2017, installation view, Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel. Photo: Elad Sarig

Identity politics and gender studies of the opaque: Ruminating on the art of Adi Fluman

Do artworks have an identity? When we look at a work of art we usually know immediately “what it is”, which identity we should apply to it according to clear categories – a painting, a sculpture, a drawing, and a photograph. It is actually the medium of photography, the one that supposedly holds the highest amount of adherence to reality, which made things more complex, redefining, in favor of a more exciting level of complexity (or confusion), the aforementioned act of identification.

The first big break happened with the movements of the 1960s and 1970s – conceptual art, minimal art, performance art, land art, pop art, and arte povera. Following this moment, artworks, especially photographs, started to be distributed as photographs without being actually so, the most obvious example being photographic documentation of performance and land art. The second big break came with the digital revolution and the growing awareness of virtual spaces, which are generated and exist elsewhere.

“Elsewhere” is exactly where Adi Fluman ‘sculpts’ her works. Within the three-dimensional generated space of computer software, Fluman builds scenes, which are first constructed and then covered with specific surfaces. Despite any assumption and easy conclusion she also creates, through the observation of materials such as hair, fabric (from aged cloth to iridescent velvet), leather and glass, the surfaces of the objects built in this virtual space.

After the scene, with its objects and related surfaces, is complete, the artist deals with the source, or sources, of light and finally directs the digital eye in order to virtually photograph the scene she created. This shot is consequently printed on paper, making its transition from the virtual space to the other space, our space. The identification of this object is, as anticipated, quite far from the immediate simplicity introduced above. Is it a photograph? Is it a sculpture? Is it a print? There are multiple answers to these questions and all of them can be easily deconstructed and put under scrutiny.

While the artist is perfectly aware of all these issues and lets us “wander in the dark” trying to translate her cryptic creations (perhaps a slightly sadistic reward for her laborious accomplishments) she also does not miss the opportunity to give us clues, leading us to what she thinks about the essence of the things she makes. Indeed the trap* lies in the frames. Following the print, or rather simultaneously to the creation of what we can encounter through the print, the artist also designs customized frames, which are fabricated with a clear and yet oblique connection with what we see in the print.

For instance, the print of a chunk of digitally sculpted brunette hair is inserted into a wooden frame that not only has the same shades of brown, but it also echoes the existence of every single hair through the veins of the wood. Another example is a print in which we can see a piece of cloth similar to those used to cover the internal part of cases built to collect precious coins. The said print is then presented inside a frame whose shapes, despite the difference in size from an actual case like those, suggest an actual open case as if the cover had been removed leaving half of its zipper on view.

In other words, despite coming from the field of photography, Adi Fluman finally reveals herself as a “digital sculptress” clarifying her total belief in this other space, which is the one generated by the software she uses to make her work. However this conclusion should not let us think that we now left the aforementioned complexity; quite the opposite, the more we think we know what we have in front, the more the thing itself tries to run away from clear definitions.

The last element, which adds more complexity to this scenario, comes from language, another form of communication meant to aim at objectivity. The best example in this regard is the title of Fluman’s first mature presentation, which anticipates this body of work. Entitled Bottleneck** it glorified that gray area, that opaque territory, in which elements of living and non-living objects are superimposed through formalism, makings us wonder, again, and again, and again.

Nicola Trezzi

* In English, the verb “to frame” has a direct meaning, to insert a bi-dimensional object into a frame, and a metaphorical meaning, which is to provide false evidence or false testimony in order to falsely prove someone guilty of a crime, to “trap” a person with unfounded accusations.

** While English stays genderless when it comes to objects, other languages, such as Hebrew (Fluman’s mother tongue) and Italian (my mother tongue), apply gender to objects, adding another layer to this gray area in which dichotomies such as bi-dimensional (photography) and three-dimensional (sculpture), virtual and real, the representation of things (the print) and the thing itself (frame), living and non-living, become two sides of the same coin.