Wedding (from the E.T.N.O. series)

Beginning his career among the conceptual artists of the 1960s, Zvi Goldstein today ranks among the most prominent Israeli artists in the international contemporary field. His highly complex, sophisticated works are kinds of metaphoric constructions that elicit free meditation and fantasy around the subject at hand. Each of his inventions is a kind of artificial world, fantastic and exciting, offering up-to-date statements about basic cultural questions, such as the status of the art object, the essence of modernity, or the way in which action on the periphery can serve as a critique, from a position of strength, of ideology at the center. In Wedding, patterned Damascene textiles are wrapped around objects in a Plexiglas and aluminum box, together with an Ethiopian monk’s cowl, a model of a molecular chain that looks like an enlarged string of Muslim prayer beads, rulers, and photographs of sharwal trousers and turbans worn by Middle Eastern men. This is the “wedding” of East and West, of sensuous, exotic Oriental sumptuousness and Western scientific rationality. Placing these components in a showcase recalls the manner in which material culture and the living creativity of foreign cultures are displayed in Western museums like strange, incomprehensible objects. This work raises questions about the differences in consciousness between cultures, how they understand (or fail to understand) one another, and about the ideological meaning of intellectual and scientific tools for learning, measuring, and research.