Getting stoned in the desert

Arranging several dozen motley shaped stones across two floors of a museum may not sound like a particularly creative effort, but it actually makes for alluring viewing.

By BARRY DAVIS
Art by Jannis Kounellis (photo credit: RAPHAEL DELOUYA)
Art by Jannis Kounellis
(photo credit: RAPHAEL DELOUYA)
What’s the first image that springs to mind when you think of the desert? It’s got to be sand, right? Wrong – at least as far as Jannis Kounellis is concerned. Then again, Kounellis is an artist and, as such, he has a different take on reality and way of perceiving physical elements.
That is manifest as soon as you enter the Negev Museum of Art in Beersheba, where the sprightly octogenarian has an intriguing installation on show, curated by Italian art historian and critic Adachiara Zevi.
“I didn’t really have any idea what I was going to do before I came over to Israel,” says the Greek-born Italian artist when we meet at the museum.
This is not Kounellis’s first professional trip to this part of the world, but his previous local proffering in 2007 was in a hangar in the Jaffa Port – a very different physical and cultural milieu.
You get the tangible aesthetic ethos as you enter the southern museum and climb to the first floor display area. What you see are stones and more stones, all connected by a long piece of rope that snakes its way through every object on show. The cordage, of the hefty, seafaring type, gives the impression of being more than capable of keeping the stones in their place, as well as leading the observer’s eye along the entire length of the course.
Artist Jannis Kounellis (photo credit: RAPHAEL DELOUYA)
Artist Jannis Kounellis (photo credit: RAPHAEL DELOUYA)
“This is not a desert of sand. This is a desert of stones!” exclaims Kounellis.
Clearly, one man’s sand is another man’s stone.
Having enjoyed a sojourn in a far-flung corner of the Negev quite a few years ago (betwixt periods of residency in Tel Aviv), I am keenly aware of the fact that the desert is anything but inanimate. The seemingly dry and lifeless sands are home to a dynamic flora and fauna ecosystem. Then again, stones are generally simply stones and do not host or generate much in the way of vitality. But that’s not how Kounellis sees things. He senses something warm about the stones of the Negev and has imbued the exhibition layout with a basic human element.
“There is a single human step between each of the stones,” he explains, adding, “Man is always at the center of the dramaturgic scene.”
Arranging several dozen motley shaped stones across two floors of a museum, loosely attaching them to each other by thick rope, and seasoning with a bunch of common or garden domestic artifacts such as wooden chairs, and a voluminous wardrobe arranged horizontally to suggest a bed may not sound like a particularly creative effort, but it actually makes for alluring viewing.
It helps to know something about the artist, who was at the forefront of the arte povera school of artistic thought. Kounellis relocated from Greece to Rome in 1956 and quickly began looking for new and thought-provoking methods to present art to the public.
By the late 1960s he had developed a more sculptural inclination and was drawn towards performance-related presentations. He incorporated two basic elements in his work – inorganic or structural form – and looked to convey sensibility through organic presence. Both are currently evident in Beersheba.
“You have to go through the art history of the last 50 years,” Kounellis remarks.
Like all up-and-coming artists with genuine innovative intent, the Italian and his contemporaries set out to challenge the establishment of the day by challenging the accepted aesthetics and – indeed – the very definition of art. Kounellis was not alone in his battle against the corporate way of thinking. His fellow rebels included Giovanni Anselmo, Aldo Mondino, Ugo Nespolo, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Paolo Scheggi, who displayed their seemingly uninspired objets d’art in museums and galleries the length and breadth of Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wanting to shake up the generally accepted perception of what a work of art should look like, they set about using a diverse swathe of materials and articles from everyday life, addressing the politics and aesthetics of art and the very concept of the artist’s role in society.
“There is something very ideological, political [about arte povera],” says the genial Italian. “It was against the tradition of painting. It was a revolution of my generation to go out from the painting – it was the conquest of the real space, to work in real space with real elements.”
That, I suggest, is a reflection of life itself.
“Yes, of course. You have the idea of always representing the drama of life, and the space – the gallery – where the drama takes place.”
“I came to Israel without anything,” he states. “I came with no materials or even ideas.”
(photo credit: RAPHAEL DELOUYA)
(photo credit: RAPHAEL DELOUYA)
While that might be a frightening prospect for most, the artist says that the absence of information makes for an expansive creative domain. “This is the condition in order to be free to see,” he notes.
So, off went our intrepid Italian, spending more than a week roaming the Negev, trying to get a handle on what makes the largely uninhabited region tick and how to convey that within the formal confines of a public repository of culture. It is very much a matter of maintaining a delicate balancing act between space and material, and between the human and the seemingly inert.
Kounellis feels that he connected with the essence of Israel.
“I don’t care about skyscrapers being built in Beersheba,” he states. “The primary feature of this area, and also the identity of Israel, is the desert.”
Then again, the artist admits that if he were to engage in a project in Tel Aviv, for example, the visual end product (he does not categorize the current contents of the Negev Museum of Art as an exhibition per se) would be very different.
Natural surroundings discrepancies notwithstanding, there is one recurrent element in the Beersheba showing and the 2007 event: chairs. The Jaffa display incorporated several dozen seating fixtures, each containing a different object and, although the classically fashioned wooden seats in Beersheba are bare, they intimate a degree of interaction. They are arranged in a circle and look like they are just waiting for a bunch of adults to sit down and take part in a school parents’ evening.
(photo credit: RAPHAEL DELOUYA)
(photo credit: RAPHAEL DELOUYA)
The artist takes the communication idea a step further.
“This is like a dramatic choir. The important thing is that all the chairs look towards the interior,” he points out.
Then again, the chairs – or unseen occupants thereof – may not actually generate reciprocity, as implied by the stone placed at the center of the circle. “They may have a dialogue, but this is not a company of drinking people,” says the artist with a twinkle in his eye.
Even with all the stones and the seeming lifelessness of the visual spread in Beersheba, there is a sense of warmth in the show, which probably emanates from the creator.
“The measures [of the interfaces between the exhibits] are all related to man,” says Kounellis. “I always say I am a humanistic artist, an artist who belongs to the humanist tradition. And, don’t forget, all the original measures and scales came from the human body. The bed is a human measure, the doorway is a human measure, the wardrobe is a human measure. The difference is that in paintings you have an artificial representation, which is the perspective. This is real.”
The installation is on display until March 3. For more information:www.negev-museum.org.il