Einat Leader: Non-Affirmative Jewelry

Art is autonomous, and as such, is oppositional to reality and a radical negation of the social status quo.

—Hauke Brunkhorst[1]

The enduring ideological and intellectual efforts invested throughout the twentieth-century to extract the Fine Art 0bject from its trapped status as a commodity did not address the realm of metalwork and jewelry.  These small-scale objects remained, as before, luxury items and status symbols, functioning as yet another stage of reification through capitalism: a diamond, literally, in the crown of the “kingdom of commodities.”

Standing on the threshold of fine art, jewelry making remained outside the process of redefining the relationship between art and society, which aspired to free art objects from the clutches of fetishism and the class system. The thinkers of the Frankfurt School, fueled by the anger and protest aroused in the aftermath of World War I, sought to impart a clear perception of art in relation to society that was based on dialectics: Art was a product of an enlightened civilization and the result of its rational development, yet at the same time, the internal power of art that gives it its moral stance grew precisely from its autonomous position, refusing to be affirmative of the existing reality. Thus it allows the emergence of the subversive power of doubt, both raising questions and suggesting a reflexive perspective.

The German sociologist Hauke Brunkhorst explains, following Adorno: “The universal aesthetic pretension of art towards truth allows a continuation of the 'open' pair of possibilities: ‘affirmation’ or ‘negation.’ Without this, art would be doomed to submission."[2] Submissive art serves the needs of society—needs of veiling, illusion, appearances, and relaxation. In other words, in being affirmative art becomes part of cultural production and loses its critical freedom. The dialectical tension between the options of affirmation and negation is what triggers the artwork’s driving and awakening forces. These forces do not allow the artwork to resettle as a passive decorative object on the wall.

Einat Leader’s personal enterprise seeks, first of all, to change the mode of activity in which the field of jewelry operates, and then apply to it the logic and discourse of the art field. She accomplishes this without transforming the jewelry into an art object per se. Leader keeps a jewelry-piece scale, upholding the basic logic concerning jewelry's contact with the body. Yet her work aims to replace the bourgeois, passive, anonymous, nameless space (ex-nomination in the Barthian sense) to which jewelry belonged in the past, with an identified, active space posing challenging questions like an object of modern art. Thus Leader undermines the body/jewelry relationship from a state of passive carrying, erasing the private standpoint and eliminating any option of change, into a state of manifestation, which suggests change and reflection. In terms of jewelry politics, it represents the absolute destruction of the protection granted by the jewelry piece to the body that carries it. Rather than camouflaging the carrier’s views through its aura of beauty and luxury—“blissful clarity” in Barthe’s words—and associating the carrier with a stable and configured status, the jewelry piece declares of its owner a specific, critical, and oppositional standpoint, exposing him or her to possible attack and counterargument. If the traditional jewelry piece worn on the lapel or collar, or decorating a finger was meant to evaporate into a general class definition or into a privileged aesthetic space, the jewelry piece proposed by Einat Leader does not evaporate into generalizations: it stabs the eyes of it viewers; it reminds us of forgotten memories; it seeks to be unique, nominal, awakening, and activating.

Such, certainly, are Leader’s pins: Manshiyyah, Summayl, Jammasin, Abu Kabir, Salama, and Sheikh Muwannis, named for six Arab villages that once stood on the land where the city of Tel Aviv was built (six out of more than 400 villages emptied throughout the country during the 1948 war). Leaders’ jewelry pieces not only remind and point out these forgotten names, but also visually stress the existence of a white ghostlike spot, in the middle of the urban space.[3] The jewelry piece made of silver and created through a gentle sawing technique, traces the historical contour of the Palestinian villages, and constructs around it the street gridlines hypothesizing the scope of possible expansion had the villages not been completely erased. For example, the map of Sheikh Muwannis covers the surrounding territories of the sheikh’s house—now the Green House, an events hall of Tel Aviv University. Leader weaves the complex topographical lace-like grid, creating a transparent and skeletal structure, which functions as a Yizkor (memorial pin), to be worn on the lapel. One could question the idea of translating a geographical map, which contains traces of painful history, into the refined aesthetic language of a jewelry piece, which continues to hold a decorative function. But Leader builds her jewelry pieces precisely on this disturbing border between amnesia and memory, between the act of assurance and the drive to negate. This evasiveness, this unsettling doubt, this flash of consciousness are her materials. She does not throw a bloody and violent reality at the viewer, but opens an option to return and to remember, undermining the viewer’s orientation, and seeks to entice the viewer into thinking about the interrupted cultural prosperity.

It's getting dark, and now, as darkness falls, the big moment of the detectors has finally come. An order was given, an instruction delivered, the detector close to us is turned on, all the Palestinians must now pass through it..[4]

Leader assimilates into the language of her jewelry the mechanisms of the occupation: the fence, the barrier, the guard tower, and the camera. She seeks to create a so-called technical, military language that draws its inspiration from architectures of war and control: geometry of fences, connections between walls, technologies of weapons and binoculars. Her materials are based on precious metals­—silver, aluminum, and touches of gold—but her handling of them gives a sense of Arte Povera. Not the socialistic, Tel Aviv style, boasting of a romantic asceticism, as defined by Sara Breitberg-Semel in 1985, but rather a drab, graceless poverty of sheets of metal, concrete, and iron fueled by aesthetics of aggressive rationalism. Leader reduces and minimizes this powerful architecture and offers another way to view it—as weak and transient, almost pitiful ... She seeks to settle very close to the beholder’s eye; to raise a watchtower on his finger; a wall around his wrist; a tiny shelter attached to a ring; a soldier firing a sub-machine gun as a pendant on the chest. These are miniaturized elements of power, connected to the body, feeling its warmth, and growing from it; as such, they ask for response and reflection.

The large series Fences and Cameras, which has occupied Leader during the past two years, is made of aluminum or stainless steel mesh of high densities, silver 999, and steel screws. It includes rings, bracelets, and pendants, and its forms are built on connected units of mesh, representing flattened perspective drawings of surveillance cameras and lenses. The combination of fence and camera is connected to methods of limiting and supervising movement, a routine aspect of occupation. Sometimes the rings themselves restrict the movement of the hand, indicating their own irrationality of existence. The level of skilled craft involved in the production of these jewelry pieces requires giving up industrial production-line methods or any other large-scale strategy. “Each piece of jewelry has to be made with my own hands, as an artist,” stresses Leader.

No less important to Leader is describing her work by combining military and artistic terminologies. She defines the basic conception underlying her work as “striving for engagement” (a military term that points to the stage of engaging with the enemy in combat). But Leader speaks of striving for dialogue and response, of a call for discussion and reflection. She terms the phase of material selection “border conflict,” referring to her challenging encounter with the materials with which she works. The type of technique and form development are, in Leaders’ terminology, “arenas of decisions,” where she replaces the military term “decisive battle” in the sense of victory, with the sense of choosing and deciding upon certain tactics in her jewelry practice.

‘What did they say?,’ we asked. ‘We do not know,’ said the children. ‘Maybe the camera located on the pillbox photographed him at the checkpoint,’ said Rami, ‘or maybe he threw stones.’ ...An indictment of sabotage of an IDF facility, because he damaged the blockade, the iron rod, belonging to the security forces.[5]

In the series Fences and Minerals, Leader has built small vessels—as if tiny straw baskets—made from thin aluminum mesh, hidden inside of which is a small lump of mineral, such as gypsum, tactite, calcite, agate, and more. In their processed and polished state these minerals are set in elegant jewelry designs, but Leader has placed them in their uncultivated form, as an amorphous wild block lacking the features of beauty and style endowed through final processing. As someone who is entrusted professionally to bring the materials to their luminous shiny state, it is a subversive proposition to place a raw block of material not embedded using traditional technique. Fences and Minerals symbolizes some relaxation and release, as well as a potential confinement of charged hidden life, confined behind a cell of tough bars. This is a minor attempt by Leader to deal with the emotional pathos of the earth and the persistent human attempt to control its territories and treasures.

In March 2010, while working on the varied Fences series, Leader created a small series of brooches, called Slow Jewelry Reacts Fast. In this series she introduces a clear political term, signifying her range of operation—the Middle East—into the linguistic and metaphorical world of jewelry. In this case, the weather forecast for the Middle East and the expected weeklong synoptic map between 14.03.10 to 21.03.10 were used as the base for brooches out of silver and embroidery thread, suggesting an alternative mapping method. Rather than interpreting the Middle East as a rich cluster of tension and violence between religions and countries, it offers a view of a dynamic synoptic region, where the winds and air currents have no borders and barriers. This time Leader has created a colorful jewelry piece, where the changing of color is due to temperature levels and precipitation, responding in ‘real-time’ to the situation in the Middle East. The series title indicates the tension between the rapid change in the weather and the slow patient work of weaving threads and creating the jewelry piece. Thus, Leader reveals another friction point between jewelry making and reality—the question of gaps in rate of change and formation time.

It was about seven years ago. He and a few other children and teenagers crossed the fence (the wall did not exist then) and threw stones at the area of ​​land that was then called the airport, and the soldiers at the checkpoint began chasing them.[6]

The series Men of Silence, on which Leader is currently working, is based on the geometric schematizing of silhouette soldiers aiming their weapons. The geometric silhouettes, made of oxidized silver and bound in gold chains cite aesthetics of traditional jewelry. The combat figures slipping silently, pixelated, disappear, as if they never existed, like a bad dream that has slowly dissipated, leaving behind a cloud of depression. The Men of Silence hung around the neck as pendants suggests a situation in which the body wearing the jewelry piece bears with it the searing of war and its shadows—a material metaphor of the repression required by Israeli citizens who live their everyday life, trying to forget the enduring occupation and enacting of military operations that occur in their name.

Einat Leader’s studio is located on the rooftop of an old building, near the Tel Aviv market, in a trendy and youthful neighborhood of urban renewal and gentrification. However, she does not respond to the atmosphere of the colorful market or to the jewelry stores under her house. The drawers of her work table are filled with old jewelry, the remaining stock from her maternal grandfather’s store in Netanya—historic Bezalel jewelry made with the traditional filigree, gold and silver chains, and brooches embedded with precious stones. But she herself, on the very same worktable, in close proximity to her family and jeweler subconscious, is unable to detach herself from the political reality in which she lives, an invasive reality demanding constant attention. Her jewelry workspace and tools have been annexed to reality, they have internalized into their inner mechanisms the existence of fences, walls, sobering surveillance cameras, and weapons pointed inward, into the home. This two-story situation—a hidden internal floor, a tradition of prestigious jewelry, and the floor above—a work surface soaked in values of reality and ​​ political statement reflecting the situation of artists in Israeli society.

For Leader, the situation requires a decisive stance: “This is not a time for pretty jewelry,” she declares, while explaining the title she has chosen for the Palestinian villages-maps series: "Order Has Not Been Restored." Citing again a military idiom, Leader promises that until order is restored, the Middle East, with its synoptic and political forecasts, will continue to be burnt, cut, and woven on her worktable.

Leader-Exhibition (1.82 MB)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Zug o Pered, Spring 2012