Uriel Miron
A narrow, elliptical conveyor belt dominates a darkened, elongated gallery space in
the Tel Aviv Museum. Spindly legs elevate the slim, dark structure to chest level,
at which standing viewers may comfortably inspect the myriad small objects
that circulate, slowly and silently, upon it, like miniature unclaimed luggage. The
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of silver and waxen artifacts that rest on the conveyor’s
moving black tiles defy immediate identification. They travel along their elliptical
path at a speed that seems, at first glance, too slow. However, as one concentrates
upon them and tries to grasp their burgeoning complexity, beauty, or sheer
weirdness, that same pace feels too fast. The viewer may stand, or sit on one of the
available tall stools and scrutinize the pageant of objects at length without stooping
or straining. High up, on one wall, three simultaneous video projections show the
objects close-up, filmed directly from above, as they circulate in and out of the frames.
The proliferation of objects that constitutes Stern Schocken’s exhibition How Many
Is One inhabits an unclaimed territory between design and art. This “demographic
explosion” of artifacts does not delineate boundaries. Rather, it questions their
validity, opening up a no-man’s-land, infiltrating the very heart of both territories.
The show’s conceptual underpinnings are firmly rooted in quintessentially artistic
considerations: philosophical and formal investigation and a complete commitment
to process. The discipline within which this exploratory process unfolds is, however,
jewelry design and industrial design.
Throughout her rich career, Deganit Stern Schocken, who has studied architecture,
industrial design, and jewelry design, has made repeated and daring forays into the
field of art. While she is a world-renowned jewelry maker/designer, some of her most
interesting and profound efforts have taken the form of installations and art projects.
Some of these depart completely from the field of design (not to mention jewelry
design), while others use jewelry (as well as other modes of expression) to investigate
the boundaries of design-art-architecture. All of Stern Schocken’s work is driven by
an investigative passion and by an insistence on the search for correlations between
different creative modes in the visual arts. It is within this expanded field that Stern
Schocken undertook her largest (to date) and most exhaustive project: How Many Is
One (2003). In the following pages, I shall attempt to examine this unique project in
some depth and to touch upon a more recent project directly related to it: Ants (2009).
In How Many Is One, the subject of Stern Schocken’s investigation is the industrial
mass-production of jewelry (as opposed to the making of unique, handmade jewelry),
hence a brief outline of this process is in order: The mass replication of jewelry relies
mainly on the “lost wax” technique (a.k.a. investment casting). In part, this is an
ancient method: a wax model (termed “wax pattern”) is encased in a refractory (heatresistant) mold, which is then baked to remove the wax. Molten metal is then poured
into the space (impression) left by the “lost” wax within the mold. After the metal
hardens, the mold is broken off to expose the casting. The modern, mass-production
version of this method employs reusable rubber molds to create large numbers of
identical wax “patterns,” or models, which can then enter the “lost wax” process.
When the rubber molds are prepared, channels are cut into them, called “sprues”
and “runners,” through which the wax is injected into the mold (later, they serve
as channels for the molten metal). As a result, the wax “pattern” that emerges from
the rubber mold always includes collateral rods and branches that are the castings
of these channels. After casting, these “waste” outgrowths, often significantly larger
than the “actual” piece, are cut off and recycled.
In How Many Is One, Stern Schocken’s investigative strategy is to short-circuit the
industrial process by intervening in the stage where the work of design has already
ceased—the casting stage. Stern Schocken disrupts this process in various ways,
“freezing” it in different stages, retaining and reifying its by-products. The physical
products of these interventions are then fed back into a mass-production process and
recombined in endless variations. The plethora of artifacts which constitute How
Many Is One were generated by a process so rich, complex, and ramified that I can only
begin to outline its principal elements.
The “raw materials” which Stern Schocken manipulates in this project are the
ready-mades of the jewelry industry: old rubber molds (often disused) and “findings.”
Frequently, the rubber molds are for very simple “findings”: prefabricated jewelry
parts—such as stone settings, chain links, and clasps—which are used in the industry
to construct a wide variety of jewelry products. In other words, many of the molds
Stern Schocken uses in this project are molds for incomplete pieces (not whole,
finished products) of indeterminate identity (since they are used to make a variety of
end products).
One aspect of Stern Schocken’s project is the retention of intermediary forms:
she cast the “impressions” of ready-made, disused molds and simply retained all
the existing sprues and runners as part of the final, silver piece. Since these surplus
“limbs” are usually much larger than the “actual” piece for which the mold was
made, they become dominant constituents of the new forms. Some of the resulting
casts are combined with others—or with other copies of themselves—and a new
rubber mold is made and fed into the same process. Stern Schocken applies the same
procedure of retention in larger pieces, using “trees.” In the industrial process, many
wax “patterns” are welded onto a central sprue (or “trunk”) before they are encased in
plaster and cast in metal. The resulting metal cast looks like a tree (and is referred to
as such), with the individual pieces forming the “leaves” or “fruit” and the sprue and
runners forming the “trunk” and “branches,” respectively. Normally, the “fruits” are
cut-off and retained, while the trunk and branches are recycled. Many of the larger
pieces in this project are whole, bristling “trees,” combined from products of other
stages in the project. In both scale and form, these pieces can no longer function
as jewelry, and they maintain an uneasy balance between industrial artifact and
sculpture.
Another typical aspect of the rubber molds used in the jewelry industry is their
dissection marks. When the rubber mold is first made, it is fused into a single slab
of rubber encasing the piece to be replicated. Using a scalpel, the mold-maker then
dissects the mold into two halves in order to remove the model. The halves are then
fit tightly back together so that wax can be injected into the mold. Hence, each
mold used in the impersonal process of industrial replication bears the individual
mold-maker’s “signature” pattern of dissection marks, which, however, leave no
trace on the final piece, since they affect the part of the mold that does not impinge
on the impression of the model. In an ingenious act of creative “sabotage,” Stern
Schocken manipulates the casting process to include these patterns in the final piece.
Specifically, she injects wax into the mold without fully tightening the mold halves.
The wax bleeds beyond the borders of the impression and casts parts of the mold not
originally intended to be cast, namely the dissection patterns between the halves.
In the resulting pieces, the cast of the original impression, along with its sprue
and runners, is surrounded by a paper-thin frame of material bearing the peculiar
rhythmic pattern of scalpel marks described above, which often resembles the
magnified texture of human skin.
In making these “bleeding” casts, Stern Schocken employs the means of
mechanical reproduction to create unique events, since the wax’s leakage cannot
be fully controlled. The resulting pieces allude simultaneously to the standard
rectangular form of the rubber mold and to the individual touch of the original moldmaker (who is usually not the designer). As with the pieces discussed earlier, some of
these “bleeding” wax pieces are fitted out with new sprues and runners and used as
models for new rubber molds in a potentially endless process of mutative generation.
Stern Schocken’s intervention in the industrial process of replication is rhizomatic
and viral: each stage branches out horizontally, rhizomatically, into new forms,
rather than following a linear progression. Stern Schocken’s ideas inject their
recombinant DNA into the industrial process’s own mechanism of replication to
generate new units at an astonishing rate, just as viruses utilize the replication
machinery of their host cells to multiply themselves. Like rogue snippets of genetic
material, these units mutate and recombine, branching off into new species, or fusing
together in burgeoning, symbiotic arrays, defining a new aesthetic, one partaking
equally of the industrial and the biological, of mass production and unique creation,
of luxury and waste product.
In his satirical masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five, the late Kurt Vonnegut invented
an imaginary race of extraterrestrial beings, from a planet called Tralfamadore. These
aliens can “see” in four dimensions (time being the fourth) as we see in three; in other
words, they simultaneously perceive past, present, and future. “Tralfamadorians
don’t see human beings as two-legged creatures … They see them as great millipedes—
‘with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other.’” Like these human
“millipedes,” Stern Schocken’s innovative, recombinant, multi-limbed creations
include the physical manifestation of their own history, even as they exemplify a vast
potentiality for the future.
The Cast That Knew Too Much
By retaining intermediate forms of the casting process and giving physical form to
otherwise “invisible” aspects of the mold-making process, by reifying and exposing
the hidden history of each jewelry idea represented by a particular mold, Stern
Schocken’s project How Many Is One enacts a Foucaultian “archeology” of a specific
practice and discipline which combines modern and ancient methods. She conflates
and manifests the various stages that lead to the “end product,” thereby calling that
very concept into question. Her investigation delineates and then breaks through the
boundaries of the industrial process, like wax leaking through a poorly sealed mold,
engulfing the original impression and creating surprising new patterns.
The radical operations enacted in Stern Schocken’s investigation of jewelrycasting evoke certain attributes inherent to casting in general. The casts she generates
literally overflow with surplus material and form, a hypostatization of the conceptual
surplus that lies at the heart of casts per se. In a certain manner, all casts evoke
surplus, a congealed excess presence, always more and less than the “original.” More
because it is always in addition to the original, always after the fact of the original;
less for essentially the same reason—for being secondary, derivative, subsequent.
In Lacanian terms, surplus is an introjection of the real into the symbolic order,
a kernel of unmediated, raw experience contained within every use of language.
Every act of signification is over-signification: it always contains more (and less)
than that which it seeks to signify, always pointing beyond its referent to that
dimension of experience which cannot be mediated by language. Each mold is a literal
morpheme (to appropriate a term from linguistics)—a repeatable pattern of form
bearing meaning. Stern Schocken takes the molds of “monosyllabic” findings (parts
that are later combined into complete “words”—or jewelry pieces) and gives physical
expression to the surplus meaning and form hidden in their physical structure
and in the various stages of their production and use. In doing so, she instigates an
efflorescence of forms that renders the idea of original referent irrelevant and blurs
the distinction between model and prototype, between matrix and content. The mold,
intended to delimit meaning and form, is shown to signify more than its intended
referent and to contain—in its very structure—elements that challenge its declared
purpose.
As we have already established, in the process of industrial jewelry production, a
large part of the cast is removed as waste, leaving only a fraction of its substance and
form as a “finished” or “complete” piece. The final product can only seem complete
once most of it has actually been suppressed, repressed. By the same token, Stern
Schocken’s “bleeding” casts—that resurrect and reactivate the industrial artifacts’
“secret” history and unwanted superfluities—always look fragmentary, amputated.
The Lacanian “real” whole is always monstrous, always excessive and surplus,
therefore always incomplete. Stern Schocken’s casts “know” and show too much, in
the same sense as in Hitchcock’s Man Who Knew Too Much and Poe’s Purloined Letter. To
wit, they bear disquieting knowledge that would usually be politely suppressed. In
the case of Hitchcock’s seminal thriller and Poe’s short story (and in almost all other
similar cases), the repressed knowledge concerns, respectively, death and sex.
The radical fecundity of Stern Schocken’s process betokens an undeniable joy of
creation. Many of the forms generated bespeak not just creation but procreation. At
the same time, the disturbing surplus quality of her unexpurgated casts, her reliance
on waste products, and her deliberate employment of expired, “dead,” rubber molds
all testify to the hint of death and entropy inherent in casts as such. Casts rely on
processes of expansion and contraction: expansion of formless substance until it is
constrained by externally imposed limits; almost all casting materials contract as
they harden (this is particularly pronounced in those that harden by cooling, as wax
and metal do). Paradoxically, Stern Schocken’s “bleeding” casts, in which the wax
has expanded beyond the boundaries of the mold, appear as though their substance
has been gnawed away in places. Molds are cavities, negative spaces, left behind by
original forms. Their products, casts, are secondary substitutes, like fossils (natural
casts), monuments to the passing of a precursor.
The strategies involving the retention and recombination of hidden structures,
and the deliberate “misuse” of the rubber molds (by allowing the wax to leak),
mine the mold as a site for the production of meaning. This mode of inquiry is
complemented by a different strategy, one which makes direct use of the molds’ mass
products: findings—the small, anonymous jewelry parts, intended to be incorporated
into larger, “whole,” pieces. Stern Schocken casts and then agglomerates tens and
even hundreds of identical parts into large clusters. As they crowd together, like
spoons gathered face to back, the familiar fragments enunciate a new syntax that
ignores the “original” connection points at which these findings are usually joined
to make conventional jewelry. This new syntax yields asymmetrical accretions that
resemble biological and fractal growth patterns more than they do mechanical or
industrial formations. The radical proliferation of form and meaning embodied in the
sheer numbers of diverse, yet genetically related, artifacts that circulate on display
is mirrored by the “mitotic” replication of form that occurs within the microcosm of
individual pieces (one is reminded that the rich and wildly divergent variety of living
species is mirrored and even dwarfed by the structural and functional complexity of
living tissue on the microscopic and molecular levels).
The potentially limitless field of evolving forms that Stern Schocken opens up
rests on a creative approach which is digital in the strict sense of the word (not
the computer sense). Namely, like language, and like DNA, it relies on a finite set
of original “words” (molds) and a finite set of syntactical rules that can be used
to produce an infinite set of expressions. It is, perhaps, not coincidental that the
project’s title seems to allude to that simplest and most powerful digital language
of all—the binary code of 1 and 0 used by all computers (including our brains). The
concept of language (as generative model) and its concomitant reference to infinity
are issues that pervade much of Stern Schocken’s work—and come to a head in How
Many Is One.
Ants
The disciplined (and playful) conceptual and procedural structure of How Many
Is One, the clarity and originality of its digital nature, make it a landmark in the
evolution of her work. How Many Is One exploits the possibilities of recombination
and permutation to the utmost, producing a bewildering variety of objects and
undermining the ostensible purpose of industrial replication in the process. In a later
installation, Stern Schocken employs the system she developed to evolve a specific
“species” within the phantasmagoria of How Many Is One.
In 2009, Stern Schocken created the installation Ants as part of the exhibition The
Natural History Museum at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art. For this unusual show,
several artists were commissioned to create works in a variety of media with the idea
of creating an imaginary natural history museum. The exhibition included dioramas,
pseudo-skeletons, a full-scale Plasticine dinosaur, and a full-scale 3D animation of a
sperm whale, as well as smaller exhibits—mainly in cabinets and display cases. Each
work was limited to a specific room or area, with the exception of Stern Schocken’s
Ants.
If How Many Is One was about production, Ants was about infestation. Stern
Schocken created thousands of individual “ants”—actually tiny pieces of jewelry
made out of findings cast from some of the same rubber molds used in How Many Is
One. Each piece was fitted with a pin extending from its “thorax,” with which they
were individually mounted on the museum wall. Ranging the length of the museum’s
largest hall in a horizontal, eye-level line, Stern Schocken’s installation infested the
entire exhibition. At various junctures, groups of ants split off from the main line to
colonize expanses of wall, appearing in other halls and rooms as well. At the center
of the main hall, the horizontal line crossed a grid of squares marked off in pencil on
the wall. The grid acts as a legend, a taxonomy of sorts, with each intersection of lines
bearing a single ant variant. Thus, Ants can be read both as a specific colony in situ
and as an abstracted conceptual system of categories.
In any given ant colony, one may find a variety of body types, varying in size,
shape, and function. Yet, all these different insects are not only of the same species;
they are, in fact, sisters, laid by a single queen, sired by a single male in a single
act of copulation. As in other social insects (bees and termites), the ants’ virtually
identical DNA is expressed differently depending on their function in the colony. All
the “ant” variants in Stern Schocken’s infestation are, mostly, based on a combination
of two or three elements: the body is a finding with a pin, cast from a small selection
of rubber molds, either in wax or in silver. The body may carry on its “back” or in
its “mandibles” either a rhinestone, a rolled-up fragment of newspaper, or a tiny
figurine. Some of these are also dipped in paint. Each variant is replicated to create a
cohort. Although based on casts, each ant is individually made by hand, as is often the
case in the assembly of mass-produced jewelry as well. To the numerous ant variants,
Stern Schocken added stamped graphic symbols based on the invented “ant” shapes.
The ants’ restricted formal repertoire “is offset by the addition of color and of more
various media than those found in How Many Is One, which, while much richer in
forms, was relatively austere in its exclusive use of silver and wax.
Stern Schocken is not merely caught up in the imaginative play involved in
creating an invented jewel-ant colony, of spinning off variations on a theme.
The conceptual severity of How Many Is One set it apart from her other work as a
monumental, but closed, experiment, an in-depth investigation of an industrial
process and its intersection with art and design. In Ants, she applied the generative
principle developed through How Many Is One to deal with other overarching
concerns that have pervaded much of her work: the juxtaposition of high and low
materials, the intermingling of sculptural and material expression with text and
graphic symbols, and, most dramatically, the juxtaposition of jewelry design with
architecture. The deployment of Ants throughout the Petach Tikva Museum leads
the viewer toward two extreme vantage points: close, nose-to-the-wall scrutiny of
individual pieces, and an attempt to grasp the extent of the infestation at the scale of
architecture.
It has been estimated that the combined biomass of all living ants—tiny as they
are—rivals or exceeds the combined mass of any other species,1
including humans.
A similar disproportion exists between jewelry (usually small and conceived of as
individual pieces) and its mass-produced proliferation. In How Many Is One and Ants,
Deganit Stern Schocken has made this scale shift a central feature of her artistic
endeavor, conjoining industry with installation art and jewelry with architecture,
and deepening our understanding of design as language.
- Ants are not one species but rather a family of several thousand species; however, the comparison is still
striking.