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Taking In the Trash
John Haberin New York City
Ilit Azoulay and Rachael Catharine Anderson
A wall lay in ruins, and Ilit Azoulay salvaged what she could. It must have been a tough choice of what to save and what to let go.
For Azoulay, trash can itself be precious, for it tells of the people who left it behind. And anything, no matter how revered and how precious, could one day soon end up in the trash. As the Jewish Museum has it, they are "Mere Things." Is it just one more step to see still life in art as sex and death? If her title sounds a trifle modest for Azoulay, Rachael Catharine Anderson despite herself keeps her subject alive. 
Precious lives and precious things
Those ruins from Tel Aviv form the basis of Tree for Too One, as in (almost) "two for one" and "Tea for Two." You can forgive Azoulay an easy pun and the old soft shoe. She puts things through a process very much like punning, which is to say art. It takes a museum wall to display them all, some on shelves and others transformed again by photographing them, before displaying the photos, too. This is both physical collage and photocollage, and it leans a magnifying class on one its pieces—to aid in looking or to put under scrutiny what she sees. Earth tones help unify the work and preserve its warmth.
Just how precious, though, is it? Azoulay is not saying, but a gasket can look like a wedding ring, and a tree (or whatever is left of it) grows right there, in a flower pot—falling to its right toward death. More objects rest in a display case a few feet away. That strangely human wish for meaning does the transforming, but so do snapshots salvaged from the site. They look all the more poignant for their bright smiles and clumsy prints, set amid a sophisticated work of photography. People, too, can become objects and images, but as testimony to lives.
This is not NIMBY—not a protest against construction in the country's most cosmopolitan city. A pressing need for housing dates back even before the international accord that promised a state of Israel and a Palestinian state. Refugees to Israel knew all about displacement, much like art. Builders were so desperate, the museum explains, that they built walls from whatever lay at hand. And yes, that was another way of valuing and preserving trash. Azoulay need only reveal what walls once hid.
Museums go through a similar process of deciding what to value every day. No surprise then, if the rest of work since 2010 responds to museum collections. None is exactly site specific, because it is also continuing its transformations. Again and again, she seeks parallels among disparate objects, like a piper and a stone saint. A photocollage makes objects from the Jewish Museum itself take flight, as Unity Totem. Azoulay produced her most massive work while in residence at a museum in Berlin, where she lives. As the title has it, there are Shifting Degrees of Certainty.
Two more works start with photographs of objects in the Israel Museum and the Museum for Islamic Art, both in Jerusalem. No surprise there, too—not when Israel still seeks safety and Palestine its due recognition. No surprise as well if the first includes HVAC units and other museum infrastructure. That work includes a collage of human cutouts and stone, while fragments of Arab art become a magician's robe. Once again people are the most precious object of all. As the work after the Israel Museum has it, No Thing Dies.
The curator, Shira Backer, stresses how much the artist relies on digital magic. "A pebble becomes a boulder, the handle of a ewer the scepter of a queen." I was struck instead by the weight of images—not just the emotional weight, but the physical weight of museum objects. The eighty-five photos from Berlin have distinct shapes and separate frames, nesting together like a single precious structure. Born in Israel in 1972, she keeps returning to both her origins and Berlin. The work provides a tour of physical space as well.
Things About to Die
"Sex and Death" may sound like a Woody Allen film, with all his surfeit of irony and certainty. But no, it is still life by Rachael Catharine Anderson, not in the least weighed down by either one. All she wants, as a work's title puts it, is Space for Thought. She finds it, too, but in the space of a painting—a space that grows more shallow and suggestive the more you look. She might have taken the gallery's own narrow space on Houston Street and compressed it further. It has room all the same for things that refuse to die.
Anderson has done her level best to kill things off, in the very act of construction. Somehow, though, they are still standing. Scissors have just cut off a fig leaf, which balances nonetheless, its stem on a narrow table or ledge. It might be leaning against the back wall or standing in front with no visible means of support. Light pours directly down, to judge by its tiny shadow, illuminating every vein of its surface. Yet it leaves the wall in darkness.
She loves the fragility of things about to die. Plums lie still uneaten, while bare twigs grow into intricate constructions. Most have no obvious source of light, but enough to multiply the shadows. This could be artificial light, like that of the gallery, which draws shades over its windows. It could also be Winter Light, as the tallest and most delicate work has it, for a time of encroaching darkness. Sharon Louden, in the gallery's previous show (through March 2) used her colorful installation to mirror and to dismember visitors, but here everything is intact, for now.
A painting's shape and illumination recall light boxes by such artists as Joseph Cornell, a born collector, which makes it the space of memory. It is an enclosure that no human touch can shatter. The scissors, their task done, lie on the ledge, cut off at front by the picture plane but no closer to you for that. Most of all, this is a space for thought. Anderson speaks of the "pensive image," quoting Hanneke Grootenboer, a writer new to me. The latter, in turn, sees "art as a form of thinking."
Sex and Death 101 really is a film, but a sci-fi film—with, as far as I can determine, no particular concern for thought. Yet sex and death are also the theme of still life in Dutch and Flemish painting. Cecily Brown makes a point of the tradition in her own painting. Things are sexy for her because they are alive and dying. At the same time, they defy death, in showing off the artist's virtuosity and art's ability to last. She paints big, bright and "all over," refusing the very stillness of still life.
Anderson is not half so as confident. She quotes Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher and mathematician, in 1670. "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." Maybe so, but the paintings also allay fears, with the solidity of subdued color, painted ceramics, and marble dust in oil. My favorites, though, are the branching vegetation and its wispy shadows. Things do not look particularly sexy, much less dead, and a good thing, too.
Ilit Azoulay ran at the Jewish Museum through January 5, 2025, Rachael Catharine Anderson at Signs and Symbols through April 13, 2024.