Pareidolia
Roy Brand
Did you know that we can see a face in a tree trunk? Did you know that on dark nights we can see animal shapes in the constellations of stars? Do these things exist? And when we hallucinate or daydream, once again we see faces, animals, and apparitions of the dead. In days gone by, when consciousness moved freely on the spectrum between wakefulness and dreaming and hallucination, the realm of the visible also contained imaginary sights whose significance was unquestioned. But even today, there is always something that is visible, but not clearly perceived – becoming, the moment of birth or death, life itself. The Greeks had a name for it: pareidolia – “beyond form” or “beside the form” – the human tendency to see a shape, or read a meaning, in amorphous phenomena.
The term is from the Greek παραειδωλια – παρά (pará) meaning “beyond” or “beside,” and εἴδωλον (eídōlon), meaning “image, form, shape.” Like paranoia (seeing intent in everything), pareidolia is a state of seeing a form of some kind in everything, and is part of our miraculous abilities as human beings to see things in things. This cave wall, with this patch on it, and the special shape of its curvature, together produce a living image. I see it, and if I were only to point it out to you – perhaps with the help of a small line or a dot here – it would be here for you too, and for anyone who comes after us. The creative work extends from the world and how it appears to us in our mind’s eye to one’s consciousness, body, hand, or to language. Thus, things are not merely matter – rock, light, or earth – but rather movement and dialogue between us and the world. Thus, this painting is not merely lines and patches of color, but a beauty full of meaning that is difficult to grasp outside the experience itself. Similarly, these marks that you now read, here on the page, are carriers of thoughts and feelings that pass from one person to another, in a very intimate way.
In the past, pareidolia was perceived as a sign of psychosis, but today it is commonly seen as a normal and universal human phenomenon. It is particularly evident in how children think, or in the worldview of primitive tribes, who attribute a will and consciousness to everything. Gods, humans, animals, the dead, plants, the weather, and often inanimate objects, are all seen as having an appetite or will, a viewpoint, and cognitive abilities – all have a soul. But the pareidolia is not about a childish or animistic worldview; it is a fundamental disposition of the human imagination. Even before we know something, we begin to see things: dots form an image, situations look like patterns, and we can take them apart and reassemble them until we have a theory (from the Greek ‘theorien’ – to look at, or by extrapolation, a way of seeing, a worldview). The world comes into view and becomes comprehensible – it is one of the characteristics of this world that it can become visible and comprehensible. So the visual image is but an extension, a capturing of the ways in which the world opens up to human experience. How wonderful it is that the world lends itself to us in this way? And perhaps that is precisely the basic, native, or classic experience of all things beautiful – the experience of being at home in the world.
Anyone who tries their hand at drawing knows that the closer you get to things, the more their contours fall apart and become fluid. There is really no clear boundary line between one thing and another; rather, there is an aura, light and shadow, and a movement of metamorphosis and metabolism in everything. It is a miraculous experience wherein things seem to dissolve of their own accord at the same time that they are captured or rather marked by art. Art shows them as distinct and as part of the world. The works in this exhibition follow this double movement– the shifting nature of the world, its appearance as form and meaning, and dissolution back into material, surface, and color. In other words, the works simultaneously conjure up an image and dissolve it. In so doing, they reveal the process that requires our imagination to work: the underlying work that brings things together and creates a world. This is an ongoing effort that we get accustomed to. But in particular moments of shifting consciousness – when we wake up, for example, or open our eyes after a long meditation – we notice the coming together of the world once again. If we fail to imagine, facing the work of art, the image breaks down and the painting and drawing once again revert to mere patches of color, the sculpture exposes its rough and meaningless material skin, and the canvases look like sheets of cloth and empty shells, rather than ghosts. Pareidolia – the emergence of a form – is something that goes both ways. In this space between the visible (the world as it appears) and the visual (the image), there is a fertile field of occurrence that is invisible to us. We often do not see how the world is made visible, or how we see it as things, forms, and states. It comes to us naturally, yet is unnatural. It is a mark of human consciousness that can be traced back to prehistoric cave drawings (throughout the Mediterranean) through Plato’s famous allegory of the cave.
The caves have a record of the longest human history – evidence of life, spiritual life, imagination, and human creation, dating back over 30,000 years. What they saw, and felt, and thought, is so remote from us – but the art preserved in the dark speaks to us immediately. I understand them and feel them. I have no idea if they spoke, or what they believed, but I know I am like them, that we are one species. They, too, saw shapes in things, and animals potentially sketched on the walls of the cave as the light of the fire flickered and animated the images. All it took was for them to touch what they saw and fix it with a judicious line, etching, a mark or a bit of paint. And so generations of human beings realized that they see the same things; that they share the same dream or vision. That they live in a world that is real, made of matter and energy, just as they live in a virtual world of imaginary forms and meaning. And that they could move between these two worlds, the material and the spiritual, and feel that they are both – both body and mind -- even though an abyss separates the two. Pareidolia marks the human ability to be a creature of both worlds. It is a characteristic of human existence that it is both real and virtual – a capacity that the contemporary economy of images has intensified, exploited, and heightened, to the point where we have lost it. Today, it is technology that does the imagining for us by seeing forms in things, emotions in a face, or financial potential in how we wield a keyboard and mouse, or gestures and motions on social media.
But in art – and perhaps in philosophy, as well – there is still sensitivity, openness, and attentiveness to the ebb and flow of life. Artists preserve that childish, primitive way of looking at things and how they are formed. In particular, they notice the intermediate states that no longer exist, or not yet. Possibilities that have not yet been realized actually exist, and there is life even in those that have faded away. The world once contained many such shadowy creatures: ghosts, apparitions of the dead, phantoms, dreams, hallucinations, and daydreams. We are fixed on either/or – either awake or asleep, existing or not – but what nonsense is this? The Greeks called all shadow creatures eidola, a term denoting movement and change in a world eternally coming into being. Pareidolia literally means a world that is all eidola – eidola in everything – in contrast to eikon (icon, likeness) which belongs to a binary world of original and imitation. Thus, the eikon/icon is quickly rendered a fake. But in the ancient world there was no single concept for a mimetic visual image, but rather, a multiplicity of such – eidolon – a spectrum of visual existence. In particular, there were no images that “look like something else,” imitations in the Platonic sense; rather, there was something that is visible but not perceived – like life itself, like consciousness – not the things in themselves, but the manner in which they appear.
It is in this realm that art is born. And still today, art harbors the human longing for transitions, for playfulness, for a spectrum of states of consciousness and emergence – but it may also shackle it. Within these boundaries of the frame, here in this painting in front of you, you can see a ghost. Here is spirit trapped in matter. Here, in this sculpture, you can see life arrested, fixed, dead. Here you are: look at them; they are yours; you control it. And here is the phenomenon that used to be a living entity, whose entire essence was becoming, namely life with no form or location. Here this thing is captured and concluded. Art always veers close, too close, to its dissolution.
Translated by Einat Adi
Pareidolia
Roy Brand
Did you know that we can see a face in a tree trunk? Did you know that on dark nights we can see animal shapes in the constellations of stars? Do these things exist? And when we hallucinate or daydream, once again we see faces, animals, and apparitions of the dead. In days gone by, when consciousness moved freely on the spectrum between wakefulness and dreaming and hallucination, the realm of the visible also contained imaginary sights whose significance was unquestioned. But even today, there is always something that is visible, but not clearly perceived – becoming, the moment of birth or death, life itself. The Greeks had a name for it: pareidolia – “beyond form” or “beside the form” – the human tendency to see a shape, or read a meaning, in amorphous phenomena.
The term is from the Greek παραειδωλια – παρά (pará) meaning “beyond” or “beside,” and εἴδωλον (eídōlon), meaning “image, form, shape.” Like paranoia (seeing intent in everything), pareidolia is a state of seeing a form of some kind in everything, and is part of our miraculous abilities as human beings to see things in things. This cave wall, with this patch on it, and the special shape of its curvature, together produce a living image. I see it, and if I were only to point it out to you – perhaps with the help of a small line or a dot here – it would be here for you too, and for anyone who comes after us. The creative work extends from the world and how it appears to us in our mind’s eye to one’s consciousness, body, hand, or to language. Thus, things are not merely matter – rock, light, or earth – but rather movement and dialogue between us and the world. Thus, this painting is not merely lines and patches of color, but a beauty full of meaning that is difficult to grasp outside the experience itself. Similarly, these marks that you now read, here on the page, are carriers of thoughts and feelings that pass from one person to another, in a very intimate way.
In the past, pareidolia was perceived as a sign of psychosis, but today it is commonly seen as a normal and universal human phenomenon. It is particularly evident in how children think, or in the worldview of primitive tribes, who attribute a will and consciousness to everything. Gods, humans, animals, the dead, plants, the weather, and often inanimate objects, are all seen as having an appetite or will, a viewpoint, and cognitive abilities – all have a soul. But the pareidolia is not about a childish or animistic worldview; it is a fundamental disposition of the human imagination. Even before we know something, we begin to see things: dots form an image, situations look like patterns, and we can take them apart and reassemble them until we have a theory (from the Greek ‘theorien’ – to look at, or by extrapolation, a way of seeing, a worldview). The world comes into view and becomes comprehensible – it is one of the characteristics of this world that it can become visible and comprehensible. So the visual image is but an extension, a capturing of the ways in which the world opens up to human experience. How wonderful it is that the world lends itself to us in this way? And perhaps that is precisely the basic, native, or classic experience of all things beautiful – the experience of being at home in the world.
Anyone who tries their hand at drawing knows that the closer you get to things, the more their contours fall apart and become fluid. There is really no clear boundary line between one thing and another; rather, there is an aura, light and shadow, and a movement of metamorphosis and metabolism in everything. It is a miraculous experience wherein things seem to dissolve of their own accord at the same time that they are captured or rather marked by art. Art shows them as distinct and as part of the world. The works in this exhibition follow this double movement– the shifting nature of the world, its appearance as form and meaning, and dissolution back into material, surface, and color. In other words, the works simultaneously conjure up an image and dissolve it. In so doing, they reveal the process that requires our imagination to work: the underlying work that brings things together and creates a world. This is an ongoing effort that we get accustomed to. But in particular moments of shifting consciousness – when we wake up, for example, or open our eyes after a long meditation – we notice the coming together of the world once again. If we fail to imagine, facing the work of art, the image breaks down and the painting and drawing once again revert to mere patches of color, the sculpture exposes its rough and meaningless material skin, and the canvases look like sheets of cloth and empty shells, rather than ghosts. Pareidolia – the emergence of a form – is something that goes both ways. In this space between the visible (the world as it appears) and the visual (the image), there is a fertile field of occurrence that is invisible to us. We often do not see how the world is made visible, or how we see it as things, forms, and states. It comes to us naturally, yet is unnatural. It is a mark of human consciousness that can be traced back to prehistoric cave drawings (throughout the Mediterranean) through Plato’s famous allegory of the cave.
The caves have a record of the longest human history – evidence of life, spiritual life, imagination, and human creation, dating back over 30,000 years. What they saw, and felt, and thought, is so remote from us – but the art preserved in the dark speaks to us immediately. I understand them and feel them. I have no idea if they spoke, or what they believed, but I know I am like them, that we are one species. They, too, saw shapes in things, and animals potentially sketched on the walls of the cave as the light of the fire flickered and animated the images. All it took was for them to touch what they saw and fix it with a judicious line, etching, a mark or a bit of paint. And so generations of human beings realized that they see the same things; that they share the same dream or vision. That they live in a world that is real, made of matter and energy, just as they live in a virtual world of imaginary forms and meaning. And that they could move between these two worlds, the material and the spiritual, and feel that they are both – both body and mind -- even though an abyss separates the two. Pareidolia marks the human ability to be a creature of both worlds. It is a characteristic of human existence that it is both real and virtual – a capacity that the contemporary economy of images has intensified, exploited, and heightened, to the point where we have lost it. Today, it is technology that does the imagining for us by seeing forms in things, emotions in a face, or financial potential in how we wield a keyboard and mouse, or gestures and motions on social media.
But in art – and perhaps in philosophy, as well – there is still sensitivity, openness, and attentiveness to the ebb and flow of life. Artists preserve that childish, primitive way of looking at things and how they are formed. In particular, they notice the intermediate states that no longer exist, or not yet. Possibilities that have not yet been realized actually exist, and there is life even in those that have faded away. The world once contained many such shadowy creatures: ghosts, apparitions of the dead, phantoms, dreams, hallucinations, and daydreams. We are fixed on either/or – either awake or asleep, existing or not – but what nonsense is this? The Greeks called all shadow creatures eidola, a term denoting movement and change in a world eternally coming into being. Pareidolia literally means a world that is all eidola – eidola in everything – in contrast to eikon (icon, likeness) which belongs to a binary world of original and imitation. Thus, the eikon/icon is quickly rendered a fake. But in the ancient world there was no single concept for a mimetic visual image, but rather, a multiplicity of such – eidolon – a spectrum of visual existence. In particular, there were no images that “look like something else,” imitations in the Platonic sense; rather, there was something that is visible but not perceived – like life itself, like consciousness – not the things in themselves, but the manner in which they appear.
It is in this realm that art is born. And still today, art harbors the human longing for transitions, for playfulness, for a spectrum of states of consciousness and emergence – but it may also shackle it. Within these boundaries of the frame, here in this painting in front of you, you can see a ghost. Here is spirit trapped in matter. Here, in this sculpture, you can see life arrested, fixed, dead. Here you are: look at them; they are yours; you control it. And here is the phenomenon that used to be a living entity, whose entire essence was becoming, namely life with no form or location. Here this thing is captured and concluded. Art always veers close, too close, to its dissolution.
Translated by Einat Adi
Roy Brand is a philosopher and curator working at the intersection of contemporary philosophy and art. He is a senior lecturer in the Master’s programs of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and Tel Aviv University. He founded and directed Yaffo 23, a center for contemporary art, and he is editor and curator of numerous art exhibits, among them, The Urburb: Patterns of Contemporary Living (Israeli Pavilion of The Venice Biennial, 2014) and Bare Life (Museum on the Seam, 2007). His book LoveKnowledge: The Life of Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida was published in 2013 by Columbia University Press. His book Art and the Form of Life was published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan. He is the founder and director of Parterre Projects for Art and Philosophy in Tel Aviv.
ד"ר רועי ברנד הוא פילוסוף ואוצר. הוא מרצה בכיר לפילוסופיה בתכניות לתואר שני של בצלאל ושל אוניברסיטת תל אביב. הוא הקים וניהל את יפו 23, מרכז לאמנות עכשווית בירושלים ואצר תערוכות רבות, ביניהן- The Urburb- שייצגה את ישראל בביאנלה הבינלאומית לארכיטקטורה בוונציה ב-2014. ספרו ״לאהוב לדעת—על חיי הפילוסופיה מסוקרטס ועד דרידה", יצא בהוצאת אוניברסיטת קולומביה, ניו-יורק בשנת 2013, ובעברית בהוצאת רסלינג בשנת 2016. ספרו החדש ״אמנות וצורת החיים״ יצא ב-2021 בהוצאת פאלגרב מקמילן. מנהל את חלל הפרויקטים פרטר לאמנות ופילוסופיה בתל אביב.
Roy Brand is a philosopher and curator working at the intersection of contemporary philosophy and art. He is a senior lecturer in the Master’s programs of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and Tel Aviv University. He founded and directed Yaffo 23, a center for contemporary art, and he is editor and curator of numerous art exhibits, among them, The Urburb: Patterns of Contemporary Living (Israeli Pavilion of The Venice Biennial, 2014) and Bare Life (Museum on the Seam, 2007). His book LoveKnowledge: The Life of Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida was published in 2013 by Columbia University Press. His book Art and the Form of Life was published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan. He is the founder and director of Parterre Projects for Art and Philosophy in Tel Aviv.
ד"ר רועי ברנד הוא פילוסוף ואוצר. הוא מרצה בכיר לפילוסופיה בתכניות לתואר שני של בצלאל ושל אוניברסיטת תל אביב. הוא הקים וניהל את יפו 23, מרכז לאמנות עכשווית בירושלים ואצר תערוכות רבות, ביניהן- The Urburb- שייצגה את ישראל בביאנלה הבינלאומית לארכיטקטורה בוונציה ב-2014. ספרו ״לאהוב לדעת—על חיי הפילוסופיה מסוקרטס ועד דרידה", יצא בהוצאת אוניברסיטת קולומביה, ניו-יורק בשנת 2013, ובעברית בהוצאת רסלינג בשנת 2016. ספרו החדש ״אמנות וצורת החיים״ יצא ב-2021 בהוצאת פאלגרב מקמילן. מנהל את חלל הפרויקטים פרטר לאמנות ופילוסופיה בתל אביב.
Roy Brand is a philosopher and curator working at the intersection of contemporary philosophy and art. He is a senior lecturer in the Master’s programs of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and Tel Aviv University. He founded and directed Yaffo 23, a center for contemporary art, and he is editor and curator of numerous art exhibits, among them, The Urburb: Patterns of Contemporary Living (Israeli Pavilion of The Venice Biennial, 2014) and Bare Life (Museum on the Seam, 2007). His book LoveKnowledge: The Life of Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida was published in 2013 by Columbia University Press. His book Art and the Form of Life was published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan. He is the founder and director of Parterre Projects for Art and Philosophy in Tel Aviv.
ד"ר רועי ברנד הוא פילוסוף ואוצר. הוא מרצה בכיר לפילוסופיה בתכניות לתואר שני של בצלאל ושל אוניברסיטת תל אביב. הוא הקים וניהל את יפו 23, מרכז לאמנות עכשווית בירושלים ואצר תערוכות רבות, ביניהן- The Urburb- שייצגה את ישראל בביאנלה הבינלאומית לארכיטקטורה בוונציה ב-2014. ספרו ״לאהוב לדעת—על חיי הפילוסופיה מסוקרטס ועד דרידה", יצא בהוצאת אוניברסיטת קולומביה, ניו-יורק בשנת 2013, ובעברית בהוצאת רסלינג בשנת 2016. ספרו החדש ״אמנות וצורת החיים״ יצא ב-2021 בהוצאת פאלגרב מקמילן. מנהל את חלל הפרויקטים פרטר לאמנות ופילוסופיה בתל אביב.
Roy Brand is a philosopher and curator working at the intersection of contemporary philosophy and art. He is a senior lecturer in the Master’s programs of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and Tel Aviv University. He founded and directed Yaffo 23, a center for contemporary art, and he is editor and curator of numerous art exhibits, among them, The Urburb: Patterns of Contemporary Living (Israeli Pavilion of The Venice Biennial, 2014) and Bare Life (Museum on the Seam, 2007). His book LoveKnowledge: The Life of Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida was published in 2013 by Columbia University Press. His book Art and the Form of Life was published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan. He is the founder and director of Parterre Projects for Art and Philosophy in Tel Aviv.
ד"ר רועי ברנד הוא פילוסוף ואוצר. הוא מרצה בכיר לפילוסופיה בתכניות לתואר שני של בצלאל ושל אוניברסיטת תל אביב. הוא הקים וניהל את יפו 23, מרכז לאמנות עכשווית בירושלים ואצר תערוכות רבות, ביניהן- The Urburb- שייצגה את ישראל בביאנלה הבינלאומית לארכיטקטורה בוונציה ב-2014. ספרו ״לאהוב לדעת—על חיי הפילוסופיה מסוקרטס ועד דרידה", יצא בהוצאת אוניברסיטת קולומביה, ניו-יורק בשנת 2013, ובעברית בהוצאת רסלינג בשנת 2016. ספרו החדש ״אמנות וצורת החיים״ יצא ב-2021 בהוצאת פאלגרב מקמילן. מנהל את חלל הפרויקטים פרטר לאמנות ופילוסופיה בתל אביב.
שם העבודה, מידות, מדיום, שנה
Otherwise: The Art of Ola Timer Kravchenko
Roy Brand
I
What makes a work of art different? For it cannot be a veil of innovative charm or pretense to uniqueness, which, after a century of modern avant-garde, has become the norm. Indeed, with its ‘ethos of individualism’ and rhetoric of the new, every contemporary work of art strives to be different—unique, original, unparalleled. ‘Being different’ carries a high value in Western culture, so much so that today, everyone seems different in quite similar ways. However, observing the paintings of Ola K. evokes a distinct quality of otherness. Under the guise of a classic or genre painting, the same undefined quality permeates, returning a sinister gaze and confronting our pre-judgments. But what is this concept - otherness? Or, rather, what conjures this sense of otherness?
Let's briefly return to the notion of ‘the other’ - a layered and complex concept that developed along with modernity - and to various representations of ‘the other’ in art history. This retrospect will allow us to return to Ola K's works in the second part so we can ask: What place does otherness have in contemporary culture? And focusing on fine art, in what ways are we exposed to art outside the mainstream, and how can we contain and experience otherness?
Following World War II, French artist Jean Dubuffet coined the term ‘art brut’ (literally, ‘raw art,’ also known as ‘outsider art’) to describe works made away or at the margins of established culture. Although Dubuffet came from a bourgeois background and began an artistic career only at 41, he presented an "anti-cultural" stance and promoted values of "instinct, passion, mood, violence, and madness." Together with the surrealist poet André Breton and the writer Jean Paulhan, Dubuffet founded the Art Brut Movement and acquired works for the first collection of art created by children, prisoners, and psychiatric patients. We can trace the foundations for these ideas in the romantic approach of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who criticized in his writings the artificiality of human (European) culture and praised the emotional and moral purity of the ‘natural state.’ That same year, in Emile, Or Treatise on Education, Rousseau expanded the term ‘noble savage’ to denote a sense of natural human dignity that was not corrupted by Western civilization. This notion had a significant influence on the discourse of art and the romantic tendency to prefer authenticity over refinement. Although such claims seem suspicious today, they have been formative to modern art and are still prevalent in contemporary circles. Artists such as Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, and Pablo Picasso looked admirably at untrained creators and were inspired by the discovery of folk art from Asia, Oceania, and Africa. From dada to Jackson Pollock and from Yayoi Kusama to Jonathan Meese, modern and contemporary artists aspire to the uncritical and uncultivated state of creativity achieved by children, folk artists, mental patients, and "naïve" or "bad" painters.
While Europeans linked savagery and nobility, Americans preferred terms such as ‘outsider art’ or ‘self-taught artists’ to emphasize the radical individualism and ingenuity of amateur artists who were not part of the institutionalized artistic milieu. Thus, the American ‘noble savage’ became a defiant and independent cultural hero that ranges outdoors from the wide-open spaces of the Wild West, through the urban poetry of Walt Whitman and Alan Ginsburg, to graffiti art and rap of the black ghetto. Despite many differences, in both centers of the Western world, a sensitivity for otherness was developing, while the initial attraction the distant other gave way to a deeper engagement with the other within.
In his groundbreaking book Outsider Art (1972), British art historian Roger Cardinal argued that art created outside the mainstream is characterized by an "attitude of internal alienation." This sensation builds up when one's inner world becomes considerably farther from shared reality. In fact, this same experience is common to many, even though it finds a sharpened and extreme expression in outsider art. In other words, "not feeling (like) oneself" has become a central feature of the modern structure of the self. And we can find various representation of the figure of the 'stranger within' in popular culture, and social media. We are fascinated with alienation and with social misfits since it has become so prevalent. This sentiment was already at play at the inaugural edition of New York's Outsider art Fair in 1993, which attracted the usual suspects of the art world, such as museum curators and prominent collectors, and the curious public alike. However, at the art fair, otherness became identified with artists' lives more than with the quality of their work. Stanford Smith, the founder of the fair, summed up the prevailing atmosphere/mood by saying that "People bought the story in addition to the object."
In the current climate of political correctness, such attitudes of "othering," the processes by which otherness is discursively produced, communicated, and interpreted, are generally frowned upon. Putting a label on an artist, checking their biographical details to decide on their quality and market value, or in any sense bifurcating art to professionals and non-professionals seems anachronistic and unethical. There is a growing recognition that the dominant narrative itself is limiting and needs to be shattered from within to include many artists from different racial and cultural backgrounds, gender, sexual preferences, and mental and physical disabilities. Whereas some would like to remove all barriers between artists formed within the mainstream art field and other creative practitioners, others want to hold on to some separation if only to credit and honor the efforts of those coming from outside the usual circles.
This dilemma was clearly at play in the masterful exhibition, The Encyclopaedic Palace, curated by Masssimilaino Gioni at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Gioni’s brilliantly brought together conventional and non-conventional creators under themed headings such as supernatural visions, taxonomies, archives, invented worlds, works with handwriting, and more. The boundaries between inside and outside were blurred, but, even so, paradoxically, the exhibition instantiated the very difference it wanted to erase.
Otherness is now less rigidly identified with biography, attitude, or style. However, it is still instructive and can be detected throughout different cultures and times. Otherness cannot, therefore, be one thing. However, there are similarities between works of art that are not part of mainstream art. Perhaps the most striking characteristic they share involves expressing a strong desire to communicate at all costs and by all means. It is as if the work wants to shout the artist's cry, the yell of the unheard, and it does not care how. Here, the yearning is for recognition as a unique human being, equal but different, and not for artistic abilities. And it is all the more resounding since, at least in the visual arts, it is a silent shout, recalling Edvard Munch’s iconic Scream.
In other cases, and quite in the opposite direction, the work seems hermetic or autistic, seemingly uninterested in the viewer. These are resigned works, expressing the loss of faith that communication is at all possible. Many of the works exhibit repetitiveness verging on the obsessive, like Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots that multiply ad infinitum in her installations. In different ways, all such works communicate an otherness yearning for recognition: ‘I am one among many, equal and unrepeatable’. However, at the same time, they insist on the primordial, the everlasting, and the universal. Perhaps because this very tension between uniqueness and universality is at the very basis of art making, many of the works arch back to cave paintings, hieroglyphics, Babylonian script, and medieval frescos.
In other words, ‘other’ works (or the work of otherness) exist along the long continuum of art and life, outside the modern ideology of ‘art for art's sake.’ Sometimes, they seem to be unfamiliar with the very notion of ‘art’ — like children or indigenous people who create with no actual connection to the art world. Yet, modern and contemporary art is manifestly an art that claims itself as such. Without the designation—‘this is art’—usually bestowed by institutions or insiders it cannot be distinguished from everyday objects or non-art. Therefore, an outsider’s work, when presented in a modern or contemporary context, becomes simultaneously art and non-art — it is art because it is not art — the very paradox found at the root of modern art is carried here to its extreme end.
II
With Ola K, the universal theme that is at the same time peculiar and inimitable is self-portraiture. Looking at oneself is, of course, as old as mythology itself. From narcissus to the selfie, we are trapped in our image, trying to understand the perceived figure, which is both foreign and familiar. In his famous article, "The Mirror Stage," psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan describes the infant's encounter with his reflection in the mirror as an essential developmental stage that shapes the structure of desire. The attempt to match the inner world with the outer figure, connect the way I experience myself from the inside with the way I look in the other's eyes is not just an early developmental experience but an originary conflict that will shape my relationship with myself and others.
In fact, we may never really be able to actually look at ourselves, thoroughly look, deeply observe ourselves, afraid that this may lead to madness. I, for one, usually scan myself in the mirror, avoiding extended eye contact. I look, and I do not look at the same time. However, there are times in which deep introspection is inevitable, even necessary. Thus, for example, when our anchors and set of identifications collapse and we lose ourselves and our sense of reality, those terrifying instances in which we lose our connection to the inner core of our being. In such moments, we must stop to take stock of ourselves, reflect, and provide an account, a portrait, of ourselves.
That is the state Ola K had found herself in through the traumatic upheavals of her life. In 2016, the creators of the documentary series, Shadow of Truth, portrayed her as the murderer of fourteen-year-old Tair Rada. They based their allegations on the testimony of her ex-partner, who claimed she confessed to him about the murder, and exposed her psychiatric condition. The broadcasting of the series led to vehement debates resulting in troubling consequences and a contemporary witch hunt. Finally, after receiving anonymous threats, Ola suffered a nervous breakdown. She fled to Ukraine, her birthplace, to live with her grandmother, piece together the fragments of her life, recover, and paint.
The police did not find a shred of evidence that may incriminate Ola and mentioned this more than once in the media but to no avail. The narrative concocted in the editing room has already set public opinion against her. The devastating repercussions of the series subsided when the affair took another turn in March 2021. The documentary Heavy Shadow presented the sequence of events from Ola's point of view and words. She immigrated to Israel from Ukraine and lived with her mother in Katzrin on the Golan Height. Years later, the lonely girl, who had experienced violence from a young age, joined a cult. There, she entered a violent relationship that lasted about a decade until she mustered the courage to leave, a decision that drew threats and extortion attempts by the spouse. She filed a rape complaint against him. The ex-partner admitted to assaulting her and told investigators that Ola confessed to him she was Rada's killer, an act she allegedly committed under the influence of a violent delusion during an acute psychotic episode.
Both documentaries presented a series of unusual paintings made by the accused or the victim. Depending on the plot the creators sought to promote, the same works were displayed to expose her madness and cruelty and, alternatively, her pain and sensitivity. Since it had been many years since I had watched television, I was unaware of Ola's existence, let alone the demonic dance that surrounded her. However, that changed the day I was exposed to Ola's paintings through the artist Tama Goren. The curiosity I discovered was binding - I recently opened a project space for art and philosophy in Tel Aviv, and Tama's call for an exhibition gained force in my mind as a personal invitation. First, the quality of the works spoke to me, not the story behind them. What I saw was extraordinary, intense, displaced, inquisitive, restless, direct, brave, disturbing, seductive, brutal, and beautiful. Through the works, I felt the power of reality in which suffering constitutes a nodal point between art and life. The paintings had to be displayed. Tama Goren and I started planning together Ola's first solo exhibition.
In addition to the oil paintings, many of them are self-portraits, we also discovered another body of work that seemed very different. Ola K. had written a children's book and added a set of fantastical drawings, naïve, magical, and playful. It was hard to imagine that they were the products of one artist as the subject, style, and tone were diametrically opposed. However, a deeper and longer look wrought several affinities. Primarily, the sense of exhilarating freshness in the making, the complete absorption and surrender to art, and the sense of deep mysterious darkness that connects life and death, oneself and another.
Finally, we return to the self-portraits of Ola K that directly look at us as much as we look at them. We witness an individual woman attempting to recollect herself through the fragments of her life, beyond the string of stories woven into her. Her gaze is suspicious and intimate, critical and compassionate. Their capability to present the foreignness we feel when we look deep into ourselves is of universal significance. The magic of any self-portrait, whether it is Rembrandt, Munch, Lucian Freud, or Tracey Emin, lies in the inability of someone else to occupy a place in the space between one and her reflection in the mirror. However, this is exactly what we see - not the reflection in the mirror, but the way we look at ourselves in the mirror. No matter where I am – an-other appears and comes into being in the impossible space between me and myself.
Edited by Masha Prashkovsky