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Yehudit Sasportas’s project Fans consists of nine original works – large-scale wooden fans, each unfolding or confining a different landscape. The choice of an object such as a fan has challenged Sasportas in terms of form as well as content, leading her to different artistic choices than those that regularly characterize her work. The current project represents a new, unfamiliar facet in her art.
The fan’s functioning as an autonomous object rather than as a fragment, a part of a whole, has invoked a spatial reference that differs from the syntax typifying Sasportas’s installations in recent years. The fan is a defined body, at once a part of a field of fans and an autonomous object in space.
The installations The Carpenter and the Seamstress (Deitch Projects, New York, 2001) and How did it ever come so far… (Berlin, 2001), were created by combining different formal and contextual details that generated a single system, a totality. They employ a similar painterly/sculptural principle that composes a whole body via numerous details, a body that embeds the possibility of perpetual disintegration.
Despite the variance and innovation in the current project, one must trace its roots to other works by the artist, and identify earlier manifestations of a similar, related essence. The idea of the fan emerged concurrent to the work By the River exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum, San Francisco. By the River functions as an archive of visual and formal images offered to the viewer through editing that contains several options and reading directions, from the beginning of the river to its end. It involves a part or a chapter of a river extending over 26 meters, offering a reservoir of images confined within a specific syntactic structure. Among these images were flow charts of hurricanes, skeletons of cities, volcanoes, spill stains and magnetic fields, that form the syntactic units in the stations of the river’s flow.
The Japanese contexts of the fan project lie in the Far East. In this respect, delineation of the image units in By the River with black frame, or the link created between the river structure and an urban grid, fundamentally associated with classical Japanese architecture, situate the fan in an intermediate realm. It is a domain that processes a classical formal structure of a fan in a manner that opens up a new reading, one that carries a borrowed image. The size of the fan, its mode of opening, and the relation to the image it bears generate a reversal in its reading. An object that has undergone a different cultural processing serves as a surface for painting that does not allow one to become absorbed. A fragmented sculptural painting that presents itself in pale hues, deadened a-priori. Peak sections manually processed in an entirely digital reality. A broken, closed, sealed painting that opens and resuscitates itself through the object’s potential of opening and closing. In this sense, the fan proposes an open possibility of image contraction and expansion. Moreover, it allows for a reading of the fan as a space of covering, concealment or presence of a nonexistent mountain.
Preoccupation with the open expanses of nature (parts of mountains; crosses between forests, marshes, chemical gardens and assorted vegetation) was already discernible in Sasportas’s earlier works. The experience of the thing itself – such as the forest, the marsh, or the plant’s habitat – is accompanied by technical, near-scientific documentation of a scanning impression that beats within the space of the drawing. (Manual ruler lines that penetrate the lines of the existing drawing and are woven therein, function as a pulse marker or a content scan of the image. In this move, the image is often voided, in fact becoming a sign of its empty shadow.)
The scope of Sasportas’s work oscillates between the emotional space of experience that frequently emerges as a projected image, and another recorded space overlooking “the thing,” scanning and analyzing it. A seismograph that appears like a fire or digital rain (as indicated by the titles of her works).
Sasportas’s return to romantic representations of nature, as well as her engagement with these realms, is a critical, disillusioned return. It does not offer a romantic move executed with expressive spontaneity. The work introduces a model of a different nature: a mountain that has lost the genetic memory of the site of its formation. It is a mountain or an image extracted from a space of metaphorical nature, one that underwent processes of hybridization, expansion and contraction, of origin alteration and distortion. The manually represented mountain remains an open image.
The fan’s ribs determine to what degree the image will be opened or exposed, a degree that varies from one fan to the next. The depicted landscape is concealed or revealed amidst the fan’s ribs in accordance with their angle of opening. This is tantamount to a pie chart representing varying statistical data. One may discern the link between the fan’s “rays” and the motif of the seismograph that probes and scans the body’s action, the touch, as well as a constant link to the linear light beams that have welled forth from the various trees in her previous works. This time these lines are not added with computerized rigidity to the free image once it had been painted. Instead they form a rhythm dictated in advance by the object.
The fan’s qualities are deconstructed into fragments and replaced by antithetical features in order to challenge the necessity of the original qualities: lightness is replaced by heaviness, transparency by imperviousness, softness by crudity. The space of opaque colors (wall rather than oil paints) eliminates both the depth and the lightness of the common fan portrayal, which is substituted for a schematic sculptural depiction obtained by constructing a mountain’s defined, delineated color fields.
In this project Sasportas introduces a different type of hybrid object, albeit one that has always been there. The fan hints at its Oriental, Japanese origin in the form and content of the image it bears. However, the calculated, rational modes of operation, such as the “digital” painting technique, and a serial field of nine fans offer a reading of loss and repeated attempts to process the authenticity of the singular fan in other realms of consciousness and culture.
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