Suspense | Menashe Kadishman

About the Work and the Creator / Mordechai Omer

Two of Menashe Kadishman's most important outdoor sculptures are on permanent display on the Tel Aviv University campus. The earlier sculpture, Suspense (1968-75), is located in the vicinity of the Diaspora Museum. The second - The Sacrifice of Isaac (1982-85), a monumental work composed of Cor-Ten steel - is situated in the vicinity of the Central Library. Both sculptures are later versions of series that preoccupied Kadishman for many years. Suspense is related to a series of conceptual-minimalist works created during the 1960s, and concerned with tension. The Sacrifice of Isaac is a later development of painting and sculpture series which originated in 1978, with the display of a live herd of sheep at the Venice Biennale (1978).

What is the connection between the figurative narrative of the Sacrifice of Isaac and the earlier geometric-minimalist work, Suspense? Edward Fry suggests an explanation that is anchored in a comparison with Jacques Lipchitz's 1941 work Mother and Child; in this work, Lipchitz abandoned Cubism in favor of a more expressive style in order to harness his work to a moral vision. Kadishman's minimalist sculptures were similarly designed in terms of relations between human bodies. The first one to point to this highly meaningful comparison, which doubtless occurs to every observer of the sculptures on the University campus, was the late artist Abraham Ofek.

Ofek was a close friend of Kadishman's, who followed the development of his work since the early 1960s. He related two of Kadishman's well-known minimalist sculptures - Suspense (1963-66), in the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden at the Israel Museum - and Rising Up (1974-76), which is located in the square in front of Habima National Theatre and the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv - to his later preoccupation with the theme of sacrifice and its numerous mythological and autobiographical resonances.

Myth and Form: Kadishman's Abstract Sacrifice

An illustrated text by Ofek, which is preserved in his estate, reveals how the biblical-mythological narrative, which carries a moral message, is reincarnated in Kadishman's work in abstract geometric forms. Each one of the geometric forms composing Suspense embodies a mythological figure from the biblical drama: Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, the ram and the angel. The geometric abstraction increases the dramatic tension to a climactic point, at which everything is suspended in a state of near-disequilibrium, as if about to collapse at any moment.

Ofek's concern, as he emphasizes in this text, was "to interpret Kadishman's sculpture about the sacrifice." The accompanying illustration features vectors representing the forces at work: the tension of the base - "the force that pins things to the ground" is contrasted with "the force of the waist" and the suspended "force that pulls upwards."

"Twenty-two years ago," Ofek explains, "I came upon a wonderful sculpture of a ram's head created by Kadishman in flat sandstone. Several years later, in London, I saw two Kenyan bronze sculptures. One of them resembled a gate - "an altar" - with a kind of protrusion at the center of the gate and a trough at its bottom – a symbolic trace of the place where blood flowed. During those years, Kadishman created no small number of stone sculptures, some of which were later stylized in different materials and painted. One of them is the work in the Sculpture Garden at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. This sculpture is painted yellow and contains a central rectangle supporting a half-moon. A large horizontal beam, which logically could not remain in this position, is suspended upon the half-moon.

Years later, Kadishman positioned his three circles in the square facing Habima National Theater at the center of Tel Aviv. Then came the painted sheep, then the donkeys carrying their cargo among the rocks at Tel-Hai, and lately large painting - sheep heads, landscapes, and even the Sacrifice of Isaac. The ram's head is a symbol of war, of the nation, of sorrow and truth, large and frightening like the bocca della verità (the mouth of truth). The scorched stain representing the ram's head smashes and demolishes the wall of evil and threatens everything; it will protect the eye slits, the source of tears and voices. The form of the head will testify to their existence."