Piero della Francesca's Ideal City shines in the whiteness of the marble. It is empty. It converges into the gaze of a single observer: a perfect, sovereign eye. It is the meeting point of perspective and humanism. It is the victory of reason and elegance over the chaos of life and the horror of death. Some regard this painting as the epitome of Renaissance thought, of the return to Greco-Roman architecture. A peak of harmony and symmetry, rhythm and scale. Others regard it as a ghost town. A city without urbanity; without people. Pure geometric shapes, without life to interfere. A post-apocalyptic promise of mind without urges. A monument to a humanity that is no more. In my opinion, there is something limiting in this type of interpretation. Painting is an independent aesthetic expression which cannot be extracted like an arrow shot into the world, like a declarative sentence, whose content is one or another. The Ideal City is first and foremost a painting.
Dani Karavan's (1930, Tel Aviv – 2021, Tel Aviv) Negev Monument is also an ideal city, made of concrete and pure form. But it is not an idea, closed off in its own world. It is part of the landscape. And it is not a kingdom of pure forms without human beings. Rather, it was intended for human beings, as Karavan himself wrote: "At the time, I didn't know what I was doing. I had no theories. I did what I felt. A sculpture that people could climb and walk on, touch, hear, smell, and see. [...] a grounded sculpture, an environment composed of natural materials and memories."1
The monument is not about a utopian future, but a terrible past. Designed in 1963 and inaugurated in 1968, the monument commemorated the struggle of the Palmach's Negev Brigade, which halted the Egyptian invasion and protected the water line. It is based on geometric elements, reminiscent, in varying degrees of abstraction, of a bullet-pierced watchtower, military communication trenches, and the like.
To a large extent, The Negev Monument looks like a tiny model, miraculously enlarged. A plasticine ball, rolled between one's hands and blown into a massive dome. A cylinder, rolled on the table and cut with a small knife, became a watchtower. Forms squeezed between thumb and forefinger grew into walls, ramps, and gigantic fortifications. This gap between the small, which may be controlled, and the monumental, which eludes perception, may best describe the sense of war or, at least, the gap between the war as it appears to generals and politicians, as a series of arrows on maps and scaled-down models, and the war as experienced by the soldiers in the field.
This is why the miniature models of the monument are so beautiful and intriguing. Tiny landscape fragments cast in bronze. Pencil drawings of shapes that think themselves without a world. A fine interplay of forms, bodies, volumes, movements, and shadows. The scaled-down model—as we learned from the exhibition "Mini Israel" curated by Larry Abramson at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem in 2007—allows discussion of the world in more comfortable field conditions: when the artist chooses the piece from the large world on which he would like to focus and the materials from which it will be built. The artist can choose to highlight or obscure some elements, to enhance conflicts which are usually assimilated into the sensory abundance, and focus on what he believes should be observed. But these preliminary studies by Karavan are not models. Not in the sense of "Mini Israel." They have no original in the world which they scale down and discuss. They are dreamy landscape paintings rendered in matter. The shadow of their strange monumentality engulfs them with a veil of horror.
There is, however, something else here, far more elusive: these preliminary works seek autonomy for themselves. They are not a miniature description of a great reality, nor are they a musical score for creating the great composition. Like della Francesca's Ideal City, they are an aesthetic expression which demands a place for itself. They are a thing-in-itself in the world. They are neither models nor maps, they are sculptures
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