Miriam Neiger's point of departure, as stated before, is the story
of the siege of a fortified city in the ancient Middle East which is based
on photographs of archeological remains and documentary evidence. The ten
collages that serve as the thematic basis for the works do not focus on
one particular city but, rather, combine bas-reliefs and other artistic
representations found in Egypt, Assyria, Babylon or Eretz-lsrael. The collages
present different stages of the story of the siege, beginning with the
feeling of "Confidence and Security" of a city that lays its trust on its
strong fortifications and the weapons at the disposal of its defenders.
Miriam Neiger is not disposed at this point to work on the level of hidden
symbols and motifs that reveal themselves slowly and gradually. Therefore,
in the collage representing the weapons, she draws the spectator's attention
to the double entendre that the word "weapon" has in Hebrew and to the
connection between this feeling of confidence and male violence. The source
for the collage depicting "Weapons" is an engraved handle of a sword depicting
a battle between Egyptian and Mesopotamian soldiers dressed in loin girdles
with swords covering their private parts. In the "Fight on the Gate" the
weapons are directed at a feminine gate (in the respective model based
on this collage the gate is even more clearly feminized). Other stages
of the fighting include "The Fight Back", the "Allout Fight" and, eventually,
"The Collapse" which is, as Miriam Neiger states, the point at which the
human spirit collapses too. Images of captured soldiers led in chains by
the victors are very popular in the ancient Egyptian, Assyrian and Babylonian
art; those serve as the basis for the "Capture" collage. The "Heap of Hands",
derived from an Egyptian relief, is a pertinent reminder of the universality
of war and its continuing actuality. In a broad temporal perspective, history
hardly draws a distinction between winners and losers, and yet this has
never deterred the winners from erecting a Victory Stele on which was carved
the story of the victory: The last collage is named "The Winners and the
Losers Wish to be Remembered", the implication of course being that none
is the winner. These collages, as I pointed out before, have been used
for the purpose of documentation - the works themselves do not function
as archeological or historical reconstructions. In a text written for the
exhibition, Miriam Neiger argues for the closing of a circle between the
ancient artist, an historian of his time, and the modern artist. She maintains
that we are still ruled today emotionally by the same feelings, fears and
sensations that controlled man then, and thus she aims at interpreting
freely the emotional experiences of the past using the language of modern
art. She does not offer a model of primitivism of the kind found in Giacometti's
art, for instance, which developed in relation to his ability to connect
it directly to its primitive sources. Nor does she follow Picasso's endeavour
during the formative years of Analytic Cubism to address himself to the
formal solutions offered by African masks. She shows no sympathy even for
the "Canaanite" orientation of Melnikov who searched for artistic roots
in Assyrian or Babylonian reliefs. She does not attempt any of these, nor
does she try her hand at anthropological reconstruction. Rather, she locates
herself solely in our own period; any carrying over of formal contents
from the archeological sources to the works is accomplished in terms of
a modernist intuition, or perhaps post-modernist sensibility.
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Prof. Haim Finkelstein From the catalog "Siege",
Avraham Baron art gallery, Ben-Gurion University, 1989 |
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