TWO ON THE RICHTER SCALE
2012 / 2018
HomeBase LAB Residency, Berlin / Nulobaz Cooporative Art Space, Tel Aviv
Text by Carmit Blumensohn
The work 2 on the Richter Scale conceals an experiential, sensory dimension resulting from the involvement of the viewer, who is invited to enter a room with a dinner table set for two. Ostensibly a routine sight seen countless times, it is now defamiliarized. The installation is rife with distortions, shifts, and reversals of meaning pertaining to rituals and cultures, alongside oscillations between the ephemeral and the eternal, between balance and imbalance, control and loss of control, color and transparency, mass and other states of aggregation, allowing for a wide range of readings and interpretations.
The Richter scale is a measure of an earthquake's magnitude according to seismic waves resulting from the quantity of energy released at its epicenter. That magnitude is described on a scale from 1 to 10, where 2 designates a minor quake barely felt, but nevertheless detected. 2 on the Richter Scale relates to the tremor as a presentation of the hidden, as a potential of destruction absent-present with every vibration of the table. The work touches upon different layers of meaning and references; it takes its place on an axis shifting between particular traditional values and universal super-national values.
The dinner, as a pivotal, highly significant ritual, is well known in various cultures. In Islam, hospitality is a cardinal virtue embodying respect, modesty, and generosity. In Christianity, the Last Supper was a seminal event which inspired Christian rituals, theological ideas, popular tales, and works of art. In Judaism, the Sabbath and holiday tables are set according to clear traditional codes.
The history of art is replete with meal portrayals: Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper (1495), Pieter Bruegel's The Peasant Wedding (ca. 1567), Annie Leibovitz's The Sopranos Last Supper (1999), as well as works by Poussin, Rubens, Picasso, Warhol, and many others. American artist Judy Chicago created an installation entitled The Dinner Party (1974-79) dedicated to 39 women from prehistoric times to the 20th century, partly historical figures, partly mythological, with the names of 999 additional women inscribed on the floor. The installation combined traditional "female" crafts (embroidery, needlework, weaving, china painting, etc.) with feminist historical research led by Chicago herself.
2 on the Richter Scale proposes intercultural crosses, acts of hybridization emphasizing material transformation, and an interplay between form and formlessness, mass and flimsiness, being and insubstantiality. The viewer enters a modest room with a table set for two at the center. The dishes are placed on the table: bowls, plates, cups, a bottle, sausages and cabbage, all of them cast from flexible silicon and an ultra-thin, fragile layer of rigid polyurethane. A chandelier is suspended from above. The distortion and shift, hinted at the very first sight, are reinforced the closer we look: the tablecloth melts and drips onto the floor; the wine goblet is semi spilled, the "Berlinesque" sausages are gigantic. The table's legs are unequal (or perhaps the floor is uneven!), and the table tips from side to side, sounding a muffled knock on the floor every 20 seconds or so.
Rivnay makes metaphorical use of plastic materials which undergo transformation and are seemingly emptied of their material essence. The constituent objects are translucent, and their visibility is unclear. In endless cyclicality, a near-unfelt motion effectuates recurring tremors in them every once in a while, invoking undersea (medusa-like substances) or culinary (a jelly-like texture) realms; quivering, unstable materials which make one doubt their very existence. The idea of the set table is deprived of its customary values, instead addressing the transient and evanescent, equilibrium and the yearning for balance.
The table's shaking exposes the fragility of the dinner concept. The ceremony of dinner for two, which originally calls for intimacy and closeness, is exposed as an empty shell. The diners are absent. According to the traces on the table it is hard to tell whether they came and left, or never showed up in the first place. The table is denied its function as the major axis of the house, a focal point around which the family gathers to hold simple mundane activities, and a field of spiritual and emotional give and take.
The tension between alienation and identification is a key component in this work which relates to immigration as a personal and mental state leading to loss of stability and the dissolution of identity. Migration refers to the physical movement of people from one place to another, whether voluntarily—due to ideology or in pursuit of better opportunities ("pull factors"), or forced—due to war, natural disaster or oppression ("push factors"). Migration involves loss of security, a yearning for acceptance, a sense of "transparency" and lack of esteem, tensions and discrimination. The immigrant strives to assimilate in his new surroundings, hence he must dissociate himself from his original culture, language and ways of life in a long and painful process.
The chasm created by artist Doris Salcedo in the concrete floor of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall (Shibboleth, 2007) alluded to a wide spectrum of socio-cultural notions. It referred to the undermining of world orders as well as to geological processes and natural catastrophes, which dwarf man, jeopardizing his sense of stability and confidence. According to the artist, the work "represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred." It is the sense of profound non-belonging experienced by "a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe," facing the fracture in his heart helpless. While Salcedo explores disruption and instability as a formal, even linear element, Rivnay analogizes the never-ending cyclical movement to the never-ending quest to seek and maintain balance.
Balance implies freedom, stability, and control. Its challenging is associated with a lack of control, the ground dropping under one's feet, the loss of one's backbone. Alongside the yearning for equilibrium, the work sustains a dialogue between two mutually-constituting types of energy: on the one hand, a hesitated, refined energy gradually emerging in a linear manner; on the other hand, an erupting energy charged with sensuality, yearning, and passion. Like the dinner plates on the table, the walls portray two pairs of hands cast in polyurethane, holding Spines in two specific points. The spines are bent at these contact points, becoming formally distorted. Human presence and memory disintegrate; they are rendered fluid and insubstantial, embodying the tension between the fixed and stable on the one hand, and the flexible and changing on the other.