Ariel Reichman

How Many Times. By Bettina Steinbrügge

Reichman’s works, realized across nearly all possible artistic media, are based on the concepts of empathy and
vulnerability; that is, they concern everyone personally. The works are marked by his everyday experiences and
for that reason are also mercilessly honest and approachable.“Subjective memories, daily rituals and fantasies
are the basis of his artistic concerns. He is interested in the spiritual state of phenomena, their possibilities of
succeeding well or failing totally. For Reichman, the intimate is also the political, and that concurrence can en-
able one to try to understand politics and one’s own environment by means of oneself, no matter whether it is
fiction or truth, historical reality or fable.” The point of his works is to say with great empathy and circumspec-
tion something that should really remain unsaid. The point is to erase one’s distance from these events in order
to become aware of one’s own involvement. The abstract status between a political reality and one’s own emo-
tional being is obvious, but it is all too often forgotten. Reichman calls this artistic work between one’s presence
and the physical effect thereof “conceptual Expressionism.” Here Rancière comes into play again, invoking Freud on why he was concerned with art: “It matters little whether the story is real or fictive. The essential is that it be univocal, that, in contrast to Romanticism’s rendering the imaginary and the real indiscernible and reversible, it set forth an Aristotelian arrangement of action and knowledge directed toward the event of the recognition.” Freud preferred the form of the silent word, that is, of the symptom, which is the trace of a story. This would be a good description of Reichman’s practice: he creates objects and artistic artifacts that evoke feelings of confusion and conflicting emotions. Often they cannot be resolved, and in that way they are analogous to the contemporary conditio humana. He causes a trace to speak and in the process urges forth an unarticulated
truth that imprints itself onto the surface of the works and thwarts rational composition. Reichman creates an
ambiguous and subtle play between private and collective memory, apparent idyll, and subliminal brutality.
The Space between Here and There. What sort of a place is Reichman alluding to? What happens in the interstices, in the transitions, at the fences, where no one is watching very carefully but where crucial things happen? It is a place in between that is not necessarily polarized but that is more complicated than it can ever be on either end, since many levels of meeting come together here in an undifferentiated way. It is located between the political and the private and between the intimate and the pub- lic; hence, it is also a place where everything still seems open, a place that is inherently a space of possibility in which one can think and act freely. Not coincidentally I am thinking of the small sculpture And All She Wanted
Was to Bring Him Home (2015), in which a bird is slowly but surely trying to break through a wall to get to
the other side. Spaces of possibility are perceived, conceived, and lived places whose function remains mutable,
flexible, and open. They permit social and economic experiments and give people room for different experi-
ences. It is not surprising that Reichman foregrounds migration and threshold states, since these represent a
big part of his own story. At the beginning I gave a purely positive connotation to this space in between, but it
too is ambiguous. A space in-between is also associated with uncertainty, with danger, and sometimes also with
a lack of belonging. Likewise, Reichman also shows that spaces can be separated, that there are conflicts and
violence. But he does so in a poetic way. His art does not allow affirmation to wash over us, but encourages us
to start thinking and learn to see. Only that which we do not understand stimulates thinking. Reichman’s work
resists expectations and moves toward complexity; precisely therein lies its quality. His artworks seem like enig-
mas, and the more deeply one penetrates them, the more enigmatic they become, since none of them offers
the solution it promises. Reichman does not intend for his art to solidify convictions, but rather to cause them
to waver, thereby activating a process of cognition that is never truly finished. It is certainly kitschy to end with
Bob Dylan’s lyrics, but that does not make it any less true:

How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.