In Sasha Serber's (b. 1973, Moldova; immigrated to Israel in 1991; lives and works in Tel Aviv) world, nothing is what it seems. Everything is a representation. Even the child who wanted to cease being a representation and become a real child, remains a representation. Even now, when he is a representation, he is not what he seems. Serber's Pinocchio is burnt, charred. He will never be a real child. He is a sculpture doomed to remain a sculpture. A sculpture of what? Of Pinocchio, who is made of burnt wood, and as such—sculpted in plastic. Wait, let's go over the entire process from the beginning, step by step: there was Grandpa Geppetto, who made himself a wooden puppet to comfort him in his childlessness. Along came the fairy and breathed life into the puppet. The puppet was burned. Along came Serber and created a plastic image of the burnt wood. Nothing is what it seems!
Pinocchio is the perfect resident of this world. He is three different things that are one: First, he is a metaphor for growing up, that is, for the child's transition from being the parents' creation to an independent individual, responsible for his actions. Second, he is one in a long line of objects of desire, brought to life by that very desire. He is akin to the nymph Galatea, sculpted by Pygmalion. Geppetto who craved a son, as Pygmalion longed for a beloved, created him by the power of his desire. Some may say that this is true about any love: the lover creates his love object, which is the reason so many human relationships are bound to fantasies and dreams. And third, quite famously, Pinocchio is a discussion of the lie. He is a discussion of the lie because in himself he is a lie: he is a work of art, a sculpture, a fiction; and also, because of the actual relationship of his body to the lie: the lengthening of his nose.
Why do I argue that these three are one? Because the lengthening of the nose is also a metaphor for male desire—in relation to lying, to fantasy. Because growing up often entails giving up one's private childish dream world and compromising with reality. Because Pinocchio is the way we create our adult self from our childhood fantasies.
Had the sculptor created Pinocchio from burnt wood, we would have said that he condemned our attempt at self-creation to failure—but he didn't. He took the failure and transformed it into a higher degree of image, thus redeeming it, for the simple reason that real things in the world have no meaning, no "aboutness"; they don't say something about something, they simply exist, whereas images say something, they are about something. Bear in mind: a standard declarative statement can be one hundred percent true, and still say nothing about the world, i.e. be a tautology such as: "Water is wet", and it can be zero percent true and lie: "Water is dry." But the image, which is partly true and partly false, e.g. "the water moves like satin scarves in the wind," can say something about the world. This is what we learn from the Pinocchio before us, which is an image of the failure to become an image. That's a pretty good reason to enter into Serber's world, where everything is an image.
