Sculpture Garden at the Spring of Salmacis / Ido Cohen

“I wasn’t making a human being; I was making a place where you can go.”
- Barbara Hepworth 

Greek mythology tells how the handsome Hermaphroditus, son of Aphrodite and Hermes, came to bathe in a spring inhabited by the nymph Salmacis. Salmacis desired and attempted to seduce him, but he rejected her advances and broke her heart. In a fit of rage, pain and passion, Salmacis leapt onto Hermaphroditus, coiled herself around him like a snake and called out to the heavens: “Grant this, you gods, that no day comes to part me from him, or him from me.”[1] Her prayers were answered, and the two merged to become a single androgynous entity, both male and female. The raging Hermaphroditus cursed the spring, so that anyone who bathed in it would suffer the same fate and “leave half a man”. On her part, Salmacis lost herself completely: Her wild abandon caused her to effectively kill herself through Hermaphroditus. The desire to become an ultimate, unified whole became her undoing.

Ovid’s words describe Salmacis’ spring not as untamed wilderness, but rather a well-tended garden: “There were no marsh reeds round it, no sterile sedge, no spikes of rushes: it is crystal liquid. The edges of the pool are bordered by fresh turf, and the grass is always green.”[2] Similarly, it appears that ancient Roman statues of Hermaphroditus were often placed within gardens, on their threshold or within view of them – an indication of the Roman view that gardens themselves were hermaphroditic spaces, both internal and external, real and mythical, full of gender ambiguity. [3]

This exhibition reimagines Salmacis’ fountain of pleasure and despondence as a sculpture garden – or, conversely, envisions a sculpture garden that has been bathed in Salmacis’ cursed waters. Though the exhibited sculptures are not figurative, they are very physical; They are imperfect and ambiguous. Encountering them may be arousing– perhaps even erotic – and at times, frustrating.

Ami Raviv’s work begins, conceptually, with the marks left behind by the body: Sweat stains, bodily fluids, dips and indentations. The work he exhibits here is reminiscent of an empty garden niche, or a torso statue. At its center is an impression of the artist’s back which has been drawn and chiseled away. Ronen Raz’s David’s Toyota Delight features a Toyota hubcap engulfed in smooth, taut skin – it is an object that has grown pubic hair and yearns to remain in its prime, young and desirable forever. The sculpture, or parts of it, may be viewed as male or female, masculine or feminine. Aharon Adani’s works represent the ancient link between sports, erotica and sculpture. In his younger days, Adani was a gymnast who often performed on rings, including by whipping around them in continuous circles. The warmth and elasticity of the rings stand in contrast to the rigid coldness of the marble, which features an image of soaring lightness. Eden Yona’s sculpture is a Dada-esque tribute, a comical, forced juxtaposition between pleasure and pain.

There were several models for the depiction of Hermaphroditus in classical sculpture. One was the “Sleeping Hermaphroditus”, which unlike the front-facing model, did not reveal the subject’s androgynous nature right away. From behind, the prone figure appears to have breasts, narrow hips and rounded buttocks and thighs; the viewer must walk around the sculpture to discover it also has male genitalia. This experience of ambiguity and multiplicity offered by the sculpture causes audiences to linger before it, attempting to determine whether the reclining figure is a man or a woman, male or female, active or passive. In 1863, the English poet Swinburne described his encounter with the Louvre’s “Sleeping Hermaphroditus” sculpture as an erotic experience oscillating between passion and despair, pleasure and frustration.

In abstract sculpture, this experience becomes subtler, and perhaps more poetic. It certainly does in the case of Moran Lee Yakir’s autoerotic sculpture, which slopes and drips over its supporting podium. Punctured by a gaping hole on one end and featuring a drooping head on the other, it appears to be frozen in time and yet white-hot, throbbing with an inner pulse. Ehud Pecker’s work from the 1970s exemplifies the human eye’s tendency to map a body and even a gender onto the most minimalist, geometric of sculptures, no matter how hard the genre sought to avoid such representation. Eldar Krainer’s relief is a plastic reimagining of a graffitied image of intertwined hearts, an attempt to “craft an artistic object from the transitory nature of new and dying loves”. Using car paint to create an industrial-like finish, Krainer employs the allure of consumer products to express a poetic longing for human warmth and connection.

Almost 2,000 years after the creation of the classic “Sleeping Hermaphroditus” sculpture, the image of Hermaphroditus crossed another boundary of artistic sterility when Marcel Duchamp purchased a urinal in 1917 and declared it was an artwork titled “Fountain”. Functionally male but visually female, the Fountain was inherently hermaphroditic. This, along with the frequent use of public urinals as a site for sexual encounters between men in those days, helped Duchamp draw a link between avant-garde art and queer sexuality.[4] In the garden of Salmacis, Duchamp’s Fountain is represented by Shir Cohen’s gleaming-white sculpture, whose materials were lifted from the world of bathroom design and which invites speculation as to the plumbing hidden within. A different Duchamp work – the Chocolate Grinder paintings – comes to mind when viewing another work by Ronen Raz, one which is made up of old leather gloves that have been stretched, or smeared, across an old frame. The chocolate-like texture and the indent at the center of the work evoke the act of masturbation and self-pleasure, which is what the Chocolate Grinder signified for Duchamp himself.

Abstraction, fusion, ambiguity and obfuscation are the tools employed by the works in The Sculpture Garden at the Spring of Salmacis to embody the beauty and melancholy of queer existence. Through them they open up a wide range of identifications, which are rarely permitted by straightforward physical depictions of the body.

[1] Ovid. “Metamorphoses.” The Ovid Collection, Univ. Of Virginia E-Text Center, translated by Kline, ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph4.htm. Accessed 12 Aug. 2024.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Von Stackelberg, Katharine T. “Garden Hybrids: Hermaphrodite Images in the Roman House.” Classical Antiquity, vol. 33, no. 2, 2014, pp. 395–426

[4] Franklin, Paul B. “Object Choice: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and the Art of Queer Art History.” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, 2000, pp. 23–50.