HADASS SHERESHEVSKY

Wanderings and Exile

“He will command His angels to guard you in all your ways. They will carry you on their palms, lest you strike your foot against a stone” (Psalms 91:11-12).

Wanderings
The term “wandering” is intimately connected with movement; whether physical or conceptual. No matter the period, whatever the discipline, movement is grasped as parallel to and a generator of renewal or change. In common with the term “exile,” wandering also connotes relinquishing one’s connection to a particular home or to a place/land where movement slows down or ceases, bounds are established and permanent borders achieved.

The artist—exile—wandering—reciprocal relations
If we understand the processes undergone by the artist’s soul, we can relate them to the concept of exile and the wanderings of an individual. The changing moods become trips to the hidden recesses of the soul.
M. Ankori, in his book, Heights of Heaven and Depth of Hell (1994), says that in the early and current primitive cultures there is a concept of “Loss of the soul.” According to the psychologist, C.J. Jung, this term describes an experience of internal severance, “exile of the soul.”
Similarly, in Jewish mysticism and Chasidism severance of the soul is described as exile: “The Shechina [Divine Presence] exiled itself from her husband, her lover.” The process of returning the soul is the process of returning the Shechina from exile. A soul’s journey is the process of internal salvation; returning the soul to its source.
The history of humanity has recognized special figures who have played a major role in influencing events of their generation. They have affected the arts and views of their generation and their impression has lasted a long time. They are called: prophets, mystics, Shamans and creative artists.
The most prominent characteristic of such people was that their ways of life, personalities, creations and teachings reflect their inner souls. The artist’s work is a commentary on his opinions and these constitute a symbolic reflection of the processes of his soul. One cannot comprehend their different and unique lives without grasping the message that rises like a divine voice from within their inner world—a message that they felt compelled to transmit to their generation as well as to succeeding ones. The artist, like the mystic—his specialty lies in concretizing images that rise from within his soul without losing their symbolic power.

The artwork and wandering—reciprocal relations
The process of creation is similar to the process of wandering, of searching and expending efforts to attain completion and find truth. A creation symbolizes the much sought-after integration that all of us desire to reach. The wanderings of an artist and each segment of his work reflect a deep and hidden united entity that he strives to achieve his entire life (Ankori). Thus the artist’s wanderings and his trip constitute an
inner awakening, entrance into the unconscious, and a revelation of knowledge whose source resides deep within a person’s soul.
The spiritual process is depicted as a trip with a destination: the attainment of wisdom, the development and discovery of the blueprint of the world. In the process of creating his work, an artist nears the secrets of existence in accord with his experiences that trigger within himself a sense of transcendence. In Jewish mysticism, this is linked to the concept of “attachment,” says Ankori. It is a special relationship with God, a link by which the subject becomes “part of God above”: “You have made him slightly less than divine” (Psalms 8:6).
By means of the trip of creation, the artist realizes his self-knowledge and he carries out his unity with cosmic completion for “longer than just a moment.” He has risen beyond limited and bounded territory which is too small to contain his desired completeness. His trip is like an act of desertion, of self-exile, and it becomes the foundation for his creative work (Sarit Shapira in the “Routes of Wandering,” pp. 67, 199).

Exile and wandering as depicted in my artworks
In my artworks I utilize reproductions of modern newspaper clippings—photographs depicting Iraqi captives of the Gulf War. Their stance and movements remind one of the myth-like “Wandering Jew.” The use of newspaper photos and their reproduction by themselves represent movement away from a fixed source and an attempt at widespread wandering and dispersion.
In scenes of human drama, contour figures apparently move about, recording the concrete world’s infinite wandering paths. The meandering paths wind around obstacles that appear in the form of a wire fence or shrubbery. These barriers can be overcome, a way of escape or defense can be found—by making a figure transparent and positioning it in the space of transparent curtains. The transparency is an expression of the reflection, of the shadows, or of a shaded area. Another means of escape is by treading on a thin rope, like a tightrope, on top of a barbed wire fence.
As they turn into shadows, the figures become anonymous and lose their individual identity. But they survive in a dried out, alien world, for they are positioned beyond time or place. They move about non-stop, perhaps because of habit and perseverance, perhaps because of the impulse of existence and the curiosity that tempts them to uncover what is new and waiting around the corner, for that may satisfy their urge to discover. The discovery of tomorrow is wrapped up in curtain-veils—transparent curtains for activity, and opaque curtains for the end of the play.
The images, objects and surroundings lose their shapes or take on forms, thereby transmitting to the spectator something beyond their concreteness. One can sense in them echoes of theosophical strains or dynamic philosophies that are Taoistic yet mystic, somehow combined with current world philosophies of the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries.
Shadow and reproduction reinforce the atmosphere of the technological age with which Man must contend and within which he must live—a world in which the hidden exceeds the visible. The shadows are an expression par excellence of the incomprehensible aspect that a recognizable object can radiate. The very meeting between the human figures and the material components of the surroundings on the one hand, and the non-material shadow on the other, creates the contact with metaphysical essences. The photographic reproductions remove the material components of the pictures and a metaphysical transformation appears. On the one hand, the shadowy images portray the unknown, the obscure, the mysterious; on the other, they depict concrete images that decay. Therefore the shadows constitute infinite essences that evade finite time and space. The images in the work are lit up or cast into shadow. This creates a twilight atmosphere, an indeterminate time and place, a dream.
Against the series of human landscapes moving across space, one central figure appears in close-up and, like a spectator, raises questions and wonder concerning the fate of Man within the existential system of actuality. Man, who moves about in rows, is actually moving about amidst the burdens of his life and his physical afflictions. All he can do is escape by way of the chaos and disorder of wandering paths.
The solitary close-up figure carries her suitcase forwards and upwards. She stands as if participating in a ceremony, lined up against the background of the sky and brightening light, calling out to the world to float upwards onto the infinite space of renewed hope and belief in redemption.
The suitcase is a clear mark of today’s wanderer in general and of the “Wandering Jew” in particular. The traveller carries it; it becomes his mobile home in place of the home he no longer has. It is a fetish that conjures up lost memories and triggers nostalgia. It comprises his memoirs, recording his travels; it serves as his “mobile museum” according to Marcel Duchamp. In the series of reproductions of scenes of the wanderings, the museum catalogues the paths and creates a bond between the reproduction and the idea of the suitcase.
It exemplifies Walter Benjamin’s statement that reproduction and widespread distribution of extraordinary artworks have replaced the need to personally go to see the original; but this is at the price of exiling the work of art from its distinctive identity as a particular artist’s unique, concrete, complete and multi-faceted creation (Walter Benjamin, 1983).

The principle of the fragment
The works are constructed as series, a multiplicity of parts are combined to form one artwork. The use of the same images projects the conceptualization of each bounded section as part of a long continuum in which each fragment depends on another reproduction. Consequently, a beholder carries over his perception of one fragment to the contiguous one.
A fragment in art is defined by the British artist, R. B. Kitaj, as a fixation of aesthetics of exile, detachment and wandering. He calls it “the aesthetics of Diaspora..” Kitaj maintains that a work of art represents a major principle that an artist drags along with him from place to place. It is an idea replete with ideas, like a suitcase or a mobile Ark of the Covenant.

Bibliography
Ankori, Micha, 1994. Heights of Heaven and Depth of Hell (Israel: Ramot Publishing House, Tel Aviv University).
Benjamin, Walter, 1983. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Tel Aviv, Israel: Sifriat Hapoalim VeHakibbutz Hameuchad).
Kitaj, R.B., 1989, “First Diasporist Manifesto,” in Kav Art Journal 10 (Israel, July 1990) (Hebrew).
Or, Miriam, 1993. “Shadows between Curtains.”
Shapira, Sarit, 1991, “Routes of Wandering” (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum).