1996.05; Sigalith Landau EN

Sigalit Landau - vagrant and terrorist
published in: Archis (1996) 5, pp 4-5 as translation of the original text in Dutch; the article is a review of Landau's solo exhibition 'Voorwerk 5' at Witte de Wth Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam/NL, curated by Bartomeo Mari (April-May, 1996)

Fourteen gouged-open outer doors in succession with two metal rake-like claws on the floor; a swimmer smashing himself against a white wall spattering it with blood; a hole knocked in a wall - with the installation she made for the show 'Voorwerk 5'in Rotterdam's Witte de With, Israeli artist Sigalit Landau (1969) launched an attack on the clinical white spaces. In het work Landau, who ranks among the leading artists in her own country, looks for 'places', spaces to 'be'.
The work ‘Wounded Territory and Life under a Stone: Computer Mouse-pads, Fungus in Cage and Mackintosh Soap’ (1995) originally formed part of a larger installation in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, a temple of Jewish culture and identity. Landau deliberately chose to question the Israeli-Palestinian conflict there. This work was inspired by the golden 'Dome of the Rock' on Temple Mount: in the Jewish tradition the rock on which Abraham was to sacrifice his son Isaac, in Islamic tradition the rock from which Mohammed ascended to heaven. “Let's stop warring over it, I'll create an alternative rock”, was Landau's subversive proposal to the Israel Museum. She reconstructed the hidden world beneath the Rock: a three-dimensional' landscape' of gnawed computer mouse pads, with a space hollowed out in the shape of the controversial Rock; a fungus culture wrapped in plastic symbolized the life hidden beneath it. Above it hung a vigilant `eye': part of the bodywork of a car with a hole in it the sort made by the impact of a stone. Visitors were invited to throw pebbles from the museum's sculpture garden at the eye: these then fell bad( on the reconstruction of the Rock. Did the visitor become David against Goliath or a stone-thrower from the Intifada? A video showed how Palestinian Bedouins – nomadic tent-dwellers with no desire to settle – survive by scavenging among the refuse dumped into their territory by Israeli dustcarts. Landau featured in it too, inside a house-high refuse container – the makeshift studio she set up for herself when the Israel Museum failed to provide her with a workplace. Dressed in bin-liners, she herself rolled refuse like through the sculpture garden. Through these video images run excerpts from an interview in which one of the museum curators opposes Landau's proposal to bring fungus into the museum: “Fungi are living organisms that destroy other life”; “fungi can grow virtually anywhere and everywhere, provided the conditions are right; the museum does its best to make sure such conditions don't arise”, “fungi may be brought in here on the one condition that they are sealed in plastic”, etcetera. Besides demonstrating the beauty of things generally regarded as sordid, she challenges the museum-as-closed-system. As such the museum can be taken as a metaphor for the state whose identity it enshrines. For those in Israel who were aware of its different layers, the work must have been shocking and disturbing. Here in Rotterdam, however, divorced from its ideological context, it has lost much of its original impact.
In contrast, ‘Compressed Household, Many Scratched Doors and Door Tent with Treshold Creature’ can hold their own in this Dutch setting. They are akin to an installation of 1994 in a disused bus station in Tel Aviv where Landau reconstructed a refuge for iIlegal Palestinian workers where she herself lived for the duration of the exhibition featuring the installation - coming from Jerusalem she had no place of her own in Tel Aviv. ‘Door Tent’ 1994-1996) is an archetypal tent-like construction with a roof made of two metal door halves over a scaffolding beam functioning as ridge. Inside lie the messy trappings of a vagrant. One side of the roof has spy-holes of the type found in doors, so that you can look out. At these points the metal shows traces of violent battering from the outside. Violence is also reflected in the 'threshold creature': an emaciated figure in drab papier-mâché, doubled up on the ground shitting cuckoo-clock weights. In its hands-which are strikingly pale and extremely naturalistic (casts of the artist's?)-it clutches an open penknife. Any attempt at self-defense would seem doomed to fail.
Central to Landau's artistic mythology is the use of refuse, literally ‘objets trouvés’, consumer goods which are worn, soiled and discarded. They are not anaesthetized and aestheticized, but integrated into the living conditions of the homeless. A nomadic existence implies one in which comfort is reduced to an absolute minimum. Every shelter, every place to sleep involves improvising, taking cover, hiding away, keeping out of sight-in silence. In contrast, the terrorist, while equally furtive, leads a violent and noisy existence and seeks to penetrate places from which he is barred. To describe Landau's own position as that of an outsider, ‘der Andere’ is to look from a central perspective. Her strength lies in deliberately taking up a position on the periphery. Uprooted, living on the fringe of the established order and thus scarcely tolerated if at all, vagrants and terrorists make it painfully dear how contorted and vulnerable the feeling of social wellbeing in fact is.

Sigalit Landau. 'Sandblasting Lighthouse', Witte de With Rotterdam
© photo: Bob Goedewaagen, Rotterdam

Two works she conceived specially for Rotterdam. One is ‘Sandblasting Lighthouse’ (1996); this looks like a ship, with a hull o( concrete blocks and a scaffold pole wedged like a mast between floor and ceiling. This not only makes the ship incredibly heavy but permanently immobile too. It is laden with splintered wood, old newspapers and refuse; the only person on board is a papier-mâché figure. The mast has triangular plexiglas 'sails' with large chunks slashed out of it; one of the sails has a compartment with an electric heating element populated by ants. Halfway up the mast, approximately at eye-level, a sandblaster swivels round - fortunately it is not working. Down inside the ship is a gently hissing miniature sand fountain, as mysterious as a burning bush. This battered vessel cannot sail, it is secured to a chain that disappears into the floor. Anyone pulling on the chain sees on a monitor an anchor moving in the opposite direction. The white wall in the room has a gaping hole through which can be seen a second wall crudely distempered yellow with a messy plinth. Beneath the concrete floor there transpires to be a layer of linoleum which has in turn been sawn through to reveal that this floor is also hollow. The space we know as museum-goers proves to be a box within-a-box. Landau reveals the building's innards behind and beneath the perfect finish of the exhibition rooms, exposing a hidden world of shabbiness. In this secret interstice Landau anchors her ship, safe and secure.
During a one-day workshop at the Rotterdam Academy of Visual Arts, Landau invited interior design students to search the college (a colossal fifties' bank building) for spaces which they could hide out in for at least a week. Behind what normally passes for the 'interior', a building such as this can be found to have an entire network of unsuspected spaces: hollow cavities under and between the floors, gullies where the pipes and cables run, lift shafts and narrow crevices to get to them. Most of these spaces are not accessible in a normal manner and can be reached only by crawling, climbing, squeezing, crouching, and have totally different dimensions and materiality: in most of them you cannot stand up straight and they are rough and harsh rather than finished and reassuring. For this reason they are seldom suitable for living in, unless you are really hard put, in which case they can be a place of refuge for vagrants, fugitives, terrorists and other outsiders. Landau looks for these places-on-the-cutting-edge, the interstices-beyond-the-fringe, and penetrates to where she is not really tolerated. Hence her work explores such notions as inside and outside, we and they, the known and the other, the accessible and the prohibited. She lays bare boundaries and challenges us to think them over.

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