Tali Tamir

“Anything contains the universe, of which the most prominent characteristic is complexity”

Jorge Luis Borges, Dr. Brodie’s Report

The question of the site – the localization of the work of art – is fundamental to the grasping of the work of Relli De Vries, who intentionally avoids the “official” art spaces, and chooses to invade with her works the unidentified margins of recognized galleries. In other words, she is there – at the site of art – but as a stowaway, locating herself at the ship’s belly or the cargo compartment, the non-present-present, sees and unseen, the one who knows but is unknown. Relli De Vries poses the spectator a detective riddle and provokes his or her curiosity, suspicion and investigative instinct. She is indeed a stowaway, but one who cares to leave traces: she emerged from her hiding-place and roamed about in the nights. She learned well enough the structure, she knows the plan, and she leaves behind signs of activity: here she dripped a drop, there she dug herself a ditch, in another place she forgot some clothing on a hanger, and here marked a caution-arrow. Will anyone, particularly sharp-eyed, pay attention to these signs and be troubled by her presence?

This has nothing to do with the sweeping movement out of museums and galleries in the spirit of the 1970s, when artists led the look to far places and dramatic locations, such as deserts and mountain-cliffs. In the case of Relli De Vries the Opposite is true: as one who started her way in studying architecture, her focus is distinctly on civilization, on structures, on the habits of human habitation – it is there to where she penetrates, out of purpose or urge to violate the recognizable sequence, to deconstruct it in order elements and reexamine the link between the defined functionalism and the surface.

The Kibbutz Gallery is located in a cellar-like construction, which exposes the foundations of the old Tel-Avivian building in Dov Hoz street. The gallery’s space is divided into two units, linked to each other in a circumferential orbit moving around a close cubical square, which serves as the gallery’s store-room. An additional side space serves as a kitchen and a toilet-room. The structure of the gallery starts at the southern entrance, leading through two passages-corridors bordering with the store-room, and blocked at its furthest point, the inner wall which delimits it from the north. It is a longitudinal structure, read naturally from north to south. Relli De Vries confuses the manner of reading the structure, only to mark the west-east latitude as carrying a so far hidden meaning: a line beginning at the out-door ground-level (at the western window overlooking the sea), enters the kitchen, crosses the gallery in the middle, penetrates the dark unknown space of the store-room, and goes out again to the exhibition spaces, while touching the electricity cupboard. On its way the line denotes the height of the ground-level and the descent from it, linking darkened and lighted, visible and invisible areas. In its course it touches upon the functions associated with the functional elements of the building – the earth, the water-pipes and the electricity system, and enters the gallery’s inner core, the reservoir of its individual history: its art-work collection as well as the pile of chairs made use in lecture-evenings, the stock of catalogues of former exhibitions and office equipment.

The structure of the Gallery, as decoded by Relli De Vries, is organized along two foci: the store-room and the kitchen, and the passages in between. The store-room serves as the darkish labyrinthic focal point, harboring somewhere in its depths the ‘source’, or the well. Whoever looks into the dark will discover a feminine image-doll, modeled on the artist’s image, herself present ‘in clandestine’, busy drawing water from the ‘well’. The dark positioning of the figure provokes the detective-humoristic dimension, and creates a paraphrase: winking both at the ‘source’ as a high-art image, leaning on the personification of the Jug-bearer Muse-woman (following the neo-classical ‘source’ in Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’ painting – L’origine), and to the popular myth of the simplicity of rural Kibbutz associated, to a certain extent, with the gallery. Spots shed light­circles, which in turn expose shelves laden with wrapped paintings and a miniaturized model of the gallery. The kitchen, in contradistinction, functions as a research field-laboratory, dealing with measurement, weighing and other experiments. Water-full glassware, wires and measuring tools are densely placed on the shelves, some of which serve the gallery daily, and some put on specifically for the purposes of the exhibition. In one of the glasses a plug-ended electric wire is dipped in a water vessel-an encounter that, even in a technological culture proud, of its rationality, preserves a magical sense of fatal, disaster-impending and anxiety­provoking prohibition. The water dipping of the electric plug (electrically disconnected) is a key for the entire work: violation of rules not for provocation but for vibration; the accidentally-exposed confounding of codes; a certain trembling gripping you when opening a dark door of a locked store-room; an opaque excitement overcoming you when following the path-level, the stairs-way, looking into the kitchen, attracted by an intimate clothing forgotten by someone. In the same manner Relli De Vries is fascinated more by the uncovering of the water-pipes, or the electricity, than by the bright surface of a smoothed floor. She searches the sites where the cover is cracked, and an ongoing process is exposed – a building still in construction, an undone or formative situation, of which you are unaware whether it purposefully opens towards you, or it is you who observed it surreptitiously.

Relli De Vries’ engagement with the concept of the ‘house’ or the ‘place’, is pregnant with a paradox: on the one hand she draws, constructs and joins shelves and places objects. She can be characterized as a feminine hoarder, attaching one object to another, and creates a sense of fullness and populating. On the other hand she plans a production-line of electricity and water, and manages a ‘field-laboratory’ operating under field rules: a masculine-like and improvised operational-field. The kitchen and the store-room exchange functions, and create a dialectical tension: the store-room hoards, hides and protects, serves as a nesting and a hatching place, yeast-like ‘puffing-up’ of myths and history. The kitchen, full with activity, aggregates knowledge about the world, and provides various types of information. Relli De Vries condenses the entire universe as one labyrinthic-enigmatic metaphor into an imagined latitude. A Latitude associatively related to Borges’ world information-gathering texts, themselves cracking, in a certain burdened moment, into a surrealist and irrational dimension.

It is possible of course to be supported by at the time radical approach of Marcel Duchamp, who asked to blur the point of difference between the art object and life. But Relli De Vries does not ask a conceptual question on the boundaries of art, but practically challenges them. She creates a conglomeration of objects, which is integrated with existing functions, and reserves a capacity for free movement, into the artistic and out again. This zigzag movement, allowing the spectator autonomously to decide on, and identify, the boundaries of the artistic practice, at the same time makes it possible for him to be there – in the elating tickling regions of the inversion of the viewpoint, of the uncovering of the pipes’ edges, of the penetration to secret and hidden places of water touching electricity. Were you successful in touching all these – the experience is all yours.

Translated from Hebrew by David De Vries