DOS AND DONTS: THE ART OF AMNON BEN-AMI
Every composer of the better sort carries within himself a canon of the forbidden, the self-forbidding...What has become false, worn out cliché, the canon decides. -- Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus
In a recent issue of this publication I placed the work of Etti Abergel in the context of what I called “furniturization.” I am hesitant to define this word in more than the most general terms, but what I am referring to is a degree of intimacy and of localization achieved by the use of objects taken more or less precisely from the world around us. Some Israeli artists, I felt, caught between an abstraction not congenial to the national character and a too-literal depictiveness, found in “furniturization” a natural solution – or at least a stop-gap one -- to this dilemma. Another, quite different, example of the expedient I am trying to describe can be located in the work of Amnon Ben-Ami, an artist, it seems to me, of exceptional
originality.
Sometime around 1990, close to his brilliant one-person exhibition at the Janco-Dada Museum in Ein Hod, Ben-Ami encountered a blind-man’s walking stick. He was taken, he said, with its formal properties, its colors, its satisfying length. So excellent an object for its purposes, he explained, “made a lot of decisions” that he would prefer to have made for him, rather than arbitrarily resolving for himself. At last count, the stick had spun seventeen works out of the artist, the largest series he had ever made. As best as he can recall, the series consisted of six paintings on canvas, one on satin, two works in wax, five drawings on paper and four reliefs.
Ben-Ami recalls traveling from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv to buy a blind-man’s stick and promptly finding himself in a quagmire of decision-making. New or used? Wood or metal? Wrist-strap or no wrist-strap? And, most disconcerting of all, curved handle or no curved handle? The choice instantly produced the first piece, Alpha, the centerpiece of a three-part work exploring the plain properties of a blind-man’s stick. In Alpha the artist placed an ordinary non-handled stick on the wall and then selected a curved-handled cane, and painted it over, following the colors of a blind-man’s stick, but in reverse order. Hung on the studio wall the stick did not, like an obedient non-handled stick, hang perfectly straight, but hooked itself into a curve. The title, Alpha, corresponds to the angle between the strict verticality of the handle-less stick and the deviation from verticality created by the nature of a curved handle hung on a nail. Mi’po l’sham, hung exactly the length of the blind-man’s stick to the left of Alpha, is the simplest expression of the controlling order: the stick, in relief, bisects a square itself derived from the length of the stick. At the same distance to the right is a painting of the stick “unrolled,” so to speak, and flattened. The order of the colors is declared as simply and smartly as a flag.
The “subject” of a blind-man’s stick is obviously open to a variety of interpretations – religious, political, esthetic – and there is no doubt that these will sooner or later find critical expression. What I would prefer here, however, is to pause and take account of the dos and donts controlling the triptych. The most important, of course, is the casual rejection of choice, the open delight in not having to make “a lot of decisions.” Implied here is the elevation of even the simplest fact of the real world above the choices made by the artistic self, the felt uneasiness with the freedom of art to arrange the world as it pleases, the wish to accept the order of the thing itself. Once I asked Ben-Ami what Israeli artists meant when they used the expression “conceptual art.” The artist admitted freely and with some amusement that he hadn’t the slightest idea. But it is possible that his work is “conceptual” in that it declares plainly that, for reasons of which he may not even be aware, he is uncomfortable in parading his artistic gifts. Or, put another way, art that does not look like art is a do, and art, to the extent it displays itself as art has become a don’t. The canon decides.
A series of extremely satisfying paintings, reliefs and three-dimensional works followed the seminal Alpha triptych. The completed series constituted a set of strict variations on the balanced, four-color chord. The centered slim gray line in all of them somehow evokes the roundness of the original form and the logic of this hint finally culminates in a work that takes the painting off the wall (but not quite onto the floor) by rolling it onto itself so that the two ends meet. It is the walking stick, but furniturized.
Ben-Ami’s sculptural work (he is not alone among better Israeli artists here) emanates an aura of dread that is not easy to explain because it is so non-specific. It is a feeling of trepidation, an uneasy apprehension of some gruesome or tragic memory or experience that we do not wish to confront or learn more about but which we nevertheless sense we have a kind of duty to experience, an obligation which compels us to contemplation while another part of our experience calls us away as if crying out, “I don’t want to know about this!” At such moments we are like the wedding guest in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who “sat on a stone: he could not choose but hear.” In the face of perturbation so intense we quite sensibly reason that a specific event, anecdote or meaning to which we could relate the work would relieve something of the generalized anxiety we find ourselves in the grip of. Often enough, such an “explanation” is useless, or trivial, or most frequently describes only the origins or beginnings of a work as the artist understands it. And, since the sources, or origins of a work are so distant from its effect we are often left simply
perplexed when we discover, or learn of, them.*
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
* All this has been expressed with exquisite precision in Cavafy’s Their Beginning, and since readers deserve a reward around now, I reproduce it in full:
The fulfillment of their deviant sensual delight
is done. They rose from the mattress
and they dress hurriedly without speaking.
They leave the house separately, furtively, and as
they walk somewhat uneasily on the street, it seems
as if they suspect that something about them betrays
into what kind of bed they fell a little while back.
But how the life of the artist has gained.
Tomorrow, the next day, years later, the vigorous verses
will be composed that had their beginning here.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Let us take, as an example, Ben-Ami’s peculiar work, the Nauman-like Two-Person Biting Device. First glance gives us an impression of a functional object, or part of one (coathanger? no.) inert, not at the moment in use. We are deflected away from seeing it immediately as a work of sculpture by its materials and by its rough-and-ready manufacture. Lengths of rubber hose, hardware-store pipe of various diameter, all joined without fussiness. The entire art object draws us away from the criteria we bring to sculpture. And, as we consider this, an emanation of the unpleasant begins to rise, like an odor. For reasons impossible for criticism to articulate, but which lie at the very heart of the experience of art, sensations of a peculiar order take possession of us; we are uneasy, we are disturbed, we feel a vague anxiety; we find ourselves trying to keep certain “scenarios” from our minds: institutions, torture, prisons, helplessness. We cannot account for any of this in words and most artists rarely attempt to. (“Did you see that piece of Amnon’s? Really scary”).
Like many of Ben-Ami’s pieces (and Bruce Nauman’s, and Yehudit Sasportas’s and Etti Abergel’s) the work’s origins are so remote and unexpected that it is simply impossible to know its “beginning” without being told, and when we are told, we marvel at how slight is the connection between what we have experienced standing before the work and the interesting but surprisingly unhelpful anecdote we are told. In the case of Two-Person Biting Device, for example, it appears that it is an advisory precautionary measure in administering shock therapy, to provide patients with something to bite hard upon as the convulsive jolt hits them. Ben-Ami’s piece is thoughtfully “designed” for a couple, receiving the shock simultaneously .
Because I had known many sculptors who, when they could finally afford it, had their work redone in more “fitting” materials, I wrote to Ben-Ami asking, if he had his way, would Two Person Biting Device be done in “better” materials? Here is part of his answer:
No, I would like it to be as it is. The rubber has to be rubber...the plastic pipes (gray and transparent) are less important as their function is to raise the rubber into space. It is as if the pipes are the base and the rubber is the art. (The whole thing for me is a sculpture, but there are two functionally different parts to it.)...This work is complete for me...I like the work’s simple (only what I need), immediate and improvised look. I like its colors. I like the dimensions of its different parts (which all begin from the dimensions of an actual mouth).
There is much for criticism to chew on in this. Some of the dos and donts hinted at in the Alpha triptych reveal themselves more openly and, again, the most esthetically and culturally puzzling is the don’t: the piece must look as much not like art as possible. And, as much as possible, some external determinant – the size of a human mouth – should replace decisions ordinarily left to the temperament of the artist. It is as if everything determined by “art,” “talent,” giftedness” is not merely suspect but undermines conviction, throws sincerity into question. Why this should be so strikes me as the most difficult question facing serious art criticism today.*Another do that gets some amplification in Ben-Ami’s note is his interest in non-art materials. Indeed, the material is often the first aspect of a work to surprise a viewer. Ben-Ami seems on a perpetual search for the most unlikely materials. He shops the shuk for fabrics, uses satin as canvas, uses ephemeral pieces of cellophane for recent works referring to sleeping bags or autobuses, uses wax to create the eerie aura of Kupah. The criterion seems to be: the less like an art material, the better. -________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
*I am also convinced that not only the visual arts find themselves so at odds with what seems their very essence. Poetry, for example, too, shies away from the “poetic” as we have traditionally known it. Take the opening lines of Philip Larkin’s This Be The Verse:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
Why does this strike home instantly as the beginning of a poem that will tell the truth, and tell it without poetry’s tired tricks of irony, ambiguity, elevated language? It is not that vulgar or common language has become poetic, but that the poetic has come to prefer the common and the vulgar, come to trust it more. And again, why this should be true is as much a problem for literary criticism as for art criticism.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
When one looks at Ben-Ami’s drawings (he calls them “papers”, as if the very word “drawing” was
somehow contaminated) one finds “art” only in the most hidden places: in placement, measurement, art references so distant and arcane that even a specialist might miss them(such as the kiss to Malevich in Fig. 6). On the surface, one sees line and shape with links to the style of awkward children, to graffiti, to the less elegant comic strips – in short, methods of depiction as far from traditional art as the word “fuck” is from traditional poetic diction.
Here, certainly, Ben-Ami is not alone. Many artists of the post-modern generation everywhere in the world seem to be cobbling together an esthetic based on a similar set of dos and donts. What distinguishes Ben-Ami, and, to my mind, all the better post-modern Israeli artists, is the inevitable, unwished-for and often unanticipated evocation of the Jewish tzitter in the best of their work. They are, in a sense, as condemned to bear their tale as the Ancient Mariner himself. This incipient sense of dread is what gives its specific nature to much of better Israeli art, especially three-dimensional art. It is too extreme a statement by far to say that only here can a work like Ben-Ami’s Kupah happen, but it is not too extreme, I feel, to say that only here can the artist take it for granted that any viewer, chosen at random, will have already begun to experience that ominous and sinister shudder which inexplicably inhabits so innocent an object in the world as a mere ticket-window.
Many readers have by now concluded that the binding convention of which I speak, the shared experience that makes of artist and viewer a community, is the Holocaust. While I do not wish in any way to diminish the manner in which the Holocaust has linked us as a people, I actually have in mind a broader, more inclusive “shared experience”, what could be called our “national tragedy.” “If a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classical tragedies,” wrote Leopold Zunz, “what shall we say to a national tragedy...in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?” Well, perhaps one of the things we can say is that such a national tragedy creates a complex of shared conventions, spoken and unspoken, conscious and not conscious on which all the arts draw freely, and which constitute, for that nation, its unifying culture. I suppose what I am suggesting is this: every artist elsewhere in the world draws strength from his relation to a tradition of art. The Israeli artist, by contrast, draws strength from his relation to a tradition of history. This tradition of history is what the Israeli public shares with its artists, and, in ways I am simply unable to pursue more completely, that tradition inflects both the way in which an artist paints a cow and the way in which the viewer looks at that painting of a cow. Some years ago the Israeli artist Eli Schwadron found himself, mostly influenced by certain Picassos, painting a series of bulls and of pigs. “Oh, I get it,” said a visitor, “kosher and not kosher!” Schwadron told me he was astonished, not because the connection had been made by the visitor, but because it had not been made by himself.
--Philip Leider .
Every composer of the better sort carries within himself a canon of the forbidden, the self-forbidding...What has become false, worn out cliché, the canon decides. -- Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus
In a recent issue of this publication I placed the work of Etti Abergel in the context of what I called “furniturization.” I am hesitant to define this word in more than the most general terms, but what I am referring to is a degree of intimacy and of localization achieved by the use of objects taken more or less precisely from the world around us. Some Israeli artists, I felt, caught between an abstraction not congenial to the national character and a too-literal depictiveness, found in “furniturization” a natural solution – or at least a stop-gap one -- to this dilemma. Another, quite different, example of the expedient I am trying to describe can be located in the work of Amnon Ben-Ami, an artist, it seems to me, of exceptional
originality.
Sometime around 1990, close to his brilliant one-person exhibition at the Janco-Dada Museum in Ein Hod, Ben-Ami encountered a blind-man’s walking stick. He was taken, he said, with its formal properties, its colors, its satisfying length. So excellent an object for its purposes, he explained, “made a lot of decisions” that he would prefer to have made for him, rather than arbitrarily resolving for himself. At last count, the stick had spun seventeen works out of the artist, the largest series he had ever made. As best as he can recall, the series consisted of six paintings on canvas, one on satin, two works in wax, five drawings on paper and four reliefs.
Ben-Ami recalls traveling from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv to buy a blind-man’s stick and promptly finding himself in a quagmire of decision-making. New or used? Wood or metal? Wrist-strap or no wrist-strap? And, most disconcerting of all, curved handle or no curved handle? The choice instantly produced the first piece, Alpha, the centerpiece of a three-part work exploring the plain properties of a blind-man’s stick. In Alpha the artist placed an ordinary non-handled stick on the wall and then selected a curved-handled cane, and painted it over, following the colors of a blind-man’s stick, but in reverse order. Hung on the studio wall the stick did not, like an obedient non-handled stick, hang perfectly straight, but hooked itself into a curve. The title, Alpha, corresponds to the angle between the strict verticality of the handle-less stick and the deviation from verticality created by the nature of a curved handle hung on a nail. Mi’po l’sham, hung exactly the length of the blind-man’s stick to the left of Alpha, is the simplest expression of the controlling order: the stick, in relief, bisects a square itself derived from the length of the stick. At the same distance to the right is a painting of the stick “unrolled,” so to speak, and flattened. The order of the colors is declared as simply and smartly as a flag.
The “subject” of a blind-man’s stick is obviously open to a variety of interpretations – religious, political, esthetic – and there is no doubt that these will sooner or later find critical expression. What I would prefer here, however, is to pause and take account of the dos and donts controlling the triptych. The most important, of course, is the casual rejection of choice, the open delight in not having to make “a lot of decisions.” Implied here is the elevation of even the simplest fact of the real world above the choices made by the artistic self, the felt uneasiness with the freedom of art to arrange the world as it pleases, the wish to accept the order of the thing itself. Once I asked Ben-Ami what Israeli artists meant when they used the expression “conceptual art.” The artist admitted freely and with some amusement that he hadn’t the slightest idea. But it is possible that his work is “conceptual” in that it declares plainly that, for reasons of which he may not even be aware, he is uncomfortable in parading his artistic gifts. Or, put another way, art that does not look like art is a do, and art, to the extent it displays itself as art has become a don’t. The canon decides.
A series of extremely satisfying paintings, reliefs and three-dimensional works followed the seminal Alpha triptych. The completed series constituted a set of strict variations on the balanced, four-color chord. The centered slim gray line in all of them somehow evokes the roundness of the original form and the logic of this hint finally culminates in a work that takes the painting off the wall (but not quite onto the floor) by rolling it onto itself so that the two ends meet. It is the walking stick, but furniturized.
Ben-Ami’s sculptural work (he is not alone among better Israeli artists here) emanates an aura of dread that is not easy to explain because it is so non-specific. It is a feeling of trepidation, an uneasy apprehension of some gruesome or tragic memory or experience that we do not wish to confront or learn more about but which we nevertheless sense we have a kind of duty to experience, an obligation which compels us to contemplation while another part of our experience calls us away as if crying out, “I don’t want to know about this!” At such moments we are like the wedding guest in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who “sat on a stone: he could not choose but hear.” In the face of perturbation so intense we quite sensibly reason that a specific event, anecdote or meaning to which we could relate the work would relieve something of the generalized anxiety we find ourselves in the grip of. Often enough, such an “explanation” is useless, or trivial, or most frequently describes only the origins or beginnings of a work as the artist understands it. And, since the sources, or origins of a work are so distant from its effect we are often left simply
perplexed when we discover, or learn of, them.*
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
* All this has been expressed with exquisite precision in Cavafy’s Their Beginning, and since readers deserve a reward around now, I reproduce it in full:
The fulfillment of their deviant sensual delight
is done. They rose from the mattress
and they dress hurriedly without speaking.
They leave the house separately, furtively, and as
they walk somewhat uneasily on the street, it seems
as if they suspect that something about them betrays
into what kind of bed they fell a little while back.
But how the life of the artist has gained.
Tomorrow, the next day, years later, the vigorous verses
will be composed that had their beginning here.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Let us take, as an example, Ben-Ami’s peculiar work, the Nauman-like Two-Person Biting Device. First glance gives us an impression of a functional object, or part of one (coathanger? no.) inert, not at the moment in use. We are deflected away from seeing it immediately as a work of sculpture by its materials and by its rough-and-ready manufacture. Lengths of rubber hose, hardware-store pipe of various diameter, all joined without fussiness. The entire art object draws us away from the criteria we bring to sculpture. And, as we consider this, an emanation of the unpleasant begins to rise, like an odor. For reasons impossible for criticism to articulate, but which lie at the very heart of the experience of art, sensations of a peculiar order take possession of us; we are uneasy, we are disturbed, we feel a vague anxiety; we find ourselves trying to keep certain “scenarios” from our minds: institutions, torture, prisons, helplessness. We cannot account for any of this in words and most artists rarely attempt to. (“Did you see that piece of Amnon’s? Really scary”).
Like many of Ben-Ami’s pieces (and Bruce Nauman’s, and Yehudit Sasportas’s and Etti Abergel’s) the work’s origins are so remote and unexpected that it is simply impossible to know its “beginning” without being told, and when we are told, we marvel at how slight is the connection between what we have experienced standing before the work and the interesting but surprisingly unhelpful anecdote we are told. In the case of Two-Person Biting Device, for example, it appears that it is an advisory precautionary measure in administering shock therapy, to provide patients with something to bite hard upon as the convulsive jolt hits them. Ben-Ami’s piece is thoughtfully “designed” for a couple, receiving the shock simultaneously .
Because I had known many sculptors who, when they could finally afford it, had their work redone in more “fitting” materials, I wrote to Ben-Ami asking, if he had his way, would Two Person Biting Device be done in “better” materials? Here is part of his answer:
No, I would like it to be as it is. The rubber has to be rubber...the plastic pipes (gray and transparent) are less important as their function is to raise the rubber into space. It is as if the pipes are the base and the rubber is the art. (The whole thing for me is a sculpture, but there are two functionally different parts to it.)...This work is complete for me...I like the work’s simple (only what I need), immediate and improvised look. I like its colors. I like the dimensions of its different parts (which all begin from the dimensions of an actual mouth).
There is much for criticism to chew on in this. Some of the dos and donts hinted at in the Alpha triptych reveal themselves more openly and, again, the most esthetically and culturally puzzling is the don’t: the piece must look as much not like art as possible. And, as much as possible, some external determinant – the size of a human mouth – should replace decisions ordinarily left to the temperament of the artist. It is as if everything determined by “art,” “talent,” giftedness” is not merely suspect but undermines conviction, throws sincerity into question. Why this should be so strikes me as the most difficult question facing serious art criticism today.*Another do that gets some amplification in Ben-Ami’s note is his interest in non-art materials. Indeed, the material is often the first aspect of a work to surprise a viewer. Ben-Ami seems on a perpetual search for the most unlikely materials. He shops the shuk for fabrics, uses satin as canvas, uses ephemeral pieces of cellophane for recent works referring to sleeping bags or autobuses, uses wax to create the eerie aura of Kupah. The criterion seems to be: the less like an art material, the better. -________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
*I am also convinced that not only the visual arts find themselves so at odds with what seems their very essence. Poetry, for example, too, shies away from the “poetic” as we have traditionally known it. Take the opening lines of Philip Larkin’s This Be The Verse:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
Why does this strike home instantly as the beginning of a poem that will tell the truth, and tell it without poetry’s tired tricks of irony, ambiguity, elevated language? It is not that vulgar or common language has become poetic, but that the poetic has come to prefer the common and the vulgar, come to trust it more. And again, why this should be true is as much a problem for literary criticism as for art criticism.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
When one looks at Ben-Ami’s drawings (he calls them “papers”, as if the very word “drawing” was
somehow contaminated) one finds “art” only in the most hidden places: in placement, measurement, art references so distant and arcane that even a specialist might miss them(such as the kiss to Malevich in Fig. 6). On the surface, one sees line and shape with links to the style of awkward children, to graffiti, to the less elegant comic strips – in short, methods of depiction as far from traditional art as the word “fuck” is from traditional poetic diction.
Here, certainly, Ben-Ami is not alone. Many artists of the post-modern generation everywhere in the world seem to be cobbling together an esthetic based on a similar set of dos and donts. What distinguishes Ben-Ami, and, to my mind, all the better post-modern Israeli artists, is the inevitable, unwished-for and often unanticipated evocation of the Jewish tzitter in the best of their work. They are, in a sense, as condemned to bear their tale as the Ancient Mariner himself. This incipient sense of dread is what gives its specific nature to much of better Israeli art, especially three-dimensional art. It is too extreme a statement by far to say that only here can a work like Ben-Ami’s Kupah happen, but it is not too extreme, I feel, to say that only here can the artist take it for granted that any viewer, chosen at random, will have already begun to experience that ominous and sinister shudder which inexplicably inhabits so innocent an object in the world as a mere ticket-window.
Many readers have by now concluded that the binding convention of which I speak, the shared experience that makes of artist and viewer a community, is the Holocaust. While I do not wish in any way to diminish the manner in which the Holocaust has linked us as a people, I actually have in mind a broader, more inclusive “shared experience”, what could be called our “national tragedy.” “If a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classical tragedies,” wrote Leopold Zunz, “what shall we say to a national tragedy...in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?” Well, perhaps one of the things we can say is that such a national tragedy creates a complex of shared conventions, spoken and unspoken, conscious and not conscious on which all the arts draw freely, and which constitute, for that nation, its unifying culture. I suppose what I am suggesting is this: every artist elsewhere in the world draws strength from his relation to a tradition of art. The Israeli artist, by contrast, draws strength from his relation to a tradition of history. This tradition of history is what the Israeli public shares with its artists, and, in ways I am simply unable to pursue more completely, that tradition inflects both the way in which an artist paints a cow and the way in which the viewer looks at that painting of a cow. Some years ago the Israeli artist Eli Schwadron found himself, mostly influenced by certain Picassos, painting a series of bulls and of pigs. “Oh, I get it,” said a visitor, “kosher and not kosher!” Schwadron told me he was astonished, not because the connection had been made by the visitor, but because it had not been made by himself.
--Philip Leider .