Hebrew Editing: Asaf Schur
English Translation: Avi Pitchon
Opening Hours during Passover
On Saturday 31.3, Passover holiday, the exhibitions Neo-Monumental and Homeroom Class will be closed. Opening hours as usual for the rest of the holiday (1-7.4):
Tuesday 4 - 8 pm
Wednesday and Thursday 2 - 6 pm
Saturday 11 am - 3 pm
Monuments appear as an inseparable part of urban landscape; an attempt to create gathering points of commemoration and national remembrance. Whether they are sculptural or architectural structures for the public to stand in front of or within, and whether they commemorate wars, triumphs or catastrophes, they are meant to formulate a story that is common for local spectators and communities. They demonstrate an everlasting, unique and sublime presence facing daily urban life or surrounding nature, their durable materiality as if stating “we were always here and will always remain here”, thus form an important pillar in the establishment of every national ethos in general, and the Zionist ethos in specific.
As far as the artists participating in this exhibition are concerned, the above renders monuments as raw material for a contemporary dealing with history, memory, and myth, in a manner that includes an examining of the materiality, form, the experience invoked – an experience that deviates from the premise of the “national’ or the “public” and is rooted in the personal and the everyday in spatial perception and in the field of vision stamped by their presence.
The works in the exhibition are presented in parallel to collections and archival material related to the planning of monuments and their popular representations. The monument might be perceived as eternal and unchanging, however the exhibition also includes commemoration site memorabilia, plans for monuments that were not realised, and documentation of imperial monuments preceding the forming of the state of Israel: monuments that did not last, failed to attain uniqueness, and have consequently become forgotten or pushed out of historical narrative.
This examination of monuments – what are they actually, what concrete and ideological materials are they assembled from, and what kind of relationships do we form with them – is the beginning of a critical move in relation to their presence in the public sphere, and an opening for a complex assessment of their socio-political meaning.
One of the outcomes of working on this exhibition is a nascent lexicon, allowing an investigation of the logic of monuments in the local and international levels at present times. Throughout the upcoming year the lexicon will evolve thanks to the labour of a artists and researchers who will formulate new outlooks on the treatment monuments demand, the treatment they are awarded in practice, as well as their place in corporeal and mental realms.
Following are several fragmented terms towards a lexicon for neo-monumental thought.
Mundane Presence
How many people noticed the Star of David shape created by Yigal Tumarkin’s monument at Rabin Square? Even more so, how many know that it is a monument to the Holocaust and the resurrection of Israel? Like other monuments, the majority of its uses are far more grounded in the everyday: providing shadow in a sunlit square, a platform for demonstrations, a meeting point for a city rendezvous. The physical presence of monuments in a space shakes off the narrative attributed to them, by those who commissioned and created them, and remain as physical objects for transient use instead.
The Inappropriate
The narrative, thanks to which any certain monument was created, keeps appearing in ceremonies and events, be it by those who wish to retell the tale the monument points at, or by those who want to address a certain inappropriate gap separating the monument and its subject from the current history and self-perception of an element within the community exposed to it or affected by it. In the case of the latter, the monument becomes the focus of a struggle over the narrative itself. That is the present case around the USA, in campaigns and attacks against monuments that praise Southern heroes of the Civil War; similar cases rise in Europe around monuments for racist figures from centuries past; and such was the case in the former Soviet Union in the early nineties, on the background of the crumbling of the communist bloc and subsequent national awakening. All of the above mark instances where the new narrative can no longer dwell alongside the story around which a monument was erected. Something must change.
Epidemic
The manner in which the charged meaning of monuments stand out in the public domain turn them at certain times to focus on conflicts between different groups. In these conflicts, often revolving around revised national tales, monuments are toppled by angry mobs, systematically taken down by a new regime, or endowed with an alternate history. Often, the above operates virally: the destruction of one monument leads to the destruction of another elsewhere. Monuments topple like dominoes. Destruction takes place over a period of time, until the conflict ends or until all monuments are erased or replaced.
Ghosts
The archive contains thousands of propositions for monuments never to be realised; ghosts of spatial gestures in architecture and sculpture. Examining these propositions serves as invitation to study the rationale of the monument, the unrealised sculptural ambition, and to learn about the role and operation of the monument prior to being cast and fixed in space, facing material constraints or getting embroiled in the policing of bureaucracy and politics en route to realisation.
Out of This World
The seemingly extra-terrestrial form is a distinct trademark of brutalist monuments of the Soviet Bloc and especially that of the monuments in Tito’s Yugoslavia. It is a phenomenon not to be seen in disconnection from the contexts of the cold war and the superpowers’ space race. Having said that, that alien formation too is just that certain period’s costume, worn by the basic principle of every monument as such. In other words, that outer space form is just an extreme, specific expression of the way every monument relates to the environment within which it is placed: alien, anomalous, from another place, standing out in its distance from the daily and the regular.
Life
In a lecture from 2014 W.J.T.Mitchel askes "What do monuments want?" and answers simply, "They just want to live for ever. They don't want to die. They want to survive, to defeat death [..] They don't want to be history, they want to be alive in the present. They are creatures of memory [..] History put things in the past, they are dead and gone, and won't come back, but memory is where the past come back".
Forgetfullness (abandonment)
Despite the desire of monuments (and their builders) that they exist forever, many simply become forgotten, sad and neglected, crumbling as the generation or regime that built them disappears. Were they to be rediscovered, it would be as historical artefacts.
A World Without Monuments
Could a world without monuments be imagined? A world in which they’d have fallen, crumbled, vanished without trace, with no new monuments to replace them? What world should that be? A world without memory, without wars and death, without victors or enemies.
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A Series for Forgotten Monuments
Concept: Udi Edelman | design: Guy Saggee | printing and production: Uriel Har Tuv
A series of posters newly tributing three of the earliest modern monuments built in the pre-1948 land of Israel/Palestine in veins similar to posters announcing the establishing of a national site or a ceremony taking place in it. The monuments in the series all attempted to define a different relation to this land. One is commemorating Napoleon’s French soldiers, erected in Haifa in the beginning of the 19th century; another is the monument for the Hejazi railway, erected in Haifa as well in 1905 honouring the 34th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire; and the third is a monument in memory of General Allenby and the British conquerors of Jerusalem, erected in Jerusalem in 1920. All three propose an imperial logic connecting the local area to the areas adjacent, and to the spreading of empires prior to the Spring of Nations of 1848 - the national awakening around which had led to the forming of the Zionist monuments we’re familiar with.
The Archive and Collection
Materials from the Israel Architecture Archive as well as several estates and private collections are presented in the exhibition. These materials provide various alternative outlooks in relation to monuments in Israel. The archival materials in particular invite us for an examination of the form of existing and planned monuments that share an “out of this world” aesthetic, that is to say, monuments that look like spaceships or futuristic landing sites. That aesthetic is not coincidental, and is bound to the spatial alien-ness monuments are meant to create and the extent to which they claim to step out of the order of the everyday. Among cases presented is a sketch for the INS Dakar Monument, situated at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, planned by David Anatol Brutzkus (1969). Alongside the archival materials is exhibited a collection of memorabilia – postcards and stamps, pins, statuettes, key rings, posters and coins – replicating specific monuments in home-size versions as personal objects, souvenirs from commemorative sites. Examining the above materials pushes us to ponder the relationship between those items and the original monument, and its meaning.
Binyami Idelson and Gershon Tzipor | Ammunition Hill
From the materials of the Israel Architecture Archive
The monument on Ammunition Hill, erected in 1975 and planned by Idelson and Tzipor, is an early example of a shift in the spatial perception of the relation between the monument and the public visiting it. Earlier monuments created a position of standing in front of its towering presence, while the newer logic creates a situation wherein the monument contains and envelopes the viewer, connecting them through it. Other examples could be found, to an extent, in Brutzkus’ INS Dakar (1969) Monument, and Dani Karavan’s Monument to the Negev Brigade (1968).
Neo-Monumental is presented in the framework of the activity of The Institute for Public Presence and as the third part in the series Monument/Action, which examines artistic strategies and modes of practice in the local public sphere throughout the 20th century. The exhibition was developed in the framework of Yael Messer and Udi Edelman’s ongoing research into the issue of monuments and memorials in the Middle-East. The series is realised with the support of the Pais Committee for Arts and Culture.
Curator: Udi Edelman
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
