Saggi Critici » The evocation of the shades.
di Karl Ruhberg
Note on Lena Liv’s Environments and Constructions in Succession.
“We should endeavour to believe more in intelligent art”.
Wieland Schmied
In his “Remembrance of Things Past”, Marcel Proust describes the influence wielded by Renoir, which was so great that the women of his time did all they could to resemble the girls in his paintings. In the ‘fifties, the Düsseldorf writer Rolf Bongs wrote his essay “Picasso moves in through the back door”, showing how the form-world of the great painters of the time, from aloof Mondrian to the expressive Spaniard, crept, in simplified form, into the fashion of the period and was accepted enthusiastically by the very people who would have had a fit, if confronted by the originals. In other words: “high” art does make itself felt, albeit in a hidden fashion, contributing towards the outward image of every-day life, which is not always to its own advantage, but is definitely beneficial as regards the general level of the period’s taste.
Things today tend to go in the opposite direction. “Kitsch conquers the artistic scene”, proclaims a headline from the cover page of the September issue of “Art”. The well-known art gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend has a weakness for the production of the American super-kitsch-kid, Jeff Koons, and the prophet of “Hungers nach Bildern” (Hungering after Pictures), Wolfgang Max Faust, asks himself and “art” collectors quite seriously whether art and kitsch can be considered” a viable proposition much longer”. The moral of the tale: art used to enrich the optical reality of the everyday world, albeit to its own cost, much as kitsch banalises art today and forcefully exacts payment therefore.
A bad time for intelligent, sensitive people, one might think, but still no reason, in view of this most recent variant of optical pollution, to imagine that some kind of “Apocalypse Now” is on the doorstep. After all, Kotzebue used to be more popular than Goethe and even Schiller was already complaining that “art’s spiritual merits had no effect” on the every-day requirements of common day-to-day existence. On the other hand, both today and yesterday the only way to fight this course of events is to go on “believing in intelligent art”, even in the midst of orgies of col-our and heavy metal, as my colleague Schmied advised years ago in the times of the student riots.
In this context, one is not only reassured by the as yet uncorrupted peaks of the artistic world, but also by numerous younger artists, who have chosen to steer clear of the soulless entertainment rat-race, keeping off the mass-crowded highroads that lead directly towards the centres of the industry of consciousness. Lena Liv, born in Leningrad – which she left for Israel before settling in Italy, belongs to this no longer so exiguous group. For her, the riddles of existence are still unsolved. She counters superficiality with reflexion, a total lack of historical sense with remembrance, progressively coarsened artistic media with her sensitivity, the mono-dimensional world with her many-layered variety.
Her “Environments”, in which the Labyrinth, with or without Ariadne’s saving thread, plays an important role, are dark or dimly-lit chambers in which cryptically symbolic allusions leave the observer plenty of scope for free associations. Her “Constructions in Succession” owe nothing to literary associations, they are verbally inexpressible picture – “stories”, in which time does not flow but is suspended: complex “snap-shots”, in which past, present and future merge in an indirect, though meditative, logically comprehensible fashion: melancholy documents of solitude and loss, silent and unsentimental.
This kind of “Evocation of the Shades” affords a less individualistic impression than Christian Boltanski’s work, aiming more at generalities than at personal aspects, although naturally these works also conceal, as all art-work ultimately does, autobiographic traces and the hint of an inward-turned self-portrait, not consciously, nor as a true likeness, rather as the reflexion of an emotional and spiritual attitude. Confronted by these discrete, convincing, silent works, I recalled Eberhard Roters’ comment that when figurative art does not confine itself to being decorative, it is philosophy in other mediums.
The complexity of the contents coincides with the formal, sensitive relationship with the materials, primarily with the paper that Lena Liv interprets both as something to be modelled, as well as a natural product. Owing its composition to the kneading hand, as much as lo the wood of the tree of which it is made, in many of Lena’s Environments it plays just as important a role as a symbol of becoming and passing, as light and shade or the labyrinth – as a symbol of the inextricable interweaving of birth and death in the enigma of human existence.
Paper is also the basic material for photography. In Lena Liv’s remembrance-filled “Constructions in Succession”, it is framed in rusty-coloured iron: weight counters lightness, massiveness is sei against fragility, durability against transience, the anonymous present against the personalized past. Sculpted everyday objects (paper shoes, a lop, a ball) are added to the pictures in disguised or authentic materials, stressing their “commemorative value” (Peter Iden).
The economic choice of materials, the nuance-filled precision with which they have been worked on, the always perceivable link with reality prevent the thought-crowded, allusive work of this artist, of Russian-Jewish descent, from gliding into approximation and mystification.
Her fragile beauty, her sensitive monochromes, occasionally broken by almost counterpointed touches of colour, has, beyond its complex transcendentalising content, its own autonomy, yielding profound aesthetic delight. Lena Liv’s theme is, to use the formula of an American critic, “the passage of time”. She makes the theme palpably comprehensible and maintains the balance between content and form, intelligence and feeling. Which gives Lena’s work substance and a high degree of authenticity. Her pensive progression which proceeds step by step, carefully experimenting the use of adequate materials, enables one to perceive that Lena Liv has by no means got to the end of her explorations.
Karl Ruhberg
translated by Rosalynd Pio