Karen Russo Selected Press
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
Selected Press 2016
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
14/11/2016
Haus Atlantis | Tohu
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Haus Atlantis Following Karen Russo’s recent video work “Haus Atlantis,” which blends the genres of documentary, historical essay, and science fiction, the artist readdresses her work’s visual and textual elements in the form of a visual essay. Built in 1931, Haus Atlantis in Bremen is a combination of patron Ludwig Roselius’ vision to restore the German racial identity by resuming the glory of ancient times, and Bernhard Hoetger’s expressionist, symbolist, and monumental architecture. Visual Essay by Karen Russo November 10, 2016 Ludwig Roselius, Haus Atlantis, Architecture, Bremen, civilization, race, myth, nazism, Weimar Republic, Bernhard Hoetger, homeland, history, utopia, Light
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In days of old, the years drifted slowly across the earth, as the earth turned slowly on her axis and she slowly revolved around the sun – from time immemorial. A year that bestowed even one single word on mankind, was a rich one. And in still more ancient times, a word would take a thousand years to emerge. So slow was mankind’s growth.
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Nowadays, the earth spins faster. It races round the sun. To us, a day seems nothing but a day, a year – a year. But some day it will be reckoned that one of today‘s days was akin to a primeval hour, and a day in the future will feel like an hour of today’s.
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Time is also matter. But the human mind, in its quest for the everlasting, is slowly conquering it. Atlantis House will put a question to mankind. Whether or not that question is well posed, only time can tell.
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Haus Atlantis | Tohu
The hardships of the Ice Age, which shaped the people we know today as the Nordic race, also shaped a system of thought that determined man's creative power and developed an understanding which ensured our survival. Thus the notion of infiniteness broke upon us in all its blazing light.
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Haus Atlantis | Tohu
These ideas, however, were eclipsed by the clash of the Nordic race and the children of sunnier climes, who had never encountered the bitter problem of grinding hardship. Thus it was, as the sun shone down unceasingly on their delight in the world's abundance, that Creation’s great plan was put to flight. So, the sublime notion of an eternal life, acquired through ice and hard endeavor, decayed into oblivion.
The material world prevailed over the spiritual. But still the Northern People endured and as the inhabitants of the whole world grew fertile, and the races of North and South intermingled, all those who bore Northern blood within them still recognized that ancient yearning to
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Haus Atlantis | Tohu
find resurrection through being, becoming, and passing away in a more pure and sublime form.
So when Jesus Christ, the mighty prophet, the Son of God, appeared and proclaimed the Gospel, it was the people imbued with northern blood who first raised their hands and fell to their knees, recalling unto themselves the great wisdom of their bloodline. Atlantis House leads us back into the dawn of mankind.
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If we are to know what lies at the heart of things, we must tear away the blindfold which mankind wears. In deep commune with the cosmos, organic life emerges – Man emerges. The primeval atom and http://tohumagazine.com/article/hausatlantis
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the universal spirit form Man's substance and soul. Devoid of soul, Man’s knowledge is merely bestial. It cannot be called knowledge.
Pronouncing the past, ruling the presence, and auguring the future, the Tree of Life towers over Atlantic House. The Three Norns bear its mighty roots, pointing the way, through ancient interpretation, to spiritual sacrifice. Amidst the cycle of eternal life, they raise the Saviour’s cross, now freed from of Man’s image, bearing only the Sun's shield of truth, towards Heaven.
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A noble woman was doomed to die In keen anguish. http://tohumagazine.com/article/hausatlantis
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Selected Press 2013
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
3/3/2014
Israeli artist explores what draws neo-Nazis to the prehistoric site of Externsteine - Magazine Israel News | Haaretz SUBSCRIBE T O HAARET Z DIGIT AL EDIT IONS הארץ
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Israeli artist explores what draws neo-Nazis to the prehistoric site of Externsteine
HAARETZ SELECT
Karen Russo challenges prehistoric perceptions in a new video, part of an exhibition in Jerusalem. By Avner Shapira | Apr. 18, 2013 | 3:15 PM 0
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Pillars on fire. From the v ideo work “Externsteine” by Karen Russo.
Last year, the directors of the Externsteine nature reserve decided to prohibit people from lighting fires or erecting tents at the site, located in the Teutoburg Forest in northern Germany, near the city of Detmold. The official reason was a desire to safeguard the natural environment, but some asserted there was also a political aim: to dampen the celebrations held there by neo-Nazis, neo-pagans and New Agers. Each of these groups gather at the ancient site several times a year and hold popular festivals with a mystic tone. The ban affected not only participants in such festivities, but also Israeli artist Karen Russo, who planned to document the activities for a video piece on Externsteine, which examines the various traditions that have become attached to it and how these are dealt with today. Russo had to forgo a number of scenes she wanted to film, but she says that the work, named after the site, was never meant to be based exclusively on documentary materials. Many neo-Nazi activities are carried out in secret and she knew it
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Israeli artist explores what draws neo-Nazis to the prehistoric site of Externsteine - Magazine Israel News | Haaretz
would be difficult to film them.
Karen Russo. Cultural twilight zones.
By Adrian Hennigan | World |
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Photo by Moti Kikion
Her 43-minute video contains interviews with experts juxtaposed with staged excerpts that illustrate the various rites that take place there, along with a poetic narration that interweaves the archaic and destructive practices of contemporary cult members with visions of future utopian communities.
RELATED ARTICLES All aboard t he Nazi Express By Avner Shapira | Jul. 7, 2013 | 7:21 PM
Russo’s work, part of the group exhibition “Mythographies,” is now on display at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design’s Yaffo 23 art space in Jerusalem and will run through June 21. Curated by Roy Brand and Sagit Mezamer, the exhibition seeks to present artistic meeting points between myths and geography, i.e., to examine how a mythical dimension is assimilated within a certain geographic space. Like Russo’s video piece, the other works illuminate the intersection where history meets fantasy, and spotlight the connections among landscape, collective memory and nationalism. In addition to the film, Russo is also presenting a wall collage of images related to German history and the ways in which ostensibly conflicting concepts such as “nature” and “civilization” go together. Archaeology and the SS Russo says she was drawn to Externsteine because of the long history of the site, which is comprised of five enormous rock columns of different shapes that together form an imposing wall hundreds of meters long. “The site, whose name means ‘the external rocks,’ is believed to be a prehistoric holy site. Some of the features at the site there indicate it may have been an observatory or place of cosmological significance,” says Russo. “But what really interested me are the excavations that were done by the Nazis and how people related to the place after Nazism was defeated.
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“At first I visited to do drawings of the unique rock formations but I kept growing more amazed at what I discovered there. Unlike other places the Nazis tried to turn into German heritage sites and that later became just a historical curiosity, Externsteine is a very lively place. It became a magnet for groups and subgroups that make pilgrimages to it, some openly and some not. Surprisingly, the authorities showed incredible tolerance over the years for all of this, until the ban that was imposed last year, when a lot of police came to the gatherings and tried to hinder them from taking place.”
MAG AZI NE The site draws about a million visitors a year, for a variety of reasons. Most are tourists who come to admire the beauty of the majestic rock formations that jut out from the flat, forested landscape. Others are attracted by the more mysterious features of the site, such as a temple-like chamber situated at the top of the largest rock column, which some theorize was once used as an altar for sacrifices. Carved in the wall above that chamber is a hole that points precisely at the location of the sunrise on the longest day of the year. Other intriguing elements include a basrelief depicting Christ’s descent from the cross, and a grave-like structure that has no clear explanation. Some visitors are drawn to Externsteine because of the theory, popular in 16th-century Germany, that the site was the location of the pagan shrine known as the Irminsul − the great wooden “pillar of the world” that was ordered cut down in the eighth century by King Charlemagne as part of his war on the Saxon pagan tribes and their form of worship.
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The uprooting of the symbols sacred to pagans signified Christianity’s victory over the German peoples. Some come to Externsteine to meditate and find points of energy in the rocks; some are curious about the cosmological theories related to the site; others believe it is connected in some way to the pyramids in Egypt, and there are even some who consider the place a burial ground for extraterrestrials. But Russo’s interest focused mainly on Externsteine as a unique example of the Nazis’ attempt to offer historical and archaeological proof of Aryan superiority. In her research for the work, she relied upon Heather Pringle’s 2006 book, “The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust,” which describes Das Ahnenerbe, the research institute founded by Heinrich Himmler, the SS commander and senior Nazi official.
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Israeli artist explores what draws neo-Nazis to the prehistoric site of Externsteine - Magazine Israel News | Haaretz
“The institute funded and employed many scientists, including anthropologists, archaeologists, geologists and botanists, with the aim of tracing the roots of the Aryan race and providing a scientific seal of approval for the Nazi ideology,” says Russo. “In fact, the institute and its scientists were creating myths and distorting history for the political needs of the Third Reich.” In the case of Externsteine, adds Russo, “the ancient history of the rock formations is shrouded in obscurity and archaeological digs have not yielded any clear findings. The prevailing theory is that the site was a pagan temple used by Germanic cults until the eighth century, and that afterward, in medieval times, it was used by monks and Christian hermits. But Himmler declared it a holy site to the ancient Germans and recruited archaeologists to justify his claim.” In the video, Russo speaks with historians and experts who have studied the site, including the German archaeologist Uta Halle, who points an accusing finger at the archaeologists who collaborated with Himmler. “Halle maintains that archaeologists in the Nazi period had just as much a part in fabricating history as the SS did,” says Russo. “She says archaeologists were responsible for a large portion of the distortions and for the uncritical way in which they fed nationalist ideas. Halle discovered that all the evidence uncovered in excavations at the site during the Nazi period dated from no earlier than the 11th century, and artifacts from the 16th century and beyond were also found; there wasn’t a single artifact from prehistoric times. At a conference arranged by the SS there were some archaeologists who refused to confirm the findings regarding the site’s antiquity, but this fact was obscured and most of the archaeologists did not try to refute the myth.” T he grandson Russo, 38, graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in 1998. She works in a variety of media, including drawing, painting, video and installations. Her work has been shown in many exhibitions in Israel and abroad. For the past nine years she has lived in London with her husband, American artist Doug Fishbone. They have a baby daughter. Russo’s “Externsteine” was first shown last year at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of the exhibition “Cabinets of Wonder in Contemporary Art − From Astonishment to Disenchantment.” It is currently also on show in Lincoln, England, in the comprehensive exhibition “The World is Almost Six Thousand Years Old,” curated by British curator Tom Morton, about the mutual historic and contemporary relations between art and archaeology. Russo says that in some ways, the film is a continuation of her earlier works “that deal with the question of how our culture portrays everything it marks as anomalous, faulty, excessive and uncontrollable; on the one hand − what is considered a legitimate expression of the culture, and on the other, what is excluded from this definition.” In the case of Externsteine, a central figure in the discussion of the site’s past and the mystery that surrounds it is the German amateur archaeologist Wilhelm Teudt, who in the 1920s, before the rise of Nazism, conducted studies with a mystical bent. He claimed that Externsteine was a ritual site of ancient Germanic civilization and formulated a theory about places possessing a mystical energy that were established in the same region in Germany. “His theory gained momentum in the 1930s, was adopted by Himmler and led to a combination of nationalist ideas with esoteric cults,” says Russo. In the film she interviews Teudt’s grandson, Jurgen Mische. “It wasn’t easy to persuade him to be interviewed. He was very wary at first,” she says. “He was disdainful of the idea that someone like me, who isn’t German, could understand the magic of the place. Like many others who are part of the groups that study the place and believe in its cosmological mystical nature, he is cautious about publicly expressing these ideas and suspicious of what he and his colleagues see as distortions made by mainstream scientists for political reasons. “The grandson is an interesting example of the spell that’s woven by engaging in the forbidden, in something the authorities supposedly don’t
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Israeli artist explores what draws neo-Nazis to the prehistoric site of Externsteine - Magazine Israel News | Haaretz
want the public to know about,” she adds. “Surprisingly, unlike other descendants of people who collaborated with the Nazis, he does not disavow his grandfather’s legacy, but rather insists on defending it. He didn’t want to talk about any political aspect of his grandfather’s work or to express any remorse. Teudt’s family was also hurt when the city of Detmold decided a few years ago to revoke the honorary title the city had awarded the grandfather during the Nazi period. Eventually, after we had some serious talks, the grandson agreed to be interviewed for the film, although there were many subjects that he wouldn’t talk about, and he also chose his words very carefully in talking about the site’s prehistory. I had the feeling that the things he wasn’t saying were of much more importance than the things he was saying. “I made it clear to him that I was approaching the piece as an artist, not as a researcher or someone working in service of one side or another. One of my motivations in making the film was curiosity about the way people project their political or intellectual ideology onto the rocks at the place − in other words, to examine the bond between history and nature. At the same time, I also wanted to see how myths speak through us. I didn’t rule out from the start the idea that perhaps there is some kind of energy force in this place. One of the issues I wanted to consider was rational civilization’s difficulty in dealing with cultural ‘twilight zones,’ i.e., with spiritualist ideas and with outlooks that sanctify that which is mysterious and outside the bounds of accepted science.” Not an indictment The pagan ceremonies held at Externsteine take place three times a year: on the longest day of the year (June 21 ), the shortest day of the year (December 21 ) and on Walpurgis Night (“Night of the Witches” ) on April 30. The thousands who participate in these ceremonies include not only neo-Nazis but members of an array of mystical and esoteric groups, and groups focused on ecology. “The sanctification of nature, particularly the forest, has always been a part of the German tradition,” says Russo. “At these celebrations, you find an odd overlap among the different groups and an affinity between pagan identity, political extremism and the rejection of Christianity and of urban culture.” Not everyone is invited to take part in this great merger: The film relates how in the 1990s the call spread among extreme right-wing activists to ban foreigners who were not German citizens from participating in the celebrations. As the film notes, this was reminiscent of the Nazi-era law barring Jews from entering the site, on the grounds that they were incapable of feeling its cosmic energies. Despite these efforts at exclusion, Russo’s film is not designed as a sweeping indictment of those who flock to the site. “What interests me,” she says, “is the discussion about the place of mythology: How can German society think anew about images from the heroic Germanic tradition without being dragged into their problematic political implications? In other words, as a society, are we capable of developing a ‘constructivist’ attitude toward myths, an approach that respects their inherent complexity, but without allowing their poetic power to strike us with moral blindness?” She adds that these questions are relevant not only to German society: “Because archaeological excavations play a central role in the creation of national traditions and in shaping a nation’s intellectual and spiritual capital, this discussion also relates to Israeli society and how archaeology is used to confirm certain political narratives.”
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Selected Press 2010
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
Selected Press 2009
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
Karen Russo On a Clear Day We Can See Forever 15 th May – 13th Jun PRIVATE VIEW THURSDAY 14th MAY 2009 | 7 - 9 PM
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Carl Jung Paradise Row is proud to present On a Clear Day We Can See Forever, a solo show by Israeli-born artist Karen Russo. In her video installations, drawings, writing, and photographs, Russo attempts to illuminate the murkier side of human life, returning to visibility that which contemporary culture paradoxically encourages and obscures. Attracted to narratives of excess, and aberrant or marginal phenomena, she locates these sites as fertile terrain, a landscape abundant with instructive, yet latent, images and archetypes.
The exhibition unites two bold and compellingly investigative bodies of work. Both reference the anarco-spiritualist ideas of Joseph Beuys, positing the role of the artist as that of a gifted mediator, someone capable of visualizing energy and articulating the ineffable. To this end
Russo employs subtle documentary means to examine the boundaries of what can be known and expressed, and the limits of what is often repressed. The Mole Man is a fascinating photographic record of the compulsive activities of 75-year-old William Lyttle, a long-term resident of Hackney, who has spent several decades digging an elaborate network of tunnels beneath his house. Metaphoric parallels with Lyttle’s subterranean endeavor and artistic production generally underlie the project, and how his intentions might overlap with those of the average artist. But the underground world the work inhabits also delves deep into ideas of human consciousness and invisibility. Target: 090913 977 (Silberschlag Crater on Moon), a video and sculptural work, commissioned by the Hayward Gallery Project Space for a forthcoming exhibition Deceitful Moon, explores a controversial mental faculty know as Remote Viewing. Discovered by ‘consciousness researcher’ Ingo Swann, and developed by physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ for a CIA sponsored program in the early 1970’s, Remote Viewing enables the perceiver or ‘viewer’ to describe in vivid detail a visual target without access to normal sense data or prior knowledge. The only information the viewer receives about the target is a series of coordinates, which serve him as a reference. The video documents the process of a ‘Remote Viewer’ attempting to identify a target on the dark side of the moon. His graphic impressions were recorded and then delivered to a professional sci-fi movie model maker, who was instructed to build a model based on the visual descriptions provided. The resulting sculpture presents a fictional lunar landscape based on psychic information, where a poetic and fictional proposition becomes more tangible than a physical place. Different modes of perceiving the world – both the world outside and world within – are engaged and a zone where the two might meet suggested. On a Clear Day We Can See Forever operates within a crucial framework of current ideas of consciousness and perception, which provide a particular history of the artwork and its theoretical discussion. Dialogues emerging from notions of the sublime in modernism and postmodernism, most notably in the work of French philosopher Jean-Pierre Lyotard, explored how the sublime, often bound to a sense of loss, emerges through the missing contents or unrepresentable aspects of a work, and thereby functions to demonstrate the limits of rational understanding. Russo contradicts this reading and contends that the goal of artists was explicitly to develop an art which expressed a reality beyond the material, a consciousness like that of a meditative state in which ordinary reality is transcended. On a Clear Day We Can See Forever looks at contemporary developments of such a position by re-framing the construct of the art object, and how it is viewed in 20th Century models of consciousness and perception.
Born in Israel in 1974, Karen Russo studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and has had solo exhibitions at Arquebuse, Geneva (2008); One in the Other, London (2006); Dvir Gallery, Tel-Aviv (2006); Delfina, London (2005); VTO, London (2005); Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2001); Herzliya Museum, Israel (2000). Selected group exhibitions include Deceitful Moon, Hayward Gallery Project Space, London (July 2009); Ein Harod Museum, Israel (2009); Busan biennial, Korea (2008); "Jerwood Drawing Prize Award 2008", Jerwood Space, London (2008); ‘Depletion’, Tel-Aviv Museum, 2008, ‘An Archaeology’, Project 176, London (2007); Montevideo, Amsterdam (2007); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2007); ‘Wanderland’, Krefeld Museum, Germany (2006). Russo lives and works in London
Private View: Thursday 14th May 2009, 7-9pm Show dates: 15th May – 13th Jun | Opening times: 12 – 6pm, Wed-Sat Entrance: 17 Hereford St, London, E2 6EX Press contact: Rhiannon Pickles PR |
[email protected] Tel: + 44 (0) 207 096 8809 / Mobile: +31 6158 21202 Web: www.paradiserow.com
By PeachMcGee
You might have heard about the chap in Hackney dubbed the Mole Man (pictured) who dug a network of tunnels under his house over a period of 40 years. Well now artist Karen Russo has used her meetings with him as one of the centre pieces of her current exhibition, On A Clear Day We Can See Forever. The other half of the show is formed from a series of experiments with psychics attempting to 'remotely view' the dark side of the moon.
Target 090313 977
Target 090313 977 started out by asking psychics to describe your works of art without having seen them. What made you ask them to describe a lunar landscape? We started filming the 'Remote Viewing artworks' sessions and I decided to add the dark side of the moon to the list of targets. My plan was to then pass along the descriptions to a professional sci-fi model maker and ask him to build a model based on that data. The result, which is exhibited next to the video, proposes a fictional poetic lunar landscape based on psychic information. I wanted to propose an alternative way of looking at what we call reality; a reality where a poetic and "fictional" moonscape (that is based on a collaborative subconscious effort) becomes more tangible than the actual physical place.
Mole Man The Mole Man project documents the subterranean life of William Lyttle, a resident of Hackney who has been fined £100,000 for digging 8m deep tunnels, spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house. Tell us about your encounters with Lyttle and what you set out to achieve.
I first heard about the Mole Man in 2006 while I was researching the psycho-geography of underground environments in London. As an artist, I was amazed to discover the similarities between the thinking of Lyttle and that of the average artist: the creation of things that don’t work, without functional value, and the obsession involved in the act of making. I decided to track him down and find out more about him, hoping to make a film examining Lyttle’s work from the perspective of an artist. Though flattered by my interest, the Mole Man proved to be extraordinarily difficult to work with. He was extremely racist, misogynistic and paranoid, and was only interested in talking about my sex life. His elusive, subterranean behaviour – in many ways like that of an actual mole – and his obsession with tunnels was the ultimate Freudian manifestation. I soon realised, though, that the sexual overtones of our relationship threatened to over-take the project completely. My encounter with this eccentric and aggressive man ended in violence against me and I subsequently decided to end the project. However, the photographic record I was left with provides a glimpse into to the inaccessible world of the unconscious, and raises intriguing questions about the relationship between artist and subject and the elusiveness of the documentary process itself.
Mole Man
For me this piece raised several questions about the ethical role of the artist in a practical, methodological sense. How do you envisage the artist’s role in larger society? I don’t think artists need to take on a moral role. I kind of like the idea of the artist as the devil’s advocate.
On A Clear Day We Can See Forever is on display at the Paradise Row gallery until 13 June. More info at www.paradiserow.com
Selected Press 2008
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
10-13 : שבת, שישי,11-18 :'ה-' ג,03-5444893 פקס,03-6043003 'טל,63503 תל אביב,11 נחום 11 Nahum St., Tel Aviv 63503, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
Selected Press 2007
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
10-13 : שבת, שישי,11-18 :'ה-' ג,03-5444893 פקס,03-6043003 'טל,63503 תל אביב,11 נחום 11 Nahum St., Tel Aviv 63503, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
Selected Press 2006
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
10-13 : שבת, שישי,11-18 :'ה-' ג,03-5444893 פקס,03-6043003 'טל,63503 תל אביב,11 נחום 11 Nahum St., Tel Aviv 63503, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
10-13 : שבת, שישי,11-18 :'ה-' ג,03-5444893 פקס,03-6043003 'טל,63503 תל אביב,11 נחום 11 Nahum St., Tel Aviv 63503, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
Selected Press 2005
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
Selected Press 2004
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
Tel Aviv Time Out, October 14 – 21, 2004
Book review “Encyclopedia Thermica” / Karen Russo Omanut La’am. 324 p. Artist Karen Russo new book deserves a new shelf in the library. Its’ content rotates along the seam-line between the literary and the visual, between seeking definitions and inventing concepts, between theory and prose. This seam-line, serious in one thread and winking in the next, is what makes “Encyclopedia Thermica” unique among well-defined books. Russo’s spheres of interest are expressed in several media - painting, photography and video – and are stratified in several layers throughout the book. Both in her art and in “Encyclopedia Thermica”, Russo tends to examine the halo that encompasses violence. The book focuses on infamous murderers (Mark Chapman, Charles Manson, the “Unibomber”), on pathological, psychological and thermic concepts, with references to violent films (“The Shining”), apparently influenced by American culture on the one hand and Romantic literature on the other (E.T.A. Hoffman and Edgar Allan Poe). But instead of a grave, awesome attitude toward the subject, Russo peels it and records it by constructing a complex archive. Seemingly “Encyclopedia Thermica” adopts the encyclopedic writing form. Subjects are arranged by alphabetical order and some entries are given definition. But once you start reading this regularity begins to disintegrate, to run wild, and a new and concealed inner order leads the reader through founding values of heat and cold (thermic attributes signifying heat and energy), that are repeated in various opposite, invented and polarizing contexts. Russo’s art disappears throughout most of the book, burst forth occasionally in images drawn from previous works. What is revealed to the reader is the corridor of her thoughts, the back-stage of her world of imagery. She turns the subject of violence and evil into research and brings quotations and references from all
corners of the world. The vast reservoir of knowledge in the book reflects the tight connection between art and violence, the way in which the world of art tends to see in violence an esthetic act. But because of the amount of disintegration, research and reviewing of different direction seeking the beauty within evil, that beauty is absent from Russo’s book, and the sensuality trickles away. The reader is left to look on from the outside, which is a pity. An interrupted and random reading saves the book from the somberness which threatens Russo. If you are looking for a book of prose which will sweep you away into the obscurity of darkness or raise a serious discourse into the causes of evil – you are looking in the wrong shelf. But if you would like to get acquainted with a world
rich in hot and cold affinities to sinister wishes and deeds, don’t
hesitate to pick out this book. It doesn’t bite, it only examines the ways of biting.
Irit Tamary
Ma’ariv, Saturday supplement, October 15th, 2004
A PRIVATE, INTERESTING AND UNPREDICTABLE WORLD Yoram Meltser / Leaves
John Donne referred to man as an island. In which case, if the island is full of treasures, then studying a detailed map of its private world can be interesting. Lately this was done here by Dan Zalka in his “Alphabet Book”, which won the Sapir Award. On the Global scene, and mainly in European literature, there are many cases in which an artist shows his audience a map, keys, a catalogue, dictionary or encyclopaedia. When the scope is relatively small, the writer may rely on a photo or on several documents as a jumping board for a personal text. But when an artists wishes to display a larger scope, with broad horizons, the natural tendency would be to choose an encyclopaedic format. Artists Karen Russo’s book, “Encyclopaedia Thermica” is just that. In a relatively thick volume, with entries set in alphabetical order, Russo spreads out patches of her life as an artists and a thinker. It is obvious by definition, that the pieces we see are those that Russo wants to show us. This is mostly due to her work in the visual arts and her engagement in discussions and opinions that involve thinking about images, about the zeitgeist and about man’s condition in our times. Thus the reader receives a text that is in its totality the writer’s private move, like the entry “Voodoo”, which includes a flicker of information and a short comment, though it is a theme that could provoke a much wider and deeper response, certainly on behalf of a person who is involved in art, consciousness, faith, myth and the connection between symbols and their perceptible influence in the world. Similarly, the entry “SARTAN” (which in Hebrew denotes both “crab” and “cancer”) contains two very short texts. One refers to cancer as a bloodthirsty parasite, busy activating its forceps and the other tells of an American farmer who miraculously recovered from cancer after being struck by lightning. But this
entry reveals Russo’s personal standpoint: definition through extremes, dealing with images, touching primordial fear.
Russo’s deep interest in myth and imagery, and especially in the deep connection between the two, is displayed before us in a long, thirty-page entry on the Niebelungs. A priory there is a private move here, which is a discourse about discourse as well, because Russo focuses on myth as it is presented in Fritz Lang’s 1924 “Zigfried”. The text deals with the manipulation of images, symbols and consciousness, with the treatment of the flawed German hero-model, with the question of German national cinematography versus (“Jewish”) Hollywood’s, and with the German’s ethos of loyalty to the bitter end. In a complementary text Russo goes on to shatter idols, concentrating on John Lennon and Ronald Reagan and their assassins. This reflects the fact that the writer belongs to the generation of TV imagery and duplicated reality, reflected in the logic of her discussion of murderer Charles Manson as well. As an artist and a thinker, Russo is depicted as very distant from the Israeli or Jewish world. Her entry on Blood, for instance, turns to allegory, dealing with rain of blood from the sky, without turning to the wonderful possibilities in Jewish sources, starting with the Bible, or even the Hebrew language. This is part of the process of our getting acquainted with Karen Russo, but these kinds of emphases constitute a statement on large parts of the contemporary Israeli art world. Russo is often attracted by the bizarre, as in her occupation with alcohol and spontaneous combustion. At times the metaphoric focus comes out, as in the Heart entry, the essence of which is Da Vinci’s opinion that the heart’s purpose is to supply heat. I find Karen Russo at her best when she is prudent with words and relies on a steadfast story, which keeps her discourse from “speaking about” and closer to “speaking the”. In a few places we come across complicated critical writing, which protrudes on the background of the light clarity apparent in the narrative parts that arouse our interest in Russo not only as an artist and thinker, but simply as a writer with a broad cultural background and an interesting talent.
