Two dark, vertical screens set at eye level on the wall like a horizontal stereoscope. One of them shows the young Esther Ofarim, in high contrast black and white, singing a German Schlager song: Morgen ist alles vorüber. Her radiant face first appears in the center of the right-hand screen. It is framed by her black hair (styled like a sharp edged wig), then by the dark background, and finally by the vertical screen enclosing it. Gradually a stage set emerges from behind her, shimmering lightly, the effect of a latticework filmed slightly out of focus (the camera lens centers on the singing face). As a result of the camera’s movement Ofarim is enveloped in the surrounding background. A backlight creates a fine bright halo around her head, distinguishing the figure from the dim background. The division of the oblong televised footage into the two vertical screens separates the stage set from the singer in a way that puts them on equal terms canceling the hierarchy between the front and back of the stage, and the image’s “figure” and “ground.” Thus the entire stage becomes one continuous surface in which the figure appears from within the optical quiver, like a figure woven in a carpet.The flattening into a single surface is necessary for turning the film into an image, and for stabilizing it as such. This procedure is complemented with a “remake” of a segment of the stage set by printing part of its televised image on a metal sheet. This supplementary organ, the work Décor : morgen_appendix, serves as the video work’s physical anchor. It is an image-object that charges the emptiness of the optical decor with metaphysical void; a relic of the ephemeral event.
A carpet, like a photograph, is indifferent even subversive to the hierarchy between figure and ground. In Henry James’s novella The Figure in the Carpet (1896) the motif of a figure embedded in a carpet serves as a hidden secret, a code the narrator tries in vain to trace in the writings of an admired author. The search for meaning, seemingly available in the work through analytical tools, is revealed to the reader as a dubious process. However, a case for disclosure through love or by being moved is being made (for lovers supremely united). The secret as such cannot be “discovered” and perhaps even there is no secret at all. Either way, the figure in the carpet attests to the incapability of literature, of language at large, to speak “truth.” The secret is both the promise and its breech.
The segment is taken from a half hour musical performance featuring the Israeli duo Esther and Abi Ofarim, produced for West German television in early 1965. It included an eclectic repertoire of songs in various languages taken from their first German album Lieder der Welt.The performance was staged as a choreography for figures and coulisses in contrasting black and white, with the singers both in rigid costumes moving like kinetic silhouettes, mechanized puppets, extensions of the sculptural set. This in turn was designed in elegant abstract geometric forms whose shapes changed with the deep shadows created by lighting. The minimalistic coulisses derive, undoubtedly from 1960s progressive German art. Moshe Ninio’s Morgen alludes to their correspondence with the light-based, kinetic-optical surfaces of the German art group Zero, formed in late 1950s Düsseldorf (the city was almost destroyed in bombings at the end of World War II, and within a decade branded as “Paris on the Rhine.” Mainly thanks to Joseph Beuys’s appointment as professor at the Art Academy in 1961, and the Schmela Gallery that mounted the first exhibitions of Yves Klein, Beuys, and Zero.) In the early postwar decades Zero was affiliated with similar pan-European movements that promoted puristic aesthetics, based on scientific and technological values, and an image of the artist who is no longer a “creative genius” but a “visual researcher.” What Zero offered the postwar world and Germany in particular was a repressive-restorative gesture, a renewed beginning of modernism from “zero,” without mysticism or expressiveness. A “new dynamic structure” made of industrial materials, “pure” color, clarity, and light movements that did not refer to any out of the studio reality or history. An art whose optical trickery served in fact as a screen of denial, designed to cover-up, to conceal: formal structures of blindness. By using a fragment from the Morgen’s stage setting, morgen_appendix takes Zero’s attempts to mechanically “create” void in material that was utilized as decoration, and recharges it, now as an artwork that bears the very repressed historical burden, without being changed formally in any way.
Tal Sterngast