If we adopt the conviction that what happens in our mind
is not essentially or crucially different from the basic phenomenon of life
itself, and if we then also adopt a feeling that between mankind and all
other living beings-not only the animals, but also the flowers - there
does not exist an insuperable abyss, then we probably will reach a cer-
tain, leťs say, wisdom which we condsider now to be inaccessible.
Claude Levi-Strauss,
Myth and Meaning
The ascendance of positivistic science marked the beginning of the dominance of reason over nature. While the concept of modernity brought the liberation of the individual, it was accompanied by a scientifically-based elimination and suppression of all that foreign to the concept. Claude Lévi-Strauss documents anthropology's radical turn away from the self-referentiality of colonialism and the paternalism of western thinking towards nature, myth and ritual.
Czech visual art makes this philosophical shift with difficulty and reluctance. The history of civilization is understood here rather as cultural history traced back to the pagan Greeks, a nation with a refined canon and sophisticated articulation of beauty. In 1992 Europe celebrated the "discovery" of North America, a crude historical simplification against which a large part of the American population has strongly protested, thus unearthing paths into pre-historical memory from the past.
This introduction would be senseless if Barbara Benish had not studied ethnology along with art, and if the movement through various cultures, mythologies and lands, and through various concepts of historical time and space did not play such an important role in her work. Just as Benish herself feels like an outsider, her work deals with otherness. It engages with irrationality, emotionality, the body and sexual instinct - which have been traditionally relegated to the feminine principle - with precisely what the rational modern world has expelled or at least has carefully controlled. It could have been this "otherness" along with the knowledge of Czech ancestry that led Benish long before the political changes of the late 1980s to Central Europe. She came to the site of the Rudolfian tradition of alchemy and the absurdity of the kafkaesque where the wondrous transformations of dirt into gold or a human being into an animal occur and signify a special affinity between the micro-and macrocosm, between humankind and nature, between reason and the imagination. Within Benish's work, the alchemy of magical Prague does not only encounter the shamanism of "primitive" rituals of traditional Polynesia and India, which she had previously studied, but also the fetishism of strict Catholicism, in which she had been raised. Benish's work is a sensitive seismograph of what appears so beautifully in Latin as the genius loci. Her approach to the spirit of a place entails the identification with its environment and atmosphere, its appearance and memory, and the transgression of cultural-historical facts. Engaging with the genius loci is for her the search for identity and a certain "deconstruction" of the common interpretation of history through the veiled images of personnal memory (birth, childhood, sensuality) and nature's essences (land, air, water, plants).
Empahasis upon the feminine has become an integral part of Benish's work, as has its revision of both the stereotypes of the interpretations of history and the stereotypes of contemporary art. Though hand-made and traditionally home-made techniques of a decidedly decorative character, Benish at once challenges the basis of the evaluation of art as uncompromisingly split between "high" art and craft [or applied art ] and reaffirms the aesthetic categories of beauty and pleasure disallowed by postmodernism. Citing motifs from Albrecht Dürer and employing the laborious craft of the old masters, Benish appropriates history to mediate the experience of visual richness to us and to question Walter Benjamin's revered theory of mechanical reproductin.
Benish further explored the dialogue between nature and history in the project "Water Enough for One Root " in Prague Gallery. In contrast to the prevailing understanding if the building's exceptional functionalist interior as a neutral space, Benish's installations uproot its very essence by conceiving it as a place for culture's direct encounter with nature, as a structure with a glass facade that defies the boundary between the architecture and its surrounding greenery, and the restless current of the Vltava river flowing below. Benish's four monumental works unfurl the theme off the flower as a life-source and as the circuitry of nature's energies. Skillfully interwoven form fabric, lace, embroidery, beads, fragile blass objects and flowers, the installations embrace the tradition of "women's work", question the validity of the hegemony of today's de-personalized technocracy and use aesthetics as a means of political engagement. The detailed handiwork, the sexual symbolism of suspended floral objects in free space, and the imaginative music, all express the necessity of liberating the physical, tactile and sensuous perception of reality. The life-source of water circulating from the art works directly into things of nature suggests, as well the contrast between, the perception of human existence as clocked by linear and cyclical time.
Just as Benish treats the notion of historical time critically, sho revises the concept of space. The extensive installation "Kafka's Swimming Pool" in the mysterious formerly luxurious spa in the basement of the U.S. ambassador's residence in Prague introduces the theme of the labyrinth, a space in which the fiction of certainty, of a fixed , defined space collapses. Here, too, the disoriented person loses the sense of his or her own identity and faces a crisis culminating in his or her transformation into an ugly, base animal. Benish placed a huge elliptical form within the emptied swimming pool holding an ordinary wooden chair within its belly. These objects express not only the relationship between the cosmos and human beings, but the metaphor of the struggle for domestic security which is either unattainable or a prison of the body and mind. In this work, space acquires a pronounced psychological character. Like the spherical container, the labyrinth is a place of escape from the objective and public world into a realm of privacy and intimacy, but also the claustrophobic vision of authoritarian control.
The spatial-psychological dimension in Benish'swork is most strikingly applied in the installatin "Spice Container" (1, 2), which the artist created for the exhibition "The Imagination of Pain" help within the shabby walls of an abandoned synagogue in the Liben disrtict of Prague. Benish selected the upper floor of the formerly sacred structure, which according to orthodox Judaism is reserved exclusively for women, and which reflects the subtle ambivalence of the relationship among intimacy, control and segregation. Into the heart of a spherical shape, which recalls her work at the ambassador's residence, Benish hung tens of fresh, brightly-colored oranges pierced with hundreds of cloves. The pleasant fragrance refers to Jewish women's ritusl task of spreading the scent of spices on the High Holidays and at the same time the work as a whole raises the more general question of to what extent is it possible to assume the identity of an individual, or in this case of a whole gender, as an inescapable consequence of both spatial and historical conventions. Benish does not offer a clear answer to this question, being too aware of the danger of simplified,absolutist formulas. Her response becomes a game of meaning among inconspicuous elements nearly unrelated to the installation. By reusing the original, tiny gallery tags and filling them in with Old Testament female names, Benish, both with conscious humility and pride, accepts history's message and women's lot. On the contrary, the mirror Benish placed at the end of the same gallery which reflects the whole space, expresses the deceptive and authoritarian illusion of the immutability of this lot and the necessity to approach it critically.
Barbara Benish mentioned not long ago that the Czech reception of her work emphasizes its aesthetic dimension. She does not reject this approach because she sees the sense for beauty and hedonism as a sign of the extreme subjectivity of human identity. This reading indicates the untenability of the generalizations of art historical ideologies which understand the work of art-and its interpretation - as immanent, timeless and {gender} neutral. This type of reading is not necessarily evidence of value-free relativism. In the spirit of Lévi-Strauss' anthropology, this difference could instead signal respect for the historical, cultural and even geographic and biological memory of human beings.
Martina Pachmanová