 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Continued from previous page.
...It is strange to identify parallel feelings to those that Ben-David transmits which are, in general, bound to the continuous crisis of faith in European culture, whose roots can be found in the beginning of the century and which seems to reach its peak at the end of it - with European authors such as Milan Kundera or Italo Calvino. This renewed reading becomes necessary when re-examining the accumulating testimonies in the lexicon of Ben-David's sculpture, including "human," "botanic," "zoological," "technological," "scientific," and "alchemist" images and indicates a new aspect requiring articulation, even if primal and amorphous.
|
|
 (click to enlarge) |
|
 |
|
|
 (click to enlarge) |
|
In "The Art of the Novel" Kundera argues that "The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialised disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a ~ whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Heidegger called 'the forgetting of being.' "Man," adds , Kundera, "has now become a mere thing to the forces (of technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, possess him. To those forces, man's concrete being, his 'world of life' (die Lebenswelt), has neither value nor interest: it is eclipsed, forgotten from the start."
From this viewpoint it seems to me that Ben-David - from his London base and with his genetic Mediterranean existence. existence - plots in his mind, in an accumulative process of enthusiasm and scepticism, an attempt to experience and understand this wholeness, in its primal naivety, a wholeness turned into tatters which can no longer he fixed.
|
|
 |
Something in Western culture has become specific and fragmented to the point that it has lost its most simple values, that of connecting between the different parts and imbuing it with the logic of a continued basic existence. This may be the reason I sense a certain hidden melancholy in some of his works. "As melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness," wrote Calvino, "so humour is comedy that has lost its bodily weight...It casts doubt on the self, on the world, and on the whole network of relationships that are at stake".
Mier Agassi - A Comedy which Lost it's Body Weight.
|
|
|
|
|
