Spin Cycle

Pondering Sigalit Landau’s enigmatic circle-themed videos at MoMA.

Landau’s installation turns on the idea of a circle and includes watermelons and lamps made from barbed wire soaked in the Dead Sea.

by Caroline Lagnado
Special To The Jewish Week

It’s tough to know what the Israeli video artist Sigalit Landau wants viewers to think when they see her new installation at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Having implanted herself among her carefully planned works, Landau’s work begs more questions than the answers it delivers.
MoMA has recently acquired Landau’s three-channel video installation called “Cycle Spun” as part of its “Projects” series for new art. All three works involve circles and circular acts, and feature the multimedia artist in a mix of performance art with video. Landau, 39, also has worked with a number of other media including papier maché, bronze and photography. In 1997, just two years out of the Bezalel Academy, Israel’s most prestigious art school, she represented Israel at the

Venice Biennale and exhibited at the Documenta X contemporary art fair in Germany.
Landau resists assigning meanings to her exhibit of three videos and a collection of sculptural lamps, insisting in an e-mail message that “it is not for me to interpret; it is more for the viewer.” When asked more specific questions about her pieces, Landau responded with a series of smiley faces, once reversing the question to ask what a video means to this reporter.
In “Barbed Hula,” presented on a small screen, Landau swings a hula hoop she has fashioned out of barbed wire. The camera focuses on Landau’s nude torso as she rocks her hips, keeping the hoop in motion; Landau’s head isn’t in the frame. Performed in the vein of Marina Abromovic, “the grandmother of performance art,” this transgressive piece makes the viewer confront the artist’s pain and accept it. In her upcoming eponymous book, Landau reveals that the spikes actually face outward.
Shot on a beach between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, (“the sea is the only peaceful border Israel has,” writes Landau) while the waves ebb and flow, the “Barbed Hula” has no sound but that of the water slapping against the shore. The piece, which dates from 2000, was previously shown at the Brooklyn Museum’s Global Feminisms exhibit, and it has been described as everything from erotic art to commentary on the bloodiness of Middle Eastern violence. Landau writes, “This was a personal ... act, concerning invisible sub-skin borders, surrounding the body actively and endlessly.”
A large wall projection, “DeadSee,” from 2005, depicts a coil of 500 watermelons strung together like beads, afloat on the Dead Sea. It’s a nod to the Israeli scientists at Ramat Hanegev who have been able to grow especially red, sweet melons (called almaliach) using salt water such as that found in the Dead Sea. Landau has inserted herself, nude, into the strand, gripping a melon, unfurling with the spiral as it opens and floats away. Reminiscent of Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” a work of land art installed at Utah’s Great Salt Lake (often called America’s Dead Sea), Landau’s organic coil is a bright green, tinged with red by the few melons that have been cut open.
Landau also displays a set of lamps she made from barbed wire soaked in the Dead Sea. Her “Barbed Salt Lamps” from 2007, hang at different lengths from the ceiling, producing an array of delicate shadows on the ground. The salt from the Dead Sea has accumulated in clusters on the wire, shimmering as bits of light bounce off the saline crystals.
Landau’s MoMA show is relatively tame compared to some of her previous exhibits, which have been highly political and critical of the Israeli government and of Judaism. In 2002 she created a horrifying installation called “The Country” with pages ripped from Haaretz newspaper in response to the the intifada. Her frequent use of barbed wire has left many wondering if it refers to the fraught Israeli border or to the Holocaust and its death camps. Born and raised in Jerusalem, Landau is a strong proponent of peace and her upcoming book details the plight of Arabs there.
Phillip Leider, founding editor of Art Forum and a former professor at the University of California at Irvine as well as at Bezalel, praised “The Country” in the pages of Art in America, where he compared it to Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica.” The reviews of her work haven’t always been so fawning, though. The New York Times called Landau’s 2001 exhibit at the Thread Waxing Space gallery “rewarding, confused and derivative.” Landau’s work can indeed be derivative; she has unabashedly borrowed from everyone from Brancusi to Smithson. It is her spin, to stay with the cyclical theme, that makes it intriguing; she infuses classic themes with her Israeli sensibility.
In the third and possibly most interesting video in “Cycle Spun,” Landau evokes a Jewish custom in which a portion of a newly constructed house is left unfinished as a reminder of the destruction of The Temple. “Day Done,” from 2007, reinterprets this “zecher le hurban” as the artist paints a black circle around a window of an unfinished house on a sunny day. When night falls, a man repaints the same portion in white while the rest of the house’s exterior is left strikingly bare. Viewers, captivated by the film’s sparseness and the suspense it causes, wonder what will happen next. n
Sigalit Landau’s “Cycle Spun,” part of the “Projects 87” series, runs through July 28 at the Museum of Modern Art, 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. Call (212) 708-9400 for more information.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization