On Paradoxes of Representation, Illusion and Vanity

Catalogue essay for Gil Shachar: Hand Made
The Herzliya Museum of Art, Israel
March 2002

Close-up: hands carrying a body of a young girl wrapped up in a sheet; a chilling image of Piet?, a melting point and a highly powerful metaphor in the show. In Roland Barthes’ terms, this is its punctum, that unexpected “element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces” the viewer, as if puncturing a little hole in the public appearance of the image, conveying a sense of density which lends the image its unforgettable impression.

The Pieta piece is a marked exception in relation to the other works presented here, mainly due to the temptation to interpret it in the local (political) context. Most of the works were created in the past two years in Germany, the artist’s current place of residence. Perhaps it is because of the distance, perhaps due to despair, that in the present show the affinity to a specific place grows dimmer. Whereas in the past his work incorporated images (mainly objects) identified as quintessentially belonging to the Israeli locality (such as the typical Israeli army jacket, the military bed roll, the gun, or the philodendron leaves), in recent years the center of gravity has shifted to universal contents and more general questions pertaining to vision and seeing, viewer-artwork relationship, the work’s problematic status in the world, the passing of time, illusion and loss. The ‘political’ statement is now present in a minor, implicit form, to such an extent that all that remains of the harsh Israeli reality, it seems, is the khaki color on several of the hand-covering sleeves.

The man carrying the dead girl in his arms could be anyone carrying a body away from a violent scene, anywhere in the world. The work’s reading in the Israeli context (the hands of a soldier carrying a girl’s body in the age of the Intifada and terrorist attacks) falls into the trap of rash contextualization, which may carry with it into the local-political realm other works that are more ‘open’, more obscure in terms of the meanings they embody. This is an example of the oscillation awaiting anyone who attempts to extract meaning or ascribe interpretation to Shachar’s works. Despite their absolute exposure, despite the naked ‘realia’ they convey, despite the fact that everything in them is identified on the figurative level, they do not readily yield themselves; they turn their back on you, evade deciphering, resist an enlightening interpretation. They always try to hide something, to reveal and conceal at one and the same time.

In this sense, Shachar’s sculptures, albeit cast from live bodies or real objects, are autonomous representations. They have no distinct relation to an approximate reality outside themselves, just as they have no affinity to a specific space in which they are supposed to exist, as it were. They avoid telling a story or saying something unequivocal about the world. It is more tempting to regard them as a line in a poem; as conducting feelings, generating an atmosphere, isolating individual moments.

“Everything I do in my art pertains to the body. My sculptures aspire to be a body, to be body-like.” This simple, albeit obscure statement made by Shachar encapsulates the essence of the entire paradox, which I perceive as a key principle in his work; a paradox on whose twists and turns I would like to shed light in this text.

Two portraits (Birgit, David), two backs (male and female), one Pieta, a figure rolled up in a carpet, a striped shirt, and hands in various postures holding miscellaneous objects, make up the current show. It is easy to start with the portraits due to their clear affinity to the traditional genre of portrait paintings and sculptures in the history of art, a genre sustained throughout history via official commission circumstances between the ruler or some other high-ranking official and the artist. For the most part, portrait paintings celebrated the commissioner’s status and authority. Only rarely did the artist infuse irony into the rendered figures or mock their vanity. In order to create a distance between the viewer and the portrait’s subject painters used to mask the unique facial features behind a material wealth of textures and volumes of fabrics and textiles.

In Shachar’s case there is nothing left of the “commissioner’s arrogance.” His closed-eye portrait sculptures, comprising a head and half of the upper body (a cut torso) transmit humility, compassion and introversion. There is not even an inkling of showiness about them. They are not wrapped in shells of material wealth (David is naked, Birgit in an undershirt). David and Birgit – with pensive, meditative expressions, are not represented by visual metaphors of power, but are rather mounted just as they are. Paragons of silence, contemplation and melancholy. Their unique features are fully exposed, faithfully and accurately, clear and transparent, touchable, painfully naturalistic. Their personality is present; there is spiritual harmony between them. They look like a couple.

The eye-shutting in these portraits is indeed marked by the power of avoidance, but not in order to create a distance. As in earlier sculptures where Shachar sealed the faces by means of masks, and like the back-turning in his back sculptures, the eye-shutting serves him to hide, divide, evade a direct gaze, to remain anonymous. The eye-shutting prevents the viewer from penetrating into the figures’ ‘inner world’. It is also the source of disconcert. There is a combination of tranquility and asceticism, passive yielding and a threatening laxness that brings to mind death masks. This sense is particularly conspicuous in another portrait attached to the wall, in the image of the balloon blower. The laxity of the face (the artist’s face?) is incongruent with the physical effort required in order to inflate a balloon. It is precisely this lack of effort to appear real that elicits the sense of discontent here. In this gap between the image and reality lies yet another paradox to which I will soon return.

In terms of the commission circumstances, things are the other way around: this time it is the artist who commissions his portrait subjects, asking for their permission to cast their bodies. Neither rulers nor men of power, these are usually family members or friends from his immediate milieu, people whose unique features allow him to convey a universal expression. Despite this fundamental difference, the portrait’s significance has remained the same as it was throughout art history: to perpetuate a given moment, knowing that all power is short-lived and ”all is vanity” (vanitas). The portrait genre is an exemplary manifestation of “the revolt against evanescence and oblivion […] Representation is akin to the traces of memory, attesting to an absence.” This affinity between the portrait genre and the notion of vanitas is crucial to the understanding of Shachar’s sculptures, as I shall attempt to show. For it is in this very concept that the paradox of representation is embodied – the yearning to present and perpetuate the absent, the transitory, to fixate the fleeting in matter.

The most outstanding motif in the current exhibition is the hand: a hand with elongated fingers, a male hand with female qualities. At times, the wrist is presented, at others – the entire arm with the shoulder, and at yet other times – a pair of hands. Always in a gesture, always showing something to the viewer, or in different states of giving: a hand offering or waving a white cloth; a hand holding a small mirror; two concave palms holding water; a hand holding an orange balloon; the hands of a (married) man in a light blue manly shirt holding a large mirror; a muscular hand in a green T-shirt holding under its armpit a painted wooden board that looks like an abstract in a dark crimson shade; a pair of hands wearing white gloves holding a green board; hands in khaki sleeves carrying the body of a young girl wrapped up in a bed sheet; a hand offering a ring; and a fisted hand dripping blood.

It is not always clear whether the hand is there because it is the very carrier or vehicle of the image, or whether it functions as a hanger or a pedestal presenting to us some object. It is also hard to pinpoint a common denominator between the various actions performed by the hands, just as it is impossible to compose some sort of a story from this sequence of actions, for each hand has its own business: there are hands of sanctity and hands of profanity. On one hand, there is a hand with a blown up balloon, or a hand offering a white cloth, and on the other – a hand proposing marriage, or a wounded, bleeding hand. Or a different kind of opposition: a pair of hands shifting a painting from place to place, in contrast to another pair of hands retrieving a body. It is an anthology of busy hands, devoid of a hierarchical distinction between a highly valued, esteemed act and a routine, casual one.

The hand gestures have a symbolic-archetypal meaning in culture: the hand postures relate to prayer, plea, giving and lamentation, just as they do to production. They are the most productive of all bodily organs; they are associated with diligence, action, carrying, but most of all, they are linked to touch. In this respect, creating sculptures of hands is like painting eyes. If the eye represents vision, optics, then the hand stands for the haptic sense, touch. The hands relate to texture, to surface, to physical perception of volume. They are vital to the act of creation in general, and to processes of casting and sculpting in particular. While Shachar’s earlier works emphasized the senses of sight and hearing (ear, eyes), the body of works from recent years focuses on the sense of touch.

What kind of a body perception emerges from the works? Here lies yet another paradox: ostensibly this is an amputated body, deconstructed into its organs, but in fact there is no preoccupation with prostheses or amputation here (as emerges from Robert Gober’s works, for example). Moreover, even if the organ is removed, it is perceived by the viewer as a tight monolithic image. “I don’t need the entire body to convey a specific image; the hand is sufficient,” Shachar remarks. Nevertheless, there is something disconcerting about partial body representations, especially in a work such as the hand that supports a bleeding arm. It seems to me that it is precisely the humanness of the body that is so chilling. This is not a bionic, nor a cyborgean body; it is a human body, too human, and when it is finally a whole body, it is a dead body, covered with a sheet or rolled up in a rug.

Camouflage, disguise, concealment, illusion, and covering are also characteristic of the technique, whose underlying paradox is essential to the works’ strategy (“the medium is the message”). Almost all of them are cast from wax and epoxy. The objects and body parts look ‘real’, but in fact, they are ‘fake’, a perfect imitation. A cast is usually intended to replicate, to create a set of identical objects (copies). In Shachar’s case, each cast is a one-off piece – singular, original, one-of-a-kind. A different mold for each sculpture. In other words: on one hand, defying “the aura of authenticity”, while on the other – sanctifying the value of authenticity and originality within the realm of reproduction.

The attempt to anchor Shachar’s work in the tradition of art history, thus, confronts yet another paradox. On one hand, a leaning towards the so-called “classics”; his greatest loves are Jan Vermeer, Fra Angelico, early Flemish painting (mainly van der Weyden and van Eyck). His sculpture too, is rooted in a seemingly classicist sculptural tradition: it is figurative, exhibiting meticulous finish, attention to detail, an illusion of representation, a yearning for the ‘truth’. On the other hand, an awareness of the failure of mediation, the impossibility of representation, the multiplicity of meanings, and the internal contradictions – all these render his work strikingly contemporary.

The handiwork, the pedantic realistic coloring that follows the casting stage, draws the sculptural practice nearer to painting, and this is another crucial matter for Shachar. This is especially evident in the back works – one bearing the traces of cupping glasses (1999), while the other’s shoulder blade – a cherry tattoo (2001). Painting functions here as an ornament, a seductive, erotic element on the surface of a sculpted body.

This is the place to note that it was a lack of faith in painting that led Shachar to the medium of sculpture. His deliberations as a nascent painter revolved around questions pertaining to that critical moment of ‘invention’, those arbitrary decisions involving the creation of something ex nihilo. For instance, how does one determine the size of the surface, the shape, the color, and why invent new forms at all, as this is, in itself, a form of hubris. “Painting is fiction,” Shachar maintains. “It is arbitrary and artificial, for there is no such thing as painting in the world,” let alone ‘abstract’ painting. The work depicting an arm carrying a reddish-brown board under its armpit may be read as a homage, or possibly as an allusion made by Shachar to the genre of abstract painting, which for him is a totally obscure genre, the epitome of arbitrariness.

With the transition to sculpture, new problems arose: how does one determine the relations between sculpture and space, how do you know which scale to use, and when do you know it is ‘right’. In order to work around the obstacle of arbitrariness, he turned to copying from reality. The ‘truth’ is found in existent things, or as Jasper Johns put it, in things that the eye is already familiar with. The size, shape, theme, scale, sculpture-space relations – is all there; there is no need to invent anything, just stick to the ‘truth’. His interest in sculpture, thus, does not stem from a formalistic study, but rather from the desire to translate, realize, faithfully copy images from ‘life’ into ‘art’. Sculpture through casting was, for him, the perfect technical solution. Scale is forever ‘life-size’ – the safest point of departure, an anchor to reality.

The question of faithfulness to the ‘truth’, the realistic appearance, the sculptures’ persuasiveness and deception vis-?-vis their life-like quality, alongside the illusion of realism, have indeed characterized Shachar’s sculpting career from its inception. Already back in 1991 he introduced the image of Pinocchio with an apple placed on his growing nose. Two years later he cast the rear side of a canvas stretched on a frame, and in 1994 he cast a mirror covered in cloth. This sculptural move was in itself a translation of an illusory painterly tradition dubbed trompe-l’oeil (French: ‘deceives the eye’). But in Shachar’s case the paradox became even more complex: while in painting the illusion is made by creating an effect of volume, whereby the real object (usually a piece of paper, musical notes, a feather) appears to be really, physically there on the canvas, in these sculptures the object is indeed physically present in the space, yet it is not real. The canvas looks like a canvas, but it is not a canvas; the piece of cloth placed on the mirror resembles a cloth on a mirror, but it is not the thing itself; the philodendron leaf (1994) appears like a real leaf, yet is ‘revealed’ to be a sculpture, fiction, a replica. The same applies to later works: the blown up balloon (2001) looks like a real balloon, but it is not; similarly, a closer look reveals that the hairs depicted on David’s torso are actually painted on. Over the years, the gap between the visible and its identification has become the very core of the works. What we see is but an illusion, an envelope, an empty cast.

Beyond the technical paradox, the tradition of trompe-l’oeil painting is also significant on the level of content. Philosophical questions concerning the relativity of the truth have been associated throughout the history of art with the fallacy and relativity of the fleeting reality, with the desire for representation, with vanitas and human hubris. The issue of ‘truth’ belongs in Classic Platonic thought. The desire to eliminate that which separates us from the things in the world, the question of mimesis and mimicry – all these postulate that there is no language in the world that can capture the idea and offer an imitation in its place. Man can but mediate, and culture is but a sequence of mediations, Sisyphean attempts to translate ‘nature’ into ‘culture’.

Hubris is inherent, inter alia, in the illusion that through mediation one can stop time. This is the very core of vanitas. Therefore, depictions of ‘reclining women’ (Venus) who expose their nude bodies while looking in the mirror, were interpreted according to the Christian moral code as an attempt to reaffirm their fading beauty, and as a moral warning against hubris and vanity. This is why the mirror, alongside the skull, material richness and the snuffed candle in ‘still life’ paintings were quintessential signifiers of the insignificance and transitory nature of earthly life. The mirror was also associated with self-consciousness and introspection, often symbolizing arts’ capacity, or lack thereof, to faithfully reflect the world. In Shachar’s works, the mirror, as aforesaid, appeared covered in cloth already in 1994, whereas here it appears twice, once placed within a palm, and once again – supported by a pair of hands. The desire to stop the flow of time, if only for a split second, to interfere with the natural law of disintegration is manifested in the smallest details: in the randomality of the fabric folds, in the recently blown up balloon, in the frozen facial expression, in the splinter of a smile, even in the portraits’ bristles.

However, the context of vanitas most pertinent to Shachar’s work is death, lamentation, and the sense of loss and distress cumulating while observing the current body of works. In his earlier pieces this context was indirectly implied through covering and concealment, as in the reversed canvases and the covered mirror (traditional Jewish mourning customs), and occasionally in more explicit images, such as the figure rolled up in the carpet (1998), the figure sentenced to death whose face is covered with a sack (1997), and the images of weaponry (1993). In the present show this dimension seems to have been enhanced, culminating in the horrifying image of the body wrapped up in a sheet.

Death becomes more violent, more aggressive, more brutal. This sense is triggered by works such as the hand with the gun, the bleeding fist, the hand holding a wounded arm with signs of congealed blood, and even the back with the black circles that looks as though it has been stricken with some terrible disease. This is not natural death. There are visible signs of murder, rape, injury and disease. Similarly, the striped shirt emerges as a trace of violence, whereas the image of the hands offering water, alongside the offering of the white cloth, are grasped as images of compassion and aid. In such a reading the images of the colorful balloons, the mirrors, the paintings carried under the armpit, and even the wedding ring which for a moment seemed like a meager promise for happiness – all lose their innocence and lightness.

The attempt to propose interpretation for Shachar’s works is obstructed, time and again, by the mechanisms of deception and refusal and by the barriers of elusiveness generated by the works. As in an endeavor to reconstruct a dream, to capture a flash of thought, a fragment of a daydream or a tail of memory, so the meaning briefly bursts forth, then fades and vanishes. What seems at first sight like a routine, a mundane action, a simple intimate moment, a familiar innocent act, turns out to be a multi-faceted, misleading image, teeming with meanings and paradoxes.

The power of the works thus lies in their refusal, in their indifference. They offer themselves for intimate observation, yet lay traps of ambiguity with regard to the contexts they generate in relation to the history of art, in fact – in relation to artistic practice itself as an act of creation, reproduction or imitation, and in relation to the artwork’s fragile place in the world. The introspection is thus reflected not only from the closed eyes of the portraits. It is assimilated in every detail, every surface and texture, and is coupled with the sadness, the sense of loss, and the abstract thought emanating from the works straight into the viewer’s consciousness.

Translation: Daria Kassovsky