Voodoo Time
Voodoo Time
The Voodoo Time exhibition wishes to put a finger on a new spirit characterizing contemporary art through three local artists’ point of view.
Behind the popular and misleading term “voodoo” stands a complex religious practice, a mixture of monotheism and paganism, which is construed in the Western world as a sort of black magic for the masses. The voodoo religion contains all the elements that comprise belief and religious identity in present day Western society – a combination of institutionalized religion, practical spiritualism, and popular mystics. In the last few years, it seems that the quest for religion and spirituality has also penetrated the art world, a phenomenon that allegedly clashes with the evolution of secularity, of which art was one of its flag bearers. Many artists and their critics have been engaged in the past decade with different manifestations of religiosity, theological and mythic motives and symbols, and exploring the thin line between the religious and the secular.[1]
The discourse on “the return of religion to art” is one of the most crucial of the past decade, and it characterizes a prominent tendency in all spheres of culture, as well as in philosophy, sociology, and political science. More and more researchers, critics, and thinkers are abandoning the secular point of view, and turn to discuss the existence of new religious movements and alternative forms of belief that are prevalent in contemporary society. The term given to this phenomenon, “re-enchantment”, came as a reaction to the “dis-enchantment”, a term coined by Max Weber that referred to the secular mind, which rejects religion.[3]
Since when can we speak about the cultural phenomenon of returning to religion?
Some claim that the return to religion emanated with postmodernism, that brought with it the elimination of the meta-narratives and the dogmatic scientific truths. This is also the point where the secular process came to its final stage of fulfillment. Some authors focus on the outcomes of globalization and late capitalism, that restored the power and significance of religion as a mechanism of political resistance. Others regard 9/11 as an historical point that evoked the religious need for social solidarity and coping of anxiety.
And regarding art – the “re-enchantment” provided it with a new status. With the declaration of the end of art, the death of metaphysics, and a long time after the death of god, it seems that a considerable amount of artists have abandoned form and returned to content, to emotion, and to the sublime. But it is not a traditional return to religion in its pre-modern form, the one that served the religious establishment, but a creation of a new system – a pluralistic and embracing one. The absolute freedom that art has experienced after its death was translated into religious, spiritual and moral freedom. Everything is allowed and anything is possible. Judeo-Christian iconography interweaves with pagan symbols, new age ideas and esotery – all these elements assimilate within each other, and are fused into a new form of creation and belief.
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Assi Meshullam, Tom Goldberg, and Morag Rubanenko convey a personal and a collective story through their work. Each one of them creates a private system of myths and rituals, sort of an artistic voodoo ceremony that loads their work with a functional meaning and presents art as a religious way of life.
All three artists create together a space which sanctifies impurity and abjection – two categories characterized by marginality, chaos, and lack of order – precisely like the “new religious art” which seeks its way and its definition.
Sanctity and spirituality for the three is not possible without impurity and abjection that first of all passes through the flesh and body, the same body that visual art has been sanctifying over fifty years – a post-human body, unstable, fragile, chaotic, that can no longer contain the Descartisian dichotomy between body and soul.
Assi Meshullam\ NGHP
In an unrestrained outburst of prophetic writing five years ago, Ro’achem (“your evilness” and also “your shepherd” in Hebrew) was born, a kind of an alter-ego, a prophet and the Order of the Unclean leader, a philosophical-religious conception, ranging between a wild and violent satire on any religion, that is characterized by the blind faith attitude, and a system of beliefs that are suitable to the present social and cultural climate.
In the biblical-like book, Ro’achem, who is a hybrid creature between a man and a female dog, undergoes a voyage of apprenticeship, saturated with violence, which begins in wild nature, continues in a wilder culture, and returns back to nature – where he discovers his messianic power.
Assi Meshullam, who sees himself as the flag bearer of the Order’s revelation, places the body and its impureness in his work at the center of religious experience, as a metaphor to the chaos and lack of order that the theological system is experiencing, and to the decline of divinity from the highest spheres of existence to everyday life, to the here and now. Ro’achem’s unwillingness to ascribe himself a position of a god, is the heart of the Order, that symbolizes religion after the Nietzschian “Death of God”, a religion that deprived the moral responsibility from the abstract and unattainable god and designated it to the individual and his consciousness. The body, as Meshullam presents it, isn’t the mundane dwelling of the soul any more, but a flinching and fluttering arena of liquids and juices, that express the man-animal deep religiosity.
The visual images created by Meshullam touch archetypical and universal religious experiences. The totem poles showing in the exhibition, an odd mixture between classic columns, sacred pagan sculptures, and dissected sacrificial hybrid creatures, refer to the savage underworld where the order was formed, and function as a sort of a psychological mechanism that carries bestial features, with which the order‘s followers can identify.
Tom Goldberg\ Neki Kapaim
Tom Goldberg is probably the last romantic artist, hidden in his studio within his own world, while creating for the sake of getting catharsis. The studio is his temple, a kind of an alchemy lab, where he is testing, examining, and searching. But something happens to Goldberg’s work when it emerges out of the studio – it is cynical, doubtful, resisting surrender to a sole truth or one interpretation, free of any modernist pretensions, and becomes a parody on the lone artist, who is full of messianic complexes.
In the exhibition, Goldberg places Jewish rituals on the borderline between sacredness and impureness by taking Jewish ceremonial props and dressing them in a magical-pagan narrative, mixing between nature and culture, life and death, abjection and sublimity, and between “foreign worship” and “Hebrew worship”: remnants of ritual objects that have been disqualified and concealed, are assembled and resurrected from the cemetery, shreds of prayer shawls that serve in the Jewish Miynan ritual.[3] undergo a rebirth after being left for four seasons outside the studio. A broken tombstone – a product of the Satan’s cult – becomes an Ouija board. A forgotten holy Torah closet picked up from the cemetery’s Genizah storeroom provides a surround system, playing sounds of a howling black kitten. Foremost in the exhibition is the video work, Neki Kapaim (“Incorruptible”). In the video, Goldberg goes to an odd night trip, returning a stolen Shofar from a mysterious Shofarot wall in Tel Aviv’s Florentine neighborhood, on which a death curse is exercised upon he who will touch it. Goldberg cast the Shofar into to a sculptural object, and in a kind of purification and cleansing ceremony, he is going to restore it to the place where it belongs.
Morag Rubanenko/ Dark Matter
Morag Rubanenko is an artist-performer in her performance shows as well as in her sculptures. In those two mediums she places her body in the center, examines it, replete with its fluids and abjection, with an openness and sincerity, which is rarely found these days.
Like her spiritual mothers, Rubanenko turns her body into canvas, and into an arena of experiences and investigations. But unlike the subversive 1970’s body women artists, who subjected their bodies to abuse, degradation, and manifestations of masochism as an act of protest and domination, Rubanenko refers to her body, first of all, as her individual one, in an attempt to spiritualize it. Her use of body fluids, that apparently meets a provocative need, is actually an instrument for her for loading it with spiritual and ritual qualities.
In this exhibition, Rubanenko’s works are prominent in their female presence, when everyday activities and ‘female’ materials undergo a mystic-ritual metamorphosis; crystal stones, a product of mother nature, are shimmering in bright light as a result of a private alchemy process of her own, a distillation of two substances that are both toxic, healing, loathsome, and sublime – sugar and urine. In her main work, Rubanenko is placing a large throne and facing it – a dress made of pig fat.
The installation, emphasizing the body’s absence, paraphrases the religious motif of the empty chair, which is well known in the history of art and which articulates the present- absent essence of God. The installation will be filled with Rubanenko’s presence twice in the exhibition, in the performance A Pit of Light, during which she will sew a new dress made of fat.
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References
[1] This new tendency in contemporary art has long been discussed in dozens of books, researches, and exhibitions during the past few years. The most comprehensive and broad is a collection of essays taken from a multi-participant panel that was held in the school of Art Institute of Chicago in April 2007, entitled Re- Enchantment. Edited by James Elkins and David Morgan.
[2] The philosopher Jürgen Habermas is an outstanding example of the cultural return to religion – after abandoning the secular thinking of the Frankfurt school, Habermas turned in the later 1990’s to discuss contemporary theological issues. Other authors who were caught up in the theological stream are Gianni Vattimo and Jean-Luc Marion, whose names are linked with the post-metaphysical philosophy, and the Marxist Slavoj Žižek.
[3] A minimal number of 10 people required for prayer in public in Judaism