Poetic Thinking Today by Eshel Amir;

Author:Eshel, Amir;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2019-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Dani Karavan, Environment Made of Natural Materials and Memories

Karavan’s abstract walls and white concrete cubes arranged as a staircase—inserted among the trees and meadows of a city park—also serve as a focal point from which to experience the environment anew. Visitors were invited to climb the stairs, which were intentionally built without a banister, and then to sit atop them, think, converse, be. These stairs elevated visitors to a higher position from which they could observe the world and others who remain below them on the ground. A playful inversion of the monotheist tradition with its all-seeing, all-knowing God, in this miniature tower of Babel it is we humans, any one of us, who may take charge. We can decide for ourselves, for example, whether to ascend the stairs, how best to address the danger of falling, and so forth. Karavan told me in our conversation in 2015 that the Kassel authorities initially forbade anyone from using the stairs for safety reasons. Visitors to the documenta, however, quickly removed the police’s “do not enter” banner and made the work their own.

Martin Heidegger’s notion of the artwork as “a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not” is mostly restricted, in his own writing, to the domain of the individual’s experience. Some of Karavan’s most celebrated artworks, however, tie the idea of the transformative capacity of a sculpture to our communal sphere and thus to politics and ethics. In works such as Ma’alot (Cologne, 1980–86), Karavan also unfolds the link between art and our communal life through language, for example, by giving his works potent Hebrew titles. The Hebrew noun ma’alot can mean “stairs” or “degrees” (as a unit of measurement), as well as “merit,” “value,” and “virtue.”12

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