richard mcbee

Michal Rovner: The Space Between

The hallmark of a provocative exhibition lies in its power to raise haunting questions and, optimally, to inform our vision in everything that we see afterwards. Michal Rovner's mid-career survey currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art elicits at least two intriguing questions. How does our knowledge of the artist affect the way in which we see a work of art, and in what way do the preconceptions that we bring to a work of art change and in some ways distort the artist's original intention?

These questions arose as I recently viewed the unabashedly Postmodern exhibition that occupies the entire third floor of the Whitney Museum in Manhattan. Postmodernism in the visual arts has notorious difficulty with meta-narratives, sustainable meanings and the use of aesthetic qualities to reveal content. All of these are central themes of Jewish art, and therefore, I approached the exhibition apprehensively.

At first glance the exhibition is impressive. The high aesthetic quality of the 55 photographic works, twelve monoprints and three video installations reflects a deeply serious approach. Interestingly, the exhibition represents a scant twelve years of work; definitively not an extensive career for most artists. Rovner's representation in the Whitney at this juncture is an impressive achievement in and of itself.

Outside, a 1990 series of three works in color, depicts a silhouette of a basic house, and at first, commands our attention in its archetypal simplicity and gravity. On a chance trip to the Dead Sea Rovner used a Polaroid camera to photograph an abandoned Bedouin house made of corrugated tin.

	Over the next two years she returned and photographed the house many times. In her New York studio she manipulated the images; rephotographing, adding color and enlarging them as much as twelve times their original size. This set of works and the adjacent series of ten monochrome images of the same house from 1991 begins a meditation on how a physical house can at times reflect one's home, while at other times simply be a mental construct.
Outside #13 (1990) (29" X 29")
Chronogenic color print by Michal Rovner
Collection of the artist

Rovner, a native born and educated Israeli who has been working in New York since 1988, is acutely aware of the tensions and benefits existent for an artist who inhabits two worlds. Sylvia Wolf, the curator of photography at the Whitney Museum, evokes Rovner's deep links with the Land of Israel in the main catalogue essay. She locates Rovner's one-story farmhouse at Kefar Shemu'el in the Valley of Ayalon and immediately connects the site to the location in Joshua 10: 12-14 where the sun and moon stood still to allow Joshua to lead the Children of Israel in victory over their enemies. Rovner comments that "This place is my element. These are the ingredients that make me who I am." The powerful attachment to the land, and the site of God's miracles for the Jewish people, is subtly conveyed by Rovner's work.

Her link to the Land of Israel is one theme in her creative process. Another central motif in Rovner's work is disjunction between the original photographic source and the final creative product. She always takes her photographs or videos in one location, and then transforms them into art in another, almost always New York. This affirms the need for distance from the original subject as a positive element in the creative process.

	Images photographed from a television screen, such as Decoy #1 ( Man 1) (1991) have a haunting quality that transcend their banal source. By its size of 24 by 20 inches, simplified image and intense surface presence of the manipulated photographic print, this work consolidates all surrenders and all defeats in every war or conflict into a single iconic image.The Negev desert remains a central image for Rovner in Red Field (1995) as this series of pigmented ink-jet prints on canvas echoes the raw emotions of exile. A figure crawling across the vast expanse of the three panels (overall 39" x 165") immediately calls to mind the scathing emotions of Hagar cast out by Abraham or Elijah fleeing Ahab. In either case the simple abstraction of the image, outlined against a desolate red ground plane, drives the unsettling meaning home.
Decoy #1 (Man 1) (1991) (29" X 20")
Chronogenic color print by Michal Rovner
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Purchase, Frances Dittmer Gift 2000

	Rovner's work is purposefully non-specific. By transforming the photographic image into a reduced and elemental blur she forces the viewer to become a partner in the creation of meaning in each work. She gives us very little specific information to work with, therefore many interpretations are possible. This dependence on interpretation is remarkably similar to how we encounter the Biblical text. Because of the spare and stark nature of the text, we are forced to depend on a set of transmitted interpretations to approach the simple meaning. Once we are aware of these traditional textual interpretations, our input is welcome and in fact necessary to keep the text alive for the next generation. As such, Rovner's work operates in the same paradigm.
Red Field (1995) (overall 39" X 165")
Pigmented ink-jet on canvas (detail) by Michal Rovner
Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, Purchase with funds form the Harriett Ames Charitable Trust

In 1996 Michal Rovner began using video as a full-fledged medium. She created Borders, a forty-eight minute "fictional documentary" filmed at the Lebanese border.
	It explores the nature of borders, war, power, danger and how art and the artist interact with all of these elements.The truly provocative aspect of the work is found in the segments that probe the issues of borders. Rovner herself appears in the video and interviews a high ranking IDF commander.
Borders (1997) video with sound (still) by Michal Rovner
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY
Partial and Promised gift, The Bohm Foundation 2001

He shows her the border of Lebanon. "That is the border. You cannot cross it. I can. It is transparent. That is where I do my job. That is where my men are. That is where my dead are." These images and this dialogue focus on the essential premise that borders are arbitrary and yet necessary, and, most importantly, when violated, the borders can be the cause for enormous strife and bloodshed. Rovner's understanding of borders is of course deeply biblical in all aspects.

	In what may be the masterpiece of the exhibition, Overhanging (1999), Rovner has created a narrative video of truly epic proportions. The installation room of the multi-channel video is forty-eight feet long and twenty-two feet wide. There are eight projection screens mounted floor to ceiling on each long wall. The images are played out, sometimes contiguous across a number of screens and at other times broken into eight different but related images.
Overhanging (1999)
Multi-channel video installation by Michal Rovner
collection the artist

In order to attempt to see both sets of images simultaneously, one sits on either end of the darkened room. The video, approximately fifteen-minutes in length, is composed of two general narrative sequences, one filmed in New York and the other in Israel. One begins in a blinding snowstorm in which three or four figures on the left wall struggle to find their way. The opposite wall echoes the snowstorm with a long line of many smaller figures equally blinded, lost and yet determined. The elements of snow, video haze and struggle are played out until there is a gradual shift in color and tone that brings us to an entirely different environment of sunlit fields. Here earth tones dominate until they are overcome by harsh crimsons and finally white-hot steaming coals of a desert floor that have obliterated lush fields. The figures at time wander, coalesce into social groups and then disperse. They reappear as field workers, tending rows of crops until one man digging with a hoe is transformed into a man striking down another.

On the opposite wall the fields repeat with the exception that in the central screen a huge eagle appears, flaps its majestic wings in a repeated loop, and dominates the surrounding images. Finally a mysterious wind sweeps all the images slowly and inevitably to a numbing peace. An electronically arranged score for voices by Rea Mochiah accompanies this installation. The sensitive chant-like drone is a perfect vocal accompaniment to these perplexing images. I feel that this video eloquently expresses the complex dilemmas of the contemporary Jewish world. In the Diaspora we find ourselves wandering, blinded and cast out while in the Land of Israel we encounter terrible violence that accompanies our simplest efforts to reap the fruits of our labor in making a homeland.

Michal Rovner's work is deliberately elusive. Neither in the photographic or video images nor in accompanying text does she allow any specific interpretation. She claims no links to Jewish art or subject matter and yet I cannot see it otherwise. Because she is Israeli and linked to the land and its struggles, practically every work resonates with Jewish meaning. Do I know too much about the artist? Have I imposed my vision on her artwork? Is it possible or even desirable to approach art as a blank slate? If not, does the viewer, especially in works like these, actually become a partner in the artist's creation? Perhaps so.

Richard McBee
August 27, 2002

Michal Rovner: The Space Between
Whitney Museum of American Art 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, New York, NY. (212) 570 3600

Tuesday through Thursday 11am - 6pm; Friday; 1pm - 9:00pm; Saturday and Sunday, 11am - 6pm; Closed Monday. Until October 13. 2002

Pubished in The Jewish Press