Dani Karavan.
Brendel, Maria Zimmermann
Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin GERMANY March 14 * June 1, 2008
Dani Karavan's recent retrospective at Berlin's
Martin-Gropius-Bau was first exhibited last year at the Tel Aviv Museum
of Art in honor of Karavan's 77th birthday, and is set to travel to
Japan later this year. In Berlin, the event is part of the official
recognition of Israel's 60th anniversary and was even launched by
Germany's Bundesprasident, Horst Kohler, and other government
representatives--somewhat ironically as it turns out, as the Israeli
artist makes it clear in the catalogue that his work seems to have been
the least understood in his own country.
As if to press this point home, Karavan's work completely
spills out of the twenty rooms allotted to it on the museum's upper
floor into the entrance hall and beyond, accommodating pieces not seen
in Tel Aviv, mostly in response to Berlin's past and present
history. Outside Martin-Gropius-Bau, a high wooden wall displaying the
words "Nie wieder" (Never Again) blocks the entrance,
referring to the Berlin Wall that once abutted this nineteenth-century,
richly ornate Italianate building. In the neo-classical lobby is Bad
Government (2008), a suspended upside-down olive tree, held by ropes
spanning two floors. Originally intended as a protest against the
building of new settlements near Bethlehem by the Netanyahu government
in 1996-99, the earth clumped around the tree's roots is the focus
of the regular watering that keeps it alive, a maintained vulnerability
that contradicts its violent uprooting.
Karavan's mixed artistic and regional heritage is not an easy
matter to resolve, straddling as it does Palestinian
"Oriental," immigrant Ashkenazi and Sephardic, and strictly
European influences (he studied in Italy and France during the 1950s).
These sources are immediately evident in his early drawings and
paintings, such as Port of Haifa (1952), Abu Gosh I (1953), Kibbuz Harel
(1955), South of Tel Aviv (1955), and Abandoned Estate of a Sheik
(1958). Yet his work remains anchored in his birthplace, Tel Aviv, and
its surrounding landscape, which accounts for the frequent appearance of
sand, wind, rocks, space, sunlight, and plants in his work
(Karavan's father was a landscape gardener).
Such early memories feed into Zeit (2008), installed in the first
room: a huge conical hourglass, suspended from the ceiling by steel
wires, empties desert sand onto the museum floor over a seven-hour
period, forming a pyramid-shaped mound. Karavan even goes so far as to
align his transparent hourglass with an "astral porthole" in a
covered central window, to direct the spectator's eye to a historic
building across the street. Somewhat like the ancient pyramids, this
site-specific work offers up an imaginary escape route from projections
across time and space.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Karavan's legendary ties to drama and dance companies like
Martha Graham's also make an appearance here. His set designs for
Graham's 1963 Legend of Judith production, consisting primarily of
a rock sculpture and a hand suspended from above symbolizing the Divine,
are represented in Berlin by a single watercolor on paper, a photograph
of the actual Graham performance, and a short film clip. In 2001,
Karavan also created 18 small bronze sculptures called Bamot--Homage to
Martha Graham, from which four have been selected for the show.
Representative of his earlier designs, these sparse yet accommodating
stage designs highlight the free movement of the dancers, in accordance
with Graham's choreography.
In the 1970s, Karavan was invited by the famous peace activist Arie
Lova Eliav to contribute images for a collection of Jewish wise sayings,
for which the artist eventually came up with a dozen drawings called
Meditations on Peace in Pencil, Gold and Blue (1975), consisting of
faint dots, lines, circles, and barely manipulated color fields. These
drawings, now housed in Florence's Uffizi, were finally reproduced
in a book co-published by Eliav and Karavan in 1975. For Berlin,
however, the artist covered the floor of a stately room with four large
mirrors, leaving just enough room along the walls to view the drawings.
Karavan is the recipient of many prestigious awards, such as
Japan's Praemium Imperiale (1998) and Germany's Piepenbrock
Prize for Sculpture (2004). As if to signal these achievements, his
renowned on-site projects are represented twice in the show: as small,
framed photographs, totaling 237, which cover the walls of a grand
staircase, and as room-sized photographic and film installations,
alongside preparatory works on paper and models in mixed media.
Different viewpoints are thus presented from different times, seasons,
and cultural perspectives--archival and recent, interior and exterior,
war and peace.
The Piepenbrock prize came with a commission, which led to
Mifgasch--Herrenabend (Gent's Night, 2004-05), now installed on the
grounds of the Villa Lemm in Berlin-Gatow, but represented in the show
by a circular projection on the floor. The subject of Mifgasch is a
famous gathering that took place in the villa in 1927 at the behest of
industrialist Janos Plesch, including such luminaries as Albert Einstein
and the painter Max Slevogt. But the most spectacular monuments, even as
virtual realities, are those where visitors are tempted with sensurround
guided tours. You actually get to "walk" through the Negev
Monument located near Be'er Sheva, Israel (1963-68), built as a
memorial to the Negev soldiers who fought in the Independence War
(1947-49). In the DVD projection, Ways to the Hidden Garden, originally
commissioned to prevent landslides in Sapporo Park, Japan (1992-99),
birds twitter and water cascades from seven cube-like fountains as one
climbs a 300-meter ascent, dazzled by the deep natural greens and whites
of the marble used by Karavan.
Given its location in a historic internment camp in southwestern
France, Homage to the Prisoners of Gurs (1993-94) evokes more somber
feelings. Beginning in the spring of 1939, the camp's many wooden
barracks were used to house Republican soldiers fleeing Spain after
their defeat in the Civil War. Then toward the end of 1940, under orders
from the Vichy government, the camp had a second life as a transit
prison for "stateless Jews," among them Hannah Arendt. After
WWII, no stone was left unturned to erase the memory of Gurs, including
all traces of Nazi collaboration. It was the son of an escaped Spanish
prisoner who invited Karavan to build a memorial on this site. In
Berlin, a looped projection with a choral soundtrack shows a skeletal
wooden structure, erected in Gurs to symbolize the now vanished
barracks, and railroad tracks with a tree sticking up between them, the
entirety surrounded by a barbed wire fence. A small model barrack and
live railroad tracks on the floor completes the installation.
One of Karavan's most sublime accomplishments is Passages:
Homage to Walter Benjamin (1990-94), realized in the Spanish-French
border town of Portbou where Benjamin died in 1940. The project was
initiated in the mid-1980s by Richard von Weiszacker, Germany's
then president, as "a memorial to the Jewish-German thinker,"
to be completed in time for Benjamin's 1992 centenary. Then
problems arose between Spanish and German authorities because the
memorial was to be located near the cemetery where Benjamin's
unmarked grave lies.
When Karavan first visited the steep hillside overlooking the
Mediterranean coast, an eddy in the sea caught his attention and became
the focus of his design. A long tunnel-like corridor, lined with Corten
steel, was dug into the cliff, containing numerous steps leading toward
the sea. These steps are eventually brought to a halt by a glass wall
inscribed in four languages with Benjamin's words, "Schwer ist
es, das Gedachtnis der Namenlosen zu ehren als das der Beruhmten"
(It is more arduous to remember the nameless than the renowned). On the
upper slope of the cliff, Karavan planted an olive tree and three more
steel steps leading to a raised wall of fieldstones. When I mentioned to
Karavan my memorable visit to Passages, he replied, "Nature tells
us about the tragedy of this man." This simple allusion confirms
what Arendt wrote in October 1940 while searching for Benjamin's
grave: "[It is] one of the most fantastic and beautiful places I
have ever seen."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
