Adel Abdessemed
09 Sep - 11 Oct 2014
ADEL ABDESSEMED
Mon Enfant
9 September - 11 October 2014
The title of this sculpture, My Child, is oddly sensational. While generating a loud clamor of resistance it also conveys the stillness of quivering, absolute affirmation. My Child. For how else could one regard this image? Through a minimalist gesture of adoption – My Child – Adel Abdessemed performs a maximalist act of re-signification. The gesture of utter, non-ironical adoption compels one to shift one’s gaze from the sculpture to the eponymous drawing. The sight is quite different from the striking title through which it has been adopted; it emits only the moving gentleness of a gesture of re-gazing, which transports it beyond the emblematic, iconic restraint which has already been applied to it. The drawing seems to re-inscribe the gaze in this so-very-familiar image, returning to the bounds of visibility the anonymity and horrifying loneliness of the moment of execution of the child from the Warsaw ghetto; a child who has remained anonymous, whose anonymity is now doubly evident, having been appropriated by Abdessemed, who, with a single Jesuit gesture, has conferred on him his own name. He is now Abdessemed’s child. And there is no one to take pity on this child.
A careful look at the drawing reveals that the child’s image corresponds to the figure of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. Like him, the child’s hands are extended forward. Abdessemed’s subtle modifications of the image – mainly the child’s posture and the erasure of the feet so that the line of his legs trails off, recalling Klee’s angel – increase the similarity between the child figure and that of the angel. This subtle comparison between the Angelus Novus and the child from the Warsaw ghetto is compounded by the sensational act of adopting him – the sensational act of his expropriation from his existence as a critical witness to the history of the Holocaust and Nazism. This expropriation points to art as a lying entity – My Child – as it borrows and invents for itself a body and a voice from spheres whose power is stronger and more present than art’s phantom presence. Burdened by its erasure from history, art adopts a presence whose signs are laden with the power of the Real. Abdessemed’s intervention in history through his act of naming wipes out this history, annuls it and its power to clear the space for another testimony; testimony that hasn’t got a leg to stand on, false testimony which also, at the same time, has a formal precedent. In this respect, Klee’s Angelus Novus functions for the child as a father figure whose form resonates in Abdessemed’s drawing. Therefore, while art rejects history as reality, the cycles of creation and giving birth to valid artistic imagery are re-embedded in the aesthetic realm. This is a radical manifestation of the contemporary postmodern artistic practices of appropriation and pastiche through quotation.
Abdessemed addresses a history filled with horror and pain, peeling it away from the artistic act in a way that is both ironically macabre and a demonstration of absolute, pure pathos. Walter Benjamin’s well-known interpretation of Angelus Novus lies behind the transformation of the child figure into the angel of history; into a pure, unsensational image. At the same time, it also charges the irony of the image’s new title, My Child, with deep pathos. The pile of wreckage from which Abdessemed has taken the child is removed from the sphere of historical interpretation and testimony, turning into another pile of wreckage – that of art itself. For according to Benjamin’s interpretation of Angelus Novus, art embodies a prophetic warning whose horrifying realization has not yet reached its conclusion. The moment of the angel’s reemergence in the image of my child, Abdessemed seems to say, endows the drawing with the validity of an absolute present tense.
The double movement created by the twofold resonance between the child from the Warsaw ghetto on the one hand and both Klee’s and Benjamin’s angel on the other is underlain by the evangelical text in which Jesus asks his followers to “receive ... such a child in my name.” In adopting the child, Abdessemed gives birth once again to art’s religious-messianic turn toward history. And so the convergence of nominal quotations (“my child”) and visual ones (Angelus Novus) entraps the drawing’s viewers away from their own indifference. The title My Child, in first-person direct speech, turns this child into the child of whoever is looking at the drawing.
The reproduction of the image in sculpture also addresses the history of art. Bringing to life all other victims, the wall and the ruins of the ghetto, it seems to evoke Rodin’s ultimate principle of sculpture: take away all the unnecessary elements and allow the sculpture to appear in the remaining material. The child’s manifestation in sculptural form therefore connects the matter at hand to yet another “name of the father” – Rodin. According to Lacan’s psychoanalytic principles, having a multiplicity of names of the father extracts the observed image from the bounds of history or from bearing testimony to the past and shift it into renewed visibility in the present. What one sees now is an artistic act – a sculpture or drawing – that places the figure at the heart of the present in which the testimony is being rewritten as a renewed claim, which is both ironic and dramatically filled with pathos. This new testimony is a history in the present tense, in which the viewer, turned father through calling the sculpture or drawing “my child,” becomes identified with the traces of the horror. The original photograph was taken by Nazi photographer Franz Konrad during the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. The re-writing or re-sculpting of this photograph brings to life the Nazi act of its production, thereby addressing those who are documenting the horrors that are taking place right now. This is your own child there, it implies, facing you with his arms raised in surrender. Such is art’s claim for recognition, defying the historical as an image of final testimony. Through the power of this removal from history, the present is evoked most powerfully as a time of destruction and murder.
Shva Salhoov
Translated by Einat Adi
Mon Enfant
9 September - 11 October 2014
The title of this sculpture, My Child, is oddly sensational. While generating a loud clamor of resistance it also conveys the stillness of quivering, absolute affirmation. My Child. For how else could one regard this image? Through a minimalist gesture of adoption – My Child – Adel Abdessemed performs a maximalist act of re-signification. The gesture of utter, non-ironical adoption compels one to shift one’s gaze from the sculpture to the eponymous drawing. The sight is quite different from the striking title through which it has been adopted; it emits only the moving gentleness of a gesture of re-gazing, which transports it beyond the emblematic, iconic restraint which has already been applied to it. The drawing seems to re-inscribe the gaze in this so-very-familiar image, returning to the bounds of visibility the anonymity and horrifying loneliness of the moment of execution of the child from the Warsaw ghetto; a child who has remained anonymous, whose anonymity is now doubly evident, having been appropriated by Abdessemed, who, with a single Jesuit gesture, has conferred on him his own name. He is now Abdessemed’s child. And there is no one to take pity on this child.
A careful look at the drawing reveals that the child’s image corresponds to the figure of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. Like him, the child’s hands are extended forward. Abdessemed’s subtle modifications of the image – mainly the child’s posture and the erasure of the feet so that the line of his legs trails off, recalling Klee’s angel – increase the similarity between the child figure and that of the angel. This subtle comparison between the Angelus Novus and the child from the Warsaw ghetto is compounded by the sensational act of adopting him – the sensational act of his expropriation from his existence as a critical witness to the history of the Holocaust and Nazism. This expropriation points to art as a lying entity – My Child – as it borrows and invents for itself a body and a voice from spheres whose power is stronger and more present than art’s phantom presence. Burdened by its erasure from history, art adopts a presence whose signs are laden with the power of the Real. Abdessemed’s intervention in history through his act of naming wipes out this history, annuls it and its power to clear the space for another testimony; testimony that hasn’t got a leg to stand on, false testimony which also, at the same time, has a formal precedent. In this respect, Klee’s Angelus Novus functions for the child as a father figure whose form resonates in Abdessemed’s drawing. Therefore, while art rejects history as reality, the cycles of creation and giving birth to valid artistic imagery are re-embedded in the aesthetic realm. This is a radical manifestation of the contemporary postmodern artistic practices of appropriation and pastiche through quotation.
Abdessemed addresses a history filled with horror and pain, peeling it away from the artistic act in a way that is both ironically macabre and a demonstration of absolute, pure pathos. Walter Benjamin’s well-known interpretation of Angelus Novus lies behind the transformation of the child figure into the angel of history; into a pure, unsensational image. At the same time, it also charges the irony of the image’s new title, My Child, with deep pathos. The pile of wreckage from which Abdessemed has taken the child is removed from the sphere of historical interpretation and testimony, turning into another pile of wreckage – that of art itself. For according to Benjamin’s interpretation of Angelus Novus, art embodies a prophetic warning whose horrifying realization has not yet reached its conclusion. The moment of the angel’s reemergence in the image of my child, Abdessemed seems to say, endows the drawing with the validity of an absolute present tense.
The double movement created by the twofold resonance between the child from the Warsaw ghetto on the one hand and both Klee’s and Benjamin’s angel on the other is underlain by the evangelical text in which Jesus asks his followers to “receive ... such a child in my name.” In adopting the child, Abdessemed gives birth once again to art’s religious-messianic turn toward history. And so the convergence of nominal quotations (“my child”) and visual ones (Angelus Novus) entraps the drawing’s viewers away from their own indifference. The title My Child, in first-person direct speech, turns this child into the child of whoever is looking at the drawing.
The reproduction of the image in sculpture also addresses the history of art. Bringing to life all other victims, the wall and the ruins of the ghetto, it seems to evoke Rodin’s ultimate principle of sculpture: take away all the unnecessary elements and allow the sculpture to appear in the remaining material. The child’s manifestation in sculptural form therefore connects the matter at hand to yet another “name of the father” – Rodin. According to Lacan’s psychoanalytic principles, having a multiplicity of names of the father extracts the observed image from the bounds of history or from bearing testimony to the past and shift it into renewed visibility in the present. What one sees now is an artistic act – a sculpture or drawing – that places the figure at the heart of the present in which the testimony is being rewritten as a renewed claim, which is both ironic and dramatically filled with pathos. This new testimony is a history in the present tense, in which the viewer, turned father through calling the sculpture or drawing “my child,” becomes identified with the traces of the horror. The original photograph was taken by Nazi photographer Franz Konrad during the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. The re-writing or re-sculpting of this photograph brings to life the Nazi act of its production, thereby addressing those who are documenting the horrors that are taking place right now. This is your own child there, it implies, facing you with his arms raised in surrender. Such is art’s claim for recognition, defying the historical as an image of final testimony. Through the power of this removal from history, the present is evoked most powerfully as a time of destruction and murder.
Shva Salhoov
Translated by Einat Adi