Sigalit Landau

BODY DOUBLE
By Andrew Maerkle


Behold the Fire and the Wood, installation view, Maison Hermès, Tokyo, 2013. © Nacása & Partners Inc, courtesy Fondation d’enterprise Hermès.

Based in Tel Aviv, Sigalit Landau has participated in major exhibitions such as documenta X (1997) in Kassel and the Venice Biennale, where in 2009 she represented Israel. Her solo exhibition in 2006 at Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin was a tour-de-force, mixed-media installation that wound through the institution’s galleries, turning each space into an allegorical situation. Spanning video, sculpture and installation, Landau’s works emerge from the specific context of contemporary society in Israel, while also addressing issues of physicality, the body in motion and the laboring body.

Landau was recently in Tokyo for her first solo exhibition in Japan at Le Forum, Maison Hermès, where she presented a mixed-media installation recreating a typical Israeli domestic space from the 1950s, as well as an immersive multi-media installation of video works shot at olive groves near the Dead Sea. ART iT met with Landau to discuss her work.

The exhibition, “The Ram in the Thicket,” continues through August 18.

Interview:


Installation view, “Projects 87,” the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008. Courtesy Sigalit Landau.

ART iT: I saw your “Projects 87” installation at the Museum of Modern Art in 2008, as well as your exhibition for the Israel Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011, both of which included videos and sculptural installations. But in researching further into your career I was impressed by how deeply you engage with the tradition of sculpture, from using materials like bronze and marble to engaging with concepts of the figure, the readymade, and the Surrealist object. Can you discuss how you balance the use of video and sculpture in your work?

SL: Some people may think of me primarily as a video artist, because when participating in international exhibitions gradually it has became easier to send a DVD, or send a harddrive, and now we send files by streaming online and the artist might not even be there to do the installation in person.
Obviously the explanation isn’t entirely that simple. When Klaus Biesenbach invited me to exhibit in the media gallery at MoMA, I said, “Klaus, this isn’t my department. Media? You’re kidding!” And he replied, “Oh, yes.” He said, “Ok, let’s bring a few salt objects.” I said, “Look, we are not going to decorate the video exhibition with a few objects. We have to bring all 36 salt chandeliers made from barbed wire, so they are like a heavy cloud under the water.”
In any case, with that installation I was able to capture people’s time, which in the current world of objects and commodities is relatively hard to do. You get a room full of people who can’t leave because they want to see how I get out of the spiral of watermelons floating in the Dead Sea [in the video DeadSee (2005)], so that’s 10 minutes of their time; then there was the video Barbed Hula (2000), which is actually going nowhere, but has some kind of meditative and ritualistic effect until you become aware that it’s only two minutes; and then there was the video Day Done (2007), with a person painting around a window from the inside out, which has such a simple concept: it’s not even about painting, it’s about the reversal of painting, because painting used to be about making a window onto the world or some kind of definition of perception, while here somebody’s coming out of the window and painting a kind of black hole in the wall.
The videos at MoMA were all very circular, and somehow that also relates to the show here in Tokyo. With the installation to the left of the exhibition entrance, which recreates an Israeli domestic space from the 1950s, it makes sense to enter through the kitchen, where you are welcomed by the sound installation of four women speaking about their lives, and then proceed from the kitchen through the living room to the back of the construction, where there is the text from my uncle’s diary and you realize that you can peer through the wall and decipher the secrets of this family. But you can also enter from the reverse side, so there is a circular option of going around the story, and around the history, and around the different stages of the space. There’s a back scene and a front scene, and two side stories.
The video installation to the right of the exhibition entrance, Out in the Thicket (2013), is very much a black mirror of this alleged “home” I tried to reconstruct in the other installation. With the videos, you’re sort of in the wild, but since they were shot in olive groves, the wild does not come from nature, it comes from humans trying to survive in the dessert. Using machines, the harvesters are trying to rapidly, mechanically part the ripe olives from the poor trees, which are being violently shaken. But of course there’s something metaphoric and physical that immediately happens to you. Walking through this grove or forest creates a place where some kind of drama unfolds.

ART iT: Do the videos and sculptures develop from the same practice?

SL: I studied in the 1990s when installations were happening. Ann Hamilton made a huge installation in New York, which I can never forget. I respond to installations that require a lot of effort, or achieve a cinematic transformation of space – Paul McCarthy, for example, or Christian Boltanski. In a way everybody making sculpture in the 1990s would install their works as an installation, like building a world. And I have a background in dance and theater, where the installation on stage is descriptive.
But also in Israel you have no choice but to grow up aware of history; even an archaeological site is a small drama, and then in the historic museums they construct dioramas to visualize antiquity and medieval life, folklore, the different cultures of the people who immigrated to Israel, so there’s an area where you can see how a Yemenite wedding looks like, and then a Russian, and so on. I always liked this kind of world in a vitrine, and I think this is also part of my installation background.


Top: DeadSee (2005), video, 11 min 39 sec. Bottom: Dancing for Maya (2005), video, 16 min 13 sec.

ART iT: Is that also where your interest in figuration comes from?

SL: I like to discover what wax and bronze and marble can do. There’s a minimal history of figuration in Israel, because art there basically starts with Modernism; in Judaism and Islam you’re not supposed to depict figures in the first place, and also think of people who are nomads, always traveling and being expelled: the probability of them developing a studio where they keep tools and materials is very slight, although they are good jewelers.
Chagall is the first big Jewish painter or sculptor, and of course he also depicts these people flying through the air with some kind of nostalgic aura, whereas there’s something in connecting to a place that brings you to your body and to material.
I am committed to all of the different ways of making a work, so sometimes that’s the same as being committed to none of them. I start a new year and decide what I feel like doing and why and where, but it’s not so predictable what form that will take.
Video is about light and image, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a four-channel video installation, it’s still an empty room, and there’s a dramatic tension between the emptiness and the illusions, and drawing with light.
I like to see myself as a worker, with things that need doing with my hands. Something about video comes a bit easier, I have to say. People know you’re the photographer, you’re this, you’re that. With sculpture, when you’re going to invent a structure and five craftspeople tell you to forget it, then you know you have to do it on your own and it has to be good, because it’s not in anybody’s tradition, for example, to hammer a shipping container into a sculptural landscape, as I did with the work Resident Alien I (1996) for Documenta X. The analog world will always travel in the container format, and there’s been a lot of container art, but I got to this situation where I thought, OK, I’m hammering the floor of the container into a landscape so that from the outside it looks normal but inside it has a memory of a place and can travel, and when you enter the container you’re suddenly going out into the landscape. I was 26 and it was this insane stage when I really thought I could do everything.

ART iT: Compared to your labor-intensive sculptural practice of hammering the container in Resident Alien I or making the papier-mâché “fruits” out of daily newspapers for your installation The Country (2002), the videos are almost gestural in their minimalism, although I’m sure a lot of production goes into them as well.

SL: Yes, I could say that’s true, but look again, the figures in the videos are also working. They’re doing something. I may make it look elegant, but lying in the Dead Sea with one eye in the salt is painful, and it’s boiling hot. These things you don’t see so much as a viewer.
I think that’s the dancer in me: even if I break my back, I am not here to express my pain, I just need to perform, and then take care of the injuries later. In Dancing for Maya (2005), with the women who are digging toward each other on the beach while the tide erases the marks of their movements, there’s a specific physicality to it. In Laces (2011), the girl under the table is tying the shoes of the adults in a mischievous gesture, but it’s also insistent. Aside from the olive grove videos on display here, there’s another work in which I document laborers picking heavy melons from a plantation. It’s gestural, and it’s something they’re doing anyways, but there’s also something specific. It’s like there’s not supposed to be a camera there, because it’s not meant to say something in art, and yet it’s not a documentary. There’s something in the video that surrenders to the situation, and that’s why it’s minimalistic, because I’m not going to cut and manipulate it and give you magic coming from the world of cinema, nor could it be presented on stage, because it would be impossible technically or just too boring, but as a canvas, it’s active and evokes good things.


Both: Out in the Thicket, installation view, Maison Hermès, Tokyo, 2013. © Nacása & Partners Inc, courtesy Fondation d’enterprise Hermès.

ART iT: Can you elaborate, for example, on what is happening in the videos shot in the olive groves? What were you looking for in producing them, or what do you see in them?

SL: There’s movement. There’s something about the light that is mesmerizing. And the violence of it all. This is how they actually harvest. It’s understandable that they would use machines to harvest the olives, but seeing how the machines shake, for me the action has a frequency similar to panic, or to sexuality, with the body spasm or orgasm, the crazy side of our bodies.
The fact that fruit is falling in this way reminds me of eyes, or even words. Something in it is overwhelming. The olive tree is a symbol, first of peace, but also of land, and the age of the land. A lot of clashes take place on olive groves. It’s a landscape, and the tree is its essence. But also the fierceness of survival is its essence: the movement, the effort, and the effortless hell that the tree is going through.
Somebody from Italy saw the work and was confused, because there they just place a net on the ground and wait for the olives to fall. With the Israeli farmers, if they see that the price of olive oil is falling, then they have to harvest that very night. And if you damage the fruit, which of course happens when you use machines, you have to press the olives the same night. So there is a cycle of impossible practices and greed.
It’s also the Dead Sea. They hardly have any water, only salt water, and the only plants that can tolerate that salinity are olives. This is the way of life of the farmers. They also have a symbiosis with the pickers, who have to be smuggled from Palestine. The Palestinians want to come and work at the olive groves. They’re good at it, and know how to do it. The farmers could use Thai workers or Bedouins, but they are not as strong or as efficient or organized as the groups from Hebron.
So there are many stories in the videos. But there are two things without which it wouldn’t strike me as much. One is the cloud of dust raised by the machines, and the other is the noise of the machines, like a machine gun. It sounds like a bullet being shot, and then you see the olive as a bullet.

ART iT: With the sculpture it seems like you’re willing to try anything. The MoMA installation with the salt chandeliers was so precise, while the container works are incredibly physical, and then you’ve also made large-scale works like the Thread Waxing Space Installation (2001), with the gigantic cotton-candy machine.

SL: We’re talking about 20 years of work. With the Thread Waxing Space Installation I was looking for a transformation, not dealing with the outside of the body but with the system of nutrition, food, feeding, communal hunger, sugar and Manhattan, the end of the gallery district in Soho. Actually, I was in Paris looking at a Barbapapa story when I realized how nervous sugar is as a material – of course it’s not very good for us either – when it’s moist it becomes like a scab, and when it’s puffed up it becomes euphorically poppish. Then there was the smell of Soho, the roasted nuts, which brought many associations. And during winter in New York, inside it’s so warm you’re wearing a T-shirt, but then open the window and there’s a complete change in climate. So sugar was a good partner. But it was also like a relationship where things aren’t going to work out, like a disastrous love affair. That’s what you can say about sugar and trying to build an igloo from this fiber. It’s not going to survive one winter. There was a lot of metaphor in the work. People asked me what I was doing, and I said, I’m going to build an igloo out of sugar and put it in the Sahara desert, but the igloo is here and it weighs four tons and it’s collapsing into a crater, although in theory if you took it to a dry area, it could stand.
Now I realize as I’m speaking with you that in the end I left the igloo behind and took myself back to the desert, where salt was waiting for me. There’s a bigger story always. Sometimes in your art you decide things before you know in life.
Sometimes I also suffer from this jumping around. Why am I doing a nursing cushion from marble [Madonna and Child (2011)]? Not because I wanted to do marble. I wanted to be a mother, it was quite late in life, and the standard gift you receive as a new mother is a nursing cushion. You put it around your waist and rest the baby on it so you’re supported and she’s supported. I mean, I love being a mother and love breastfeeding, but immediately I see these Henry Moore jaws hugging me and I’m quite comfortable without it. I also had some frustrations with being successful, trying to be a woman, an artist and Israeli, and this and that, running around. So I wanted to do an uncomfortable nursing cushion, and of course I’m going to stuff it harder, make a mold, make it more perfect and then send it to the craftspeople – I didn’t devote my life to it, although I could have. Louise Bourgeois also did it this way. Marble is the opposite of bronze. I could have done it in bronze but it wouldn’t have the same meaning. Marble is part of the earth. When you’re pregnant, you feel like an incubator or a piece of earth, something is growing in you or on you or over you, this unknown entity. That’s why it had to be marble.


Top: Thread Waxing Space Installation (2001), installation view, Thread Waxing Space, New York. Bottom: Madonna and Child (2011), installation view. Both: Courtesy Sigalit Landau.

ART iT: It’s interesting how throughout your practice you maintain an exquisite balance between presenting a found object as it is and manipulating the symbolic meaning that surrounds the object.

SL: It’s looking. This is what art is, just looking. But there is more to it than that as well. I have many pockets of associations, and this comes through words and language. I think this is the connection with ancient culture. Something in the word is the DNA. You’re looking, but you’re looking through a lot of filters, and that affects what you see.

ART iT: So when you make work are you reprocessing the filters?

SL: It’s like being able to articulate it more clearly for other people to see. It’s like tidying up. The world is chaotic, and the artists go out and show what is painful, beautiful, painful and beautiful, contradictions, so that it moves people. It also depends on what the artist wants: I want people to feel. I’m not necessarily an expressive artist. There’s something modest, stoic, and accepting in what I do, and I work hard to get it that way.

Sigalit Landau: Body Double

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