Yehudit Sasportas, ‘The Three Trees R+A+Y’ (2004)

All photographs by Uwe Walter, courtesy of Gallery EIGEN+ART,
Leipzig/Berlin

Secrets of the Forest and River

Samuel Klein responds to the thought-provoking work of the Israeli artist Yehudit Sasportas Yehudit Sasportas, ‘The Three Trees R+A+Y’ (2004)

He looked lovingly into the flowing water, into the transparent green, into the crystal lines of its wonderful design. He saw the bright pearls rise from the depths, bubbles swimming on the mirror, sky – blue reflected in them. The river looked at him with a thousand eyes – green, white, crystal, sky-blue. How he loved this river, how it enchanted him, how grateful he was to it! In his heart he heard the newly awakened voice speak and it said to him: ‘Love this river, stay by it, and learn from it.’ Yes, he wanted to learn from it, he wanted to listen to it. It seemed to him that whoever understood this river and its secrets would understand much more, many secrets, all secrets.

– Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

It is in Book II of The Republic that the fugitive of Plato’s cave parable, stumbling and groping towards daylight, suffers the trauma of self-knowledge. Reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, he is at first dazzled, then bewildered by the sunlight and the array of shapes and colours of the upper world. Gone is the warm and inviting fire that deceived him into believing in a false reality. Instead, the fugitive – disorientated, insecure and feeling very much alone – confronts the painful realization that the world he knew before, the shadows dancing upon the walls of the cave, was but an illusion. For Socrates, the narrator of this parable, there is no serenity in this transformative experience, no blissful act of ‘becoming’. With liberation from the darkness a sense of distortion and disorientation prevails; eyes struggling – and failing – in the alien landscape to see past the tonal variations in colour.

Such a landscape greeted those attending Yehudit Sasportas’s most recent exhibition at the Leonhardi-Museum in Dresden, The Cavelight (2006), which resonated with the magnificent simplicity of Plato’s dialogues. Awarded the prestigious Israeli Art Prize, Sasportas was also a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation (2003-5). Having taught in the Fine Art Department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem since 1993, she has exhibited widely in museums and gallery spaces internationally and is represented by Sommer Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv and Eigen + Art in Berlin and Leipzig. The prodigious series of pen and ink drawings – the result of several years’ work – reveals an anonymous world bereft of colour: a white, silent, eerie kingdom of forests, swamps, hills and crags (‘The Double Cave’, 2005).With each image the viewer turns a new corner, a bend along the stream or along a mountain path, coming upon quiet groves, grassy clearings and standing pools. In tones of washed-out grey and ashy-white, the Spartan trees bend and contort with perspectives awry, the pale light affording a glimpse of distant hills and rocky crags. The forest canopy may provide some protection from overcast skies but not from the sense of threat brought by acid rain and deforestation, the intervention of man in an otherwise untouched primeval forest (‘The Three Trees R+A+Y’, 2004).There is also something of the apocalyptic in these images. Whilst there is no hint of any man-made structure, there is a lingering sense that we might come across the ruins of human habitation – as if traversing the hinterlands of a past civilization that nature has reclaimed.

The visual stillness of the scenery, punctuated occasionally by the splatter of ink, the clean cut of a line, reminds us of a forest in the fading light of dusk or twilight, sudden moments of nostalgia or melancholic yearning for a ‘beyond’ – a destination through the trees and mountain passes that continues to elude the viewer wandering amidst unfamiliar terrain. In his introductory essay to the Cavelight catalogue, the German critic Christoph Tannert interprets this evident nostalgia in Sasportas’s aesthetic as drawn from the school of German Romanticism and as a direct response to the Waldeinsamkeit or desire for ‘forest solitude’ that constitutes an essential part of German identity:

It is hardly exaggerated to say that German romanticism was the first discoverer of the forest. At least: the first discoverer of it as a biotype of yearning. The real stocks of trees may continually dwindle,but poetry and music have glorified the dense forest: for good and for ill . . .When Yehudit Sasportas exhibits drawings with forest and underbrush motifs in Germany, exhibition visitors are immediately transformed into tourists in the biotype of yearning.

While not clarifying precisely what he means by ‘a biotype of yearning’,Tannert suggests that the drawings elicit memories of ‘going into the forest’ that permeate the German national consciousness. His attempt to hoist the cumbersome weight of German Romanticism on to Sasportas’s delicate and highly complex sense of proportion and line remains unconvincing. More plausible is the tacit suggestion that Sasportas’s breathlessly static drawings echo Casper David Friedrich,an artist famed for capturing the Weltschmertz of nature during the turbulent years of early-nineteenth-century industrialization. Friedrich’s monumental paintings of the raw and untamed power of mountains and forests are peopled by small, anonymous figures that stand in awed contemplation of the vast expanses before them. Sasportas may indeed (to use Tannert’s phrase) have ‘exacted a surprising turn’ from Friedrich by holding the exhibition in Dresden, the place of his death. (In 1798, the artist moved to the city, eventually becoming assistant professor at the Dresden Academy – centre of the literary romantic movement in Germany.)

Tannerts’s writing reveals a desire to discuss the exhibition within a specifically German context. A more credible and convincing view of Sasportas’s oeuvre might be found in Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson’s essay accompanying the artist’s exhibition By the River (Kunstmuseum, Bonn, 2003):

Her themes – the problematics of defining form, displacement, and the inability to define a border – are both specific to her own experience living in Israel and almost universally resonant. Found in Sasportas’s works are actions and emotions that embody a global self at the beginning of the twenty-first century; wandering, elusiveness, instability and concealment; tension, aggression and lack of control. The honesty of Sasportas’s expression is such that her perspective could be encountered in individuals in the United States, Northern Ireland, Tibet, India, or numerous other places.