In the last stages of installing the work Neustein remarked
"I have not completed it – I will simply stop".

In Hebrew l' hitmakem means the act of situating /placing/ orienting oneself in space.

Maps trace the physical and mental contours of a landscape; forming, as it were, a palimpsest of borders, of boundaries created by politics, economics and culture; recording natural and social phenomena; tracing the fault lines of natural and political history, indicating erosion and resources and their concomitant demographics.

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To mold a landscape in ashes, instead of soil and rock, hints at borders that stir and disperse in the slightest breeze: in the region where Joshua Neustein has located his fifth map of ashes, border erasures are imminent.

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Neustein's geographic ambivalence is central to the evolution of his work. He proposes and retracts, explores and dismisses options as an integral process to the making of the installation. The rejected possibilities become the subtexts of the final work, a kind of under-paint.

* * *

Originally the artist considered Beirut for his map. But that choice seemed too obvious. The public discourse on Beirut had crystallized and ossified into Left wing and Right wing rhetoric. The purpose of the Israeli invasion into Lebanon in 1982 was to establish peace at home - a political Shlom Bayit. The invasion was referred to as Shlom Hagalil "Peace unto the Galilee" until that euphemism lost favor and it came to be known as the 'Lebanese War'. Neustein conceived Still Life in response to that war.

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If we drew a line between Beirut and Bne Brak on the map, it would divide the country along an imaginary diagonal, with the West Bank and Jerusalem on the right side and the coastal line, Gaza, Bne Brak, and Tel Aviv on the left. Maybe that invisible border between Beirut and Bne Brak actually does exist as a series of sociological fractures within present-day Israeli society.

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Domestic Tranquility Bne Brak deftly weaves itself into the warp and weft of the social fabric of Israeli life - its birthright, it's social climate, and its vicissitudes.

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The ash map in Domestic Tranquility Bne Brak was built from a material produced by a cycle of oxidation, the cycle of organic life, our existence, a carbon cycle. This final cycle reduces us to oneness, equality, and unification.

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Interestingly, carbon copy is used to duplicate markings and has come to be seen as the opposite of the original.

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The ashes are lush, alluring, hypnotic, dense and fragile. As a material, ash retains a quality of absorption, of sound, moisture, light, and to a degree even the oxygen of the space it occupies.

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Here, the outlines of the streets are of the city of Bne Brak, but they also encompass its inhabitants. The ideologies of Bne Brak represent a culture older than the state of Israel. The installation addresses demographics of one nation but disparate cultures: many cultures and one geography, many geographies gathered, clustered, fused into one reality.

Its dark trenches conjure up the sociology of a country, like multiple Rorschach drawings: the dualism of its coalitions and the dichotomy of its co-habitants.

The ash block formations delineate a close- knit group of detached and independent habitats. Domestic Tranquility, Bne Brak is not just an image, a projection, of the city of Bne Brak, rather it also represents a dialogue with the rest of Israel.

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Details in maps are often the progeny of old ideologies, retained histories that can become the stuff of national legend. But anomalous areas are the consequences of forgotten histories – unclaimed lands, relinquished dreams, struggles or aspirations.

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The ash sunflowers are incomplete. Old maps have legends and cartouches – scrolled decorations, emblems, grotesque heads or cornucopias – not unlike these ash sunflowers that indicate an un-charted land, a negative space. The ash sunflowers spread their petals, effacing some of the streets of the city, like the way the languages on the video counteract and overlap one another. Maybe these too represent uncharted territories, or a metaphor for the struggle of the other for autonomy.

Echoing this leitmotif of non-completion, Neustein thought of leaving a mundane wheelbarrow, replete with ash and shovel, at the edge of the map. The image of the wheelbarrow filled with ashes as part of the exhibit has remained with me: The shovel, the wheelbarrow and, inside it, a mound of soft powdery ash.

It was the right decision to take it away.

* * *

Without the video, the ash map alone, would imply tragedy. I have worked with Neustein on two other ash cities, but this is the first to include a video presentation as an additional dimension. The video portrays a struggle of ideologies, languages, and dominance. The mirrored reflection of territorial conflicts and language, affect and confine women.

Ideologies that lend dominance to men? As an insider – and as a woman – I am aware of hierarchy and equality; of the gulf between divinity and the nurturing of the flesh, between the lone prophet and the masses.

* **

In the video, Neustein delivers a speech to a field of sunflowers, all facing attentively in his direction. The oration is a text by Ben Zvi, Israel's second president, (1953) exhorting the tribes of Israel to come together and form a unified nation. Neustein discovered the speech on the new Israeli 100 Shekel bill. He had it translated into English and Arabic and delivered it to the sunflowers in all three languages. An aural rivalry ensues as each language in turn overpowers the other by modulation of volume.

The video loop continues until the speech has been completed in its entirety in all three languages. The sound track goes on while the screen moves back and forth between Neustein in the field of sunflowers and a young woman in a room, ironing. Her clothes and gestures imply a certain ambiguity of ethnicity, a sense of loss seems enmeshed in her ubiquitous yet obscure narrative, which now highlights the individual rather than the masses of sunflowers.

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The repetitive, soothing motions of ironing can be seen as a form of catharsis, or a 'dulling of the senses' – an escape from the inequity and nullification of her dreams. Her movement recalls the motion of men deep in prayer – a mantra for her meditations.

The docile and domicile performance empowers her, as in traditional homes both the ultra orthodox woman and the traditional Arab woman, nurtures the daily needs of her surroundings. In her distinct dimension she is the peacekeeper, by default she controls the domestic serenity.

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The anthropomorphic quality of a field of sunflowers assumes an almost votive aspect. Neustein could have used the image of a harvested field, a field of hay bales (which he used in works of the 70's). Instead he delivered his declamation to the bowed heads of compliant sunflowers, an adroit portrayal of masses tending towards idolatry.

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The woman, – like the sunflowers – is the depiction of compliance within the hierarchy of the home.

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"There are those who want a text (an art, painting) without a shadow, without the "dominant ideology"; but this is to want a text without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile text (see the myth of the Woman without a Shadow). The text needs its shadow: this shadow is a bit of representation, a bit of subject: ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds: subversion must produce its own chiaroscuro. (Commonly said: "dominant ideology." This expression is incongruous. For what is ideology? It is precisely the idea insofar as it dominates: ideology can only be dominant. Correct as it is to speak of an "ideology of the dominant class," because there is certainly a dominated class, it is quite inconsistent to speak of a "dominant ideology," because there is no dominated ideology: where the dominated are concerned, there is nothing, no ideology, unless it is precisely—and this is the last degree of alienation—the ideology they are forced (in order to make symbols, hence in order to live) to borrow from the class that dominates them. The social struggle cannot be reduced to the struggle between two rival ideologies: it is the subversion of all

ideology which is in question.)"[1]

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The impact of the installation as text – a blurred text, perhaps – is that this work strives to lose its indigenous attributes and attain a purer materiality of form and space, not unlike the textures and negative spaces that exist on a page of writing. In If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino's character, Irnerio, teaches himself how to look at text without actually reading the words. He refuses to recognize meaning and instead focuses on the material forms, the mesmerizing rhythm of the letters themselves – until the text begins to disintegrate before his eyes.

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Neustein made Beit Alfa in the early 70's. The work is made from large sheets of tissue paper used to wrap oranges. The sheets came from the Hedera paper plant before they were cut into individual wrappers. The color was a pale orange, the scent of oranges was imprinted in faint lines on the paper. A steel belt bound the papers. When one walked near the work, the sheets of paper fluttered lightly in the breeze of one's movement - arousing a faint scent that was just enough to titillate the senses.

Do ashes also possess a scent, a hint of surroundings that can envelop one's senses? The capacity to transfer one from here to there, from now to then, as, let's say, an orchard grove? Can one stand in the path of an ash city and be transported to another dimension – somewhere not experienced, somewhere open to sensory captivation?

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An allegory: a student meeting hall with a large table, chairs, and in the middle a wide architectural beam which serves no structural purpose. It is named Axis Mundi; its purpose is to act as an obstruction preventing any individual at the table from seeing every one else.

The opposite of our own vision is another person's view of the same thing. You can only see another's point of view if you shift or adjust your visual perspective.. Metaphorically we can look beyond our position and attempt to understand something outside of ourselves. Axis Mundi defines a person's boundaries while defying them simultaneously. Axis Mundi requires diligent observation of one's location and scrupulous respect in observing the location of the other. It is a definition and obliteration at once: a momentary erasure of one's self by confirmation and deference to the other. As a point of departure, a reference for all other experiences - to look over and beyond the pole of Axis Mundi that blocks the path and the view.

* * *

The practices of prevalent interpretations short-circuit the potential of viewing activity.

Gershom Sholem wrote that the highest level of spiritual continuum is achieved by the 'inauguration of a problem', the formulation of a question.

In Domestic Tranquility we make our way through the maze of blocks that lead to the large chandelier that hangs so low, seemingly devoid of any function. This unlit chandelier with the tears of crystals buried in the ash block seems to me to be a filigreed personification brought forth from the ash city. The ashes are oneness; they erase identifying signs. Will the general audience perceive Bne Brak as a Ghetto and miss their own affinity to the field of sunflowers?

Wendy Shafir

[1] Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text p.32