Education (1985)
2017
Installation: Bookshelves, books from the artists' mothers library, plumbing system, pump
"The installation comprises a standard household bookcase. The books on its shelves seem to suggest the organic accumulation of a private library over the years, at the same time pointing to a specific time and place: the 1980s in North America and Israel, where the artist had spent her childhood. Encompassing many self help, parenting, new age and feminist theory books, the library looks somewhat dated. A hidden mechanism pumps droplets of water to the library’s upper shelves, regular pulses that drip down, soaking the books on their way and accumulating in a puddle of water that accrues around the library. The books’ encounter with the water is, obviously, a devastating one, as their entire contents – a body of knowledge that, despite the time that went by since the books’ publication, takes on still relevant questions of gender, personality, self-accomplishment and creativity – will be slowly erased irretrievably, with the books themselves becoming a formless and meaningless pulp of matter.
The ongoing erasure operated in the work brings us back to the moment before the appearance of the text – to an extent, to a pre-lingual stage. Goldvicht, who has continuously tackled language in her work over the years, examining it in the range between signification and raw substance, attempts a return to the point of departure, to a place where language isn’t but a taste, an instinctual sense perception. While very personal in nature, this work brings to mind religious rites of cleansing, both private and collective. Through objects that carry the mark of private belongings and the unique, and gradually diminishing, body of knowledge stored in them, it points to a moment of crisis and lost opportunity"
Text by curator Sally Heftel Nave, from the catalogue for 'An Ocean Within An Ocean', The Jerusalem Artists Studios
Special thanks to Yaniv Cohen and Michal Goldvicht
Photo credit: Eli Posner, Alexandra Dvorkin