Drawing parallels between the work of an amoral Renaissance maverick and the teachings of God-centred Judaism may appear somewhat forced and arbitrary. However, if we look past the blood, sex and death motifs that are quintessential Caravaggio, there lies in the artist’s work a pointed refusal to depict tragedy as a victory of the impersonal force of nature over the human condition. This affirmation of hope contrasts with the view taken by Greek myth that human beings are prey, to quote Sacks again, to ‘the random cruelties of circumstance’.
In his dark, brooding canvases, Caravaggio’s saints live their fate bodily and refuse to be brow-beaten – there is nobility in their suffering. Such was the sensation I felt when witnessing a highly charged and intense canvas such as ‘The Flagellation’, with its brutal contrast between the gentle acceptance of Jesus and the viciousness of his tormentors. Jesus has no hope of living. He knows he is to die. Yet despite this inevitable fact there is space amidst the agony for ecstasy and passion.
I would have liked to have seen the Caravaggio exhibition with Adi Nes, an Israeli photographer whose interpretations of Tragediah in contemporary Israel are subtle and sensitive reflections on classical mythology. Having followed his work since the late 1990s, I believe him to be one of the most successful modern artists to have quoted Caravaggio’s reflections on Eros (desire) and Thanatos (death).
We might have spoken about the Israeli understanding of tragedy,given that violent death at the hands of others is commonplace in Israel, a country where random acts of terror have become an everyday occurrence. Whilst Caravaggio’s oeuvre was never meant as a social critique, Nes’s work is a direct reaction to the events of his time and perhaps a comment on how the hubris of stateendorsed militarism brings the nemesis of terror in its wake.
Take, for example, Nes’s picture of muscular soldiers frolicking waist-deep in water (see page 13). Shot on location in an officers’ pool at a Golan military base, the photograph makes an explicit reference to the iconic Life magazine cover of 13 June 1967, showing Commander Yossi Ben-Hanan raising his rifle in the Suez Canal following decisive Israeli victory at the close of the Six Day War. In his article ‘A Soldier Named Desire’ (Village Voice, 2-8 April 2003), Richard Goldstein considered Nes’s photo-quote of the famous image ‘a bitter homage’ to the hubris of the Israeli counter-invasion and the subsequent ‘entangling’ occupation of the conquered territories. Looking out from amidst the carefree behaviour of his comrades, the soldier’s half-smile is unconvincing and superficial, an edginess belying his cavalier attitude.
Nes’s photographs, which resonate with the motifs of the Renaissance Old Masters such as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Caravaggio, are emphatically texts: structured, complex, meaningful surfaces. With meticulous attention to detail, he painstakingly crafts his images. His insistent layering of his pieces with references to cliché and social mores turns looking at his pictures into a semiotic event.Yet I have seen Nes make space in these ‘texts’ for ecstasy and passion, despite the constant threat of death in a land ‘that devours her children’.
The artist’s preoccupation with youths and beautiful soldiers has been linked by some to the dionysiac photographs of the not-so-closet–pornographer Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden whose nineteenth century postcards of naked peasant toy-boys caused something of a stir in his day. Whilst this may be an interesting (although obscure) link, I am surprised that many have totally overlooked the obvious connections with Caravaggio’s earlier paintings of languid, soft-fleshed ‘music boys’ for Cardinal Del Monte such as ‘The Concert’ and ‘Bacchus’ (1595-6).
Nes is the first to suggest that Caravaggio is a major influence on his work, an attribution made by a number of those who have reviewed him over the past few years. A fellow recipient of an Israeli Art Prize recipient,Yoav Shmueli, claimed that
Nes got much of his knowledge of art from Caravaggio...the beauty portrayed is innocent, tender, erotic, romantic, but not perfect...a mixture of beauty and wound (Ma’ariv, 2 November 2000).
Unfortunately, the Hebrew word for mixture – me’urav – loses much of its resonance in translation. It suggests a haphazard blend of diverse elements; whilst I have only been able to speak with the artist on the phone from his studio in Tel Aviv, some of those who have met him personally speak of his mixture of delicate bookishness with the rough edge of one whose childhood was spent growing up in the development town of Kiryat Gat – on the desert frontiers of Israel:
There is a likeable meekness in Nes’s thin frame and shy smile, but something perhaps predatory in his glance...There’s a bit of the owl in him too – an intense stare behind a heavy cocked brow. And in his presence, the interlocutor varies between discomfort and a feeling of being at complete ease (Daniel Grushkin, ‘Telling It In Gat’, Jerusalem Report, 4 June 2001).
As far back as 1998, Adi Nes cast himself as the ‘Doubting Thomas’ of Israeli military culture. It was the year of the Wye Plantation Accords – which involved ‘Giving back land for peace’ – when the Jewish Museum in New York launched an exhibition of Israeli artists. (This was when Bibi Netanyahu was pushing through territorial compromise with Yasser Arafat, a rather hypocritical form of foreign policy that was greeted with a great deal of outrage and disappointment by right-wing elements in the Israeli press.) As part of its city-wide publicity campaign, the Jewish Museum put an incongruous photograph of a bare-chested Israeli soldier on the subways. Smug and selfsatisfied with his sculpted biceps, he gazed admiringly on his bodily assets, welcoming praise and adulation.
Adi Nes, ‘Untitled 1996’, from the Soldiers series |
