Carmela Weiss Ylem / Aleph 2023 Jonathan Hirchfeld
Y l e m / A l e p h The word “encyclopedia,” whose origins is a Latin version of a Greek expression, can be understood as an articulation of and an attempt to draw a circle (cycle) around a repository of human knowledge (paideia; education; as is pedagogy). The circle is not a border but a signifier of circularity, of the axis of movement whose circumference can grow but whose movement leads to the same point.
This means that the knowledge in this circle aspires to appear before us without hierarchy. Like a point in the circle that is neither further from nor nearer to the center, or more advanced than any other point. Knowledge is organized in a mechanical arbitrary alphabetical, and somewhat whimsical, manner. Borges’ famous Chinese emperor’s encyclopedia details animals “belonging to the emperor,” “embalmed,” “mermaids,” “stray dogs”. Behind this arbitrariness hides a profound understanding that every conceptual system is related to language, time, and culture, and even to human biology. It does not really point at distinct phenomena in nature, or the world, for there are no “things” in the world. Everything in the world is like water in water. Let’s examine the concept of “natural species”. A species in nature is defined by us as an incident in which two subjects can have fertile offspring. Hence a horse and a donkey are two distinct species because their offspring is sterile. Yet let’s observe this definition from the perspective of space and time.
In space: around the Alps there is a bird. Let’s say the Parus Major. The Italian Parus can have offspring with the Swiss Parus. The Swiss can have offspring with the Austrian, which is a tad lighter in its coloration. The Austrian can have offspring with the German, which is slightly bigger. The large German can have offspring with the brown Belgium. Yet here it is revealed that this Belgium, the brown and big, can no longer have offspring with the Italian. So, is it a Parus Major? Does a Parus Major exist?
In time: let’s assume a contemporary man gets into a time machine and travels a thousand years back in time. Could he fall in love with a Middle Ages woman and have offspring? Yes. Why not. And if he travels ten thousand years to the eve of the agricultural revolution? Possibly. But if he travels one hundred thousand years in time, and falls in love with his species, a beautiful Homo Sapiens woman of the Paleolithic era, could they have a family? No chance. The genetic distance is too great. So, is the Paleolithic Homo Sapiens a man? Is there such a thing as a man.
Perhaps this was a slightly long demonstration, but it is crucial, because only through such attentive and focused observation can we unpack the illusion that language bestows upon the world, as if there are things in it: Parus Majors, Homo Sapiens. But the truth is that we are floating in a soup of atoms, that there is no real objective criterion with which to discern between one group of atoms and another. There is nothing that is identical to itself.
Simply put, our definitions are not more than a tool that makes it easier for us to deal with the meaninglessness of existence. Naming a concept or phenomenon is similar to pointing at a few stars and declaring them as the constellation “Leo” or “Virgo”. Those starts are not close to one another, some no longer exist, they do not resemble a lion or a virgin and we could have just as easily selected some others and created and seen a different group. Our words and concepts do not really correlate to the reality in the world, and they are always infected with our immediate sense of time and space.
Another point that clarifies this issue is raised by the philosopher Graham Harman, as he undermines the distinction between an “event” and an “object”. We say that a match that was lit and burned for a second was an event. And that the mountain in front of us is an object. However, reminds us Harman, that is only our space/time chauvinism; that is, our “man is the measure of all things” according to which a mouse is small, and a mountain is big. Yet a mouse is gigantic in comparison to a flee and an elephant is tiny in comparison to a galaxy. And a burning match from a smaller and slower perspective is an object like the sun (which is likewise an event of combustion that
Carmela Weiss Ylem / Aleph 2023 Jonathan Hirchfeld
commenced and will be over in a blink of an eye from a larger perspective) and the mountain is but an event of continents marching towards each other and colliding, and form their collision the soil rises upwards.
Hence, the encyclopedia, more than it tells us about the world tells us about ourselves. About our conceptualization machines. About our comprehension ability. About the shape of the fishing net that we cast upon the ocean of existence to extract the world.
Contemporary art acknowledges quite a few artists one might call “encyclopedic”. Artists whose work outlines a circle around the knowledge, which is not hierarchical. Artists who present to us our cataloging organizing measuring and ordering mechanisms more than the position of the artist as a subject, their opinion and emotional expressions in relation to the world. From Gerhard Richter, via Fischli and Weiss, to Uri Lifschitz’s “Index”.
Many artists are preoccupied with the encyclopedia as form and not as content. One example is Sophie Calle. Others seek out the encyclopedic form in the gap between truth and fiction. For example, Tamir Tzadok or Roee Rozen.
This leads to this discussion and this is the background upon which I wish to present Carmela Weiss’ project.
The discussion in the Ylem/Aleph project I would like to examine through three concepts.
1. linguistic dispossession 2. castrating aesthetics 3. the Leonardoesque page.
1. In a sense, throughout history feminine art has always seen its commencement in a “linguistic dispossession”. From Olympe de Gouges’ French phonetics’ “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen,” via Hannah Höch’s collages, and Barbara Kruger’s posters, there is the idea that the world’s representation language was appropriated by men. So de Gouges does not write in their language. Hannah Höch, who does not have a language of her own in western painting cuts and pastes the master’s language, and Barbara Kruger enters the relatively new language of visual communication in order to participate in the art field.
Both painting and the encyclopedia as a masculine field of world representation are languages from which Weiss steps back.Here one might add a note about a sentiment that Weiss shares in our conversations: her bewildered position facing the ocean of knowledge and its organizational chaos. To a considerable extent, this project, in which she appropriates the encyclopedic knowledge, takes over it, designs it, makes it her own, is a calming remedy for the dread and anxiety in the face of the tsunami of human knowledge.
When I look at the dozens, maybe hundreds of encyclopedia pages upon which she painted I notice she does not have a “hand” she has no “gesture” she has no “style”. She refuses the masculine historic code of subjectivity and expression. She moves freely from academic drawing to the line of an illustrator and from that to a graphic designer and back to the painter. The weakness becomes strength: I have no language of my own – I have everyone’s language! Which leads us to the next point:
2. I term castrating aesthetics the action by which something has been robbed of its function in the world and becomes an ornament. For example, the head of a deer with splendid antlers hanging over the fireplace: the antlers that had a real function in its life have been depleted of their power and are now an ornament. That is the strategy that Weiss employs. She turns the encyclopedic knowledge aesthetic and castrates it. I wish to understand this in relation to the previous maneuver of linguistic dispossession. Yet what occurs here is deeper than a personal antagonism, it is a philosophical stance. Weiss, who feels excluded from the encyclopedia, penetrates it as a Trojan horse and performs an aesthetic castration. She does not eliminate it but recreates it as a poetic autobiographic conundrum filled with enigmas and clues. A riddle that is not read as a text but is experienced as an aesthetic experience, it is not emptied of content but loaded with a different kind of content. An emotional content. An artistic content. And this leads us to the next point:
Carmela Weiss Ylem / Aleph 2023 Jonathan Hirchfeld
3. Whoever looked at children’s drawings surely knows that charm of the lack of boundaries between inside and outside: the child draws the house from the outside, with the triangular red roof and the square window etc. and then draws the lamp or table that are supposed to be inside. That is the child’s encyclopedia prior to the internalization of the mature categories.But there is knowledge about the world, which is better transmitted that way than within the regular categories. Observe the Leonardoesque page. It is a page in which text and image are intermingled. Inside and outside flow into each other: we see the body from the outside and its internal organs – simultaneously. Carmela Weiss’ works use the Leonardoesque page strategies. The encyclopedia’s text is not just a dead background. It is the philosophical and contextual background for the paintings. The paintings read the text for us. The text is their inside.
The current exhibition inserts the viewers into the encyclopedia. The text becomes space. Like the man in the famous thought experiment, who has been shrunk to the size of a molecule and wanders round the brain, looking for the place where thoughts reside. The encyclopedia’s pages surround him. Upon the walls of the wallpaper. As first glance the image appears abstract, upon the second glance is looks familiar, it is Matusovski’s original design for the Hebrew Encyclopedia, which has een dispossessed of language and now functions as a word in Weiss’ language, which has been aesthetically castrated and is now, neutralized of its function and in repeat print is demoted to ornamental rank. Above it is a cornice, which outlines a kind of ceiling, a kind of respectability, a kind of boundary, as if to say, that’s right, everything is overwhelming and threatening, but also, everything is a game.
To conclude, I wanted to show how the encyclopedia is an X-ray of a given culture. That many artists work from within this comprehension to critique and comment on the culture in which they live. That women who felt themselves relegated from the language of representation turned to various strategies to explore the encyclopedia. That Weiss operates within this field, and from this dispossession performs an aesthetic castration to the encyclopedia and locates it in front of us as the Leonardoesque page new knowledge, a visual and theoretical text, lyrical and autobiographical, in which her art reads the world for us.
Jonathan Hirschfeld, March 2023