With the Passage of Time

Painting, Photography, Sculpture, and Video

Dan Birenboim, Bracha Guy, Karin Dolin, Lihi Chen, Tova Lotan, Debbie Morag, Chava Raucher, Michal Rubens

The wind whispered in my ear, / “It’s about time for you / To come with me to the other world,” / Enticing me with its cloying voice / So I quickly answered, “I will stay here yet a while, / For I still have things / Left to do. / The wind’s face looked put out / As it went back where it came from / In an indignant whoosh.^[1]

Childhood is a territory of temporal deception, whose outlines are at once distinct and blurred, familiar and enticing as well as elusive and indefinable. When one returns to one’s childhood and reconstructs it, one must come to terms with the intangible quality of memory and the distant time it belongs to.  The time of childhood is at once absent and continuously present.

The other time of childhood is also associated with the idea of the Garden of Eden. Numerous works of poetry and prose express a longing for an image of an Edenic past – a representation of a time rooted in consciousness that is too far away to remember with precision, yet too close and important to forget. In the Book of Genesis, the Garden of Eden represents a time and place outside of any chronological continuum. In a certain sense, time begins with the expulsion of Adam and Eve and their exposure to the annihilating force of time and of the world, to illness, suffering, and death. Just as Adam and Eve were chastised by being exposed to this painful "other world," so the child's world is disturbed when the real world invades his Garden of Eden and propels him into real time, to a place where there is pain and death. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz[1] describes a moment of return to the Edenic garden of his childhood:

The light of the Sud-Ouest . . . there is a signal that tells me I have crossed the threshold and am entering the country of my childhood; a pine grove on one side of the road, a palm tree in a courtyard, a certain height of the clouds that gives the terrain the mobility of a face. Then begins the great light of the Sud-Ouest, noble

and subtle at the same time; never gray, never low (even when the sun is not shining), it is light-as-space, defined less by the colors it imparts to things . . . than by the eminently habitable quality it communicates to the earth . . . it is a luminous light. You must see this light (I would almost say: hear it, so musical is its quality)

 . . . liquid, radiant, heartrending . . .  Hence, at the age when memory is formed, I acquired of those "realities" only the sensation they afforded me: odors, exhaustions, sounds of voices, errands, changing light, everything that, with regard to reality, is somehow irresponsible and having no meaning except to form, later on, the memory of lost time . . .  If I speak of this Sud-Ouest as memory refracts it within me, it is because I trust Joubert's formula: "Do not express yourself as you feel, but as you remember."^[3]

Barthes similarly describes unique moments of transcendence in his childhood encounter with nature, moments of inspiration and wonder focused on an experience of the present, devoid of time and thoughts. Later on in life, we tend to observe the present moment based on our awareness of memory and cumulative experience. We quickly realize that the stream of events in which we are immersed is finite and irreversible. This type of early awareness is often elusive, blurred and forgotten far from our everyday preoccupations, until late in life it strikes us again.

The process of coming to terms with the passage of time and death is evident in the well-known biography of the Russian writer Lev Tolstoy. In an essay included in the book The Meaning of Life,^[4] Yuval Lurie recounts how in midlife, at the height of his fame, the renowned author came to feel that his life was meaningless. Tolstoy, who was born into a religious family, abandoned his faith as an adult and devoted himself to literary writing. He was knowledgeable in many fields, married, established a family, and enjoyed great success, until he was plagued with doubts and overcome by the realization that his work would eventually disappear, and that there was no purpose to his life. Tolstoy fell into a deep depression, and even considered suicide. During this time of distress, he was influenced by numerous philosophers – including Arthur Schopenhauer, who argued that a man living in fear of death is living the wrong way, since he is attempting to control the uncontrollable – that is, his future – when the solution is to concentrate on the present. A man who does not direct his gaze to the future is cured of the fear of death. Tolstoy eventually succeeded at creating a synthesis between religious and philosophical thinking. He sought to experience the meaning of things in depth and to live according to the will of God in a direct manner, without the mediation of concepts and ideas affiliated with one religious ideology or another. He came to believe that only his personal will, rooted deep within his being, could endow things with meaning. At the same time, Tolstoy recognized that he was a mortal creature, that his life would end, and that his will, which endowed things with meaning, would disappear upon his death. His deep acceptance of the inevitable passage of time and of aging, alongside a focus on the experience of the present, was his way of coping with his distress.

Each person must find his own way of coming to terms with the advent of old age. No one can fully prepare people for the personal challenges they will experience in coping with aging and with the way it will reorganize their memories and anxieties or alter their judgment and values. The social perception of aging is not encouraging, associated as it is with loneliness, solitude, and sometimes also sadness. Yet the process of coming to terms with it inevitably deepens our awareness of the fact that our body has been fated to a process of gradual dissolution as part of the world's natural process of change, and that it exists in constant movement, since nothing is static. We understand that everything we experience appears and disappears – vacillating between the poles of sorrow and joy, growth and decline, life and death.

The exhibition "With the Passage of Time" attends to these tensions, which stem from the unquestionable power of the passage of time – such as the tension between beauty and dissolution, and with the need to concern oneself with the meaning of life as we face processes of aging and become cognizant of the finitude of existence. Each one of the participating artists offers a unique exploration of the passage of time. From a visual perspective, some of the works are implicitly concerned with old age and death, which quietly percolate deep within them, carrying a message that is at times elusive and does not lend itself to clear-cut interpretations. Other works engage more explicitly with dissolution, annihilation and death, at times from a calm stance centered on acceptance. Optimistic and pessimistic messages are alternately woven into the works.

Tova Lotan's enigmatic works are not easily decipherable, despite their seemingly straightforward appearance. Her discussions of her work are characterized by the same fragmentary spirit, and by descriptions that circle around what the eyes see – revealing her unique appeal as an artist. The painting   Introducing Tree Shadow to the Interior of the House (2015), for instance, depicts a schematic, transparent house whose outlines are boldly drawn. The shadow of a tree is visible in the darkened background, and patches of bright red color gleam beyond its black branches. As Lotan writes in her unique, enigmatic style: