Shosh Kormosh Part II: Wreaths

Let me state from the very outset: these wreaths are not wreaths; they are not tied to a sturdy plastic frame; they are laid out like wreaths just for the sake of the photograph, but they are momentary wreaths, ad hoc wreaths. These are flowers that moved along the trajectory of their lifetimes and met here fleetingly in the form of a wreath, were photographed, and from here the wind will carry them to their destinations. As Goethe says to Johann Peter Eckermann in the famous dialogue, the flower is beautiful not in spite of the fact that it will wither, but precisely because it is transient; by the same token, these wreaths are beautiful because they were not constructed by a florist, but were placed by a poet like words in a haiku poem, side by side, for a moment, before they go back to serve the merchant or the clerk.

This series of photographs, with its baroque-like, dark and dim appearance, was taken in conjunction with the artist's terminal illness. Death has opened an embassy in her life, and she is trying to furnish its abode. The plants, pseudo-scientifically isolated as if for the purpose of classification and cataloging, lay the body bare in their biomorphic forms. They are like internal organs on the operating table. It is a series about the shadow that death casts on life, and at the same time—they are wreaths. They were somehow made concurrent with Moshe Gershuni's wreath paintings, and were even exhibited together. Other Israeli artists have also engaged with wreaths, including Sigalit Landau, Erez Israeli, as well as the undersigned—in other words, we are concerned with a fundamental image in local culture An image centered on death. An image that has an affinity for Europe and its customs. An image with an artificial majesty and a hint of the cyclicality of the uroboros, the serpent of life that bites its tail. The wreath is always comprised of flowers and leaves regimented and tamed, at the inevitable intersection of nature and culture: death.

Kormosh discussed the flowers in a conversation with Tali Tamir: These are not wild flowers, nor is this a bouquet of spring flowers. The flowers are as though embalmed; dead flowers that are beyond the threshold of beauty. Their leaves are curled like the edges of a petticoat—a sort of sensuality whose time has passed, and it spreads to places where there is a slight odor of decadence and rottenness. Like make-up applied too heavilyin an effort to present a fresh appearance. Flowers are a dead art. Who today treats flowers in art? Robert Mapplethorpe photographed them upright, sensual, like huge erections. In my work they are imprinted in the paper, like the flowers we used to dry between the pages of books or notebooks. They don't become moldy. They are frozen or embalmed in an intense climactic moment, and that is how they are photographed.1

These words echo a sentiment I expressed in part I of the text about Kormosh regarding memory and forgetfulness. In the previous text I also remarked that photography has a claim for truth, but in Kormosh's works it produces truth from the very relinquishment of that claim. I further added, that her works are the opposite of monuments. All three observations apply here even more forcefully. The wreaths are works of memory and oblivion, works about truth beyond the indexicality of photography, and they are works with a transient, anti-monumental fragility. But due to the physicality of the flowers and the link to the artist's illness, there seems to be something more here. Something miraculous.

The fact that the photograph is a sign on film of an event that happened in the world is simple, but that it becomes a sign of what happened in one's psyche, or in one's body, in the invisible sites of the disease—that is miraculous. In this sense, Kormosh's wreaths are similar to the stigmata marks appearing on the hands of Christian saints: an invisible occurrence recorded in the visible.

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