Menashe Kadishman's (1932, Tel Aviv – 2015, Tel Aviv) life's work should be regarded from a historical point of view, which will make it possible to clear up some of the aspects currently obscuring its significance and quality. One must bear in mind that Kadishman was a painter, sculptor, multidisciplinary artist, and recipient of the Israel Prize for sculpture. His power and influence on the local discourse have been immeasurable, and for years he stood at the forefront of the most avant-garde practice, and has even worked alongside the leading New York pop artists in those years. It is to these moments in his life that the 1970s series discussed here belongs. In 1978, Kadishman represented Israel at the Venice Biennale, where he presented sheep whose backs were painted.
In the series under discussion here, the artist deleted the names of people from the pages of the Manhattan telephone directory. The resulting papers contain erased, hidden information, and have a rhythmic visual appearance. In fact, Kadishman transformed the pages into paintings partly reminiscent of works by Robert Ryman or Ad Reinhardt, and partly reminiscent of a more pop-like abstract, of the kind that emerged in the late minimalist period and the beginning of the return to painting. The resulting paper sometimes calls to mind the Manhattan street grid from a bird's-eye view. What is the meaning of this practice? Wherever we open the telephone directory to find someone, Kadishman is there to signal: whoever you find here is not "someone." I will try to explain: there is a connection between a certain hostility felt by artists toward professional art commentators, and the mysterious smile of women on a first date. The connection is everyone's aversion to what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls "jouis-sens" (the jouissance of meaning). Simply put, the work of art, like a young woman on a first date, seeks to remain enigmatic, like the sun through the clouds, rather than letting others sum it up in one sentence. Art cannot be reduced to the ideas and emotions it expresses. It activates something obscure and enigmatic in the viewer's sense of self. The perfect meeting point of these two rejections of meaning is the Mona Lisa: the museums are full of paintings of women where the audience understands who they are and what they symbolize, while the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile continues to intrigue us precisely because it is inexplicable, it has no meaning.
This insight highlights the weakness of the institutional theory of art: the audience, galleries, museums, students, collectors, and the so-called "art world" as a whole—which, according to the theory, define the work of art—suddenly become its meaning. In other words, to say of Johannes Vermeer's Milkmaid that it is a work of art due to its institutional contexts: who purchased it, where it was exhibited, who wrote about it, etc., is jouis-sens.Worse still, it is like answering a question that no one has asked, and no one cares about. Imagine an institutional theory of man, whereby each person can be presented by the institutions in which he or she participates: social security, health insurance, pool subscription, the institution of friendship, the family institution, and so on. Wouldn't we protest and say that these are answers to the questions that are least interesting to those who want to know a person?
I propose construing the telephone directory pages erased by Kadishman in 1970s Manhattan in this context: the subject's cry against the congestion of signifiers, which define, file, catalogue, sort, measure, and evaluate him. Modern society attaches an infinite number of institutional meanings to a person: name, ID number, address, telephone number, and so forth. But an individual cannot be comprehended from these data: knowing my address, my phone number, and my credit card number in no way helps to know me better.
In the American context, these works can be seen as a response to the anonymous mass society, to the streets of Manhattan, and the American artists that Kadishman encountered there. They can be construed as a continuation of the discussion regarding the relations between art and knowledge apparatuses, art and classification, art and cataloging. They may even be tied to one of the most complex discussions of 20th century art—that of art and erasure. But I suggest reading them as an insistence on the unraveled, sense-resisting infinity of human subjectivity. I suggest imagining Kadishman going over the names in the phone directory and saying: No, Jon Brown of 9th and 34 is not a name and a number; no, Sylvia Smith of the Lower East Side is not a name and a number, and so on. Every individual is a whole. Every person is a world. If I am right, then the beauty of these pages lies in the fact that the viewer is given the opportunity to be the subject, rather than a sign, when he derives aesthetic pleasure from observing and contemplating these pages, a pleasure which possesses a quality that cannot be measured, named, numbered, sorted, or catalogued. It is the pleasure derived from a work of art.
