Joshua Neustein is one of the very few artists
I know who has expressed, forcefully and stirringly, the transcendental dimension
of the anarchist's rejection of the authority principle as summed up in the
proud motto "Neither God nor master" – a maxim which, in the final analysis,
is simply a rewording of the injunction of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha: "Be
thine own lamp". One might say that the fundamental drive that governs Neustein's
endeavor is what he has termed "a strategy of subversion" (1995, 38) of the
established way of thinking and perceiving. And Neustein specifies: "My art
addresses ideological patronage, the contradiction and allure between the archivist
and the anarchist, mass man and the charismatic individual" (loc.cit.).
Thus Kristine Stiles is perfectly correct when
she observes that his art "for some thirty years has been, in large, measure,
a meditation that questions the various authorities that control meanings. I
could say he has mapped the objects and materials of authority into pictures
of the territories of law and its functions" (Stiles 1995, 1). And she goes
on to specify that "his art constructs visual parallels to relationships of
authority, the contexts within which that authority is exercised, the boundaries
demarcated by sovereignty and the objects, architecture and social positions
that fix power and establish dominions of control" (idem, 2). Basically, what
Neustein tries to define with every work is a problem of the identity of an
expatriate and of an artist in general, torn between the conflicting demands
of his ego and of society, and on the aesthetic plane of an autobiographical
expression and one of a more universal dimension.
What also fascinates me in Neustein's oeuvre
is that it brilliantly confirms the age-old idea that each artist's work, in
any creative field – literature, music, visual or conceptual – is most of the
time, although disguised, the artist's physical or spiritual self-portrait.
But seldom has an artist's biography so tellingly shaped the very poetics (the
logos) and the medium (the praxis) of his work.
Neustein's early mature works already reveal
that his first problem was to invent a style that would be appropriate to transcend
artistically an ethical imperative. Concerning the formal exigency he was first
influenced by the slick painterliness of American figurative expressionism (Richard
Diebenkorn and Larry Rivers in particular). For the ethical issues, the concerns
of the Ofakim Hadashim (especially of Zaritsky and Arie Aroch) made a lasting
impression on him. He thus confirmed to Pincus-Witten the "strong moral influence"
exerted by these two artists "whose small pictures reveal private pictograms
linked to the earthbound sources of Judaism" (Pincus-Witten 1977, 44).
Neustein was born in a crucial year, 1940, and
in a most dramatic area: Danzig – the Polish city that was first invaded by
the Germans and then occupied by the Russians. As a consequence, Neustein was
displaced to Siberia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where his father had been sent
as a forced laborer. At the end of the war the family returned to Warsaw. But
not for long. The climate of rabid anti-Semitism congenial to the Poles led
the Neusteins to emigrate to Austria, and from its Eastern Zone to escape to
the West; from there they went to Israel, and finally to New York in 1951, where
his parents settled in Brooklyn. At the age of 24 Neustein decided to return
to Israel, moving to Jerusalem. For seventeen years, while based in Israel,
he also traveled frequently: to France – where he exhibited in Paris with Yvon
Lambert in 1972, England and New York – here Bertha Urdgang launched his first
American solo shows in 1974. Five years later, in 1979, he returned to the US,
settling in New York, where he now lives and works.
Neustein's diasporic condition, rendered dramatic
by his experience as a refugee, literally a "wandering Jew" from birth to late
childhood, largely accounts for his having explored, so convincingly, the themes
of displacement, belonging and safety, and for his obsession with maps and boundaries.
A twin subject matter which, in one form or another, runs like a red thread
through all the different stages of his work, and which has also conditioned
his crossing of the lines between established techniques, moving with the greatest
ease from one expressive medium to another, using, as the case might require,
plain paper works as well as carbon-, tar- and sandpaper works, drawing, painting,
sculpture, installations, performance, photography, video, environmental art
and assemblage.
The fact that for so many years Neustein suffered
the fate of a displaced person, with the entailing horizon of alienation and
absence, could not fail to bear on his activity of the late Sixties and early
Seventies when, as well discerned by McCormick, he "explored displacement and
multiple perspectives, using photography as a conceptual medium to articulate
the psychology of perception. Documenting bales of hay as forms newly transplanted
or no longer there, Neustein began his unspoken conversation on absence and
alienation. In another piece of that time he superimposed different photographic
views looking towards and out of a window. Another photographic work recorded
in succession a wall's surface, inner structure, absence (seeing through it)
and its other side. Through these early works Neustein devised a structuralist
equation of displacement and changing pictures of the same reality" (McCormick
1987, 12).
Paradigmatic, in this frame of mind, are not
only his "map works" but also his 1975-78 performances such as "Border Piece"
in which a dog was taken to urinate – to mark off its territory as opposed to
the political boundaries – on the border of the Golan Heights; on the German-Danish
border (at Kroza) and on the treaty line of Northern Ireland (Belfast). As observed
by Klaus Ottman, political boundaries were being removed "and replaced with
boundaries of a different order" (1987, 28). And McCormick remarked, in turn,
"His focus on the borders of conflict is not to exploit them for creative fuel
(as so much 'political art' is prone to do), but to exorcise the inherent frictions.
His past performance and environmental art gestures along hostile borders acted
cathartically as ritualistic releases of pent up frustrations. Neustein's persistent
facade of inscrutability and deliberate rejection of political rhetoric envelopes
his art with a shamanist intensity" (McCormick 1987, 13).
Another equally determining factor was the question
of language. Neustein, as was the case for so many wandering Jews born in the
dramatic years of the Forties, has never had a mother tongue at home: too many
different homes and hence, at best, too many step-mother tongues! And all of
them, as well noted by Robert Pincus-Witten, "poorly spoken, in accents and
inflections differing from the way the natives speak; even in the first stable
environment that Neustein knew, there was anxiety. In a fundamental way, the
artist even as a child was forced to seriously focus on the language problem
– what language do I speak? In which language do I think? Neustein imagines
he spoke Polish until he was 7. He recalls a lapsus, an infantile breakdown
when he took to bed and from which he arose only to speak English" (Pincus-Witten
1977, 43). This multilingual situation was sublimated by Neustein into his use,
as already mentioned, of many different media and expressive techniques.
His biography has also largely determined his
predilection for the light and ashes polarity, both used as essential components
of many of his creations – and the chromatic range of his palette – limited
as it is to the darkest black fading gradually into transparent grays and occasionally
exploding into a blinding snow white. Thus, discussing with Douglas Shultz the
origin of his carbon paper series, he recalled what led him to associate light
and the ash-colored underground luminescence: "I remember, vaguely, living in
basements as a child with my parents. It was dark, safe and confined. The basement
was a privileged shelter. The windows, no higher than the weeds growing outside
the house, ushered in blocks of light. The light was laden with danger and still
one looked to it as essential to survival, like a breath of air. I remember
the light filtering through iron gratings over deep sills. Long-stemmed rays
ran across the floor, touched cement walls, vaults, buttresses. Subterranean
light was another light, a powdered haze that blurred more than defined" (Schultz
1992, 11-12). Ashes are also associated, and now indelibly, with the Shoah even
though Neustein denies such associations and hastens "to banish memory from
the work of art" (in a conversation with the author).
The fact that Neustein studied for five years
(1951-56) in a Yeshiva (that of Rabbi Yaacov Yosef, in Brooklyn) and then, for
another five years (1957-61), attended the College of the City of New York,
studying with the historian and humanist Hans Kohn, is certainly pertinent in
the formation of his approach to his conceptual works, which all have an esoteric
and ethical dimension that is well nigh absent from what is commonly termed
"conceptual art", something with which Neustein's works should never be confused.
To understand the motivations behind Neustein's palette and the reason for his
repeated use of ashes in his work let us dwell, for a moment, on the symbolic
significance of ashes and on the light-darkness dichotomy. As is the case for
all archetypal symbols, ashes have an ambivalent value.
On the one hand ashes stand for the total extinction
of life. Being the residues of what fire has consumed, they also point to the
precariousness and vanity of human life. A connection which, according to the
Torah, Abraham had already perceived when he associated dust and ashes with
the unimportance of his own person (Genesis 18:27). But, on the other hand,
being connected to the sun – through fire, their common origin – ashes also
stand for the eternal return, the endless life-death cycle or, in a word, for
eternal life. This value is emphasized by a further consideration: ashes are
the undifferentiated state of any and of all things destroyed by fire; in turn
this undistinguished state is characteristic of the pleroma, namely the
chaotic tohu-va-vohu, which is the essential preliminary stage of creation.
In turn, black and white largely confirm the
ashes' emblematic implications. Both these colors are equally associated with
death and mourning as well as with life and its eternal renewal. Blackness and
obscurity are the characteristics of the Western and Eastern Feminine principle.
Its Chinese equivalent, the Yin, terrestrial, maternal and instinctive, is black.
And so, very frequently, on account of their Chthonic origin, are the life-giving
Great Mothers, the Earth-Mother Goddesses – like Diana of Ephesus – the Goddesses
of love and fertility. In the Song of Songs the very personification
of the Eternal Feminine is "dark but comely" (v. 5). And the same color is what
in Hinduism corresponds to the Greek pleroma and the Hebrew tohu-va-vohu,
or namely the Prakriti (the undifferentiated prima materia). And,
just as naturally, the first stage of the alchemical process, the "germination
in darkness", is termed Blackness (Nigredo). So archetypal is this symbolism
that, for the Torah, the stage preceding the creation of light and life was
that of a universal darkness, just as for Greek mythology the primordial personification
of the universe, the God Chaos, generated Erebus (darkness), Nyx (night) and
Gaia (earth).
In turn white, being black's polar opposite,
is linked to it and therefore shares, its symbolism. It is the color of death
– because of the pallor of the corpse – and that of the Horses of Death; but
it also characterizes the Male vital principle – the Chinese Yang, for example.
In the Jewish tradition and in its esoteric writings the white of mourning is
messianic. It stands for an absence that is only temporary and is destined to
be reclaimed; for the certainty of rebirth; for an initiatic step in the long
process of awareness. Thus white is related to the Uranic solar awareness just
as black is associated to the chthonic unconscious apprehension. Most telling,
in the context of Neustein's oeuvre, is the fact that the marriage of black
and white (the hierogamic union of the Female and Male principles) generates
the gray color of the ashes which, in the chromatic sphere, is the value of
the center and hence of the human being who has conquered the golden awareness
(aurea apprehensio) and has thus become a fully individuated person.
Before examining to what extent the events –
factual or emotional – of the artist's biography have had a bearing on the form
and content of his oeuvre, and whether the symbolic implications outlined here
are also reflected in his single works, it should be noted that a servile correspondence
is not to be expected, because in that case the work would be merely didactic
and illustrative, while with Neustein, it is always inspired and poetic. As
well noted by Carlo McCormick, "Neustein is too sly and enigmatic a performer
to give up art's sense of mystery for the sake of supplying answers" (1987,
7).
On the other hand, I believe that Neustein is
well aware of the danger of giving free rein to one's own emotions, if one wishes
the work to have an objective and hence universal significance. Indeed, he has
explained, in the course of a conversation with Douglas Shultz, that his personal
associations do not threaten the autonomy of his works, "they emerge
from an experience but are not representing or describing that
experience" (Schultz 1992, 12, the italics are Neustein's). While, on the other
hand, he also acknowledges that his carbon drawings were indeed based on his
childhood memories (loc. cit.). Neustein also clarified that in transmuting
a feeling into a work of art a critical sublimation of the immediate emotional
event has to take place. In his words, "A work of art presents an image but
it also registers dissatisfaction with the way things are. The 'game' is to
transpose immediate poisons into cultural cuisine – art currency – to make an
instrument out of allure" (idem).
Answering a question concerning what Shultz
called "heroic art", Neustein insisted again upon the necessity – if the work
of art is to be meaningful indeed – for the artist to assume a critical approach
to both form and content. In other words, an artist must have the courage
to reject what Duchamp had already defined as having a mere "retinal" appeal,
claiming that the artwork must rather delight the mind. Neustein, inspired by
this injunction and firmly believing that "seeing is not knowing" (Ofrat 1995,
98), specified in turn: "I dislike heroic artists, not heroic art. Artists who
deny the spirit of inquiry, deny the right to ask questions, cling to habits
of feeling, they are afraid to break the thrall of art's spell. Modern art internalizes
the critique, absorbs it into its creative process" (idem, 13).
There exists a subtle underlying correspondence
between Duchamp and Neustein that stems from their both having led a life as
expatriates, the French artist settling in New York, but not severing his ties
with France; the Israeli staying also in New York, but still deeply involved
with Israel. In the work of both artists we can sense a strong element of ideological
nomadism, which manifests itself by shifting, as already noted above, quite
naturally from one expressive form to another. At the same time, and notwithstanding
an extremely great variety of formal results, in both artists the same theme
adamantly persists.
Duchamp never imposed his views on the viewer.
On the contrary, he stated that "it is the viewers who make the painting" (Schuster
1957, 143). Katherine Stiles, discussing Neustein's libertarian drive, similarly
points out that, in Neustein's mind, "it is the viewer who must finally determine
meaning, must finally assume authority of the image of the artist and the words
of the writer. For if the work of art is to have a continual life in the world,
it must inform sight, and by so doing, alter mind. Only by affecting subtle
transformations in the mind's eye of the viewer can the seeds of artistic creation
be passed on in perpetuity" (Stiles 1995, 2). And McCormick, in turn, observes,
"Neustein's manner of perception fixes its sights on emotionally and intellectually
loaded points of converging perspective without ever stating his own point of
view" (1987, 7). In fact, and here again Neustein concords with the role assigned
by Duchamp to the viewer, "The emphasis is not on what to see but on ways of
seeing" (loc. cit.).
Finally, and most importantly, the nomadic element
in both artists surfaces in the same esoteric way. McCormick has well perceived
that Neustein's "art is not about, nor does it reside in, one particular place.
It exists rather in the spaces between places, as a kinetic geography of transience"
(loc. cit.).
This immaterial, utopian location is precisely
the topos of Duchamp's saga of the Bride and the Bachelor who, additionally,
celebrate their marriage in the "infra-thin" dimension (Neustein's spaces between
places) which, according to Duchamp himself, is something "which escapes our
scientific definitions. I chose on purpose the word thin which is a word with
human, affective connotations, and is not an exact laboratory measure. The sound
or the music which corduroy trousers make when one moves, is pertinent to the
infra-thin. The hollow in the paper, between the front and back of a thin sheet
of paper" (1947, 46-47). And so "un-located" (u-topos, i.e. utopic) is
Neustein's "spaces between places" (I am tempted to write "place of the initiatic
rite of passage") that, in his maps, "there remains a haunting absence of detail
throughout this metaphorical land. It is a poetics of passage, but one that
has forgotten all specificity and speaks only to our collective experience"
(McCormick 1987, 13).
How important to Neustein are his map works
is also revealed by a letter he wrote to me on October 16, 1994, in which he
pithily expresses what it has taken me pages to elucidate: "I am deeply committed
to the Maps, which I consider my natural landscape, the nomad's horizon, the
Jewish perspective. The beauty of the art lies in the detail, the message in
the generality". In a film about him, he further commented: "I love maps even
without theoretical principles. I love MAPS for their own sakes schematic colors
and repeated shapes ebb-tide shapes. Maps are another order of image, between
diagram & representation. They are shared mass space with acoustical contours.
Maps are more significant than meadows and forests. Maps understand languages
and political tensions. The ocher cross thatch lines that indicate occupation...
are givens imposed by geography more akin to dialect. I love MAPS not travel.
I don't like travel anymore. I traveled enough with my parents. We covered the
length & breadth of Europe and Asia. We crossed a lot of borders and let
go of a lot of countries. Only the map remained with us. I was fascinated at
border crossings a certain confusion among the people a slight panic. I wanted
to stand on the border. Exactly on top of the purple border line in the map.
I wanted to track the dotted line or the red road system, and when road systems
proliferate and criss cross as they approach some metropolitan area there is
that intoxication, the quickening. Then there are the old fashioned elements
that some maps still retain, the railway system with the zipper line or 'some
points of interest' marked by asterix. I recall as a child during thewar. Do
I recall it? Do I image it? The bubbles along a road system that marked Warsaw
Bialistock, Minsk Moghilev, Vitebsk Smolesk, suddenly Moscow, then the Asian
expanse – Gorkij, crossing the Volga to Kuijbisev the Urals. The steam of locomotives
and the railway yards, acres of steel rails, resonance of the Russian songs
the sound of cantors bleating mournfully. In maps I sense responsibility. The
valley, the town, the stream have no meaning, they are terra incognita.
And the physical aspects change, only the maps have certainty. Names of places
conjure myths, send shivers up my spine and I hear the changes of Hasidim, of
monks, of army choirs. Maps construct their own history. Into each place I arrive
I bring my own history that I impose upon the new place. The distance from Broadway
at Columbia University to my studio is the same distance as from Abu Tor where
I lived to Romema where Bezalel Art School studios were. A walk of three-quarters
of an hour. Was it the same distance? What does that mean? Lands understand
borders, languages and political conditions. Forests and meadows have no understanding
of these histories, of these grammars. What knowledge does the meadow have?
Knowledge of a few cows, a few lovers? A few bugs and hugs, a few chickens –
but a straw, the straw is a map, a formulated land. The straw has known pain,
another season another reason. The straw has known cutting blades, it has winter
knowledge not only spring promise".
Quite recently Neustein sent me a memo to clarify
the circumstances that led him to dedicate himself to maps: "I turned to MAPS
when the Sinai had to be returned, when it had to be psychologically disowned
as living space. It felt like an amputation. I painted the Sinai again and again
in an ever-receding territorial denial. It was not so much the loss of a physical
limb as a grammatical trauma, a dyslexia of language. I had embraced a tyranny,
an assailable appetite. I paint MAPS because they are a diagram representation,
they are a shared mass space, they draw resonance for neurotic political fantasy,
deterritorialized territory. MAPS are displaced landscape allowing the spectator
multiple perspectives to see a different whole (Neustein 1999, 2).
Bertha Urdgang appropriately recognized in Neustein's
maps "a measure of the individual's relationship to the world. As the quintessential
ontology, the maps are typography turned into texture, turned back into typography"
(Urdgang 1986, n.p.). In short, Neustein's maps are "a system of notation for
the physical world as well as a receptacle for narratives of human drama" (idem).
This accounts for their inducing the same kind of emotional response that poetry
can provoke. A fact which led Zalmona to point out that "the code which activates
them is poetic rather than scientific" (Zalmona 1983, n.p.). In this context,
Jaromir Zedlinski also remarked that these maps "seem to be charting out a geography
of the heart, since many of them have at their center the city of Danzig, Neustein's
birthplace, and the point from which he set out to become a 'refugee from the
world' as he puts it" (Zedlinski 1997, 13). While Neustein explains that he
turned to maps when the Sinai had to be returned, the emotional stimulus can
be traced back to the mid-Seventies when his "Border Piece" performances
(1975-78) as well as works like Territorial Imperative (1976), Sculpture
for a Moving Border reveal his preoccupation with the shifting character
of borders and the transient territorial reality of states. Two of the most
characteristic works in this area are True North (1989-91) and The
Fist of the Red Sea (1992, both in the Israel Museum collection). True
North is made up of four elements. Two canvases each 244 x 183 cm. The hand-drawn
maps are of the Middle East up to the Horn of Africa. One canvas is drawn with
gold oil paint while the other is painted with black and white acrylic. The
lower map faces north and the upper map faces south (i.e. it is upside down
for the European orientation). Between the two maps is a mechanical device that
creates the gravitational center. In fact both maps' heads are towards that
center. Inside the mechanical structure are inductive circuits, measurements
and orientation devices, like Jacob's clock, a magnetic recording of a Mezzuzza
and gravity coils. The artifactual map creates its own history. The elements
Neustein uses in other works involve inducing magnetism by means of powder.
The ash maps as well as the rust maps are susceptible to the same
magnetic forces. Maps conduct their own history of impulses and their
own orientation.
The Fist of the Red Sea is a rust
map, approximately 150 x 130 cm. Etched into the steel is the shape of the
Red Sea from Bab el Mandeb, crossing the Rift Valley in the Horn of Africa,
moving diagonally across the surface, splitting into two Gulfs. The etched map
of Israel, Lebanon and Jordan implies an outstretched arm and fist or some other
aggressive body part. The rest of the terra incognita is a rusted surface
that continuously encroaches on the "known" or mapped view. Neustein's maps
stir the political and erotic imagination. Neustein told me "the figural gesture
of charted areas entwines with the law of nature which is 'rust never sleeps'.
The relationships are never symmetrical. The subsurface geology and the battling
societies create a doctrine of chances. The politics are equivalent to magnetic
directions, instrumental vectors. In a single predicate they act on multiple
actions".
When I first had the opportunity to meditate,
seeing the actual paintings for the first time, on Max Ernst's Fireside Angel
and Picasso's Guernica, both painted in 1937, I believed that few works
in the future would ever be able to evoke so poignantly and powerfully the tragedy
that has transformed the country of Goethe, Heine and Kant into a land of hate,
murder and ignorance, and a peaceful small Spanish town into the abode of death
and despair. Nobody, I thought, would have been able to again conjure up the
drama of a century that will be known as the Moloch Century for having exacted
such a frightful human toll. I am weighing the relevance of my words when I
say that with How History Became Geography (1990) (in the Israel Museum
collection) Neustein has brilliantly emulated his predecessors in transmuting
an appalling catastrophe into a work of art of the highest ethical and aesthetic
significance.
There is, however, a substantial difference
between the two paintings of the Thirties and Neustein's installation. While
the former are figuratively direct, fringing nearly on rhetoric, Neustein's
image is subtler and hence highly moving. The splinters of glass that are an
essential element in the work cannot help but remind us of the Kristal Nacht
when it all began, and the contrast of the beautiful baroque chandelier illuminating
the reign of death and desolation could not be more striking. But let us describe
this momentous memorial.
On a low (dwarf-legged) large metal table (25
x 230 x 230 cm), Neustein placed a hand-painted map (200 x 180 cm) of the "Old
World": Europe, the Mediterranean countries, the Middle East and Western Asia.
On the map are stacked, in vertical order, pieces of cut glass, the height of
each stack being directly proportional to the amount of violence perpetrated
in the area it covers. A heart-rending topography of human ferocity is thus
created. Above the map, and in sharp contrast with its subdued reality, hangs,
almost touching it, an exquisite baroque chandelier.
In How History Became Geography the aesthetic
achievement is the outcome of the well-known Surrealist dictum that recommends
drawing together two distant realities in a relationship which only Neustein's
poetic sensibility has grasped. Both Pierre Reverdy and André Breton observed
that the farther apart are the two realities brought together, the more brilliant
will be the spark obtained. The metaphorical dimensions of the two main elements
of Neustein's installation enhance still more the gap as well as the relationship
which separates and unites the map and the chandelier. For what is more in opposition
than darkness (the "Old World" obscured by the shards of glass) and light (emanating
from the chandelier)? At the same time, light and darkness are as inseparable
and complementary as night and day.
The same principle is at work in Neustein's
installation Domestic Tranquillity, which stages a carpet of ashes and,
again, a chandelier. The latter, in Arthur Danto's words, is "a fixture as elaborate
and intricate as a jewel – a fountain of luminous glory" (Danto 1999,1). And
Danto has also recognized that the aesthetic relevance of this piece is derived
from the contrast between the ashes over which shines a "chandelier, exemplifying
brilliance [which] declares the brilliance of the event over which it shines:
the ball, the reception, the concert, the wedding, the banquet" (idem). Danto
thus recalls, in harmony with Reverdy's and Breton's formula that while "light
and ashes are powerful symbols in their own right, [their] conjunction [is]
even more so [since there is] a symbolic incongruity between the chandelier
and the ashfield just beneath it" (idem).
A further optical detail enhances the conjunction
of the two protagonists of this installation, since the map is also endlessly
united and reproduced in each of the chandelier's prisms. In a letter to me
Neustein sees these reflections as "the neurological replications that show
this and not that and define the ownership and assessments which people call
normative views, knowledge and science. The problem here is what we call a complete
view... How History Became Geography addresses with a present tense a layered
consciousness" (letter dated September 2, 1999).
Perhaps we can detect in the series of Neustein's
works involving light and darkness a reflection of the age-old ambition of the
human being – that of reconstructing the union of his split personality. Thus
achieving the status of the mythical homo major, enriched and completed
by both elements of the sexual polarity, the feminine Chthonic darkness and
the male Uranic light.
