joshua neustein's series of "map" drawings was created during the
past year in new york. the emotional trigger which has set the machinery of
their creation into motion was released by the returning of the sinai peninsula
back to egypt ("in spite the fact that my political views justify it"
says the artist "i went then through a deep trauma, such as the one that
follows the amputation of an essential limb". psychologists would consider
such a statement to be the expression of a castration trauma, but such a reaction
would suit perhaps an artist whose work has been based for years on the principle
of breaking up the whole into parts and reuniting it...). neustein sees it as
an unconsciously engaged description, a visual expression of day-dreams, of
a trauma caused by living in an oppressed world... as well as an artistic solution
for a political trauma.
semiologically, the map is pluralistic in meaning. It relates to reality by
means of analogy and representation. It is a picture of the geographical world,
but, from the point of view of its decipherment, it is schematic and sometimes
abstract. the map is a rational sign, impersonal, mechanistic and has a character
of a poster at the same time, it is an image politically and emotionally charged,
a documentation of geography, history and politics - a "picture of the
world". artists, particularly conceptual artists, have used maps as an
image or as a scientific nominator in their works both ironically (by the israeli
artist michael drucks) and as a "visual investigation" (by the dutch
artist jan dibbets).
but neustein's "maps" are paintings, and the code which activates
them is poetic rather than scientific. neustein's maps have a certain artistic
"style". most could be considered as a kind of abstract painting.
the paints he applies to the maps with varying thickness are not characteristic
of maps: mother-of-pearl, black, grays and browns.
the facture is sensual, expressive, gestural and free. storms of colorful material
seem sometimes to attack these maps - an expression of a desire in action.
western culture has tended to separate clearly between scientific and expressive
signs. neustein, not respecting this
convention, creates a strange complexity of these two kinds of signs. he plays
on the border between the contradictory readings of different codes. his maps
loose something of the abstract dimension inherent to the scientific code. they
do not bear names of sites, and with the exception of longitude, latitude and
boundary lines, they lack arbitrary signs. these lines become lines of an artistic
drawing. sometimes they are glimpsed beneath the layers of colour like the preparatory
lines for compositions of traditional paintings. neustein's maps are as close
to reality as possible (they sometimes look like satellite photographs with
added lines of latitude).
the large dimensions of the maps and their "public scale" facilitate
the emotional and "existential" contact between them and the spectator,
as if it was a section of a space fitting the scale of human movement.
this contact is supported by the organic and sensual character of the brushwork.
neustein turns a conventional system into art and, at the same time, he secularizes
the painting by turning it into a "map".
the wild and emotional maps of joshua neustein express his ambivalence towards
israeliness. on the one hand he paints the country, the sinai desert and the
middle east, compulsively, as if to say "i am in the west but my heart
is in the east", but on the other hand, he does not paint the landscapes
of the place but rather its map, his outlook is objective, remote, the view
of a satellite... the maps do not reflect an emotional and rooted contact to
place. neustein is a "refugee" par-excellence. born in 1940 in danzig,
poland, he wandered as a refugee to russia, germany, austria and to the u.s.a.
after living in a religious jewish atmosphere in new york he began to study
art and immigrated to israel. here, in the 1970's he became one of the country's
leading young artists and then returned to the u.s.a. while retaining a deep
emotional affinity with israel. this affinity is sometimes apparent in his work
in which the question of identity is a natural preoccupation. it was expressed
both in the principle of removal and transfer that characterized his work in
the past and, in the concentration on the question of defining the identity
of an art object.
geography and the delimiting of territories were essential to the "refugee"
artist (many of his works related to the question of borders. in one, a dog
carved out his individual territory by urinating along its boundaries).
what is the connection between these maps and neustein's previous works? in
the past (at the beginning of the 1970's) his works were defined as the investigation
of the nature of visual language and the possibilities of representing reality.
His works revealed the process of their making and were based on manipulating
visual and physical categories (folding, tearing, etc.) according to certain
preconceived rules. the dynamics of reading was the principle interest of his
works. in the late 1970's his work became less epistemological and less abstract.
the paper's folds and its tearings concealed (perversely) figurative images.
the colour was applied in "emotional" and free strokes, with sensitive
and painterly brushwork. the works became organic, their viscera glimpsed, like
in an operation, from beneath the layers of torn outer "skin". the
drawings of the maps relate to this later group in their intensive expressiveness.
But they also relate to his earlier works by being receptive to the complex
question of representing reality (map/painting), the existing of a given system
which does not belong to the realm of art, and which precedes the process of
painting and determines the image and the shaping of the forms.
"i have no need to fold and conceal", the artist claims in relation
to the maps/drawings. and indeed, the perversity of the personal affiliation
with an object, the complexity of representing reality, the relation between
a three–dimensional and two-dimensional representation of reality (which
is actually the use of a map, which is a "flat" description of three-dimensional
reality), all these exist in the map series, and do not require a more complex
treatment of the support.
