Yehudit Sasportas, ‘Floating Trees Plus Ground’ (2004)

In Jacobson’s reading, Sasportas is drawing on an international language in the motifs she employs, rather than highlighting her own (or any other) specific cultural and ethnic background.Jacobson’s use of the term ‘global self ’ with respect to Sasportas is interesting in a number of ways. She may be referring to a set of political or moral principles or values that seek to transcend social mores and embrace diversity and difference. Concomitant with such an approach are the everpresent tensions in the self ’s relationship to others or the Other: keen to transmit the richness of cultural identity but at the same time seeking to participate in a professional international community beyond the boundaries of language, race and ethnicity.Perhaps most importantly, the ‘global self ’ is at root a conflicted self, attracted by the humanist call of universalism but still responding emotionally to diverse and at times conflicting demands.

To my mind, what makes Sasportas so compelling is her grappling as an artist with all these issues. This is not to say that she has rejected cultural specificity for homogeneity; on the contrary, she appears keen to assimilate and fuse distinct genres and styles within her work. Rather, it is her searching beyond borders and boundaries – both personal and otherwise – that lends complexity and gravitas to her efforts. It was a mistake, therefore, for Tannert to focus on the particularism of his own native German identity rather than discussing Sasportas in the light of the more ‘global’ concerns identified by Jacobson or indeed the more universalist message to which Friedrich himself alluded in his paintings more than two centuries ago.

The ‘simultaneity’ of Sasportas’s drawings – the sense that her art is a multi-layering of ideas and thoughts – in both the Cavelight exhibition and elsewhere is indicative of the fusion of different sources she uses to develop and hone her images. The surreal dreamscapes of generic and anonymous groves may be reminiscent of the forests of Germany, her native Israel or even Japan, from where she clearly draws inspiration. Her visual ‘wandering’ recalls the transcendentalism of eastern mysticism as much as the vague and illusive aspects of German Romanticism.

Assessing Sasportas’s deepest concerns in The Cavelight, therefore, I experience less a concern with any particular forest, or indeed any particular location or tree, than a search for a metaphysical ‘type’ or ‘form’of Tree-ness, her drawings acting as visual signifiers for the Transcendent – that which lies beyond the reach of human expression (‘The Cavelight’, 2005). Speaking of ‘the Transcendent’ in this way is not tantamount to vagueness or intellectual wooliness, but representative of a western philosophical tradition stretching back to Plato’s discussions about our experience or knowledge of The Forms beyond the material universe.

A search for ‘The Transcendent’ in both traditions – western and eastern – is found in the novel Siddhartha (1954), by the German poet and writer Herman Hesse, an author who was as steeped in the literature of the German Romantics as in Indian philosophy and mysticism. Through his description of the ever-fading search for the Eternal Self that is neither body nor consciousness, Hesse movingly describes that ‘yearning’ the Cavelight exhibition reveals – that of a soul yearning for its source, but still seeking solace as it wanders in Sansara or the ‘Life of this World’:

Slowly, like moisture entering the dying tree trunk, slowly filling and rotting it, so did the world and inertia creep into Siddhartha’s soul; it slowly filled his soul, made it heavy, made it tired, sent it to sleep.

Sasportas, as if directly responsive to this poignant metaphor of souls as trees, sets before us the slowly decaying trees of ‘Floating Trees Plus Ground’ (2004) and ‘Three Black Lakes’ (2005); the journey is wearying, and we – Sasportas’s (and Hesse’s) protagonists – are reluctant to rouse ourselves from spiritual torpor but must stray in Sansara, bewildered and alone. Sasportas is not aloof from this journey and casts herself as a traveller intimately engaged with the lonely and sometimes anguished existential issues of self, identity and meaning. Her ability to communicate the seriousness of this message without overwhelming the viewer says as much about her sense of propriety as about her natural empathy.