Joshua Neustein: You cannot step into the same river twice
Joshua Neustein (b. 1938, Danzig), an internationally-recognized pioneer of conceptual art, began his artistic and theoretical activity in 1960s Israel. Neustein is known for the original vision he brought to environmental art in charged locations. His groundbreaking works on paper expanded the definition of drawing. He is also renowned for his installation series Cities of Ash, presented in five museums across three continents.
Neustein's new work, created especially for the Museum's gallery for temporary exhibitions set within the collection galleries of Israeli Art, emerges as a distant echo and a rethinking of the Jerusalem River Project—a revolutionary work from 1970. In a sound work—the first ever produced in Israel—Neustein and his project partners, Georgette Batlle and Gerard Marx, placed loudspeakers in Wadi Azul, along the dry course of the Valley descending eastward from Jerusalem. The sounds of flowing water emitted from the speakers formed an imagined river, in a radical gesture that challenged distinctions between nature and representation, and between material and language.
When invited to reenact the sound sculpture of the valley indoors, inherent problems presented themselves: can one enact a land art piece inside the museum? A discourse developed between Neustein and the curators on how to overcome this paradox. The title of the current work, You Cannot Step into the Same River Twice—drawn from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus—illuminates Neustein's commitment to materials and to constant movement in his oeuvre, refusing to settle into fixed or familiar forms. In the new work, Neustein presents the meandering path of a river using stainless steel plates and sound. This winding steel river eludes clear medial definition as installation, sculpture, or event, distilling formal and material principles that recur throughout his earlier works.
Many of Neustein’s works are welded with sound. Aspects of this "steel river" echo his previous installations. You Cannot Step into the Same River Twice floods into the current crises as a work of institutional critique. It is both site-specific and time-specific. Neustein is among the earliest artists whose sensibility maintains high modernist sobriety while simultaneously engaging with eco-poetics.
Neustein's work celebrates the modernist gaze and continues to engage with Jewish identity, as well as with questions of tension, displacement, and geographic ambivalence.
Joshua Neustein, Georgette Batlle and Gerard Marx
Jerusalem River Project, 1970
photography: Reuven Milon