Archeology of Modernism

It was actually the tall broadcasting tower that initially awoke Sharon Ya’ari’s interest exactly ten years ago when he came across the public square at Bnei-Or Street in the desert city of Beersheba during one of his many trips through Israel. It is difficult to precisely express in words why Sharon Ya’ari becomes interested in a specific place. It is invariably the constellations of objects or people that attract the artist’s attention and acquire a meaning in the photographic image that extends beyond the commonplace. Sharon Ya’ari often regularly returns to such sites, some of them on numerous occasions, in order to capture the changes that have occurred there. 

Bnei Or was planned in the early nineteen seventies, a public square of the type one probably comes across quite often, built in keeping with the spirit of a modernist heritage. The urban planner was in any case concerned with providing the square with a center that would lend a structuring order to life in the surrounding neighborhood of faceless apartment buildings. Concrete benches formed a triangular ground plan with an urban sculpture in the center. Consisting of thirteen concrete cylinders of various heights and widths, it resembles a set of children’s building blocks enlarged to monumental proportions. Sharon Ya’ari began by taking photographs of the square and later regularly returned there in subsequent years because he was curious about the changes made to the site, and also because he became aware of a strange contradiction in the treatment of the neighborhood. While the planned city Beersheba is expanding a great deal, this relatively old quarter remains rather neglected. At the same time, three palm trees, for example, were planted on a piece of ground enclosed in a concrete circle. This attempt at beautification proved futile as the trees died one after the other due to a widely disseminated Mediterranean beetle infestation. In the end, the trees were cut down, leaving only the trunks behind. Construction sites came closer to the square, mounds of sand towered upwards in front of growing high-rise buildings. Children played on the concrete cylinders, leaving their soda bottles behind; adolescents sprayed graffiti; residents hurried past; the concrete crumbled away here and there. The cylinders remained a constant feature of everyday life within the context of the rapidly changing urban scenario. Each time he returned there, Sharon Ya’ari was captivated by the hidden beauty of the place whose original purpose and function was not so clear and was touched by the futile efforts to keep up the neglected area. 

When Sharon Ya’ari came to Krefeld to plan his exhibition in Haus Esters, he brought dozens of photographs of the square with him, albeit without yet having any clear notion about the form this series would take in the show. He quickly realized that the concrete cylinders would play an important role in the exhibition to the extent that some of its central themes are concentrated in the urban sculpture that never had the intention of being art but rather as geometries of everyday life in which the heritage of a modernistic notion of rational ordering principles is legible. 

He arrived at the idea of duplicating the elements and producing a German version of the concrete cylinders that would be juxtaposed with the photographs of the site in the exhibition. Midway in the planning phase, only a few months before the exhibition opening, the city of Beersheba unexpectedly granted Sharon Ya’ari permission to excavate the concrete cylinders weighing several tons and transport them to Krefeld. Because the square was to be completely redesigned, the city was grateful for their free disposal in the end. The artist nevertheless had to overcome numerous bureaucratic obstacles because his interest in this object awoke the suspicions of the responsible authorities who feared that a monument of great value had perhaps been overlooked. In the end, the 13 cylinders weighing several tons, now owned by the artist, were transported by ship to Germany.

By virtue of the artistic act, Sharon Ya’ari helps provide new life to objects whose future has effectively already expired. In doing so, he continues an artistic practice that has long been an inherent part of his photographs, but for the first time does not apply it to photographic images alone. He is lending a generally valid significance to the marginal and the everyday through his special particularly way of seeing and displaying. His work process is, in a sense, comparable to an archeology of modernism that analyzes and interprets the material remnants of contemporary human existence. In a concession to an archeological form of presentation, the decision has been made to leave the concrete roots of the last two elements visible, making the original underground structure evident.

But the particular significance of this specific act of translocation lies in the fact that the relics not only tell about their own story and reality but also establish a dialogue with their new surroundings. In the garden at Haus Esters, which like the villa itself was planned by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and subjected to the measuring system of his architectonic formal vocabulary, their modernist stylistic language acquires a new meaning. Their presence comments on the iconic appearance of Haus Esters just as the new location changes the appearance of the concrete elements. The fresh rolls of turf in which they are embedded offer the greatest possible contrast to their native sandy ground. It is all too evident that they originally belonged to a very different reality. The translocation of the objects has lent them a curious ambiguous status. They are neither art nor everyday life; they are no longer social sculpture, but also not completely autonomous sculpture. The decision to place the concrete in Krefeld’s exquisite and meticulously maintained gardens likewise contains an ironic aspect. The idiosyncratic liveliness that the concrete cylinders possessed as a self-evident part of a Mideast settlement is subdued. The wild and rough quality that this western modernist public square had in the middle of the desert appears cultivated, even domesticated here. 

The presence of the concrete now seems like an unwanted relative that turns up unannounced, and no one is sure how to treat or if better to ignore him. Although the shared genetic make-up is obvious, this relative also looks disturbingly different, a person who is obviously not as well-behaved and cultivated as one might expect from a member of the family of the upper middle-class villas Lange and Esters. Put another way, the concrete objects have been planted at a place that exemplarily represents the origins of modernist architecture—in its luxurious variant that has nothing to do with cheap concrete or prefabricated construction or subsidized public housing. And it is indeed perhaps especially because of this contrast that the thirteen concrete cylinders in the garden of Haus Esters relate a history of modernism. Forms migrate, transport the visions and hopes associated with them to another place, are adapted to new circumstances, are transformed and reshaped by life. 

The concrete object from Beersheba appears to be an anarchistic monument to the crumbling great visions of modernism. The fact that it can unfold its special sculptural potential is owed to the consequence with which Sharon Ya’ari translates his interest in the constellation and condition of this urban ensemble into an artistic act. He decides to place an object from the present intended to be thrown away in a museum context, thus giving it the capacity to represent a cultural moment that has suddenly become part of the past. The photographs on the wall and especially the large-format artist’s book on the table containing 38 photographs that the viewer can leaf through plays a decisive role in this interaction. It opens up a separate space where the square’s history, use and changes over a ten-year period of time are portrayed chronologically. The relationship between viewer and work changes with this book object; the size and weight of the double pages, each of which consists of a photograph folded down the middle, require the viewer to become physically active. An affinity develops between image and viewer through the act of carefully turning the pages back and forth that likewise lends the depicted a different presence. At the same time, however, the series can never be seen as a whole; the perception of the photographs is ever new and constantly changing. It is details that provoke comparisons with the object in its current state, for example the Hebrew graffiti recognizable outside on the concrete cylinders as a sign that has faded with time. The eye wanders back and forth between the object in front of the window and the photographs inside the room like a permanent mirroring of the one in the other. And like in a self-reflecting mirror, this process can never come to a conclusion; it contains a moment of indeterminateness, a hermeneutic blank. The concrete elements entice with an authenticity that the photographic image has long been unable to redeem. At the same time, their new context has the effect that they are at least temporarily transposed into the mode of an image. They are, so to speak, a representation of their past reality that we in turn can imagine by means of the details from their history selected by the artist. With its chronological and spatial shifts and overlaps, the installation as a whole enables to participate in an open process that develops between chance and decision, discovery and selecting, daily life and overriding significance, documentation and imagination.