The Meir Agassi Museum:
A Real, Metaphoric, Mental Space

Following "The Meir Agassi Museum" (2004, Curator: Yaniv Shapira)

This Exhibition's catalogue book is available for purchase at the Museum book shop

By Yaniv Shapira

“Illumination is a sudden vision that is given suddenly to the spirit that has gradually been prepared for receiving it. If something is revealed to me this evening, it is because I have carried my heavy stones towards the invisible building. I am preparing a party. I will not have the right to speak about a sudden appearance of a different spirit within me apart from myself, because I am the one who is struggling to awaken it within me.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“I feel multiple. I am like a room with innumerable fantastic mirrors that destroy by false reflections one single pre-existing reality which is not there in any of them and is there in them all… I feel myself as different beings.”
Fernando Pessoa

“My aim is the total work of Art [Gesamtk-unstwerk], which combines all branches of art into an artistic unit.”
Kurt Schwitters

Meir Agassi was known from his childhood on for his artistic tendencies, both in visual art and in writing. In his youth at Kibbutz Ramat-Hakovesh he was already considered an authority on art in his kibbutz, and when he was 16 he was sent to study art at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv (1963-1965). After completing his army service Agassi chose artistic activity as a way of life, and held his first solo exhibition, “Drawings”, at the Bar-Kochba Gallery in Tel Aviv (1970). During the following decade he held five solo exhibitions and participated in the same number of group exhibitions. In 1980 Agassi was awarded a scholarship to study art in England, and in 1982 he settled in Bristol. Concurrently he continued devoting himself to his second love – writing.

Already in 1968 Agassi published his first short story in the Keshet quarterly, and in 1969 his first book of poems, Clouds Carving Forms was published. Subsequently he published dozens of poems, short stories and articles, which appeared in various periodicals and newspapers, including Yediot Aharonot, Ma’ariv, Monitin, Proza, Haolam Hazeh, and Ha’ir. From the mid-’80s on his writing was devoted mainly to art topics, and he wrote regularly for the art periodical Studio (and in January 1988 also guest-edited a special issue of this periodical – Hotel Utopia-Dystopia – which discussed Outsiders’ Art). His biographical novel The Black Hills of Dakota appeared in 1987, and the book Meir Agassi: Yehiel Shemi’s Papers was published in 1998.

The years of Agassi’s childhood and youth in the kibbutz had a decisive influence on the shaping of his personality and the character of his work. The kibbutz grounds, its lawns and dining hall, are presented in his early works as an ideal and familiar territory, a mix of the patterns of the local landscape and of his developing personality. As he matured and became more aware of himself, his turned his focus away from the kibbutz where he had grown up, making it a background against which he clarified to himself questions of identity and belonging.? In The Black Hills of Dakota Agassi sketched a picture of his childhood there in a melancholy light, as one who felt different and persecuted by his peer group. In the dozens of self-portraits he created in a diversity of artistic techniques – drawings, paintings, collage works and photographs – he depicted complex mental and existential states, which compose a rich and multi-faceted mosaic of emotions. On this background, the idea of the museum, which had begun crystallizing in his thought, appeared to him as an ideal solution that could relate to many of the questions of identity that engaged him.

One of the insights Agassi arrived at was an acknowledg-ement of the multiplicity of voices jostling within him, and of his ability, as an artist, to see these as separate artists: “…maybe, at the end of the day, instead of struggling with the idea of the one-unit-cell-Artist, I should change my way of thinking altogether. Maybe, instead of seeing myself ‘officially’ as one artist, I should declare myself as many Artists, with many names (I could invent artists, give them names, biographies, myths, signatures, etc.). why not?”. In a later article, “Some Questions and an Answer”, Agassi once again raised questions that that attest to his mental distress: “How (should I) deal with all these different and divers voices and ghosts of Artists who are populating my mind”, he asks, while describing them as incessantly “haunting, influencing, inspiring, animating, encouraging, motivating me, but […] at the same time, push[ing] me to the edge of so many different directions and inaccessible roads that it leaves me stagnated?”

In 1992, at the height of that period of clarification and crystallization, Agassi announced the establishment of “The Meir Agassi Museum”. The “museum” opened a possibility for him to present various personal portraits he had created, which together represented their creator not as a single personality that uses pseudonyms, nor as person who had undergone a conversion experience or a change of heart, but as a multiplicity of spiritual biographies all of which constitute varying reflections, real and fictional, of himself.

It seems appropriate to look at Agassi’s fictional characters on the background of similar case in the world of culture and art. The Portuguese poet, author and thinker Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) also split himself into several dozens of poets, each of whom speaks in his own unique voice and has a different biographical and intellectual background. Pessoa described his fictional characters by the linguistic term “heteronyms” [hetero – other; onoma – name], and this defined himself as the publisher of their work, which is simultaneously identical with and different from his own.

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) adopted a tactics of imposture as an ironic act towards the abysmal seriousness that characterized the art world during the first decades of the 20th century. This irony reached its peak in February 1917, when Duchamp decided to send a work titled Fountain to an exhibition held by the Society of Independent Artists at the Grand Central Gallery in New York. The organizers of the exhibition were astounded to see that the Fountain was in fact a urinal standing on its side and signed by R. Mutt. Duchamp thus questioned the boundaries of good taste and drew attention to the institutional mechanisms behind the definition of art as art, by means of an object that had never before crossed the threshold of exhibition spaces and whose chances of being liked were very small.

Duchamp’s two-faced artistic strategy was also streng-thened because of the pseudonyms he adopted. In 1920 Duchamp invented another fictional identity, “Rrose Selavy”, a female double of his male identity. He signed this name to scores of art works, letters to friends, poems, etc. In one of the large projects that he created, such as The Box in a Valise (1941), Rrose Celavy is also named as a full partner in the creation, in captions such as “of [de] or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Selavy”. By using her and her name Duchamp sought to create a separate personality for himself, which some historians have seen as a feminine alter ego that questions the rigid gender divisions, and others have seen as a further move in the Duchampian dialectic that questions artistic and cultural conventions.

As for Agassi, his interest lay neither in pen-names nor in a mask or persona. What we have before us are portraits that Agassi created in his own character, “alter egos” that resided in the depths of his consciousness and gave expression to the multiplicity of facets in his personality. For Agassi the museum was an organizational structure that enabled him to encompass not only the characters, who were creatures of his imagination, but also the rest of the components of his work: “only one traditional/new space can contain together (in a form of one unit which is “depart-mental”) a Library, a result of a Studio work, an Archive, Collections and many artists – a Museum. So, my mind, my space – the mental, the metaphorical, the real (where I live and work) – will be a conceptual, metaphorical and real Museum – the Meir Agassi Museum.”. It seems that the appearance of the “museum” in his oeuvre was one of those moments of grace, of illumination, and not in the religious sense of the word but as a consequence of constant and daily mental struggles.

Agassi describes its appearance as moment of truth and happiness such as he had not felt for a long time. He describes the moment of revelation by means of a dream he had: “I wanted to dance because I felt so light, because I knew that from now on I am going to have the purpose and meaning, the drive, the special impulse, the adrenalin and the blessing of the muses”.

With the establishing of the “museum” Agassi began presenting his works under the title (in varying sequences) “Works from the Studio, the Archive, the Collections, the Diaries and the Museum of Meir Agassi”. From that moment on, every work that he created became part of the “museum”, which also encompassed all the works he had ever created. The “Museum” became a real and inseparable part of his life routine, containing all the fields of his artistic activity, his writings, his collections, and even his library with its hundreds of volumes.

A central place in the activities of “The Meir Agassi Museum” was given to the works and the biographies of his three fictional characters – Mo Kramer, David Strauss and Susan Lipski. The portraits of these three – who are different from one another in their character and belong to different periods in the 20th century – became an instrument through which Agassi presented different faces from his inner world.

Agassi’s Portraits

“The link between the three artists from the Meir Agassi Museum Archive and Collections, is the simple act of drawing. […] in retrospect, these artists’ drawings are not just a tool of visual thinking and thought. They are also something close to the nature of what the Surrealists used to call “objects containing our lost spirits in our lost continents”.
Meir Agassi

Mo Kramer (henceforth M.K.) is the most developed character and the one with the largest oeuvre among the characters Agassi created in the context of his “Museum”. Kramer’s estate comprises more than 500 drawings, photographs, portfolios and artist’s books, which also contain texts, letters, poems, and remarks on the nature of drawing.

Agassi presented the essence of M.K.’s oeuvre in a project titled The Lost Life of Mo Kramer (1920-1993), which consists of visual materials (photographs, drawings, collages, etc.) and textual materials (writings, poems, documentations of dreams, letters, etc.) that are inter-related and illuminate one another. At the center of the project there is a cardboard box (8x34x41.5), which contains art items, documents and texts from M.K.’s estate that constitute the main part of the body of his work.

Agassi considered the box as an object possessing many meanings and many uses, as can be seen from his words about another box, Michal Heiman’s : “Like any box the contents of which are still unknown, it may be a box that contains a gift of marzipans, or a Pandora’s box, a black box or a box containing certificates of birth, marriage and death”. Agassi was of course aware of other bodies of work, among them those of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Marcel Broodhaers and Christian Boltanski, that had made use of the box. Duchamp, for example, in 1941 exhibited his work Box in a Valise, which contained a representative sampling of his oeuvre, and at the same time functioned as a “Portable Museum”. Agassi adopted a distinctively Duchampian tactic of design and affixing in the historical memory, when he sought to contain the entire pageant of M.K.’s life and work in The Mo Kramer Box of Fragments from Memory and Amnesia. This box served simultaneously as a portable museum, an archive, and a souvenir that could be bought in the Museum shop.

The portfolio of works titled Meditations on a life as a blurred image, which is also contained in the box mentioned above, contains photographs from M.K.’s “life” – a collection of 18 photographs from a family album and a small booklet that discusses aspects of contemplating photographs and the attempt to reconstruct a life from them. Through the blurred, stained and worn photographs, Agassi seeks to sketch a kind of visual map of biographical milestones in M.K.’s life, while the choice of random, poor quality snapshots taken by an “unknown photographer” contributes to the construction of the enigmatic character. Agassi was very familiar with the work of Michal Heiman, whose “Readymade” photographs by unknown photographers are an important and central component in her work. Her collections contain scores of such photographs, on which she has imprinted the stamp “unknown photographer”. The act of imprinting accords artistic-institutional legitimacy to the anonymous figure in the photograph and to the unknown photographer who took the photograph, who are thus placed in the foreground of the artistic stage. In Agassi’s work, too, the use of “Readymade” photographs connects with questions of lost identity, historical memory, and the construction of the myth of the artist from random biographical fragments.

M.K.’s work consists mainly of drawings, and hundreds of these are stored in “The Meir Agassi Museum”, beside some of the articles that he devoted to the various aspects of drawing. On show in the present exhibition are works from two series of drawings that M.K. created in New York – one in the years 1958-1959, and the other in the years 1975-1981. These two different periods of creation point up the changes in his work from the late ’50s to the early ’80s, and the influences of the time and the place.

The drawings from 1958-1959 are intuitive and compressed. Discernible in them are the influences of American Abstract Expressionism and of the early Cy Twombley, and the imprint of European artists such as Vassily Kandinsky, Kurt Schwitters, Paul Klee, Jo?n Mir?, Andr? Masson and others. Through acts of quasi-automatic scribbling, M.K. creates connections between image and text that turn the writing into drawing and the drawing into writing. This is especially conspicuous in his signature, which appears both in Hebrew and in English, and at times invades the center of the page and becomes an inseparable part of the drawing itself. His drawings form 1975-1981 are much airier and more minimalistic. What is most discernible at this stage of his work are the accumulating influences of the American Minimalism of the late ’70s.

By means of drawing, perhaps more than by any other artistic form, Agassi sought to give expression to the diversity of artistic influences to which he has been exposed. The roots of his concentration on drawing may be attributed to Surrealist art, which reached its peak in Europe in the mid-1920s. Surrealism – an outcome of the undermining of the belief in “reason” and “order” –raised the banner of freedom of the spirit and the imagination, and championed artistic expression that affirms awareness of the irrational, of dreams, of unconscious impulses. Automatic drawing, as a virginal and impulsive artistic act, was perceived by the surrealists as a direct and sincere reflection of the human condition, which is characterized by uncertainty, transience, and chance. Agassi – whose dreams, obsessions and eruptions of the unconscious form an inseparable part of his work – adopted the technique of drawing that had been developed by the Surrealists. By means of his M.K. character he activated the craft of drawing in order to express something of his split personality that was suffused with influences.

David Strauss (henceforth D.S.), unlike Agassi’s two other characters, is not a pseudonym, and his biography is not fictional. The real D.S. lived in Kibbutz Ramat-Hakovesh, where Meir Agassi was born and grew up, and his character was as-it-were filed away in the depths of Agassi’s memory since his early childhood. Despite D.S.’s reclusiveness and his strange and mysterious behavior, or perhaps because of these, his presence played a meaningful role in the boy Agassi’s world picture. In some way D.S. symbolized for Agassi his hidden childhood anxieties.

In the early ’80s the character of D.S. began troubling Agassi’s thoughts. In 1980, it turns out, Agassi became acquainted with Outsiders’ Art, and with “Art brut” – a term that is associated with the art of Jean Dubuffet, and that relates to art created by people who had no communication with any cultural or social center, such as the mentally ill, prison inmates, nomads, pensioners and others. Agassi read and studied a lot about this art and also visited important collections such as the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg, the “Art brut” collection in Lausanne, the collection of Outsiders’ Art in London, etc. Now, for the first time, he was able to connect his memories of the unknown oeuvre of D.S. with a defined domain in the art world – the bounds of Outsiders’ Art.

At around this time Agassi remembered his own personal involvement, at the age of 16, with D/S/’s life story: in the summer of 1962, D.S. was hospitalized, and Agassi – due to his status in the kibbutz as the local expert on art matters – was asked for his opinion about the drawings and paintings that had been left behind in D.S.’s room. Agassi describes his initial encounter with the works, which were different from anything he had known until then, and seemed to him infantile, ugly, primitive and depressing. The recoil he felt towards them was so strong that he turned his face away and wanted to flee from the room. Years later he reconstructed this encounter for himself: “Because of this surface I needed to get as close as possible to them. So close and intimate, that I could smell the paper and the pencil. Their obscurity derived mainly from their poor materials. Their humility [,…]reflected by the ‘poverty’ of the surface, by the cheap, austere paper and the simple primitive and at times systematic traveling of the half-sharpened pencil [reminded me of our first drawings in the kindergarten].”

Agassi did not go back to see D.S.’s original drawings again. He assumed they had been lost, though it is possible that later drawings are still in the old archives in Kfar Ganim, the institution where D.S. was hospitalized during the last 22 years of his life. The series of works titled “The Landscapes of Lost Delusion” consists of 39 works on paper of various kinds – old maps, brown wrapping paper, and printed pages from books upon which Agassi added ink and pencil drawings, coffee and moisture stains and collage. These are works of varying sizes and with faded colors, that are crammed with primitive images, mathematical formulae, musical notes and male-female motifs. The signature “Strauss D” appears on most of them, in large, stylized letters.

It seems that by reconstructing the lost works, Agassi sought to extricate from oblivion not only the oeuvre of D.S., but also the particular person who was part of the human ambience of his kibbutz even though he had never had any direct personal contact with him. These reconstructed works gave him the legitimacy and the institutional framework to create as a “real” Outsider, that is, to bring to expression the unconventional artistic drives that pulsed in him and to create with unbridled artistic freedom. In many senses, these small-scale works enabled him to express the “Outsider” aspect of his personality –be it as a “different” child in the kibbutz, or as an adult living as an exile in England, or as someone who felt that he had not yet attained to the artistic exposure and recognition that he merited.

Susan Lipski (henceforth S.L.) is the third character that Agassi created – an artist, photographer and collector who used to enrich her collections everywhere she traveled. S.L. based her collections principally in her obsessive attraction to cameras, photograph albums and old photographs, which she purchased in secondhand shops, old photography shops, flea-markets and the like. These places, she believed, were collective reservoirs of private memories, where discarded life stories mixed in a public space of anonymity and meaninglessness, “purposeless until their new incarnation by the hand of a new possessor”.

S.L. met Agassi at the Venice Biennale in 1988, and work connections developed between them. In the letters they exchanged she extensively discussed the essence and nature of collecting, and fixes the boundaries of her own collecting to the period between the 1900 and the 1960s. About this time-span she writes: “It was the beginning of that barrage of popular color photography, cheap and more sophisticated cameras and plastic albums and it seems to me, you know, like the end of an era. […] when hunting for these albums I never pretended to myself that I wanted to keep at bay sentimentality and nostalgia. But I guess that the peculiar ironies of the collective memory were on my mind too, I mean, when you gaze into other people’s photographs you are actually gazing into your own.”

The exchange of letters with S.L. enabled Agassi to express his “credo” as a collector. The objects she collected corresponded to his own (Agassi’s collections also included cameras, photo albums, and old photographs), and the interest she took in them paralleled Agassi’s own interest in popular/amateur photography (as distinct from professional/artistic photography). In collections of such objects Agassi found a reflection of the delusive irony of collective memory, on the fine line between remembrance and oblivion. The artistic use that Agassi made of the family photo albums (see also M.K.) turned him into their “new owner”, who contributes to the blurring of the boundary between the private and the public, which S.L. wrote about in her letter. The skill and the methodical approach that he developed in his collecting, the sorting and the cataloguing of his collections, helped Agassi when he turned to setting up his “Museum”.

S.L. is represented in this exhibition by two series of works. The first, “Portrait of a Female Mannequin with a Macintosh and a Homburg”, consists of 16 small text works, oblong in format, which describe in great detail original photographs that depict hats. Beside the works is a list of notes, detailing the place where the photograph was acquired, the data that were appended to it (titles, dates, names of places, remarks) and their character: scribbles on the photograph or on the verso, on an appended note or letter, etc. S.L. selected the photographs described at random from her collection of photographs, which she had accumulated during her travels around the world.

The second series, “Letters from an Unknown Person to an Unknown Person in an Unknown Language About an Unknown Subject”, is based on a letter from S.L. to Agassi from 12 December 1996, and on some drawings that she appended to the letter. In this letter, which was sent in reply to Agassi’s invitation to her to participate in a group exhibition titled “Correspondence” at “The Meir Agassi Museum” together with Mo Kramer and David Strauss, S.L. tells about a severe disease and a personal crisis that she experienced in the ’70s, following which she underwent a series of psychotherapy treatments and joined a workshop called “Therapy through Other Voices”. In the course of the listening exercises in this workshop, she encountered a persona or a “voice” of an autistic person who called himself “X”, and who caused her to paint his “secrets”. Lipski became a medium of that “voice”, created hundreds of drawings in his name, and called them “Letters from an Unknown Person to an Unknown Person in an Unknown Language About an Unknown Subject”. After scrutinizing and learning the works of M.K. and D.S., Lipski added: “[…] I realised to my surprise that these “drawings of X” could not only be a tribute to them, (X is the ultimate obscure artist), or even because, like them, “his-mine” drawings are “manuscripts” somewhere between writing and drawing, but also as a bridge between the two modes of drawing: 1. The insane, the naive, the visionistic, the unconscious Outsider (DS); 2. The intellectual, the erudite, the conscious and influenced Outsider (MK). In this context X could function as the mediator between MK and DS.

This letter (or parts of it), with the few examples attached here from the series ‘Letters From an Unknown Person to an Unknown…’ etc. will constitute my piece and collaboration in your ‘Correspondence’. Yours, Susan”.

By means of S.L’s candid letters, Agassi presents to us a fragile and complex human biography that in many senses corresponds to his won. S.L., who was the same age as Agassi, is the only one of his fictional characters who conducted a personal dialogue and had work connections with him. Their mutual fields of interest enabled Agassi to clarify many of the means and contents characteristic of his own works, and indeed also the characteristics of the art of his two other characters.

With the inception of “The Meir Agassi Museum”, a new and fascinating phase of Agassi’s work began. The museum was an answer principally for his obsessive preoccupation with the traits of his character and his personality, which from that moment on took on “new faces” by means of the three characters that he “created”. Mo Kramer, David Strauss and Susan Lipski, with their biographies and “portfolios”, became a central axis in his new artistic program, and served as mediations of Agassi’s mental states. They enabled him to develop and to give precise expression to his artistic desires, which included the turn to the domains of imagination, dreams and fantasy, the question of identity that arises from the predilection to imposture through other characters and the discussion of the craft of collecting and of Outsiders’ Art. Presenting the various characters in the framework of the “Museum” allowed Agassi to bring together his engagements with painting, drawing, photography and writing in the one sphere.

Well-versed as he was in the history of Western culture, for Agassi the museum in its new format was a mental, metaphoric and real space to create in, and when he decided to “found” it, he did this in a conscious and well-organized way. The importance he attached to the “Museum” is also evinced in the program that he prepared, where it is described as a body whose aims are research and development of its collections, collaboration with artists and other institutions, publication of research articles and dissemination of the art stored within it to the public at large. His intensive activity in this sphere reveals another aspect of Agassi’s artistic personality: in the thirty or so items on show at the “Museum Shop” – which include original works, numbered series, posters, catalogues and other publications – Agassi is revealed as an artist who has learned to develop a crystallized language in the domain of graphic design as well.

Meir Agassi was a man of culture in the broad sense of the word. His activities, his fields of interest and his knowledge went beyond the arbitrary boundaries of the world of visual art and were nourished by literature, poetry, cinema and theater as well. In his life and in his diversified work, which oscillated between the culture of Europe and the developing Israeli reality, he sought to be as exhaustive as he could.

He found “The Meir Agassi Museum” to be a worthy frame-work for all this abundance. In its contents, it represents two contrary poles in his work and his personality that would seem to exclude one another. On the one hand, it constitutes a mirror of his divided personality, his wonder-ings and the orientation of his spirit, which required more that one fictional character on order to articulate the various “voices” that ran around inside him; on the other hand it functions as a self-conscious and well-organized domicile for his entire oeuvre. As such, it embodies the multiplicity of faces and identities that are bound together into a unified artistic expression.