\u00a0\u201cBezalel knew how to combine the letters by which the heavens and earth were created.\u201d
\n\u2014Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 55a.
\nFive books were cast in iron by Micha Ullman and filled with earth; five volumes of red-loam earth as red as blood (Sand Books, 2000). They make me think of sacred books and big notions such as myth and history, but, first and foremost, they bring to mind the connection in the Hebrew language between sand (hol) and secular (hulin). This sand denotes earth in the most literal sense, as a piece of ground, as well as landscape which molds one\u2019s identity.
\nFive kinds of earth grains were poured by Ullman into the drawers of a filing cabinet, which have turned into pit-like cavities within the \u201cpit\u201d of the mouth cavity suggested by the work\u2019s title\u2014Mouth-Here (2014). The simple, effective logic dictated by the alphabetical order is turned into an artistic act that takes place within the filing cabinet: the forms of the 22 Hebrew letters and several punctuation marks were cut out of the drawers\u2019 bottoms in places corresponding to the place where the sound of each letter is produced within the mouth. This is a resonance chamber of letters and words, which serve \u201cas receptacles for delicate and profound thoughts and exalted emotions. Some words [are] like the high mountains of the Lord, others [are] a great abyss. \u2026 Words rise to greatness, and, falling, turn profane.\u201d
\nIn the grass, a pit has been dug by Ullman. It is in the form of two Hebrew letters, pe and he, yet another play on words between the Hebrew letters spelling both po and pe\u2014here and mouth, respectively. Here is a silent mouth, a preliterate tohu, the silence of mouths that have not learned how to speak with each other in the fractured local environment.
\nIn the museum\u2019s front entrance plaza, winter clouds are reflected in murky river water. Books are drowning alongside flowering water plants that peek, like the water lilies beneath Claude Monet\u2019s bridge, out of the green-scum blanket covering the stagnant water. Wooden shelves laden with books climb up the wall adjacent to the pool, like a many-armed organism threatening the books that float in Avital Geva\u2019s river, fleeing for their lives. As if waging a final battle, a cluster of books attaches itself to the raft. These rafts of words demand that we contemplate the current image of Israel as rife with conflict, the notion of refugeedom, and spaces where one may exercise freedom.
\nMicha Ullman and Avital Geva have both placed books out there, confronting them with the wear and tear of the exterior. In a sense, they have returned them to the ground. Ullman has dug up the deposits of history and memory from the hard ground, removing the covering skin to reach the layers beneath it, only to find the void there. The earth removed is usually left beside the pits he digs, at times transported elsewhere and then returned to its former place in a way that leaves visible the wound\u2019s sutures. The emptiness or negative space\u2014which Ullman calls \u201cthe space between the lines\u201d\u2014is the material with which phantom sculptures are made.
\n\u201cOnce I wrote Now and in Other Days. Now I have arrived at those other days,\u201d lamented Yehuda Amichai, sober-mindedly, the passage of time and the life that once was or that was once dreamt, with which he became disillusioned. Geva leaves books on dirt roads, on sewage openings and in water pools, alongside clouds, rain, dreams, and fragments. He employs a somewhat constructivist approach to ask questions, articulated by the disintegrating books, about a society that has imploded. Ullman, too, claims that \u201ca pit knows how to ask questions.\u201d As a sculptor in whose work the conceptual interfaces with the spiritual, his thoughts about culture, history, and man\u2019s place therein stem from his play (through physical action) with the library\u2019s various basic forms: the house of books, the chair within the house of books, the letters within the books, and, respectively, digging, emptying, outlining, imprinting, casting, and covering.
\n***
\nTake poems but don\u2019t read them,
\ndo violence to this book:
\nspit on it, kick it,
\nwring its neck.
\nThrow this book in the sea
\nto see if it can swim.
\nHold it over a gas stove
\nto see if it doesn\u2019t burn.
\nNail I, saw through it
\nto see if it resists.
\nThis book is a paper rag,
\nletters like flies\u2014and you
\nare a rag of flesh: you eat dust, ooze
\nblood, stare at it, and snooze.
\nThe abuse of the \u201cpaper rag\u201d demanded by the poet Meir Wieseltier\u2014which lowers the poem from the lofty realm of the spirit to the down-to-earth\u2014is indeed to be found in Geva\u2019s treatment of the book. He grounds this capsule of civilization, history, and human genius by emphasizing its existence as a physical, perishable object. Geva poured concrete on books, joining them together like bricks; looking at his wall one cannot help but think about books as the cornerstones of Jewish culture. He has allowed them to grow rancid, torot and become a growth bed for mold and fungi, thereby becoming once again part of the cycle of organic life.
\nAs a materialist, Geva\u2019s conceptual actions have a lot in common with agricultural work. In The Books-in-Landscape Experiment\u2014which he conducted in 1972 as part of the \u201cMetzer-Messer Project,\u201d which comprised a series of artistic actions by several artists, including Ullman, Dov Or-Ner, Moshe Gershuni, Yehezkel Yardeni, Efrat Natan, and others\u2014the books served as raw material or as an agricultural product. Images documenting this action are included in the exhibition. Geva poured heaps of second-hand books (collected from recycling containers) into large cattle-feed troughs on the strip of land separating the Jewish Kibbutz Metzer and the neighboring Arab village Messer. They looked like piles of hay or fertilizer, such as farmers unload in the field and then scatter to improve the soil. In doing so, Geva asked a simple question: can books, epitomes of cultural yield, serve as cultural and social fertilizer? Will they, when unloaded in the field as heaps of fertilizer, set in motion socialization processes and lay the ground for interaction between different sectors and groups\u2014in this case, Jews from the kibbutz and Arabs from the adjoining village?
\nWhat actually happened was that passersby started rummaging through the books. As a result, the books were randomly scattered around the area, creating what looked like pathways of neglect and entropy. The entire area soon had a disturbing post-apocalyptic atmosphere. There, between the Jewish kibbutz and the Arab village, the disused piles of books resembled piles of dead bodies after some cataclysm; now, in the garden in front of the museum, the books are piled on stones, like sculptures that yearn to be resuscitated while sinking downward into the ground, like organic fertilizer that will enable the growth of a future civilization. And since Geva is always interested in the synergy between life-and-culture bio-ecological systems (combining the two meanings of culture), one should ask whether once the books are removed from storage and laid out in a public space they in fact contribute to the creation of a new society. By cultivating books\u2014just as he cultivates, fish, microscopic algae, or wheat sprouted on Styrofoam beds\u2014Geva indicates the possibility of viable coexistence.
\nGeva\u2019s installation Books in the Deep River, Oh Lord is a further development of the pool whose point of origin is the ecological pool in the Ecological Greenhouse he established on his kibbutz, Ein Shemer. He has placed books in a shallow pool of sweet water, which has turned, in the course of the exhibition, into a puddle of green, stagnant water, full of life yet putrid. This action spurns society\u2019s ivory towers, for the very choice to conduct social \u201cexperiments\u201d with books resonates with profanation of the sanctity of the book and human culture. Reflected in the water, the books appear to have been relegated underground; but are they there to draw something from the depths of the earth, or to bury waste in it?
\n\u201cWhen cultural values are at risk,\u201d Geva says to me, books \u201crepresent the culture that needs to be saved.\u201d In a society which is losing its cultural and moral resources, the books he \u201cabuses\u201d may be read as survivors, time capsules that preserve something just before it is gone forever. Geva\u2019s \u201criver\u201d refers to an African American spiritual sung by slaves who likened its crossing to longing for freedom. In Geva\u2019s work, the river crosses the museum\u2019s garden, laying out a dream path toward an unknown destination to be reached by the rafts. Is this a 2015 version of the Jordan River? What does the hope for a Promised Land look like when reflected in the stormy waters of current events?
\n***
\nBurning diaries, burnt parchments and letters \u201csoaring on high\u201d are apt descriptions of Micha Ullman\u2019s books and letters; more and more pits, more and more cavities that are sometimes catacombs, bunkers, holes, or just open or covered wounds in the field. In affinity to the literature of Jewish Kabbalah, Ullman\u2019s work stretches between emptiness and fullness and between the concepts of shevira (shattering) and tzimtzum (contraction) in order to reach tikkun (mending) and renewed creation. The pits he digs are not necessarily an act of burial or hiding. Ullman digs beneath the skin in order to remove something from the depths beneath.
\nBeneath the ground of Bebelplatz in Berlin Ullman dug up a negative space, enclosing air in a room surrounded by silent shelves, empty of words (The Library, 1995-96). One can walk over the transparent lid of this \u201csculpture\u201d as over a precipice, peek into the neon-lit subterranean room that serves as a memorial to the twenty thousand books burned there by the Nazis in 1933; but one cannot go down into it. In the afternoon, as the German sky touches the pit\u2019s glass ceiling, one can imagine smoke rising from within. I cannot help but see Ullman\u2019s scattered-sand works from recent years as a physical gesture of ash scattering; ashes that have turned to red-loam earth ground to dust. Whether we like or not, the scattering of ashes brings to mind the piles of ash marking the place where hundreds of thousands died, who instead of being buried in the ground rose up, as crematorium smoke, to their burial in the sky.
\nThe pit dug by Ullman in the museum\u2019s garden is in fact open to air and light. Only the shadows cast by the trees around it stroke the painful ulcer in the form of the Hebrew letters pe and he\u2014Hebrew letters spelling both po and pe (here and mouth, respectively). The first winter rains have already left a murky puddle inside it. Next to it is the pile of dirt dug out, affined to the book in being spirit manifested in matter. It is live matter, which changes with the sunlight and weather, for the northern wind, against whose direction Ullman has positioned the pit, will bite away at its walls and inner body over time. A dug up book? A pit full of emptiness? Perhaps a fractured male-female unity comprised of the combination between the aggressive incision of the penetration into the bowels of the earth and the primal soft, sensuous pile dredged up from it. The pile and the pit, which Ullman often likens to a womb, both contain the materials of the incised letters, and the displacement of the earth generates \u201cthe tension of separation and yearning in the material to return to its place.\u201d
\nThe time during which the earth is dug out of the pit is likened by Ullman to the inception of speech, when sound starts to be produced by the mouth, just before it is divided into clear syllables. This physical act is also a poetic one, touching on the act of creation between heaven and earth. The pit, which is man-size times four, establishes the rules of the reciprocal gaze between the standing body and the one lying down. The entire composition demonstrates the state of man\u2014facing the pit in dread of death and awareness of life\u2014as well as of nature and culture. It resonates with a sense of \u201cI am here\u201d such as Barnett Newman created in his sculptures; a relationship between place and body which Maurice Merleau-Ponty articulated by saying, \u201cthere would be no space at all for me if I had no body\u201d.
\n\u201cI am a digger,\u201d Ullman declares. For over 45 years he has been digging pits in the ground, an act which to his mind may be likened to reading. To understand the newest pit he dug\u2014a word-pit, as well as his first outdoor letter-sculpture\u2014one must trace the development of his pit-digging over the years into sculptures that touch on the body, the mouth, and language, thereby also establishing a connection between man and book, body and mind.
\nIn the \u201cMetzer-Messer Project\u201d Ullman dug two of his first pits: one in the Arab village Messer and the other in Kibbutz Metzer. Then he exchanged the earth removed from the pits, filling up the Messer pit with Metzer earth and vice versa. The work has been described as an action meant to raise consciousness of the various political, religious, and nationalist meanings of regarding the land as a value, pointing out that ultimately, the land is one and the same for all. It is interesting to compare this gesture to Geva\u2019s action with books in the same project. Both suggest a rather simple idea and express\u2014naively or not\u2014faith in the power of art as an instrument of change in society.
\nUllman has since continued to dig pits. In 1975 he made Pit with Steps, and in 1980 he transported earth to the Venice Biennale (together with Moshe Gershuni), where he dug up pits in which mud seats were embedded. The pits he has dug since then have gradually become more structured and have gained additional existential and social meanings. Such is The Library (1995) in Berlin, whose metaphoric meaning is particularly loaded, as is Equinox (2009), in which the sky is interred in a grave-pit while playing with varying light-and-shadow exposures. Red earth is also a recurrent element in Ullman\u2019s work, from his early drawings to recent installations in which he sprinkled sand on books (Sand Days, 2001) and on people in an impromptu wedding ceremony (the performance Wedding, 2011) and then preserved the traces left in the sand by the books or people, like a photogram which records negative spaces.
\nIn Ullman\u2019s work one must always bear in mind another entity, an absent one, which has no material representation. He sculpts presences without in fact embodying them. Simple, quotidian or necessary actions performed with simple materials indicate a deeper meaning: \u201cA pit is earth that surrounds a void; it is equally a void created by the absence of earth. And this void is connected to the sky, to the entire universe.\u201d In Ullman\u2019s pits, which are empty molds for human bodies and books, boundaries emerge not only between man and his environment or beliefs, but also within man himself, between the matter and spirit that constitute the core of his being.
\nImages that imply an absent body are common in Israeli conceptual art, in which images are always \u201celusive and strive for redefinition,\u201d and are grounded in an outlook that regards language as the tongue of G-d\u2014that is, language is perceived not as the bearer of a message but is rather as \u201cthe message itself.\u201d Ullman\u2019s sculptures take one step further the implication of a divine presence in man, doing so through the connection to language which, to Ullman\u2019s mind, \u201cis connected to the void within the pit.\u201d And he adds, \u201cThe content of the pit is not matter but spirit. The space within the pit is the space between people. Looking at people talking to each other, one can see that the dialogue between them is in fact sculpturing in air.\u201d
\nThis enigma that Ullman dubs \u201csculpting in air\u201d creates an entire world filled with mystery in the filing-cabinet work on view in the museum. Quite possibly it was the artist\u2019s collaboration with the National Library of Israel, which commissioned the project, which sparked Ullman\u2019s engagement with ideas that have interested him for many years. The outcome is a conceptual sound box filled with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the countless possible combinations between them. The cabinet drawers have become the body which organizes the various areas in the mouth cavity and associates them with the spiritual qualities of the ability to speak, enunciate letters, form words, and create a language which creates a world. The letters, huddled within the drawers like sounds within the mouth, are positioned in each drawer in the place corresponding to where the letter\u2019s sound is produced within the mouth, from the innermost to the outer area (throat, tongue, palate, teeth, lips). Here, too, like the pit dug outside the museum, the physical space is staged as metaphorical to the contrasts within man, who is both body (material and earthly) and spirit (in both the private and the public spheres). Mouth-Here situates the pit, which until now had been dug in the ground (even when turned into an empty library in Berlin), within the body. Ullman\u2019s pits have turned into drawers which are mouth cavities that, containing language, imply both the physical and metaphysical aspects of the linguistic sign. The language spoken within the drawers of this cabinet is like a concealed conversation or an inner dialogue held within oneself. On opening the drawers, this internal conversation opens up, too, revealing the connections between interiority and exteriority that inform human culture and the complexity of existence.
\nBetween Ullman\u2019s inner dialogue and Geva\u2019s cultural and political allegory, these two veteran artists observe Israeli society from the vantage point of tribe elders. They form, coin, drown, and bury Hebrew words\u2014be it in a pool that is an allegory of a river which is also a dream or in a pit that is a thought about the body which transpires in-between land and letters of light in the air.
\n\u00a0
\n\u00a01. C.N. Bialik, \u201cRevealment and Concealment in Language\u201d (1915), in Modern Hebrew Literature, ed. Robert Alter, trans. Jacob Sloan (New York: Bherman House, 1975), p. 130.
\n3. Yehuda Amichai, \u201cOnce I wrote Now and in Other Days: Thus Glory Passes, Thus Pass the Psalms,\u201d Open Closed Open: Poems, trans. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld (Orlando, Florida: Harvest, 2006), p. 31.
\n3. Meir Wieseltier, \u201cTake,\u201dThe Flower of Anarchy: Selected Poems, trans. Shirley Kaufman with the author (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2003), p. 27.
\nBabylonian Talmud, Avoda Zarah, 18a.
\n5. Micha Ullman, \u201cIn Favor of Plaster,\u201d in Rupture and Repair in Art, Judaism, and Society, eds. Emily D. Bilski, Avigdor Shinan, exh. cat. (Jerusalem: The Adi Foundation, 2010), p. 20.
\n6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), trans. Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 117.
\n7. Ullman in Maya Stern, \u201cDigging Pits, Performing Weddings: An Interview with Micha Ullman,\u201d available at www.israelilifeusa.com\/celebs\/3862 (Hebrew).
\n8. Irena Gordon, The Absent Body: Body Imagery between Judaism and Christianity in the Work of Eight Israeli Artists, exh. cat. (Tel Aviv: Beit Hatfutsot, 2012), p. 115.
\n9. Joseph Dan, \u201cDivine Language, Human Language and Artistic Expression,\u201d in The Basement of the National Library, ed. Gideon Ofrat, exh. cat. The Israeli Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia (Tel Aviv: Israeli Association for Culture, 1995), pp. 115-121, quoted in Gordon, p. 112.
\n10. Ullman in Stern.
\n\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u201cBezalel knew how to combine the letters by which the heavens and earth were created.\u201d \u2014Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 55a. Five books were cast in iron by Micha Ullman and filled with earth; five volumes of red-loam earth as red as blood (Sand Books, 2000). They make me think of sacred books and big notions such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.petachtikvamuseum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.petachtikvamuseum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.petachtikvamuseum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.petachtikvamuseum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.petachtikvamuseum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.petachtikvamuseum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14143\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.petachtikvamuseum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.petachtikvamuseum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.petachtikvamuseum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}