Gideon Ofrat
The Hebrew word manganon originates in Talmudic Hebrew. Its ancient Greek
root, mangona, denotes an engine of war, a siege engine. The parallel English term
“apparatus” is borrowed from Latin and derives from the verb apparare: to prepare, to
make ready for. The term’s etymology thus takes us to a complex domain extending
between the mechanical device, which is a technological operating system, and
a general act of “preparing for” something. In 2009, Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben published his book What Is an Apparatus?, in which he defined apparatus as
follows:
“I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity
to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures,
behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.”1
Agamben’s broad definition of “apparatus” relied explicitly on assertions made by
French philosopher Michel Foucault in a 1977 conversation in which he defined the
term “apparatus” (dispositif in French, from the root disposer: to order, arrange, set) as
a mechanism of social-ideological power:
“… a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions,
architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific
statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions […]. Such are the
elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can
be established between these elements. […] [The apparatus is] a sort of […] formation
which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to
an urgent need. […] [I]t is a matter of a certain manipulation of relations of forces.
[…] The apparatus is thus always inscribed in a play of power.”2
Deganit Stern Schocken has been fascinated with apparatuses from the very outset of
her jewelry-making career.
When she began creating “fibula” pieces in the 1980s, the Roman toga-fastening
brooch was only an excuse to design “apparatuses” made of silver; these combined
aesthetic refinement and mechanical sophistication through potential movement
of the piece’s components, which begin with the body (the garment) yet extend (via
silver threads, chains, and cords) into the immediate environment and into the world.
In some cases, she deconstructed the mechanisms and left the “jewel” as loosely
assorted elements (as she did in the series From Fragment to Structure, 1980); in other
instances, she assembled the apparatuses to form a contraption reminiscent of a
snare or an ancient weapon (in the series Function, 1980).
Stern Schocken began her artistic career as an architect (graduate of the
Department of Architecture and Industrial Design at the Bezalel Academy of Arts
and Design, Jerusalem). The tension between “body” and “city” seems to dwell in
the spatial depths of her work, establishing itself on the expanded—Foucaultesque/
Agambenian—principle of the apparatus, which is the “one” embedded in the
multiplicity informing Stern Schocken’s work (How Many is One). She, who has
oscillated in her extensive, profuse work between many different projects, subject
matters, ideas, and materials, seeks the “apparatus,” which sends latent extensions to
the ethical space of the city as well as the place. In 1980, she had already named her
series of apparatus-based jewelry The Body as City (here, silver threads, winding and
linking the brooches, functioned as elastic “urban roads”).
In the 1990s, Stern Schocken explained:
“I regard my jewelry pieces as miniature architecture of the body. As an
architecture graduate, I observe things from an aerial perspective and am
enchanted by the powerful ‘urban landscape’ spawned by the link between the
object of jewelry making and its wearer.”
Criticism and irony often permeate Stern Schocken’s works: in the series tags for
some futuristic conference, she designed metal tags bearing words and images
ostensibly promising social order.
In the 1999 series Nations, Tolerance, Fashion (in participation with Ron Gilad
and Uri Shaviv), the criticism of social “ordering” assumed the form of architect’s
measuring meters, which protruded from stainless-steel boxes like authoritarian
columns.
The tension between “body” and “city,” between the individual and society,
corresponds with the syntactic tension in Stern Schocken’s oeuvre between
Minimalism (marked by line and tension) and Pop; on the level of Pop, she uses
social-political ready-mades, as in the 2007 series Qalandia Checkpoint, which consisted
of run-over, corroded soft drink cans, or the 2009 series Figure of Speech, in which she
introduced plastic tags (combined with Chinese images) to teach reading in Arabic,
or the 2012 series In the Air, in which she grafted images of safety instructions for
airplane passengers on perforated silver sheets. Soldiers at a checkpoint, a teacher in
a classroom, and a flight attendant in an airplane are all representatives of “power.” In
2013, she incorporated “jewels” in the pages of a daily newspaper.
Her works from that period were based on images laser cut in metal, signifying
a helicopter, a soldier, a bomb, a missile, a grenade, a tank, etc. In this aspect of her
work, Stern Schocken explicitly reaffirms her critical interest in power apparatuses,
as if she were revisiting the mangona of the belligerent war machines.
The metaphoric quality is present in Stern Schocken’s work to a greater or lesser
extent. It is thus no wonder that she named a 1997 sculpture of a truncated pyramid
(with a lever next to it) Humanism 2020? (authoritative monumentality combined
with decapitation …).
Accordingly, in the 2007 series Hopscotch, images of the common children’s game
allude to the ethical dilemma regarding obedience to rules and, mainly, not crossing
lines …
A 2011 series, Holy, was made entirely of Stars-of-David, which were revealed to be
a commercial billboard, or bloodstained, or blackened, or yellowed (as a yellow patch),
and so forth.
Implied feminist criticism may be identified in a 2015 series in which reproductions of art historical paintings depicting women were inlaid in a perforated metal
plate (which, in itself, signifies disobedience by virtue of the circumferential tension
between the straight-lined cutting and the circle shape).
The above indicates that, inasmuch as Stern Schocken is fascinated by the
apparatus as a system of power, she equally distorts, deconstructs, and negates it.
Hence, her jewelry-making syntax is also underlain by critical reflexivity. Referring
to the affinities between works she exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2003
and Michel Foucault’s philosophy, Uriel Meron wrote:
“By reifying and exposing the hidden history of each jewelry-idea represented by
a particular mode, Stern Schocken’s project […] enacts a Foucaultian ‘archeology’
[of knowledge] 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.”3
In her 2003 solo exhibition at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, How Many Is One, a large
mechanical conveyor belt apparatus rotated elliptically in the museum space,
carrying jewels.
These pieces were created using industrial ready-made jewel molds into which
she cast wax until it overflowed and erupted to produce mutations of unexpected
shapes. In her engagement with the void of the mold’s negative, the unexpected
overpowered the expected in the mechanism’s function. Intervening in the
apparatus-related process and deviating from it, the individual-idiosyncratic
prevailed over the mass-produced and the technological. Moreover, while it is the
nature of the apparatus to enforce (in the single operative system) the power of the
one over multiplicity, Stern Schocken’s works breach the one into multiplicity.
Her 2009 work Ants consisted of countless ants, cast using a brooch mold, which
spread out like a swarm on the walls of Petach Tikva Museum of Art.
The miniature expands into environmental presence. Is this succinct description
not indicative of the power of the individual to assert his/her presence in the general
social sphere? Such was Stern Schocken’s multi-miniature wall installation from 1996,
Rachel, Looks, which employed minimalistic syntax (partly serial, partly grid-based,
and inclined toward white in its dual use of metal objects and plaster),
or another installation from the same year, Pose on Pose, in which cymbals were
attached to a large photograph of female “sculptures” (performance) in the city
square, from which white strings were stretched, taking over the hall like cobwebs.
In Stern Schocken’s work, intimate/physical apparatus-based jewels (such as
the 2012 brooch series In the Air, in which a silver-thread spiral functions as an
“apparatus” on which a precious stone is elevated, challenging its materiality and
weight) are also models for apparatuses of social powers and release from them. The
aesthetic and the ethical, the private and the public, as well as the aforementioned
body and city, conduct a dialogue. Thus, in 1996, the artist installed her works as
fragments on 1:1250 urban master plans; in another series, Re-place-ments, she created
a jigsaw puzzle of brooches from Xeroxed photographs of city maps.
Even the “pool” structures (silver receptacles containing water as a metaphor for
precious stones) from 1994 are public buildings of sorts, although they were meant to
be handheld.
Hence also Meira Yagid-Haimovici’s comments on the series Arrangements:
“These works […] create a spatial order from particles—like an architecture of
molecules. The elements are joined to each other in various degrees of density. […]
It is an open-ended system that enables the construction of a structure that seems
like living, breathing urban tissue.”4
Deganit Stern Schocken’s jewelry making combines and assembles only to then take
apart; it introduces tension only to release; it forces itself into configurations, only to
ensure freedom.
- Giorgio Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?,” in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik
and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009), p. 14. - Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh: A Conversation with A. Grosrichard, G. Wajeman, J.-A.
Miller, G. Le Gaufey, D. Celas, G. Miller, C. Millot, J. Livi, and J. Miller,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews &
Other Writings by Michel Foucault, 1972–1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp.
194–196. - Uriel Meron, “Findings: About the Project How Many is One exhibited at Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2003,” in
In The Air, exh. cat., (Montclair: Gallery Loupe for Contemporary Art Jewelry, 2013). - Meira Yagid-Haimovici, “How Many is One,” in How Many is One, exh. cat. (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art,
2003).