Meira Yagid-Haimovici
“How Many is One” is an applied work model, a system that generates a succession
of random changes, creates mutations from elementary metal particles. It is a work
in a different rhythm—in terms of jewelry time, almost a computer animation. An
adventurous journey to the unknown, reproductions as random as a pinball machine
game. The works are an accumulation of almost infinite possibilities, initiated by
Deganit Stern Schocken’s exposure to the jewelry industry.
Through breaking down borders, through deviations from standard industrial
work processes, she creates enigmatic works, silver casts that seem to belong to
ancient times and places. Some of the works seem not to have been designed at all
but to be fragments of something, fossils, traces, remnants from another culture; in
others, the sense of uniqueness is the result of transformations created by various
surface treatments—some of the surfaces present tribal tattoos of sorts, a decorative
array of signs with no clear cultural reference. An idea has been developed here,
resulting in the tectonic presence of the work surfaces. Decoration, in this context, is
seen to create difference, uniqueness of form, separateness.
In 1916, the architect H. Tessenow wrote: “Ornament is an unavoidable,
unintended, therefore unconscious expression of things which architects do not want
to show. Don’t they really?”1
Stern Schocken intentionally produces “mistakes,” firmly consolidating chance
occurrences. In the process of casting her jewels, the drama of uncertainty takes
place at the moment the wax has been poured into the mold, as it turns from liquid to
solid and overflows beyond its intended limits. This is the random moment, creating
differences between the jewels that are unlike the industrial casting process. Further
differences are created through treatments of the surface: painting, inlaying stones,
or buffing and polishing.
The lead actor in this process is the conductor, the “anguss” (sprue), the mediating
channel through which the wax is injected into the rubber mold in order to create
the jewel’s wax model—an umbilical cord of sorts, which it is customary to cut
at the end of the “lost wax” process of jewel casting. Here, the umbilical cord is
uncut, remaining part of the work after it has fulfilled its original role as a mediator.
The present project runs in two channels. The series Anomalies includes works
of decorative physiognomy created through deviations from form and breach of
balance—the mistakes, the unexpected.
In his book Especes d’espaces, Georges Perec wrote of dissolving space: “Space
melts like sand running through one’s fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me
only shapeless shreds.”2 Is this decoration or imaginary decoration? These are not
compositions inspired by botany or controlled geometry; the decoration of these works
does not follow rules and principles from the Middle Ages, nor those or Art Nouveau.
The sense of decorativeness originates in the tactility of the surface, which was
actually created through random, unplanned incisions in rubber molds by an artisan
in a casting factory (molds originally intended for the casting of some item related to
the jewelry industry—a fastener, for instance).
The second series, Arrangements, includes compositions made by sequences and
repetitions, like music. These works, bringing to mind sprouting, germination, and
reproduction, create a spatial order from particles, like an architecture of molecules.
The elements are joined to each other in various degrees of density; two- and threedimensional spatial structures that allow growth through the repetitive use of a basic
element. It is an open-ended system that enables the construction of a structure that
seems like living, breathing urban tissue.
At first sight, the project How Many Is One seems like a sharp change, a metamorphosis in Stern Schocken’s work. In fact, it is a continuation and a development of
ideas that she has been preoccupied with for a long time and is part of the structural
chassis formulated beneath the surface of her work: one thing grows from another,
toward a new creation. Like her former projects, the present one was also initiated
in the reaction of the artist (to some trigger: an event, a phenomena)—in this case,
to the jewelry industry. Her work is concerned with three main issues: dealing with
the question of borders and border transgression, control and lack of control, through
a grid; relationships and ties between people and objects, between people and
situations, in the context of space; and the tension between chance and intention,
the dimension of arbitrariness in creation. In his book Notes sur le cinematographe,
3
Robert Bresson enumerates ten qualities of the object, following Leonardo da Vinci—a
conceptual framework that is relevant to an observation of Stern Schocken’s objects.
Lightness and Darkness
The poet Avot Yeshurun once wrote that the homeland of life is childhood, and
leaving it behind is the beginning of the journey. “It all started when I was seven
years old. My parents had left the house, and I spread all the threads, buttons, and
scissors on the floor,” tells Stern Schocken, “and then I lit a flashlight.”
Threads and twisting coils, open lines, and circles are a leitmotif in her work. The
threads “produce” the ties, the connection between hand and gaze, between eyes
and fingers. They function as the foundation, like a vanishing point of sorts in the
observation of a physical-spatial axis system.
Color and Material
The artist moves between materials and ideas; the material in her work often serves
as a conceptual conduit. Her materials are various types of stones, threads, words,
fabrics, metals, plaster. She mixes them, disrupting presuppositions and images
related to their status.
When participating in an exhibition in Padua on the subject of light, she inserted
a diamond in a single match from a matchbox—a pocket-work of sorts. In another
context, she inlaid a diamond in the tip of a paintbrush with a golden handle. In an
exhibition in France on the subject of gold and medals, each participant was asked
to work with five grams of gold; she tied her gold nugget with medal ribbons, baking
molds, filing stones, and various threads.
In the 1990s, she created landscape brooches, territories (ponds and orchards) on
silver surfaces—connecting the body to what lies outside it—using various types of
stones, ribbons, gold, silver, stainless steel, copper, etc.
In the mid-1990s, she created the series How Many Are Four, works on paper
addressing the tension between two- and three-dimensionality. She glued bits of
gold and silver on Xeroxed photographs of objects and blurred them with paint.
She says: “I found four tourmaline stones in a store…”—a translucent, precious
stone, in which leaves may be seen. A stone is touch, creation, eternity; she creates
stones from fabric, “forms” them from water, alternating the use of real stones
with pseudo stones. In the present project, the works are silver casts. Confronting
mass production, she uses “classical” casting material while working it in ways that
remove it from industrialized anonymity and endowing each object with uniqueness
and individuality.
Form and Stance
In Stern Schocken’s works there is a tension between form and the lack of form.
Georges Bataille coined the term informe (formless) as an opposition to form;
Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois used the term as a conceptual conductor in an
exhibition they curated at the Pompidou Center in Paris (Formless: A User’s Guide,
1996), comparing the informe as an operative move of constant movement, mixing,
confusion, and distortion to the formal modernist stance.
The early works of the 1980s, structural compositions dealing with movement and
corporeal spatial signs, have evolved into spatial territorial analogies. She used
threads as drawing stitches on Xeroxed photographs, as miniature wall pictures, and
as grid-directed weaves in space, grasping at threads. In the installation Hopscotch
(1998, Kibbutz Nachshon Gallery) and in the installation Poubelle (Garbage Can) created
with Ron Gilad (1999, in the trash room of Office in Tel Aviv Gallery), the threads were
compressed and became a dense web, allowing only a look from the outside. Her work
first developed in the cultural climate of the jewelry world in the late 1970s, years of
passage from an aesthetic view of jewelry design to an ideological, conceptual one. At
the time, a few avant-garde galleries, mainly in Amsterdam but also in London and
Munich, presented the works of several individualistic jewelry designers, most of them
born in the 1940s, who breached the ethos of Pforzheim (a town in Germany, near the
Black Forest, that has been a jewelry-making center since the 18th century). Their works
demonstrated the provocative, intellectual, and expressive potential in jewelry making.
In their hands, jewelry became, among other things, a tool for social class criticism,
challenging the representations of social class and using “low” materials, and a means
of addressing questions of identity, the body, and symbolic contents.
Thus, for instance, Otto Künzli investigated ideas and materials in a blunt
manner, at times ironic, shooting arrows at a restrained, courteous Swiss society
while examining its symbols and icons (“Gold blinds you” on a box of chocolate, the
Swiss gold). Gijs Bakker’s works are like “biting remarks” on human desires and the
objects that serve as their substitutes. He creates, in his own words, “anti-jewelry,”
juxtaposing “low” and “high,” dismissing the use of valuable stones, and clashing
with the Catholic Church. Around the same time, the collector and gallery owner
Helen Drutt from Philadelphia was presenting avant-garde jewelry in the United
States (including Stern Schocken’s works). In Israel, too, there was a conceptual
breakthrough in the early 1980s. It was led, among others, by Esther Knobel and Vered
Kaminsky, and it also manifested in the Jewelry Department of the Bezalel Academy
of Arts and Design.
Among the artists whose works show affinity to Stern Schocken’s, one may
mention Claus Bury, Georg Dobler, and Giampaolo Babetto, whose creations
are characterized by a sculptural, geometric presence and a preoccupation with
proportions and scale. Babetto’s work evolved into minimalist mini sculptures, and
Bury created visual interpretations of architectural perspectives, influenced by the
Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism. However, it is probably Onno Boekhoudt’s
approach—whose works, more fragments than jewels, sanctify the road and the
search—that reverberates in her work (his exhibition Why Not Jewelry? was shown at
the Israel Museum in 2000). In a master class he instructed in Edinburgh in 1999, he
asked the participants to design jewelry for passers-by. Stern Schocken’s work was
made from synthetic rubber, which she crushed along its edges, blurring the stamped
words (from a stamp she had used previously) “This is my wall and it is cancelled.”
That same year, while participating in the project “Nations, Tolerance, Fashion,”
she designed (with Ron Gilad and Uri Shaviv) How Many Are Three, and in a jewelry
design competition in Germany entitled “Thinking the Future” she prepared badges
for an imaginary convention—some of them with Xerox images of a hand or an ear,
and some with a written word (“Precious,” “Future,” “Silver,” or “Gold”)—that were
attached to the lapel by a three- dimensional head made of silver or gold; in the future,
she said, jewelry will be observation, word, thought.
The works in the series Anomalies look like fragments of something. They bring to
mind fossils (nature’s casts); their surfaces, created through the inclusion of anomaly
in their creation process, are not identified with the duplicates of mass production.
The works in the series Arrangements, like Bataille’s informe, confront the wish to
endow reality with form with mathematical clothing.4 In both series, the emphasis is
on an open, dynamic process.
Distance and Proximity
Distances and borders, physical and metaphoric, were the subject of the installation
Rachel: Spectator (created with Francis Nordemann) at the Office in Tel Aviv Gallery
(1995). The installation dealt with the breaking walls of privacy, with restricted space
and the range between eye and object while creating a private, intimate space of sorts
on the wall.
The one-person show Replacements, at Ra Gallery in Amsterdam (1996), was developed a year later at Periscope Gallery in Tel Aviv into an indexical installation of “Stern
Schocken’s dictionary.” A variety of works formerly presented elsewhere in different
contexts—territories, private road signs—were placed like fragments on top of six urban
fractions: maps of urban construction plans, 1:1250. The point of view, from above,
enabled the viewer to observe the items while physically moving around them.
Mobility and Immobility
Fear of stasis is a leitmotif in Stern Schocken’s work. Since the 1980s, she has designed
jewelry that is miniature sculpture in motion, its various axes enabling it to be worn
in several ways. Other works seem like events that take place on a twisting line along
both sides of the body, and yet others refer to urban space. In Xerox Works she created
a brooch jigsaw puzzle of sorts out of Xerox images of urban maps; in the series
Pools she made puddles, “inlaid water,” on the bottom of miniature silver pools; and
schematic baking molds turned in her hands into a swing pendant. In the installation
Hopscotch, she threw a stone on the gridded square and moved along it, all the while
keeping her balance. Many of the works—Pools, Landscapes, animal-shaped baking
molds—were made in pairs; the difference within each pair is infinitesimal, a nuance.
In How Many Is One, a conveyor belt moves the works; the spectator is led into an
observation in constant movement. The “one” is always a plurality, always in motion.
What is the “one” of which Stern Schocken inquires “how many”? Is it works, or
anything but jewelry? In the chance play of her works, the “one” is always “many”;
however, it is impossible to know whether it is through the disintegration of the
whole or through growth and reproduction. In her own words: “There is no ‘One’ and
there are no ‘Many’—it is always the tension between them.”
- H. Tessenow, “Tatouage et camouflage,” L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, March–April 2001, p. 85.
- Georges Perec, Espèces d’espaces (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1974), p. 123. English version: Species of Spaces and Other
Pieces (London: Penguin, 1997). - Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinematographe (Paris: Edition Gallimard, 1975). English version: Notes on the
Cinematograph (New York: Urizen Books, 1977). - Georges Bataille, “L’informe,” Documents 7, December 1929, p. 382.