Omer Industrial Park - Exhibition

from:- Yona Levy Grosman

Notes on the Exhibition Omer Industrial Park - March 97

In a reality containing an infinity of dimensions, humanity is found in two of them, the spiritual and the tangible. These dimensions also contain an infinity amount of data, but mankind is found only within the framework of a very limited range. (Think about the spectrum of light rays which we humans can discern as compared to the infinity of light rays found in nature.) Whatever man may think, feel, express, dream, construct instruments to broaden our knowledge and thought, experience mystic connections, etc., will always remain within the framework of these two dimensions. The curtain can be pushed aside slightly but the infinite always remains ahead of humanity beckoning like a country which can never be reached. It carries within it the same limiting human barriers which in one way delimit and in another serve as protective barriers against the invasion of the infinite which will lead to its destruction. I did not originate these ideas. They are taken from Baruch Spinoza. He presents them at great depth and we only have to leaf through his pages to find them.

Since I associate my work, to a certain degree, with the Romantic movement, I feel obliged to give a little historical background. With the Industrial Revolution, and all the changes that it brought about, the followers of the Romantic movement found themselves in conflict with the adherents of the Enlightenment that had come into being out of the belief that an educated person will, of necessity, be a better person. Both movements saw the results of the industrial revolution, the human and environmental casualties it brought about, as well as the naive, uneducated past, as being black. They looked forward to a brighter future in which education would elevate mankind to the level of the gods. However, at the same time they feared the separation from nature and from the feeling of infinite wholeness that the enlightenment, and the industrial revolution in its wake, had brought about.
They feared for the future.
They yearned for that same infinite wholeness which primitive, innocent mankind had possessed. One of the milestones of this school of thought is Schiller's work, "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry."

Both schools discovered Spinoza who speaks of achieving freedom through the intellect; of the "infinite" being the substance and the substance being the "infinite." Namely, reality is an infinite wholeness and there is nothing outside of it. The degree of human ethics is dependent on the degree to which reality is understood. Spinoza spoke of three levels of awareness:

1. Individual awareness: its characteristics being that it is both subjectively and sensuously passive. This is due to its being a basic and innate awareness.

2. Intellectual awareness: This is an acquired awareness. The result of learning activities, and it is, therefore, active and critical. This awareness is scientific and engages in understanding immutable laws.

3. Intuitive awareness: This is also an acquired awareness. The individual's awareness of his or her purpose in the totality of the infinite. This is a direct perception, a kind of internal comprehension that not only is the all dependent on the whole, but that any specific individual is dependent on the whole and the whole is dependent on him or her. In other words, understanding the individual matter caught in its logically imperative eternal place, above time. And from here, the perception of the totality as a whole.

Up to here, what was. Perhaps things would not have changed if not for the revolution which science and modern technology has brought about in and to our lives. Less than a hundred years ago all of these ideas and thoughts were the property of only the few. Today, we can all sit in front of our television screens, and if we are not being fed rating shows we stand a good chance of viewing scenes that reach us from space, or a historical analysis of a revolution, or perhaps a fascinating trip through our bodies, and many other interesting and educational things. But, the point is that the infinite is no longer only the province of the religious person, or an idea for a philosopher, outside of the common man's grasp. The infinite penetrates the all of our consciousness since we are nurtured by an infinite amount of data wherever we turn. The planet Earth has indeed shrunk, but our world has expanded. The feelings of the individual within the infinite totality are no longer a matter of belief or a philosophical idea, they are now anchored in concrete thought. However, the question still remains of whether man, within the framework of the limitations I previously mentioned, is capable of understanding, thinking of, or perceiving the infinite? Since it is clear that humanity is not able to think in terms of the infinite.

My personal opinion is that for this question as well, the answer is, no (I highly recommend the book, Flatland). If, according to Spinoza, the infinite is the whole and the total substance, humanity's world is dual. It moves on a linear continuum between two poles: good and bad, black and white, spiritual and material. Mankind uses the same duality to deal with concepts such as: time, order and chaos, space and substance, etc.

My work fits in at just this juncture. The same meeting between with an infinite reality whose shadows we construct into a reality which, of itself, is infinite, and this with the weak and ineffectual tools we have at our command, mainly linear thought. And since I am occupied by the thought of that same meeting between the infinite reality and a humanity equipped with such problematic tools for confronting this reality, my work, therefore, revolves around two main areas:

1. Attempts to understand reality through the plastic arts.
2. Expressing humanity's shortcomings in terms of understanding reality.

If the sand dune is reality, as a plastic artist speaking of the human limitations in seeing reality as a whole, I create a work which appears to be a spy-hole, or a disassembled puzzle with parts missing. But, more than anything else, and significantly more than all the other elements I use, is the line. As a human being this is my plastic representative; I use it to confront vistas of infinite scenery, which, from my point of view, represent reality. The line, which is a philosophical entity, is me. My reality as a person is woven with its aid, and the line is also the entity which erects the barriers excluding a whole reality on the other side. Since I live and create in my own time, I am amazed by both landscape surrounding me and by humankind's achievements. I am, of course, aware of evil, but I am also aware of the magnitude of human spirit and thought. I cannot but seek out those who are called scientists, and glean crumbs of information, concepts and comprehension, in order to assemble my puzzle of reality for myself. Therefore, by employing that same line, which I have already said is my human representation on the canvas, I find myself building realities that reflect both from within and by virtue of concepts I have received from those who are engaged in science. I construct paintings of infinite sand dunes from one item of a diagram emitted by an electronic instrument, and play with it according to the principal of quantity and timing. I build one dune after the other, depending on how long I want to continue the game, out of a diagram that had no connection with sand. The dunes are similar to one another, but at the same time each one is unique. Since all is all, and this all with all its details and shades is a product of timing and quantity. Just as we, humankind, are separated from all the other created creatures, including trees and flowers, by only our genetic quantity and timing.

Another diagram is sometimes used as a base for constructing desert scenes or at times stormy or serene seascapes, depending on how they are presented and the associative context. Since, as I have already said, reality is infinite, that which we think is infinite is dependent on our own minds.

I have not yet spoken of the problem which has begun to engage contemporary artists, and which will continue to engage those who come after us to an even greater degree. This problem is raised in my work as well, if in a covert fashion. If Magrith asked where the reality lay in mounting a picture as part of the scenery seen from the window, I present a landscape whose base is no more than posed section of a diagram of a manmade tool built for completely different products. Despite the fact that I do not yet even know how to ask all the right questions, some of them still persist in being raised. Is this an imagined reality? To what degree does it converge with reality itself? What is reality?

We human beings with a nervous system that absorbs data according to the principle of all or nothing at all, build instruments that operate according to the principle of yes and no.

We adjust them according to a specific sensitivity scale (otherwise we get white noise) to bring us a specific datum in the form of a diagram, from which we then build the "reality" with which we wrap our world.

I must emphasize that despite concepts such as fractal structures and Euclidean geometry, and questions such as: What is space? Is it substance? What is substance? Is it space? Is time continuous? Perhaps the source, direction and partitions in time stem humankind. These questions sometimes play an important part in my work, and despite the fact that I make use of and go to great lengths to understand scientific concepts to serve my art, at heart I am still a romantic. Not a romantic from the Romantic Period, yearning for a humanity still in the stage of personal awareness. I also am not so anxious to meet humanity at the stage of intellectual awareness. That is a dangerous stage, but necessary for humankind to pass on to the stage of intuitive awareness. The same holds true for the individual as it does for historical periods and publics. In the world of art where they still like to make use of all kinds of words ending in "ism," levels of human understanding are categorized by concepts such as, pre-modernism, modernism, and post modernism.

I especially like the saying from Confucius, "...to an ignorant person a mountain is a mountain, a valley is a valley, and a river is a river. To an educated person a mountain is not a mountain, a valley is not a valley, and a river is not a river. To a superior person a mountain is once again a mountain, a valley is once again a valley, and a river is once again a river..." The more I think about it the more wisdom I find in it, and to one degree or another it serves me as a touchstone. Since, as much as humanity will extend itself to wander in the infinite spaces, they will always return to themselves. And I must add, the further afield human beings wander, the better people they will be when they return to themselves. Therefore, this saying opens the exhibition.