EMEK-ON THE ROAD TO KFAR YEHOSHUA

Mordechai Omer

In the late 1970s I began teaching Art History at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem.[1] The first two courses I taught were "Artists of the New York School and their Viewpoint on Suffering" and "Marcel Duchamp and his Influence on Conceptual Art"; both courses were attended by Elie Shamir, an absorbed, inquiring student for whom, one may generally say, the history of art was an inalienable part of paving his way as an artist. In 1978, while still a student at Bezalel, and again in 1995, he underwent a crisis of faith, for which the history of art was both a cure and a starting point for new directions to justify artistic work. The opening paragraph of Baudrillard's essay on "The Aesthetic Illusion" deals with a subject that illustrates Shamir's dilemmas as an artist: "If you really think about it, what is it that modern artists do? Like the Renaissance artists who thought they were painting religious pictures but in fact were making works of art, are our modern artists, who think they are making works of art, actually doing something else? Are the objects they produce not perhaps something else entirely? Like fetish objects, for example? – Demystified fetishes, though, purely decorative objects for secular use (Roger Caillois might say 'hyperbolic ornaments'). Objects of superstition in the literal sense that they no longer depend upon the sublime nature of art and no longer correspond to a profound belief in art, yet continue nevertheless to perpetuate the idea, the superstition of art in all its forms. Fetishes, therefore, of the same inspiration as sexual fetishism, which is itself sexually neutral: by making its object a fetish, it simultaneously denies the reality of sex and of sexual pleasure. It does not believe in sex: it believes only in the idea of sex (which in itself is, of course, asexual). In the same fashion, we no longer believe in art, but only in the idea of art (which in itself, of course, has nothing aesthetic about it)".[2]

In late 1970s Bezalel, in view of the teaching methods of such teachers as Yehezkel Yardeni and his assistant Gabriel Klasmer, or the recently arrived teacher Zvi Goldstein, Elie Shamir lost his faith in the perceptual component of artistic work and its ability to lead to what Baudrillard defines as "a radical illusion, of secret and seduction, an illusion of magic". Baudrillard: "It is not easy to avoid succumbing to the nostalgic charm of painting, and to remain posed on this thin line that has less to do with aesthetics than with lures, heir to a ritual tradition that has never really mingled with the tradition of painting – of trompe l'oeil. It is a dimension that links back up, beyond the aesthetic illusion, with a far more fundamental form of illusion that I shall call 'anthropological' – meaning that generic function of the world and its apparition, by virtue of which the world appears to us long before it has taken on meaning, long before it is interpreted or represented, long before becoming real, which it only became rather late, and rather ephemerally at that. Not the negative, superstitious illusion of another world, but the positive illusion of this world, of the world's operatic stage, the world's symbolic operation, the vital illusion of appearances  that Nietzsche talks about – illusion as primitive stage, far older, far more fundamental than the aesthetic stage".[3]

Shamir's earlier works, e.g. The Judgment of Paris, 1987 (Collection Tel Aviv Museum of Art) or the triptych John the Baptist, 1991, clearly illustrate his almost desperate attempt to "return painting to the service of the mind", as advocated by Marcel Duchamp, while keeping faith in the suggestive power of paint brush application and the retinal dimension – the following eye. In the triptych John the Baptist Shamir unites and divides three kinds of motifs, each anchored in a different world, with the only element uniting them being the artist's hand. The central part of the painting incorporates a motif from Caravaggio – the head of John the Baptist; in the right-hand part is a photograph of Marcel Duchamp's Fresh Widow, one of the Semi-Readymades he created in 1920. Originally the work is "a miniature French window, 77.5x45, painted light green. The panes of glass are covered with black leather. The window is fixed onto a base […] bearing the inscription FRESH WIDOW COPYRIGHT ROSE SELAVY 1920". This Semi-Readymade may be considered a tridimensional pun (Fresh Widow being a pun of French Window), for it is not limited to the work's title but branches out to the plastic realm: the leather covers on the panes force the viewer to believe the room is dark. The work's symbolism is further articulated in the feminine signature, Rose Sélavy, which appears here for the first time.[4] The triptych's left-hand part is executed with fixer on photography paper in a darkroom, and evokes an almost graphic illustration of a glowing television box (see Figure).

Since leaving his studies at Bezalel, Elie Shamir has come a long way, closer to the artistic perceptions of Israeli artists such as Avigdor Arikha or Israel Hershberg. At the same time, one can discern in the impressive panoramic landscape paintings of the fields of the valley and Kfar Yehoshua the decisive belief that 21st century painting is in need of both conceptual thought and painterly illusion. The way from Piero della Francesca's Nativity at the National Gallery in London, to the painting which seeks to utter a Lullaby for the Valley, 2008, necessitates an escape from the "representative form" and being carried away with "the specters of metamorphoses" – a process which Shamir is conscious of and is willing to be assimilated into.[5]

[1] I taught Art History at Bezalel on a regular basis, from November 1977 to July 1994 – the year I was appointed Director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Regretfully, my name is absent from the list of the institute's teachers in the jubilee volume Bezalel 100, 2006, for reason best known to that book's editors.

[2] Jean Baudrillard, "The Aesthetic Illusion", Parkett 37 (September 1993), pp. 13-15, translated from the French by Stephen Saratarelli.

[3] Ibid., p. 15.

[4] Mordechai Omer, Marcel Duchamp: To and From The Large Glass, exhibition catalogue; curators: Arturo Schwarz and Mordechai Omer, The Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, Tel Aviv University, 1994, pp. 95-96.

[5] These are concepts dealt with by Baudrillard, see supra, note 2. For the painting Lullaby for the Valley see Elie Shamir's essay in this catalogue.