Nature Relics - A Visual Alarm.

Introductionary article to the new book

 

 

CCANW

Highlights from Shai Zakai’s ‘Forest Tunes – The Library’ Comment Book

 

I really like the sound the elephant ear make when I strike them.  Thank you.

 

Inspired!

 

Wonderfully conceived; beautifully executed.

 

Thank you, this is marvellous.  (nice banana notebook, too) I can’t tell you how many times I pick up a bit of rock or twig to remember a place in time and space as it will never be again.

 

Very interesting.  I recommend it and will come again.

 

Thank you for turning the mundane ‘act of noticing’ into a rich soil for posterity and prosperity (hopefully) for us all – Prana – good luck in further work

 

The best contemporary art exhibition I’ve seen in a long time.

 

Thank you. Very inspiring to meet you and talk about your projects (student MA Art & Ecology at Dartington College).

 

This helps us to see what we’re missing – especially in Autumn.  There is so much to observe.  We are too busy rushing talking or moving.  It was great in the Devon part to highlight the needless killing of plants and trees.  When will it stop.

 

Dear Shai Zakai,

I have been ill lately .  Your work has touched me in that healing way.  A way that there’s more to life; that there’s more to life;   A relaxed, gorgeous, softness richness that is always happening and around us to vibrate with.

 

Unique inspirational fuse of media for lasting impression left on all our senses.

 

How moving to experience your witness of so many un-notice (by others) events and loses, and to feel your sensitivity of the beauty you convey. 

 

Love the boxes, makes me look at everyday trees and flowers.

 

Positively Proustian

 

Thank you  - a moving and inspiring exhibition wonderful work.

 

Having spent a few hours involved with your work, I can only say thank for your time, commitment and creative spirit.  A gift for us all.  Thank you.

 

Really drew me into your thoughts on how we preserve and damage our world.

 

Just looking at the baked landscape and how similar it is to Dartmoor and how it might be in the days of excessive global warming.

 

Really an impressive work!  The atmosphere you’re able to recreate is incredible!  Hope to see it somewhere in Italy.

 

Dearest Shai,

In a way I do not know what I shall say here to you.  The display you have here is very touching for me – I too am an artist and I work with similar ideas as you though know our perspectives are different.  I wish that we could create a dialogue without the use of the internet or the jotting of my ‘contact info.  At any rate I leave your work with a yearning for a dialogue and an exchange of sentiments and thoughts.  I should like to bring to you some of my collection.  Perhaps I shall.

 

 

 

 

 

add text...

Philadelphia - Interview with Shai Zakai following the exhibition

Greater Philadelphia - Jewish Exponent - Art Critic

Forest Tunes- The Library, Shai Zakai

 

Upcoming venues :-

- Watec - Water Technologies and Environmental Control Oct. 2007

- U.S.A , global warming group exhibition oct. 2008                                                       

 

 

'Forest Tunes - The Library', Shai Zakai, a solo show at the Engel Gallery, was shown in part, Nov.  2006 :-

  

The Minister of the Environment, Mr. Shalom Simhon, and Professor Moshe Zukermann, The Cohen Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas in Tel Aviv University, will speak at the opening of Shai Zakai's exhibition to start the season at the Engel Gallery, in Tel-Aviv, on Thursday, Nov. 3rd at 19.00. The exhibition will be opened to the public at 17.00.

 

In the course of Shai Zakai’s exhibition “Forest Tunes – The Library” the public are invited to bring fallen leaves to the gallery and contribute to the direction of inquiry in the exhibition.

 

About the Project

Forest Tunes – The Library – a project in process, begun in 1995 and still ongoing, has to do with daylighting the processes set in motion by human beings every day, for the most part hidden, related to the most burning ecological issues in the world, such as the loss of biodiversity, the deforestation, and global warming.  The project aims, among other things, to give a ‘face’ to natural entities referred to as the Genius Loci (sense of place).

 

About the Exhibition

The exhibition makes use of several media – photography, video-art, installations, text, sound.  For about two months, the space of the Engel Gallery is transformed into a black box containing photos from within the ‘dead forest’ and the ‘living forest’, an installation of about 100 black boxes containing leaves and seeds from around the world, and texts collected over a period of about eight years – the Library.

 

The ‘Genius Loci' – video-art 4.5 minutes long, serves as the “sound track” of the exhibition and attempts to awaken us to natural entities that are neither human nor

trees but rather the essence of the place.  (Much has been written about this in environmental studies, but never has its character been spelled out.) We have become blind to those entities. However, they still exist.

 

The Library is constructed as though of four geological layers: a layer of man-inflicted environmental damages, a layer of local/global insights, a personal/global diary and the Nari, simple magic.  The Library includes scientific, artistic & environmental disciplines; through it one can experience the growing dissonance between man and place, and become acquainted with aspects of the global and the local culture of the twenty-first century.

 

The public are invited to bring fallen leaves to the gallery from places that have significance for them (with written explanations), to “leaf through” 'books' from Provence, Korea, Japan, Australia, Cyprus, France, Turkey, the Valley of the Goddess in Israel, and more, to read the texts planted inside each box, and to ponder on the species that we are destroying unthinkingly all the time, and that take place before our very eyes.  The Library is, at one and the same time, a personal and collective diary of events, a documentation of environmental damage, a lack of environmental awareness, and a mapping of species/aesthetic values to be preserved.  The leaves deposited in the Library function as relics; they are markers of the nature that was and the connection that was.  Nature in boxes.

The visitors are given a copy of the inventory and may choose whether to carry out a random meetings with leaves & texts, or else to focus their choices on particular boxes selected from the inventory.

 

 The Library is connected metaphorically by the Dewey System to art libraries throughout the

world.  The texts are written in such a way as to combine documentation, scientific data, and poetic observation.

 

About the artist

Shai Zakai, a photographer and ecological artist, author of the book Faces and Facets (Portrait of a Woman) and the project “Concrete Creek 1999-2002” – in which reclamation of a stream functions as an artistic creation.  She is the director/ founder of the “Israeli Forum for Ecological Art,” and holds an M.A. degree in Art and Environmental Policy.  She has displayed more than fifty exhibitions in museums and galleries in Israel and throughout the world.  Her works are to be found in both private and museum collections.  She has represented Israel in the Art Biennale in Korea and in art and environment exhibitions and symposia in Africa, Japan, Italy, China, the United States, and more.  She is a guest lecturer and curator in the field of ecological art .

 Further details may be found in her website – www.eco-art.co.il .

 

From the text of Professor Zuckermann, Tel Aviv University, about the Exhibition

“…Shai Zakai is the Israeli artist par excellence whose creative oeuvre in recent years has been devoted almost entirely to wrestling with the history of this complex and problematic relationship between nature and civilization, a relationship that has developed during the last few decades into a worldwide critical discourse about what is referred to as “the severe ecological problem” (some call it the “ecological Holocaust”) now confronting human civilization…Shai Zakai intervenes in nature in order to rescue from it what has been afflicted by alien intervention…”

 

List of work on the show, technical details

  - 4 wooden installations of shelves and supporting beams coming to sharp points at the top.

- 120 boxes containing leaves from the world + inventory

- Video-art – “Genius Loci”                                            -   4.5 minutes loop

- 60 Series of black and white photographs on canvas    –  50x50 cm.

-  Color photograph  on canvas                                         -  300 x 44cm

-  Artist’s notebook – 10 prints on waste paper                -  24 X 30 cm.

 -  A composition - 'The Necessity of The Forest to The Human Soul'

-  Three-dimensional armor made of the tissue of the sabra plant

-  Silver print on metal ( from the Tautology series)        - 50 x 60 cm.

 

Below is an example of texts from inside the boxes in “Forest Tunes – The Library”.

 

770.56  Israel/ Observations + Diary/April 2003, December 2004/Dead Sea/Wanderings

We go to set up a tent beside the salty and the sweet.  Crystals are caught up in tree trunks, and I take photos of transient structures of salt.  I change form, becoming the air between the crystals, play with the stalactites, taste them.  The Dead Sea is disappearing.  Must taste before we forget, or before they mix it together with the Red Sea, or before the temperature changes.

 

A year after, I return and sit beside the sweet spring, so very close to the salty, as if the place hadn’t decided what would be their meeting spot.  Holding a small piece of salty tree trunk in the palm of my hand.

 

I volunteered to meditate somewhere along the central axis of energy in Israel on December 24, and I chose the salty station.  Shmuel asks us to write what we felt when at the same time, that same moment, into the same axis were channeled all the intentions for healing heaven and earth. 

 

Einstein, facing teachers at an educational conference, said: “A problem will never be solved by the consciousness that created it.”  I want to create a new possibility.

 

I lose the sense of time.  I’m a meeting of winds, an hour in a minute, inhale  and am inhaled.  I connect the disappearing sea with the Jordan and sail toward the mysterious crown, melt natural borders and the four points [wind directions].  I tunnel under the salty, am swept, scorched to the Jordanian border, show there in graphs, without words, when the sea will disappear for them.  Return with eyes closed, not to see what we have already wrought.

 

770.59  Israel/Personal-Global Diary/1998/After the lecture in the communal dining room of Kibbutz Shuval/The Coral Bean Tree

And when they all left and I went outside to the glorious coral bean tree (erythrina), and I knew that the lecture had been good, I wanted to mark it in some way, I could have asked for the compliments in writing, but I preferred to gather up the fiery flowers from the ground at the foot of the tree and remember via its fireman’s cap flowers.  From the flowering I could know that it had happened in the spring; from the type of lecture, that it had been quite awhile ago; from the path to the car, that I had remained alone; from the amount I had gathered from the ground, that I had had enough time.

 

A work of art, said André Breton, has value only to the extent that hints of the future seep into it.  The act of gathering from one spot enables preservation, enables remembrance, enables texture and composition, enables future events like those that have already occurred; makes possible the concept of perpetuating the leaves in box 59.

This is a green-gray daily work made up by observation of the smallest details. My lab is the British Park and forest by my studio. My open-air studio. There are no climaxes in this work. No drama takes place. I insist upon fitting the acts of observation and photography in the forest into my tight schedule, upon putting them on the agenda of each and every one of us.
The process involves observation of the architecture the forest creates for itself when uninterrupted: the path of ant tread marks creating a dark thin shadow and a groove in the ground. Plants creeping up along trees, rendering diverse formations and compositions. A wooden log disintegrating into the ground.
Like musical notes, the combination of a certain branch hue with the dark tree-trunks creates a poem. At times, there is a counterpoint between the carvings left by the tree-bark beetles and the crickets, at other times the sounds are dissonant.
Through the camera lens I have noticed that when trees die, their contours become more emphasized, generating beauty of another kind. Foresters never pay heed to the beauty of dead trees. They have no value in and of themselves, not even as nesting place for birds of prey.
I go back, again and again, to the same places, photographing them in different lights, in different seasons.

The unit in charge of cutting down trees marks the trunk to be chopped with dark red stain in the middle. I am working on “Re-Paint the Painted Tree”, trying to reach the accurate brown hue of the trunk before it was marked.
A forest keeper through art
By photographing, manipulating, acting through different media, I preserve and protect the place, necessitate the existence of the forest as is. By making Forest Tunes a mundane act, I no longer treat nature as the Other, and man as the center of the universe. I am merely the caretaker. I point at a ‘place’, performing technical acts which bear shamanistic meanings.

At times the composition I had photographed at 4 p.m. no longer exists at 4:10. Persistent, continuous documentation makes it possible to notice the slightest of changes. Yesterday a branch fell down, and over here a black branch was caught in a buckthorn.

In the age of zapping, I stop by a bark beetle, discovering ancient carved writing; identifying the mother-beetle and her egg-laying route; observing the female symposium transpiring within a single shell.

My social art/life incorporate the world of nature in a different manner then would a tour guide or an ecologist. Mine are insights of another kind, intended to sharpen the nature sensibilities we have lost; the type of gaze forgotten due to the acute crisis between man and his surrounding. I do not deal with the “sublime,” “beautiful” nature. There are no breathtaking occurrences here. There is “yet another nature”. There is a type of writing found in-between events and words, in-between culture and nature, man and the environment.

I would like to introduce the work Forest Tunes as an integral part of one’s daily routine, like brushing one’s teeth every morning. It is still a difficult task, where there is no apparent reason, as it were, to perform such an activity on a daily basis. Forest Tunes deals with issues of declining of forests around the world, deforestation the daily loss of biological diversity and lake of environmental awareness.

Social ecologists believe that the potential for cultural change lies in human imagination and creativity. They strive for a dialectic synthesis between spontaneous imagination and thought on one hand, and spiritual development on the other.

Artist book - 10 photographic prints, on upfalt from a print house, package - found residue.

100 photographs of the same area along the years. Prints on canvas, 50X50 cm.

Library of leaves in recycled up to 200 boxes, used to be - shoe boxes, camera obscura ( pinhole cameras ), cartons, paper, trees. + inventory.

Video-art-dance -"Genius Loci" 4.5 min. in a loop.

Rorshach leaves - photocopy

Global memory - photograph 3.00X0.45 m. print on canvas.

Self Portrait with Jean D'arc - tryptich, color photographs, 2.15X1.15m

Sabotage art - action against global warming

On The Dialectics of Man and Nature

 

 

One of the clearest expressions of the repressive foundation of the human condition (conditio humana) is embodied in the ways human civilization appears in natural surroundings, and, more generally speaking, in man’s control over nature.  This problem is one of the key issues of modern thought in its entirety, an issue that reached its most compact and polished formulation in Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis, “Dialectic of Enlightenment.”  Man’s control over nature, it is argued,  has always been a necessary condition for the existence of civilization anywhere, civilization itself being essential for the liberation of humankind from the threat of natural disaster and from inexorable dependence upon nature.   Biblical myth relates to this in the story of the banishment from the Garden of Eden, banishment from a situation devoid of oppressive control, characterized by the harmonious integration of humankind with nature, to a situation in which the human being becomes lord of the land, but at the price of enslavement to arduous toil: only by the sweat of his brow shall he eat bread.  In this matter, the “Dialectic of Enlightenment” converges into a fundamental trans-historical argument having three dimensions: mankind’s possessive mastery of the natural surroundings has been dependent since ancient days upon man’s control of his own inner nature, a control that necessarily brought with it man’s subjugation of his fellow man.  It is this inherent connection between human control over nature as the basis of his mastery of self and his domineering control over the Other that reveals oppression as a substantive dimension in the process of civilization, and in so doing reveals the institutions of civilizations to be expressions of the oppression embodied within human practice, and in particular, in the human practice that leaves its mark on nature.

 

Shai Zakai is the Israeli artist par excellence whose creative oeuvre in recent years has been devoted almost entirely to wrestling with the history of this complex and problematic relationship between nature and civilization, a relationship that has developed during the last few decades into a worldwide critical discourse about what is referred to as “the severe ecological problem” (some call it the “ecological holocaust”) now confronting human civilization.  Her present exhibition is composed of several artistic works that vary in character, although not in their objective: a large installation of shelves on which are placed about one hundred boxes with leaves and branches of plants accompanied by short texts.  There are large photographs of forest, a silver print on metal, a video-art work lasting 4½ minutes that keeps repeating and constitutes the “sound track” of the exhibition, and also copies of Zakai’s “artist’s notebook.”  The intent of the exhibition - primarily conceptual – is a general attempt to transmit a message that is not unfamiliar in many non-artistic discourses.  After all, the ecological discourse is among the most widespread and influential throughout the world in recent years.  Less well-known, on the other hand, is ecological art, of which Shai Zakai is one of the pioneer protagonists on an international level.  The reason for this can be two-fold.  First, it may be that art is not the most suitable medium for advancing ecological matters which inherently encompass political, social, and economic interests of such weight that instrumental reason (or alternatively, the moral-practical discussion of the problem) has taken over all the relevant discursive space.  Second, the question arises whether unique means of artistic expression have been created in regard to ecology for the ecological discourse.  This is not an inconsequential matter, since non-artistic ecological discourse is itself replete with so many bravura activities and theatrical acts that attract the media that one may wonder as to the status of art in this militant-activist discourse.

 

And indeed the art of Shai Zakai extends to varied and diverse artistic diapasons.   With a decidedly inquisitive basis, she combines data storage, collection, lexical organization, and experiential concreteness, embodied in the installation of shelves with its profusion of boxes containing an impressive quantity of lifeless natural items along with documentation of the ecological contextual dimension of the item (and the civilizational disturbance that made it problematic), additional details (date, place, and the like), but also, and no less important, words of personal interpretation in the realm of experiential subjectivity – a kind of emotional counterpoint to the dry practicality of the act of documentation.  Here is what is written on one of the boxes:

 

770.2 There are disturbances/Nov. 2000/Park Britannia/Breaking a new road through a forest/the discovery/3/2

a. The Jewish National Fund does not transplant the plants, nor does it organize rescue operations to remove thousands of cyclamen, asphodel, narcissus, and iris bulbs that were found on the path of the road.  Not to mention the common thorny burnet (Sarcopoterium spinosum).  If we multiply this by the number of new roads paved over the years, the result is clear.

b. The Jewish National Fund does not take into consideration the seasons during which it would be best to build roads.

c. Attempts at activation of a slumbering community to what is happening under their noses, to save the bulbs, are met with indifference.  (Only one was recruited.)  I gather cyclamen before the D9 arrives to crack apart rocks, and the lone recruit plants several of them in a public park.

d. Afterwards – the roots project upwards, facing the sky. The Syrian woodpecker is already familiar with this; he extracts beetles from inside the tree.  He rescues the forest that remains.

e. Gathering broken branches with living lichens – a sign of clean air.  They have been here for thousands of years, slowly crumbling the rocks.  They are the artists.

 

“They are the artists” is how the text concludes, and it would seem that these words may serve as a paradigm for the sum total of Shai Zakai’s artistic endeavor.  Shai Zakai intervenes in nature in order to rescue from it what has been afflicted by alien intervention, intervention that is civilizational, sinister.  The dialectic of the artistic act, artificial in its essence, that seeks to accord to nature its own voice by documenting its death and the cruel disturbances it faces, and by revealing its “history” (“They have been here for thousands of years, slowly crumbling the rocks”), this dialectic at the same time echoes the longing for unblemished nature (and to be precise – the intention to act against this foreign affliction: “Activation of a slumbering community to what is happening under their noses”) and the sober awareness that it is a utopian act after the fact that is spoken of - civilization can of course not be restored to some pre-civilized state; and even arousing interested parties to take action against the concrete affliction is not a foregone conclusion (attempts “to save the bulbs are met with indifference.  [Only one was recruited]).”

 

This element of “blending into nature” with the knowledge that it is impossible to do so except as a secondary derivative through rational reflection or by means of the artistic endeavor, also finds expression in Shai Zakai’s other work.  Her broad panoramic photographs dotted with human figures appear as a kind of echo of the man-nature dialectic: Man himself is still a part of nature, but his other part has also become a “second nature,” his social nature, the one that abuses nature in pursuing civilization, and in so doing, abuses his very own nature.  This matter finds even more impressive and salient expression in the video-film included in the exhibition: the combination of nature’s sights and sounds and amorphous images of human beings attempts to impart to nature its own language.  And it turns out that this pre-human voice is not free of anthropomorphic images, from the over-humanization of nature.  This might be interpreted as a “flaw” in the artistic endeavor.  But that would be a mistake: the “flaw” is only an artistic expression of that from which the man-nature dialectic cannot – and indeed also need no longer - be freed: from the civilizing transformation of the human experience into “second nature;” this and only this is capable of providing an escape from what has been perpetrated: destruction of nature, whose devastation will return eventually to human beings themselves and bring about their annihilation, if they do not reconsider while there is still time.

 

Professor Moshe Zuckermann is affiliated with the Cohen Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas in Tel Aviv University.  Until now he served as head of the Minerva Institute for German History, also in Tel Aviv University.