Elie Shamir: The Place of Man
The linguistic and conceptual idiom of Elie Shamir’s work is characterized by a complex relationship with art history. In an indirect dialogue with postmodernism, and with modernist ideas in the background, he chooses to address, in a renewed manner, the concept of man as the center of the universe. His figures seem to emerge from the canvas towards the viewer; their direct, immediate presence raises doubts regarding the place of man in contemporary society.
Shamir’s position seems to reflect a humanizing spirit, in a conflicting reality. According to philosopher George Steiner, who addressed the concept of “dehumanization,” the first methodical industrialization of the human body began in the eighteenth century, as it appeared in the writings of the Marquis de Sade and the paintings of William Hogarth. The spectacular collapse of the European order between the two world wars (1914-1945), when the glory of industrial rationalism was exposed as enabling the death camps and the existence of methodical political torture, genocide, hunger, and burning to death, as well as the words “Stalin,” “The Vietnam War,” “Cambodia,” “Khmer
Rouge,” and so forth – all these resound in the background of the discussion on processes of dehumanization occurring in the twentieth century. According to Steiner, the twentieth century is responsible for the notion equating mass production with dehumanization.
Dehumanization was discussed at length in the works of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, particularly Herbert Marcuse in his One-Dimensional
Man (1964). They argued that the triumph of late capitalism was enabled by mechanisms of dehumanization, which define economic value as absolute value and diminish man to his productive-consumptive dimension only. Hence, the obligation to create a counter-culture that will preserve human likeness and ensure spiritual freedom.
The return to humanization in the work of Elie Shamir thus embodies a moral choice, reflecting a socio-political stance informed by contemporary needs. Man stands at the center of the rural idyll of “Kfar Yehoshua” – a theme that has accompanied Shamir throughout most of his career. The clumps of earth in his paintings rest on geological layers laden with the Biblical past, ancient culture, Zionist history, socio-economic ideology, and artistic tradition. “Kfar Yehoshua” is simultaneously a specific agricultural settlement in the Jezreel Valley and the story of a general local ethos. This site embodies the Israeli idyllic past as a kind of lost cultural paradise. Shamir places it before us as a gauge and mirror of the society we live in today.
In the twenty-first century, a site like this, manifesting the ideas of the ideal/idealized past, offers, on the one hand, an incisive critique of the mass society that believes in quick fixes, a society characterized by a short memory, anxiety, alienation, and poignant loneliness. On the other hand, in our times the site represented in Shamir’s works is also a proposal for change, renewal, and hope.
Elie Shamir was born in Kfar Yehoshua, 1953; lives and works in Kfar Yehoshua.