “Tikkun Olam,” 391.
73
Brockhaus, “Public Commissions,” 841; Dani Karavan, “The Monument to the
Palmach Negev Brigade, Be’er Sheva or How a Historical Event Is Transformed
into a Plastic Form,” in: Dani Karavan: Negev Monument catalogue (Tel Aviv:
Gordon Gallery, 2015), p. 45.
71
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Giacometti’s “sculpture – as board-game,”74 created in the spirit of
Surrealism. Both the small sculptures and the models for the Negev
Monument are characterized by the use of independent geometric objects
spread over a horizontal surface, the dramatic shadows cast by these
objects, and the integration of masses that are emptied and filled. All of
these characteristics also reflected in drawings by Miro and De Chirico.75
Figure 6
The dimensions of the monument also evoked a comparison with the
architecture of Le Corbusier, in particular with The Chapel of Notre Dame
du Haut in Ronchamp, based on the connection between architecture and
sculpture (according to Scheps) and the “figurative quality” of the church
(according to Neuman).76 The comparison to Le Corbusier also highlights
the surrealistic quality of the monument. In his article “The Ghost in the
Machine: Surrealism in the Work of Le Corbusier,” Alexander Gorlin
emphasizes the surrealistic aspects in the architecture of Le Corbusier as
existing in an “ambiguous relationship between interior and exterior
74
Term used by Krauss to describe Giacometti’s horizontal sculptures as Man,
Woman and Child (1931) and No More Play (1932). Krauss, Passages in Modern
Sculpture, 118.
75
Neuman, “The Dialectical Meaning of Form,” 848.
76
Scheps, “An Axis for the Future,” 106; Neuman, “The Dialectical Meaning of
Form,” 848.
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129
space.”77 Le Corbusier’s borrowing of internal elements for the exterior
and external elements for the interior (a reversal often observed in his
buildings) is seen by Gorlin as manifesting a surrealist tension that can
also be found in the paintings of De Chirico and Magritte. He writes:
“there is a strong contrast between the otherwise normal setting and an
image of disorder or chaos, the emptiness of either the void or wild nature.
There is also a feeling that human beings are absent from a place that they
had just occupied”78 Based on Gorlin’s descriptions, the surrealist
dimension of the Negev Monument has similar roots. The geographical
remoteness of the monument, its ostensibly abandoned, ruined buildings,
turned inside out, fragmentary, and casting shadows, create a surrealistic
experience, which, being sculptural-architectonic, has an increased
psychological impact on the viewer.
The treatment of the surrealistic qualities of the monument was never
extensive and never went beyond the accepted ideas about its influence on
the viewer. As Omer hastens to qualify: “Nevertheless, Karavan’s
assimilation of the natural landscape into man-made works is not imbued
with the sense of alienation and Surrealist quality.… Rather, sculptures
opens up into a more holistic experience, which unifies the dimensions of
time and space.”79 Yet, as I have been arguing throughout these pages,
there is no contradiction between what Omer calls the “natural, holistic,
unified” qualities of the monument and its other aspects, which produce
strangeness, detachment, and a surrealistic sensation. All these effects
coexist in the complex dialectical array, for which we need a deeper
understanding.
The discussion on surrealistic aspects of the monument leads us back
to my main concern – the minimalist reading of the Negev Monument. The
connection between Minimalism and Surrealism has not been sufficiently
researched. Yet, in spite of the dearth of studies, there is a noticeable
interest in this issue on the part of some key researchers, which suggests a
fascinating potential in this connection. As early as at the beginning of
studies on Minimalism, in a long footnote in “Art and Objecthood,” Fried
pays special attention to the closeness of these two movements:
The connection between spatial recession [the duration of the experience –
K. E.] and some such experience of temporality – almost as if the first were
the kind of natural metaphor for the second – is present in much surrealist
77
Alexander Gorlin, “The Ghost in the Machine: Surrealism in the Work of Le
Corbusier,” Perspecta 18 (1982): 51.
78
Ibid., 55.
79
Omer, “Early and Late in Dani Karavan’s Oeuvre,” 403.
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painting (e.g., De Chirico, Dali, Tanguy, Magritte…) Moreover,
temporality – manifested, for example, as expectation, dread, anxiety,
presentiment, memory, nostalgia, stasis – is often the explicit Surrealist
sensibility…which ought to be noted. Both employ imagery that is at once
holistic and, in a sense, fragmentary, incomplete; both resort to a similar
anthropomorphizing of objects or conglomeration of objects; both are
capable of achieving remarkable effects of “presence”; and both tend to
deploy and isolate objects and persons in situations.80
The connection to Surrealism that Fried describes in a language loaded
with mental and emotional terms lays a foundation for a turn in the
research on Minimalism – from a phenomenological reading proper to a
psychological reading that both grows out of and diverges from the
phenomenological. Such an affinity and turn can be found in the writings
of Hal Foster on the sculptures of Richard Serra:
[W]ith the torqued pieces the viewer appears to be inside and outside the
sculpture at once, so that the subject-turned inside-out is also a spaceturned-outside-in, as if it, too, were made a function of subject. In this way
Serra has opened up a psychological spatiality in his work, one of
evocative interiors often associated with Surrealism.81
The exteriors and interiors of the Negev Monument, which are
characterized by a similar discrepant surrealistic spatiality of separated
elements, merit a deeper psychological examination.
The analysis offered by Fer regarding Eva Hesse’s art can contribute to
the idea of an affinity between Minimalism and Surrealism and enhance
the understanding of the phenomenological and mental influence of
abstract sculpture that has a surrealist aspect. Fer examines the formal and
material qualities of Hesse’s works within the Minimalist framework and
focuses on their relation to “Surrealist desire to put the unconsciousness to
work in representation.”82 She recognizes the symbolic structure of the
loss in separation of surfaces and spaces, emptiness and obfuscation that
arise from the tangles of metal wire in Hesse’s works (as, e.g., in
Metronomic Irregularity, created in 1966).83 In a complex analysis that
80
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 145 (f. 19).
Foster, “The Art-Architecture Complex,” 159.
82
Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2000), 118. Fer refers to Lucy Lippard’s comment on Hesse’s relationship to
Surrealism: Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: New York University Press,
1976), 185.
83
For the work, see http://www.evahessedoc.com/#!metronomic-irregularity/
zoom/cowp/image_co7
81
Katya Evan
131
relies on psychoanalytic and gender approaches, Fer writes: “Hesse’s work
makes a drama of that loss, in that it is encountered by the viewer as a
fraught series of disconnection.”84 In other words, the formal lack in
Hesse’s works arises as a result of disassembling and isolation of the
materials and the components that are nevertheless contained in one
compositional array. By focusing on the internal (psychological) body as
opposed to the external (phenomenological) body, Fer continues to explore
Hesse’s artistic strategy and concludes that formal lack in her works is
translated through the bodily sensation of the viewer into a psychological
sensation that “something is lacking in the body.”85 Thus she clarifies the
sensation described by Fried, who says that a minimalist work “distances
the beholder – not just physically but psychically.”
Fer contends that the minimalist work creates a split between the literal
(physical) space in which the viewer is situated and the psychological
space that he/she senses: “[T]he external bodily orientation and the
‘internal body’ do not work in neat unison, but are split. Rather than
continuity, which suggests a kind of mirroring or empathetic
identification, the emphasis here is on the something lacking, some lacuna
in the body`s schema.”86 That is, a minimalist work, similarly to a
surrealist one, builds its composition in an almost absurd way on the
principle of disconnection and separation between its parts, and thus
creates a conflict between the bodily and the psychological. Fer defines the
space of the conflict and the gap between the physical and mental
sensations of the viewer as the space of loss; referring to the writings of
Julia Kristeva, she contends that “loss is the founding fact of psychic
life… Death cannot be represented in Freud’s unconsciousness, but
imprinted only ‘by spacing, blanks, discontinuities’ which amount to the
‘destruction of representation.’”87
The Negev Monument as a Site of Personal
Memory and Bereavement
Fragmentation and wholeness exist simultaneously in the Negev
Monument and explain its dialectical influence on the viewer. Physical
action, continuous and delayed in time and taking place in a discontinuous
space, filling up with unexpected masses and emptying out in irrational
84
Fer, On Abstract Art, 123.
Ibid.
86
Ibid., 128.
87
Ibid., 124–25.
85
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hollows, creates an unstable experience in which closeness and belonging
alternate with disquiet and apprehension. In the terms of Krauss and Fer,
we see in this monument a split between the bodily and the mental that
arises as a result of “destruction of representation” of a three-dimensional
environment that is experienced by the viewer as “his absolute core.”
Returning to the question of what is the memory that is brought to the
present experience of the viewer, I suggest that the answer seems to be
found in Fried’s binding of memory together with “expectation, dread,
anxiety, presentiment, nostalgia and stasis.” All of these describe memory
as something that is lacking in the whole and from now on is absent from
it, that is, a mental experience of loss, death, and bereavement. In the
Negev Monument, memory is embodied in discrepant surrealistic spatiality
of separated elements that reproduce “fragmented wholeness” and lacunae.
In retrospect, this is the memory that is brought to its tragic extreme in
Karavan’s late work, Passages: Homage to Walter Benjamin (Fig. 5). The
rusty and narrow corridor down to sea level represents nothing but the
enclosed void, while its sharp 33-meter-deep descent provides an intimate
journey, full of presentiment and anxiety as an expression of losing the
way and loss of life.
As an ideological mechanism, commemorative art strives to strengthen
the national identity and values, set apart and glorify death in battle, and
convey a historical-mythical content that derives from this death.
Alongside this, every monument also contains, folded within it, the private
mourning of individuals.88 However, the theme of personal bereavement
does not necessarily arise in connection with memorials of such
dimensions (nationally and spatially) as the Negev Monument. As I
pointed out above, the monument has always been discussed as raising
commemoration and memory to a mythical, heroic, and didactic degree,
while death and bereavement in their existential sense are weakened in it,
if not completely absent. Yet today, at a time when the individual is
strengthened and the collective is weakened, as Dimitropoulos explains,
national memorial sites often lead us to focus on the thought of the tragic
fate of the human being, and we seek in them a more personal experience
of memory and loss. It seems that the minimalist reading of the
phenomenological and psychological bind offered here helps us to
understand why, in contrast to other monuments from the same period, the
Negev Monument still remains relevant: some of its aspects manage to
exceed the collectivist ideals of the period and illustrate a subjective state
in which the viewer is exposed in a dim and momentary way to the
88
Almog, “Israeli War Memorials,” 206–208.
Katya Evan
133
experience of death and bereavement. These are effects that imply the
changes in the perception of commemoration that have taken place since
the 1960s and have led to the creation of memorials such as those of Lin,
Eisenmann, Arad, and others. These effects place the Negev Monument at
a decisive crossroads of artistic, social, and national paradigms, pointing at
the change in the Zeitgeist.
List of Figures
Figure 1. Dani Karavan, Monument to the Negev Brigade (Negev
Monument), 1963–1968, Beer Sheva, Israel.
Figure 2. Dani Karavan, Negev Monument (detail), 1963–1968, Beer
Sheva, Israel.
Figure 3. Dani Karavan, Negev Monument (detail), 1963–1968, Beer
Sheva, Israel.
Figure 4. Dani Karavan, Negev Monument (detail), 1963–1968, Beer
Sheva, Israel.
Figure 5. Dani Karavan, Passages: Homage to Walter Benjamin, 1990–
1994, Portbou, Spain.
Figure 6. Dani Karavan, Wave, Slant, Ball, 1973.
All images Courtesy of Studio Dani Karavan.