Mountainous Landscapes and the Pilgrim of Love

Tali Tamir

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While the distance between the foot of the mountain and its summit gets smaller and smaller as the climber walks up the narrow path, Efrat Klipshtein marks continuous, rolling distances along a road that cannot be reduced and does not reach its destination. Having started her professional career as a geographer and continued as an artist, Klipshtein embarks on artistic journeys, mapping flora and fauna, ocean liners, star orbits, and mountainous expanses, high cliffs towering above the clouds, and roads that stretch to infinity. She indicates a place that is not quite a territory and creates a landscape that is not exactly a place. Klipshtein measures and experiences the space with her body, equips herself with travel and protection accessories, and draws the viewer in to follow her along unknown routes, which are gradually deciphered as personal codes of a very private path.

 

In Zen thought, the way is more meaningful than the destination, and the journey has an autonomous value, whose importance exceeds that of the finish line. Faithful to the heroic act of hitting the road, Klipshtein does not settle for the philosophical aspect, but turns the interim stay in the space in-between into a personal tool: she uses it as a kickstart for performative tasks, which yield a spectacular wealth of art objects. The end of the route is thus not the securing of the "holy grail" for which the journey was intended, but rather the ceremonial opening of an exhibition... The yearning for the faraway destination was replaced by a passion for making art, and the original reason for the journey was pushed out of the frame, as a mere starting point. The artist's departure, driving her private car over distances and roads, turned into a mechanism of a desiring machine that feeds itself, without which art would not have been created.

 

The desiring machine, the yearning libidinal body, and distance are pivotal elements in the private journey taken by Klipshtein, who with rare courage seeks to make (in the heart of our late post-modern era) a grand farewell gesture to a love story long concluded. This biographical fact, however banal and heart-rending—an archetypal story recounted repeatedly in prose, poetry, cinema, and art throughout the generations—becomes a challenging task when Klipshtein attempts to translate it into a sculptural vision that connects space and love, wondering whether the geographical distance is not a mere obstacle between the lovers, but an immanent essence, symbolizing the impossibility of realizing love and desire. From this point on, the philosophical metaphor of the path, which has neither a starting point nor a defined finish line, becomes a specific physical experience of movement from point A to point B: a focused, emotionally charged journey on a repetitive route leading from her home to his; a geographical distance that was converted into a set of physical acts carried out on the side of various roads. Klipshtein renounces the purposeful authority of the Waze navigation software that connects two locations in the fastest and most efficient way, instead creating a fragmented route, with multiple stops and delays, focused on the tar-like, dense materiality of the road itself, and more precisely—the cracks that open along its length and on its margins. These cracks, which most of all attest to the hidden vibrations deep underground, under the layers of black asphalt, are being cast on site by Klipshtein, using liquid silicone. During this physical process, the feminine-pilgrim position, which corresponds to the repetitive rituals of love, adopted a "masculine" practice of casting, which involves labor, dirt, carrying, and loading. Later, in the studio, with the mediation of plaster molds that are filled with colored glass heated in an industrial kiln, these hollow cracks, with their rough, irregular edges, will transform into colored transparent crystals, which Klipshtein will place, with the utmost care, on a pedestal of dark African walnut wood that will be installed on the summit of a "mountain" carved from white pine, and will finish off by illuminating them with a beam of light. Through this sublimative process, the hollow darkness of the road-crack was transformed into a concrete form in the world: an illuminated crystal, an autonomous object of desire, which can also be held by hand or cradled close to the body.

 

The labor of sublimating the wound, akin to a therapeutic practice, is carried out in real time and on the level of corporeal reality: the luminous crystal is placed ever so gently on the mountaintop, as if it were an "art embryo" metaphorically fertilized by the power of the distance. The ritual of casting and the creation of the molds along the way, as well as the scattered presence of coiled electrical wire, spears, and knives, indicate the dangers involved in the task in the open field, on the margins of roads. The erotic energy that hurried the beginning of the journey seeps into the roads, and does not ultimately converge in the intimate locus. The site of love disappears from view, in light of Klipshtein's conscious decision to operate within the delayed gap—much like Marcel Duchamp's mechanistic tactic in the "Large Glass," which reflects the replacement of the canvas with glass ("Delay in Glass: Use 'delay' instead of picture or painting").

 

The differentiating, contact-preventing, delaying-delayed distance is a basic component of Duchamp's iconic glass work whose full title is The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23): the "Bride" is sprawled in a white cloud in the upper glass panel; the "Bachelors" crowd in their hollow uniforms in the lower panel, separated by a lead band. The mechanism of desire drives them and lubricates their gears with its oils, feeding their longing for the Bride, but for "the Bride motor" to continue and arouse desire, the Bachelors—as Duchamp stresses in his notes for The Green Box—must be "far from being in direct contact with the Bride." There is no continuity between them, other than that caused by electrical splashes and the power of imagination. The "Bride" is the "motor" that drips oil, and she is driven by the power of "ignorant desire" as an auto-erotic apparatus that stimulates itself, of its own will, so that the power of imagination and the sparks of creation constitute a substitute for direct physical contact. According to Duchamp, the Bride is stripped bare twice: once by the power of the "Bachelors'" imagination, and a second time—by the power of her own will and imagination, hence, her erotic "blossoming" is compared to "a motor car, climbing a slope in low gear. The car wants more and more to reach the top, and while slowly accelerating, as if exhausted by hope, the motor of the car turns over faster and faster, until it roars triumphantly." Klipshtein's car, and the cast tire pattern chains, which attest to the rolling road being covered, similarly indicate the limiting universe of desire, which transpires in its mechanical apparatus that sets it in motion.

 

Despite the alchemical and kabbalistic parallels that dictated the hegemonic interpretation regarding the enigmatic set of images comprising "the Large Glass," a feminist perspective will immediately notice the bias of the male stance, whereby "the Bride is stripped bare by her Bachelors," and not the other way around. Moreover, such perspective will linger on the linguistic incongruity inherent in the departure from the immediate, called-for pair "bride and groom" to the threatening encounter between "the Bride and her Bachelors." Duchamp himself justified his mechanistic choices by the aspiration to eliminate the bourgeois ethos of the woman as wife and mother, sheltered in the shadow of the church's marriage oath or abiding by the goals of Freudian coupling, instead enabling her to free her body to its bubbling passions and to an independent space of action. Therefore, while the "bride-groom" union realizes the decent, disciplined passion and does not threaten the purity of the bride, her juxtaposition with the solitary Bachelors represents exposed Eros, which acts as a perpetuum mobile vis-à-vis the "apotheosis of virginity," threatening to violate it. According to Duchamp's cosmology, Klipshtein, the "motor-bride," who strays from the destined path, pits herself against the "Bachelors" in the free, dangerous space, replacing asphalt with glass and responding to the intense fertile ground that art offers her.

 

Elevating the black asphalt to the crystalline transparency of colored glass, alchemy can provide Klipshtein's practice with an optimal image of "turning straw into gold." But the emphasis on filling and healing the crack also brings her closer to the Japanese Kintsugi artists, who specialize in the repair of broken pottery using lacquer mixed with gold powder. The gilded veins protruding on the surface of the vessel increase its value in the eyes of the beholder and potential buyer, infusing it with a rich "biography": the flawed is revealed to be interesting and full of potential. In the spirit of the culture of geographical travels, Klipshtein's installation alludes also to the Chinese painting tradition of cliff landscapes shining through the clouds and to the architectural tradition of building Buddhist temples on the pointed summit of an isolated mountain. The temple perched on the summit of Mount Fanjing in southwest China, towering to a height of 2,336 meters above sea level, can serve as a perfect model for that vertical metaphor of the summit—that isolated point where monks chose to settle, the place where "ever fewer climb with me on ever higher mountains," as Friedrich Nietzsche put it —which is the very spot that Klipshtein chose for holding the crystals of the cracks, offering them as sacred objects.

 

 

***This book sums up a decade-long (2013–23) work process in Klipshtein's oeuvre, and specifically two exhibitions presented two years apart, which complemented each other and were a mirror image of one another: "Morning Noon Evening" (2020) at the Herzliya Artists' Residence (curator: Ran Kasmy Ilan) and "Clouds from Up Close" (2022) at Ramat Hasharon Contemporary Art Gallery (curator: Ravit Harari). While the former featured the three-dimensional crystals as a mountainous landscape scene that aspires to the heights, the latter presented the gray plaster molds from which the crystals were cast directly on the floor. While the first exhibition was colorful and bright, the second was gray and monochromatic, lackluster. The former evoked travel and movement, while the latter—death and silence. The first addressed the Eros of the journey in real time, and the second—memory and fading, not to say reconciliation. The second exhibition revealed what the first concealed: the scar and the wound. The cracks and grooves dug in the gray molds resembled scars in the skin, a bleeding cut, and sometimes—a twisted vaginal groove. Contours of irregular tissues, rich in capillaries and bristles, were cut in the gray rectangles. The cracks turned into an absent, crumbling body, a life imprint that petrified and froze. Klipshtein walks a tightrope, between the inner wound and artistic spectacle, similar to Marcel Proust's linguistic bravura in the face of his lost love: "Love is nothing more perhaps than the propagation of those eddies that, in the wake of an emotion, stir the soul," wrote the one who stretched his love for the elusive Albertine over seven whole volumes, only to return to the beginning: "Mademoiselle Albertine has gone." The void—the crack—expanded in her place and continues to reverberate in his poem.

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[1] Marcel Duchamp, facsimile manuscript notes for The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box, 1934), in Marcel Duchamp, "The Green Box," typographic version Richard Hamilton, trans. George Heard Hamilton, in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, eds. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), p. 39.

[2] Ibid., p. 43.

[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge UP, 2006), p. 167.

[4] Marcel Proust, The Captive and The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, vol. 5, ed. William C. Carter, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (UK: Yale UP, 2023), p. 15.

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