Daphna
Margolin: Ada-Mah?.com
The Museum
of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan, 2002
Reviewed by Jude James
Freelance artist-scholar
Ada-Mah?What is man?is
the question asked in the title of the
artist Daphna Margolins installation
at the Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan
in 2002. In particular, Margolin is concerned
artistically, philosophically, and materially,
with man in relationship to and with the
environment. Daphna Margolin is one of
a number of Israeli artists, The Israeli
Forum for Ecological Art, whose work eloquently
addresses this and like issues. Margolins
answer to the question of what is
man? is multivarious, as demonstrated
through the exhibition works presented
in the catalogue. Her works are structures,
often large, that demonstrate a complex
and questioning relationship of the nature
of man; of the relationship of man and
nature; and of the relationship of science
and the technological; and of man
sensibilityconscious and immanent.
What is missing through the limitations
of our sensory organism is the imperative
that drives Margolins questioning.
How else might we conceive of mans
sensibility beyond the organism? is a
question that Margolins work evokes.
Some of the explorations through which
Margolin offers us some pointers in answer
to these questions are overtly technical
and scientific in reference, such as,
The Genetic Cloning Mixer and the
Solar Genomat for choosing ones
genes, directly referencing The Genome
Project. They are also humorous. All works,
however, including the Genetic Facycle
and MatterSpirit, rupture the boundary
between man and machine and shock the
certainty of an anthropomorphized condition
of consciousness. Disembodiment of the
human or anthropomorphized consciousness
is evidenced in works such as Reincarnation,
a floating shrouded corpse and petrified
bronchus tube; Wombrain, an inviting
inwardly lit sphere that less invitingly
spews out gut like tubes, controlled by
an electronic framed circuit;
and the Human Sandglass, a Perspex
angular object that rotates in space Sphinxlike
dissolving time (human time that is).
These works evoke that borderless expanse
of self and environment that is Margolins
constant referent. Spiritual TouchThe
Seam Between Bio & Technology; a multi-sensory
installation, Margolins title
to her own contribution in the catalogue,
appears to offer us a clue. The concern
of her work is certainly beyond matter
as we know it. The monumental recumbent
Gene Garden, a digital garden that
"examines human evolution and its
potential, as well as the dangers of genetic
engineering" is, for this viewer,
the most powerful of her works and conveys
no nostalgia whatsoever for the anthropomorphic.
Rather, it is the simplest, and the work
that most eloquently evokes Margolins
question Ada-Mah?What is
man? This recumbent and monumental
tumulus, a palimpsest between the ancient
(the tumulus as ancient burial site),
the modern (life generated from within
the petrie dishes that cover its lit surface)
and the possible future (the luminescence
that hovers formlessly from within and
around the site of the installation),
is perhaps rather like Klees angel
caught between the past and the future.
Margolins tumulus of a Gene Garden
is translucent and light glows from within.
Is it perhaps a call to return to absolute
zero, the photon energy of whichwe
are informed by the scientistswe
are all made? Or is her statement here,
more in the nature of that posed by Jean-François
Lyotard as a question in "A Postmodern
Fable" (1997). "What would a
human and/or the brain resemble at the
moment that they leave the planet forever,
before its destruction?" That, Lyotard
does not tell us. Nor does Margolin. Her
work merely alerts us to that question.