Israel's "Guernica": a complex, metaphorical installation by Sigalit Landau is, for the author, "a work of endless lamentation, "summing up the nation's pervasively bleak mood - Report from Tel Aviv - Critical Essay

Art in America, May, 2003 by Philip Leider

Current Israeli art rests in the hands of a remarkable group of women who have come to artistic maturity during the past 10 years. A few of them are reasonably well known outside Israel--Yehudit Sasportas, for example, has shown widely in Europe and America, and Etti Abergel will represent Israel at the forthcoming Venice Biennale. Two other gifted artists are Dalit Sharon and Marylou Levin. Sigalit Landau found herself selected for the Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1997, merely two years after her graduation from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. She was a participant in Documenta X the same summer. Within those two years her work was also exhibited in Germany, Ireland and Holland. In 1999 she won the OPEN 2000 Competition in London (where the prize committee consisted of Rachel Whiteread, James Lingwood, Richard Cork, Brian Eno and Michael Morris) and followed this with exhibitions at the Heidelberg Kunstverein and the Museum of Modern Art in Saitama, Japan.

Almost every year her work had been seen in Israel as well. Due mostly to bad timing, I'd seen only one of her shows here and so was less prepared than I perhaps should have been to see, in her great work The Country (2001-02), shown at the Alon Segev Gallery in Tel Aviv this past fall, the best work of art made here during the 15 years I have been looking at Israeli art.

An active art critic sees new work several times a week. He usually likes it a little or a lot, or dislikes it a little or a lot, and often he isn't really sure of his feelings at all. The experience is slightly disappointing--it is not for this that he does his work. What he is looking for, like a junkie for his fix, is a bolt of certainty, the blessed banishment of all doubt, a sensation of falling in love. The experience is rare, but once one has had it, one is hooked.

During the third quarter of the last century, when American abstraction reached its world-dominating peak, American criticism was much interested in exploring and explaining this dialectic of certainty and doubt. The critic Michael Fried believed that to conquer doubt an ambitious work of art had the job of "inspiring conviction" in the viewer. Conviction of what? Fried's answer was superb in its clarity: conviction, he said, that the work you are looking at can live in the same room with comparable great works of the past. One knew, for example, with undeniable conviction, that Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon could hang in the same room with Cezanne's Bathers, that Mondrian's Composition in Red, Yellow and Blue could hang alongside Picasso, that Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm could hang alongside Mondrian, and so forth. In all honesty, because I have found myself so unsympathetic to the kind of art being made today in America and Europe, I never expected to experience that thrilling kind of esthetic wallop again. Especially in looking at an installation, for I have come to see installations as self-indulgent, theatrical and impractical. But a critic must always keep in mind Pascal's injunction: do not judge the miracle by the law, but the law by the miracle.

It was in a skeptical spirit that I went to see Sigalit Landau's installation, The Country. To my utter astonishment, and at a single glance (confirmed by subsequent visits and long hours in the gallery), I knew that I was looking at something remarkable. Over time I realized that I could not fault it or find anything to quibble or carp about; I saw that the whole and each of its parts were equally brilliant. And I realized further that I had no doubt that this work could take its place beside Picasso's Guernica and hold its own very well. For just as Picasso's masterpiece articulates the horror and outrage felt by all civilized people at the wanton bombing of an open city and the introduction of Schrecklichkeit (horror) as a weapon of war, so Landau's The Country, a work of endless lamentation, sums up in a way not likely to be matched the mood of Israel at this moment in its history.

Interpretations will vary, but all will agree that The Country gives expression to the sense of desolation, discouragement, hopelessness and, above all, sadness that has come to fill the hearts of all people of good will in this land during the past two years. The work began to form in the artist's mind with the outbreak of the current intifada. It should be recalled that this outbreak of violence followed a period of high hopes inspired by the 1993 Oslo Accords and the agreement to resort to negotiations, not violence, in settling differences. Then the atmosphere of hope collapsed, the mood of the country plummeted.

It's not so easy to describe Landau's installation, for description is itself a form of criticism (Fried again), and what I choose to describe may not be what you would, and what I emphasize may not be significant to you. So I will begin with a generalization that will guide the aspects of the work I choose to emphasize: Landau achieves her objective in this work by making nature itself her subject. Nature is presented as mutated, perverse, upside down, disoriented, as if the violence done by man to man had finally extended to the natural world itself. A group of fruit trees in this work becomes a hideous metaphor for a world out of joint.