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Reuben Kadish and His Work

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Reuben Kadish and His Work ' REUBEN KADISH • June 10 - August 1, 1992 University Art Gallery Staller Center for the Arts I State University of New York at Stony Brook I CURATOR'S NOTE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Without the dedicated, knowledgable, and sensi­ I would like to express my gratitude to guest tive help of sculptor Jenny Lee and painter Hilda curator Mel Pekarsky, painter and Professor of O'Connell, this exhibition would not have been Art at the State University of New York at possible, and I want to thank them. Herman Stony Brook, for curating this exhibition. Thanks Cherry, Reub's good friend, a poet of a painter, are also due to Jenny Lee, Hilda O'Connell, and and a wonderful man, would have added to his Douglas Still, Registrar, and the staff of Grace statement, but couldn't, owing to failing health; Borgenicht Gallery for their assistance with the he passed away earlier this year. To Dore Ash­ organization of this exhibition. ton, universally renowned and respected for her I also want to thank Dore Ashton for contri­ work on a generation of feisty artists that buting the insightful essay published in this cata­ changed art in America and the world, I express logue. I am also grateful to Herman Cherry who my personal thanks for a deeply felt and moving gave us permission to reprint his essay on appreciation of Reuben Kadish and his work. Reuben Kadish in our catalogue. Special thanks are also extended to members of Mel Pekarsky the Staller Center for the Arts staff: Heejung May, 1992 Kim and Amy Schichtel, Curatorial Assistants; Ann Bomberger, Brenda Hanegan, Julie Larson, Michael Parke, and Christina Ridenhour, Gallery Assistants; David Buckle, Jisook Kwon, and Roseann Stewart, Gallery Interns; Patrick Kelly, Liz Stein, and the Technical Crew, Staller Center for the Arts, for exhibition lighting; and Mary Balduf, Gallery Secretary. Most of all, I wish to thank Reuben Kadish for sharing his work with the Stony Brook community. Rhonda Cooper Director Pli«o tmlil' • 1992 Res;n. Ch<rry, NYC Spa.rt<l.CUJ, 19&8 Terracotta, 2•* x 14 x 20"' •1992 UnJ..,.lty Art Gallny, SWJor Conttt for tho Am, Stat• Unlwnlty of New Yorlt at Stony Brook Front Cover: At .teca, 1980 Bronte, 59" high Typttttting and Printing: TAM COMMUNICATIONS, Ltnt by Mr. and Mn. Michael Harris Bohnni&,NY REUBEN KADISH: Man of Substance In one of Kadish's published statements, his intelli­ Mexican revolutionary thought that these two boys, gence and self-irony peer through an appropriate Kadish and Guston, were America's great hope. He quotation: "words, words, words." He knows, and sent them to Mexico to make a gigantic mural in anyone who writes knows, that the distance between Michoacan, and Kadish most certainly registered words and things can be very great, and sometimes forever the searing light and the great stone objects unbridgeable. His own most profound needs are met ancient people carved, and the thousands of sculp­ not through words, but through tangible things tures fashioned in rich red clay, and even the three­ which, all the same, have meaning. What one feels, penny prints with their harsh celebrations of the Day of Death; their skeletons and horses and dogs and • confronted by Kadish's sculptures, is an intense search, born of myriad experiences in a long life; an cows and men all submitting to the forces of destiny existential understanding of the importance of homo with grinning masks; those mad calaveras of Posada. fa/Nr - he who makes, who shapes. Even then, around twenty years old, Kadish knew I think of Kadish as a man of substance. Of substan­ that these reminders, so many of them monumental, ces. If we divest the word substance of its long history were all too often of terrible things. of philosophical conundrums, it remains indelibly A few years later, word began to filter back to the substantial-wrought of matter and simply there, United States about the activities of the Nazis, and standing. (The Latin root of the word has the conno­ Kadish's alert imagination was bestirred. He would, tation of standing thereness. Quite unlike the words, alas, have an opportunity during the Second World words, words.) Aristotle thought of substance as any War to see for himself what human beings could do "distinct" thing, but he knew, and artists have always when the will to destroy took charge. He was not known, that substance is always coupled with shadow. unaware, as his drawings of the period show, that Only a sculptor who is himself a distinct thing, stand­ wanton violence not only murders people, but also ing, ever really understands with all his being what it mangles the trees, beasts, and everything contribut­ is to fashion another distinct thing that stands, shad­ ing to life that is not human. Finally, the issue of the ows and all, there. And that also embodies meaning, Holocaust (of all holocausts, since one of Kadish's however mired in shadows. most profound wounds remains a vivid image of what Kadish's caveat about words of course diminishes hydrogen bombs really do)-such dreadful memories the confidence of the writer who knows all too well in one lifetime have surely bu.rrowed into the man what Kadish means. I approach his work, particularly that fashions his response in substances and shapes the reliefs and heads of recent years, trepidantly. I do that bear witness. not want to describe his method, which is superb I have no idea why Kadish chose to respond to his technically, or his choice of traditions, which is ob­ deepest needs by going to ea.rth again. That is, the vious. Rather, I want to try to talk about the sub­ famous decade in which the boy from the big city stance of his work as if it were (and he says it is) the became an expert man of the land, growing provender evidence of the whole of his experience in life; the for himself and his animals, and tending to the ani-. tangibilia remaining after experience upon experience mals with a new awareness of their coexistence moulds the inner man. I, the witness, cannot be sure throughout the history of art with the image of man. (can he, the artist?} just how these various and often For many years he worked only the land. But I am overwhelmingly tragic experiences can have wound almost certain that in the mud of the farm, and even themselves into the huge terra cotta heads, diminish­ the mud of the pigsty, Kadish felt his potential. When ing all the spaces around them and proclaiming them­ he picked up the mud and began to fashion it, he was selves sovereign reminders. Or, into the large sconces at home. As his friend, the wise and intelligent painter hardly containing their enthroned goddesses and Herman Cherry, wrote: "Some of his large terra cottas mythic heroines. But there is a thread, certainly, lead­ look as if they had been dragged from the earth, ing back to the fresh and intense experiences of Kad­ bringing with them scriptural matter. Clods of earth ish's early youth. Back, in fact, to the days when he cling like leeches to its life force." In any case, at a and Philip Guston waxed indignant about the excesses certain point in his life, Kadish felt a compelling force in American life, such as the brutal activities of the and answered with a prolific few decades of scuplture. Klan in Los Angeles when they were boys, and scenes I don't think that a lifetime of worry and dismay of cops wading in among strikers to crack skulls and about human destruction ls all of Kadish's biograph­ poke billy sticks int<feyes. And then, there is Kadish's ical story, and it would be ridiculous to assume that he encounter with the fiery Mexican, Siqueiros, who is moored in tragedy. Like many other artists, he has was filled with certainty that only ra,dical acts would known the great explosive joys of seeing the world ever set mankind right. Fervent and volatile. this through the eyes of artists of other times and other places. Surely his familiarity with India, and it.s over­ heads-slit eyes, protruding eyes, eyes sunk behind whelming sculptural presences, twining and inhabit­ the bony cage-and I imagine the younger Kadish was ing centuries of invidual Uves, and his immense knowl­ attentive to Picasso's eye that so unerringly selected edge of the great works of art of the world, have inventions from so-caUed primitives. But Kadish has contributed incalculably to his own expertise. It is his own story to tell, and it tells of the obdurate survi­ not accidental, I'm sure, that he chose to work in val of he who thinks and suffers and shapes. modes that human beings have nurtured for many Part of his story has to do with his extended rumi­ centuries, using earth and metals drawn from the nations on the nature of myths, and particularly the ea.rth. myth of the earth mother. "Don't forget," he told me He says, '1'm absolutely archaic," but what does once, '1 have worked with animals." In his cryptic that mea.n7 I have reason to beUeve that those who way, Kadish tells of the continuity of man and beast see themselves in the great prospects of history, or and, above all, the mystery of procreation which he those who renew traditions, no matter how rebel­ sees centered in woman. A long, interesting history Uously, still have inexplicable powers.
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