|
"My painting is based on the
fact that the only thing there is, is what can be seen," claimed
Stella, attacking the demand of American Abstract for transcendence
in art, "it really is an object... the whole idea can be grasped
at once without any complications... what you see is what you see."
Gerstein emphasizes his strong connection to Stella's "objecthood"
and to his devotion to the fine line between painting and sculpture,
but nothing can induce him to give a definition that estranges him
from subject, content and poetic nuance. Gerstein is no formalist,
certainly not in the strict sense of the word. He translated Stella's
patterned repetition of shape and geometric structure into three
layers of cut painting, with one echoing the other and completing
the picture, as well as into replication of the figure and multiple
images. The matching shadow, which forms when the cutouts hang against
the wall, is also taken into account as part of Gerstein's poetic
duplication and echoing effect.
Anyone who ever rode a cab down Dizengoff Street from North to South,
swiftly flashing by the shop windows, could not help but notice
Gerstein's showy cut-outs in the window of the Rosenfeld Gallery.
The eye catches the colorful enticing figure at once, as though
it were a large toy for grown-ups.
Toys, as Rolland Barthe suggested in an article from "Mythologies",
(an anthology dealing with ideological criticism of mass culture
and its language), are microcosms of the adult world: Diminished
copies of human articles. According to Barthe, a child who receives
toys that reduce the world for him identifies himself as the "owner
of", as "user of": the toys that were prepared for him offer activity
without adventure, without wonder, without joy. They are provided
as "Ready Mades", without anything whatsoever for him to discover
about the world's mechanism.
David Gerstein, who was born in Jerusalem in the forties, had no
toys. "My parents were not aware enough to provide me with toys,"
he says, and admits that together with his twin brother, he had
to devise them from anything that came to hand. To invent a world
for himself. To cut himself people and cars out of cardboard and
paint windows, wheels and doors onto them, exactly like the thin
toys made out of tin, which years later were declared illegal. Naturally,
the Gerstein twins, bubbling with relentless creativity, were quickly
considered highly gifted wonder children.
As he approaches fifty, assuming that every adult continues to view
children as being his other representative, Gerstein returns to
the "low art" of which he was deprived in childhood, and seemingly
compensates himself for his lack of toys. In his cut-outs - even
though most of them are fashioned in three layers - something can
still be found of the two-dimensionality of the cut and painted
cars.
It should be emphasized that Gerstein's affinity to traditional
Pop Art took place in the eighties, when shapes and images from
popular culture around the world took on a monolithic, humorless,
glassy and frozen character. Think of the transition from the soft,
monumental sculpture of Claes Oldenburg - the "low" everyday objects,
such as a piece of cake, an ice-cream cone, a clothespin or lipstick
- to the cold, metallic and "soulless" objects of Jeff Koons. No
other period of modern history has produced such a quantity of artists
who were involved in so many aspects of mass culture.
|
