TWO WOMEN
Yehudit Matzkel, Curator,2006. The Museum for Israeli Art, Ramat-Gan
DR. Hadara Scheflan-Katzav
Women in modern Jewish and Christian societies are orphaned of their mothers, argues Phyllis Chesler in Women and Madness, (1972). Referring not only to the world of symbolism and imagination, but to the real world as well, Chesler claims that in patriarchal societies there is no significant representation of women, nor are there really models of a mother-daughter relationship with which women and girls can identify or imitate. Representations of the mother in Western civilization, with its overridingly Christian connotations, tend to show figures of a mother and son. The origin of this image is Mary and Jesus, the Madonna and Child. However, in the modern age artists have continued to develop this image until it has become secular in essence, while in a secret, invisible but sophisticated way it continues to rely upon Christian convention.
This religious justification is hardly disingenuous. Its indirect aim has been to bestow an aura of sanctity upon secular Middle Class mothers, who were at first pioneers in the new bourgeois accent on art at the end of the eighteenth century, when it turned away from the purely religious, and flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A secular mother only takes on an aura of sanctity if a male baby is lying in her bosom.
Artists of both sexes have produced many depictions of the happy mother with her newborn babe. Very few have depicted mothers and daughters. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century was there a context for special avant-garde art. However, it was initially the female, Impressionist artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who served as pioneers in forming this new image of a mother and daughter.
Male Impressionist artists liked to depict bourgeois daily life, and focused on leisure themes. As for example, the famous scenes by Georges Seurat of lazy Sundays watching boats on the Seine. Or Monet’s waterlilies. In contrast, female Impressionist artists preferred household themes among the same bourgeoisie. For the first time, particularly in the art of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, images could be seen that stretched the boundaries of previous traditions. Both female artists lent a new, subversive and interesting slant to the mothers they painted—showing them in realistic situations with their young daughters. Yet, contemporary critics found their paintings excessively “sweet”. Unlike the iconic and “sanctified” image of the mother and her son, Morisot’s and Cassatt’s mothers and daughters undoubtedly came over as too simple, redundant, verging on Kitsch.
In light of this grating criticism, which obviates the possibility of regarding the work of these women as properly avant-garde in the modern sense, Impressionist female artists were left high and dry; so the extent that, with exception of a few outstanding ones, they did not renew their effects in this direction for well over a decade. After all, would anyone want to be considered a Kitsch amateur artist in the modern age?
Chesler aims her remarks about motherless girls at modern Western civilization, with its underlay of Christian culture. Could her argument, by extension, be applied to most patriarchal cultures? How many images of mothers and daughters do we know from different mythologies? In so many famous legends, after the death of the biological mother, the “mothers” that are depicted are usually vicious stepmothers. A mother and daughter, who support one another, rely upon and stand up for one another, would entail an extremely close and intimate relationship. There is one relationship of such outstanding closeness, whose presence is the exception to the rule, which elsewhere is remarkable through its absence. Demeter, the Goddess of fertility and the Earth and Persephone, her daughter, the Goddess of Spring—is the famous couple in Greek mythology, which provides the exception to the rule of the uncaring, predatory mother. If this couple is so outstanding and if all the other images of motherhood are so different, what would be the exemplary image, the model image for those women in reality? It is therefore hardly surprising that the image of mother and daughter was bound to re-invent itself.
In 2002, the Arad Museum hosted an exhibition titled Mothers and Daughters: Enskeined within Magic Ropes. Curated by Miri Targan, the exhibit ? showed a variety of work by eleven women artists. It presented a tangled world, but actually one that was far from magical. Most of the works threw light on the interpersonal relationships between the artist and her mother, a relationship charged with one of the ideologies or traumas that are common in the daughter’s childhood: the Ideal Mother (by Timna Shahar); Zionist motherhood, the Shoah Trauma, the Dialectic Relations between Motherhood and Womanhood, Phallic Motherhood, and a Mother-Daughter Contest (by Pazit Bar) ….
A study of this exhibition, like other works of art dealing with the subject, leads one to the conclusion that it is impossible to address a mother-daughter relationship without some reference to the relationship that preceded it between the mother and her own mother.
Tamar Shalit-Avni has spent most of her working life as a photo-journalist. This exhibition is based on a process to which she devoted five years, starting in 2000, by taking photographs of mothers and their Bat Mitzvah age (twelve-year old) daughters, and placing them in front of a camera every year. Through the medium of her lens, Avni gauged the unfolding, developing dynamic.
The situation in which these mothers and daughters found themselves was not always so simple: it was hardly pleasant, rarely convenient; never natural. The women and their daughters were put in a studio and asked to project themselves “naturally”… They had to ignore the amorphous space and the artificial context, striking poses as they saw fit. However, the outcome was different. It seemed as though there is a hinterland, a whole world behind each and every scene, directing it, zooming in or out, getting the mothers and daughters to stand straight or look the photographer in the eye. Each scene brings together overlapping worlds: the world of the mother and the daughter; their relationship from the mother's point of view; their relationship from the daughter's point of view, the history of the relationship between the mother and her mother, and even the viewpoint of the photographer, herself a mother of two boys and a girl.
The reading that I propose here is of a double entendre: its first side or fold is irrelevant to those photographed for it only deals with the photographer herself, who chose the subject of the project, its duration, its location and finally the individual pictures (which she chose from among a significant variety of pictures that were taken) that will ultimately be presented to the observer. I would like to discuss the viewpoint of the photographer and what she herself is seeking through the photos: What is she looking for? What is the significance of her repeated return to the same place–of revisiting a mother and daughter at different stages of their lives? Where does the photographer actually place herself in this situation—which she has taken such pains to create?
Shalit-Avni began this project one year after her own daughter, the third of three children, was born. A close look of the girls photographed during various stages of their puberty could be taken as bemusement and wonder about the future life and the inner world of her own infant daughter. It can also be seen as projecting herself ahead to their mother-daughter relationship, when her daughter would one day reach adolescence. Another position is the viewpoint suggested by the artist—not as a mother but as a daughter—telling the observer more about how she used to be during her own adolescent years, and her view of her own mother.
The artist’s interest in these adolescent girls is consistent. During the project, she chose to interview only those girls who were initially photographed, and she did not interview the mothers. Her research therefore can be seen as springing from the need to check this age group from the point of view of an adolescent girl and not from a mother's point of view.
At the conclusion of her project, the photographer looked through the lens of the camera and saw something different from what she imagined her view would be. At this point I would like to elaborate on the difference intended between “glancing at” and “seeing” something. One can glance at something without understanding what it really is. The verb "to glance at" also carries some connotations of searching; while the verb “to see” carries the sense of understanding or even finding.
One photo after another, one image after another is aimed at grasping on to the remnants of the past, trying to pinpoint the same ghost image that gives no rest. This image becomes ever more elusive, more transparent with each look; its effect present even as it remains symptomatically Sisyphian. In other words, the artist embarked upon a voyage through time—traversing "entrances" that were known to her, yet every entrance she came through pushed her out, into the next entrance, and on and on…. The artist's inability to empathize with the way the girls see their mothers leads us to a discussion on mothers. Although a time span has been picked that mainly “belongs” to the world of adolescence and the girls, it is clear that this time period also belongs to the world of the mothers—crossing the threshold of turning forty.
The other fold of the text accompanies the photographer's view as a researcher on the history of modern women at a pivotal moment, as they move from their fourth decade to their fifth; from years during which primary daily child care has taken up most of her physical time to years during which the frequency of care would decrease and its quality would change. The importance of the project lies in the exposure of a new feminine image – mother/woman (here is it worth dwelling for a moment on the name of the project: “Two Women” and not, as it could as easily have been titled: “Mother and Daughter.”)
The developments in the representation of the mothers during this five-year project provide evidence of a new physical presence. They change their hair styles; they emphasize make-up and other accessories, such as jewelry and scarves, their dresses become more feminine through skirts, dresses, lower necklines. Most display a far more relaxed attitude to their bodies, even when it comes to capturing their figure in the lens.
In Israeli art, the representation of Jewish women (from the mainly Ashkenazi spectrum), has appeared in the guise of a mother figure with reference to the Virgin, the Goddess of fertility, Mother Nature, or the figure of sister (a sexually “sterile” pioneer). Eros—sexual desire—has not been extended to Arab women, or, later on, the various forms of femme fatal or prostitutes. Shalit-Avni's photographs successfully evade the sublimation and repression of feminine sexuality. Alternatively, the photographs also avoid the demonization of the images of women and mothers in the history of local art. These photographs present a new brand of mothers: mothers who are conscious of their bodies and aware of their own sexuality. It is not the first time that women like these appear in Israeli art, yet it is the first time that we are present at a period of such awareness of it. Shalit-Avni’s photographic research pinpoints this turning point at around the age of forty. For Israeli women this is an age that marks a new vision of women vis-à-vis their bodies, and among other needs, their physical and sexual needs. Moreover, through Shalit-Avni’s artistic domain we encounter a new world in which sexuality is viewed from the woman’s perspective and not from the viewpoint of the observer. In other words, the woman and mother is not pictured here through the voracious gaze of a male artist whose fantasies about her body are essentially for his stimulation and pleasure, nor are they depicted with the aim of fitting them into a mold that might match male cultural values. These mothers are described as feminine subjects who create a dialog with the “other”; who look out at those who observe them from an active perspective. It is from this stance that they generate a meaning with its wellspring in their own world, and not merely in the world of their “creator”.
Hadara Scheflan-Katzav
From 2 women to Cassiopeia*
Cassiopeia is an ongoing body of work that began in 2000 and includes photographs of six pairs of mothers and daughters.
The series consists of three beats over two decades: the first beat began in the girls Bat Mitzvah year (age 12), filmed in black and white and documented the girls for five years in a row. This series is named 2 Women and was exhibited in 2006 as a solo exhibition at the Israeli Museum of Art, Ramat Gan.
The second beat was taken in colour, during the girls’ twenties, once every three years . The third and final stage, during the girls’ thirties, will be filmed as a video work especially completed for the exhibition and displayed aside the previous beats.
I started filming the first series right after the birth of my daughter. A relationship with a daughter after two sons seemed like a mystery that I would not know how to decipher and will probably culminate during adolescence. For me, this photography series was a kind of glimpse into the future.
When I started the project, I was focused on the chronological development, the small changes of time, but as I continued my focus shifted to the relationship between the pairs themselves, to the multiplicity - the whole. I create a collection, an archive of body gestures and expressions. (The subject of body language is the main focus in most of my works and serves as a key to reading the world).
As I continued to shoot, I felt that the multiplicity transmit power. I felt a group was created, a “gang". In Arabic, there’s a specific name for a group of girls - “Sabia” (صبايا), the Sabia I created can also be an alternative to the traditional linage.
On the first beat, I named the works as the family names of the pair portrayed on the pictures and the year they were filmed: Bar Zakai 2000, Abu 2004, and so on. When coming back for the second beat, some of the women were divorced, some of the daughters got married. It occurred to me women’s surnames do not stand on their own, they cannot pass them from mother to daughter and therefore cannot continue the traditional lineage themselves. That is why I changed the names of the works and chose their first names, the ones that will remain with them forever: Dina and Avishag 2011, etc.
In the existing beats, I chose to work with steels in order to emphasise body postures of intimacy and detachments. In the next beat, in 2020, I intend to use video which will able me to capture the moment before the convergence of posing for a photograph. This will allow the collection of gestures and expressions to expand to small nuances such as a blink or a touch, as well as the use of additional means such as the sound of breathing.
Cassiopeia * is one of the oldest constellations and one of those whose name has hardly changed since ancient times to the present day,, And it is one of the three dedicated to women.These groups symbolize different aspects of the personality of the "great mother" (the great mother had 3 faces) .In prehistoric worship, female hegemony was important, symbolizing the creation and fertility of both man and the earth. The three faces and the identification of the group in the form of the letter M or W allow the creation of a hierarchy with a different outline from the chronological outline of the male lineage.