Mixed Media

Head Ball Sarit Shapira

Eran Shakine's most recent sculptures and drawings (2008) are situated at an intersection that leads down two main roads. One alludes to central tropes of modernist artmaking: the work Shaharit (Dawn Prayer), for instance, calls to mind Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column (1914); other works, whose skeleton (Dawn Prayer) or envelope (The Hill Boys, Sabbath Match) is composed of skullcaps, may recall Claes Oldenburg's soft objects; and the block of concrete leaning on a neon tube in Floating (2008) clearly points towards Minimalism and its derivatives. At the same time, these works allude to ritual paraphernalia and other items from the "Jewish object shelf": the column in Blocked Sabbath, for instance, may call to mind a synagogue column; the skullcap included in quite a few of the sculptures and drawings may appear like the product of a workshop specializing in Jewish ritual objects; and the symbolic image in Menorah or Two Orange Menorahs clearly represents the candelabra with seven lights used in Jewish worship.

These works all juxtapose the production mechanisms of modernism with the memory of hand-crafted, traditional Jewish objects. One may even argue that modernist textuality – which late modernism, or postmodernism, has posited as a central characteristic of the entire movement – is likened in these works to the textuality of Jewish tradition; that the traces, or memories, of these two types of textuality are interwoven into a single textile. Shakine's works affiliate themselves with the postmodernist inventory of freakish, schizophrenic images that allude to multiple contexts, and their unique affinities may even underscore their parasitical quality and their status as one link in a long chain of related links. Nevertheless, this quality does not seem to explain their disturbing effect even on viewers who have long become indifferent to works concerned with the vacillation between different cultural contexts and sites.

Shakine's works shake the viewer's indifference by means of titles that underscore their distinctness, while inviting a comparison to similar, related images. In order to clarify this point, let us turn to Sabbath Match, which appears to be a soccer ball composed of a patchwork of Jewish (kippot) skullcaps. In the context of contemporary art, such a "soccer ball" is reminiscent of another object-like image related to the realm of iconic sports – the football-object that appears in Haim Steinbach's 1984 work Dramatic Yet Neutral. Steinbach's "football," however, has a limited shelf life as a fetish or exhibit related to the culture of consumption – a quintessential simulacrum that substitutes for the football player's objectified body.

It is simultaneously also a substitute for money, the great equalizer that is itself both a means to an end and a parable for power games and market forces in a real, "first" world. Shakine's image of a soccer ball, by contrast, has no real-world equivalent; it is an invented, fabricated body – softer and less rigid than any of its possible matches in the art world or on the market (such as the sports market, with its paraphernalia, players and games). The phallus – the symbolic injunction, the linguistic Law of the Father represented by the objects' outline (which touches upon both the peripheral environment of the Israeli art world and the traces of Jewish memory) – is revealed to be flaccid, depleted and almost impotent. Unfamiliar with the rules of the media game and rejected by the world of simulacra, Shakine's ball was not produced as a monolithic image, but rather patched together from numerous skullcaps, or fragments ("the fragment is the Jew's world," as the painter R.B. Kitaj once remarked). These fragments commune together, forming a miniscule assembly whose circular shape seems to be surrounding a head (if this shape were a bit softer, it would resemble an image of the brain). In place of a bodily simulation, Shakine provides a simulation of the head. Since the ball is essentially a cover composed of skullcaps, the head is perceived as what must be protected, whether due to its vulnerability or value.

The skullcaps also relate the vulnerability and protection of the head to a higher, divine power: the omnipotent Jewish God, or perhaps the ideal, absolute forms of Platonic philosophy, or the systemic model of conceptual art. Shakine's ball is not identified with the consumer power of the market, or with the cannon blasts of efficient, stylized mechanisms of representation. This ball – which was created in the peripheral region known as "Israel," in the context of Jewish ritual objects – mobilizes the gaze from the body to the head, from the foot to the top of the body. As it is transformed from a "football" into a "head ball," the ball redirects object-based art to thoughts about one head, which is concerned with higher authorities. The head covered by this accumulation of skullcaps may thus point us back to a crucial early moment in the process of artistic conceptualization, at which art sought to turn over the stage to the individual head's power to imagine, desire, hallucinate, dream, think, know and remember. This moment is obviously related to the art of Marcel Duchamp; in the context of Shakine's image of a head and of skullcaps, moreover, it is worth recalling Duchamp's 1921 photograph Tonsure, in which Duchamp was captured (by Man Ray) with his hair shaved into a star-shaped tonsure – as if he were being admitted into an order whose power is derived from the heavenly constellations. Yet the accumulation of skullcaps assembled into a single body in Shakine's work attempts to insert itself into additional, more political contexts; it alludes to the connection between groups of skullcap wearers and the culture of a masochistic, manipulative and aggressive "brotherhood," which not infrequently takes on a nationalistic character (as is the case, for instance, at soccer games).

Other works by Shakine similarly refer to the distorted, almost perverse expropriation of Jewish symbols in the service of nationalist ideals. This is the case, for instance, in Two Orange Menorahs, which features a candelabra composed of parachute fabric sewn into soft, semi-inflated phallic forms. Aggression, militarism and authority infuse even such representatives of an impotent phallus. This is one side of the linguistic idiom coined on the periphery; yet Shakine also insists on pointing to its other side, and on giving concrete form to its masculine character as related to the conceptual potency of the one, in a place where it is possible to refind, or reinvent, the power of conceptual art.