Helen Britton
Event Site
Events are not static. Events embrace place and action. Events are networks of
materials and communication. They have a locus, in the analogue world, a site.
Writing about the whole oeuvre of Deganit Stern Schocken’s practice, 40 years of
installations, sculptures, texts, and jewelry is like taking a walk in a big interesting
city. I have visited this place once or twice before, seen the highlights, but now I
am to live there for a few months and record my experience. This work is an urban
construction, concept based, and punctuated by all these events: Function as
Expression, Thinking the Future, Eye of Infinity, Figure of Speech, Dead Sea, Smashed Cans,
Rachel: Spectator, Animals. That’s just a small selection.
I’m walking in this city of events, finding their locations, their histories,
searching out their rationale. My dear old friend de Certeau accompanies and reminds
me: “It is true that operations of walking can be traced on city maps in such a way as
to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories
(going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to
the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of
passing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or ‘window shopping,’ that is, the
activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible
line on the map. … Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation
that made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace
left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the
geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing
so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.”1
And there we have it. This is work where action is involved, exploration,
discovery, wearing. Action and interaction drive the experience. The body becomes
a cityscape, marked out and punctuated by jewelry events that are portals into ideas.
Engineered elements from the very beginning become communication tools, speaking
to me from the site of the wearer. Body is City. Function is Expression.
Scanning the surface, I find a deliberateness in the points and incisions, like
on a building site. All the preconditions of considered construction. I look for the
sprayed markings—there are none—maybe that is work not yet made, work to come.
A delivery of spray cans has been delayed. But there is a box of unfamiliar tools,
elements made with purpose strewn around this city-body. They have a function—
this is clear—but when I look at these constructions, what engages my curiosity is
a question. What are they for? How can I fit that use into what I know? This is often
not possible, for I am provided with fragments; things are missing. I try and break
the code. Things lie around purposefully, but the function is ambiguous. I return
again and again, until I realize that I am the solution; I am the body that completes
the whole. I complete the work by putting it on. It is after all often jewelry. And it is
that action, that event where the work makes the most sense. De Certeau had tried to
explain, it is the activity, the act that is not on the map! Chains, bars, eyelets, cards,
tins, links, they ask me to experiment with them—this long rod on the chain could
pass through this hole in the plate, and then I could use the piece in this way or start
again and build something else. Tools, signs, portals for my city-body of events.
I couldn’t visit Rachel: Spectator.
2 Not because of the virus, but because the event
was before my time. But I have the data: images, words. I discover a delicate site,
archaeology in process, intimacy, people interpreting what has happened. I see tools
were provided at the time to assist in finding the necessary information. Like entering
something sacred, fragile and once discovered vulnerable, a complete experience. Art
functions not through the eyes alone but through the complete activity of experience,
the site/event situation. There are memories contained in fragments. I ask whose
stories? Whose things? What do they mean? Why were they left behind? What can we
learn from them?
I can also understand “function as expression”3 in these construction sites,
although that phrase came from another event—the workings exposed beneath the
smooth surface—the rafters, braces, and tools; everything that holds up the facade is
laid bare, and it is, while sometimes gestural, functional and necessary. I experience
the paradox in the data of Rachel: Spectator. The intimacy laid bare, the sacred site
open for analysis, and the parallels between these other jewelry works are apparent
and confirmed by Deganit’s own words: “Jewel-making … contains layers of cultural
memory, time, and distance that can bring us immediately closer not only to the
private, the physical, the most personal experience, but also to the social space, the
community, and the hidden and overt places in the centre of human existence and
experience.”4
There is a tight connection between archaeology and jewelry as evidence of
cultural history.
Architecture, Engineering, and the Body
Without a doubt, this work shows traces of earlier studies in architecture, reinforced
by a genealogical architectural map5 of connections spanning time, space, history
with all the social and political issues that such a map necessarily describes, although
the difference between maps and events is now clear.
I encounter frames. I like frames, what they do. That selective device, now
ubiquitous as we go about photographing every blade of grass, every leaf (perhaps
because of an anxiety that they will soon no longer be there?). Frames are the basic
condition of all architecture, the device to separate inside and outside, what we trap,
collect, contain, present, and protect. They create territory.
To better understand this device, I turned to Elizabeth Gross who interprets
the emergence of the frame as “the condition of all the arts and is the particular
contribution of architecture to the taming of the virtual, the territorialization of
the uncontrollable forces of the earth. … With no frame or boundary there can be no
territory, and without territory there may be objects or things but not qualities that
can become expressive, that can intensify and transform living bodies.”6
These works are frames for fastening my own experience, filtered though with
manipulative triggers of the artist’s design. The use of frames connects to architectural
thinking. They hang from chains, are pinned to the torso, or slip around fingers. Gross
elaborates: “The frame separates. It cuts into a milieu or space. This cutting links it
to the constitution of the plane of composition, to the provisional ordering of chaos
through the laying down of a grid or order that entraps chaotic shards. … This cutting
of the space of the earth through the fabrication of the frame is the very gesture that
composes both house and territory, inside and outside, interior and landscape at once
and as the points of maximum variation, the two sides, of the space of the earth.”7
My journey through the cityscape of this work brings me to event sites under
construction, buildings and their fragments with points of entry, spaces, questions,
assemblage measurements, directions. The efforts of an engineer. Deganit
appears again and describes the situation: “Brooches by themselves are seen as
isolated buildings defined in terms of their dimensions and their relationship to
their surroundings. Single units, placed on continuous lines, create a dynamic of
possibilities. Like streets they form a network—the city! Jewellery is spread on the
body, its earth—‘terra firma’ from which these jewel-events are extrapolated.”8
Materials
In architecture, no material is perhaps more pervasive than air. We move from the
frame to the void, the spaces it creates, and their use. I encounter space at these event
sites as it traces around the words and around the body. What is not there creates
movement and functionality. And then there is everything else, petrified wood,
plastic signs, trapped instructions, threads, text, pearls, stones, hanging suspended
or up in the air! Suddenly, too, the surprise of decoration! Porcelain that had a
utilitarian function. The rational is not always accessible and so makes us engage
with the question of functionality because of this opacity—not giving up comforting
answers to what it is for and how it works.
There are material transformations, not only wood to stone but object to context.
I think of arte povera in the use of materials, but also because the body and
behavior become the art, the everyday becomes meaningful, traces of nature and
industry resonate in the jewelry techniques.
Materials and their histories, where things come from and are then situated,
create meaning. Soda cans from the Kalandia checkpoint set with diamonds and
inscriptions build layers. Using a mass-produced discarded product as the main actor
brings me to Walter Benjamin’s description in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction: “One thing stands out: the here and now of the work of art—its unique
existence in the place where it is at this moment. … That includes not only the
changes that it has undergone in its physical structure over the course of time; it
also includes the fluctuating conditions of ownership through which it has passed.”9
When we think of these words in relation to the production of generic objects used
in some of Deganit’s works, paralleled with the specificity of the location of their
collection and then the artist’s intervention, the addition of materials ascribed with
another system of values and subsequent fantasies about them, i.e. the discarded
drink can from a political frontline set with gold and diamonds, the artist’s intention
becomes clear. As with everything we touch that has been manufactured or that we
buy or collect, we must ask ourselves at what cost, at whose misery or pleasure. To
use the old Donna Haraway idiom, “With whose blood were my eyes crafted?,” Donna
reminds us, “Vision is always a question of the power to see—and perhaps of the
violence implicit in our visualizing practices.”10
Language and Symbols
On my walks, words and signs pervasive to the cityscape are encountered at the
event sites. Pictograms try and teach me things, arcane symbols appear—my beloved
infinity. How am I expected to interpret them? Recognizable signs from everyday life
lure me with a sense of recognition, but these other acerbic marks lead to a state of
confusion, like navigating a new foreign city. Clearly there is a subversion of how the
diagram should be originally understood. This is the framework for the artist’s desire
to give an alternative story with all these figures and words. De Certeau appears again
with his own questions and interpretations: “What is it then that they spell out?
Disposed in constellations that hierarchize and semantically order the surface of the
city, operating chronological arrangements and historical justifications, these words
… slowly lose, like worn coins, the value engraved on them, but their ability to signify
outlives its first definition. … These names make themselves available to the diverse
meanings given to them by passers-by; they detach themselves from the places they
were supposed to define and serve as imaginary meeting-points on itineraries which,
as metaphors, they determine for reasons that are foreign to their original value but
may be recognized or not by passers-by.”11
Words define these events, works, as communication platforms—portals into
a series of questions and experiments that expose a way of navigating the world
by latching onto what we know and moving out from there. But when there are
only fragments to guide us? We must fill in the space left with our own culturally
defined imagination. Deganit reminds us what that can mean: “In our endeavour to
comprehend a thing, one of the things we do is name it. It seems as if naming a thing
is like creating it. … Once we name something we expect it to be one specific thing
and not any other.”12
Fragments
As my walk comes to an end, I remark that often my paths of understanding are
blocked by this unfamiliar combination of clear signs, strange materials, engineering,
and archaic symbols that I encounter along the way. There is stuff here I know, but I
am often left with a sense of uncertainty. It slowly dawns upon me, having walked all
night, that light creates silhouettes of all the structures, that the space is there for me
to fill in with my own story to complete the work. I complete it with my presence and
more importantly with my interpretation. In the case of the jewelry works, with my
body. But in fact that is true of all jewelry. The fragmentary nature of Deganit’s work
leaves space for mystery and questions, space for me to reside.
“Re-place-ments are an attempt to join different places; to create a territory: to
integrate and interrogate a city. Jewellery is a replacement, an attempt to organize
fragments so as to emphasize the process which will keep the fragmentary as the
principle of organization. The pressure is to transform the fragment, the partial,
the necessarily incomplete into a whole that will give expression to its fragmentary
nature.”13
The fragments from diverse locations create a new story, a new telling of
history, non-linear, intersectional. Stuff is laid out like a mapped archaeological site,
industrial, though, and paradoxically contemporary. These event sites on body-cities
are crossing points. The relevance of the geographical and historical position of things
taken and made illuminate my path, and yours. So now over to you. Enjoy your walk.
- Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984),
p. 97. - Deganit Stern Schocken and Francis Nordemann, Rachel Sukman’s Office, Tel Aviv, 1994.
- Deganit Stern Schocken, “Function as Expression,” 1980.
- Deganit Stern Schocken, “Beaten Gold / Industry.”
- Deganit studied design and architecture at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. One of her first papers was on
Mendelsohn. Her great uncle Robert Stern was a well- known architect in Köln. - Elizabeth Gross, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2008), p. 11. - Ibid., p. 13.
- Deganit Stern Schocken, “Urban Jewellery: The Body as City,” May 16, 2000.
- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) (London: Penguin Books, 2008),
p. 5. - Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books,
1991), p. 192. - De Certeau 1984 (see note 1), p. 104.
- Deganit Stern Schocken, “Tracing the Beaten Gold, or What’s in a Name?”
- Deganit Stern Schocken, “Re-Place-Ments.”