text by R. Zommer  Ein Hod Museum Director  

Yuval Shaul’s new series of works, currently exhibited at the Janco Dada Museum, addresses a moral problem. All the works are made of animal hides, animals which not only provide man with meat, but those whose hides, muscles and fur benefit man. Since the dawn of civilization man used to his advantage, and even today, on the threshold of the millennium, the exploitation continues. 

Yuval Shaul uses the skins as a kind of ready made. He buys them after they have been treated, and are ready for their next function (upholstering material? garment? rug?), but he does not treat them any further and does not change them in any way. What he does is introduce man’s greatest creation-culture: words put together to produce an idea.

Yuval Shaul juxtaposes two principal essences constituting his works: matter versus spirit. The matter is the base, and the spirit is the verbal expression of the fur.

He culls his sayings from all sorts of sources, but most of them have their origins in popular catch phrases. He has found some in newspaper articles or in books, and some are classical aphorisms, which he quotes in his works in Hebrew and in English. Although they originally referred to every-day occurrences, most of them are full of pathos. “Hope always dies last” is an overstated title of a news story about the failure of a football team, which he stamped on a cow skin. “Happiness is an achievement without refinement” is a sentence he found in article dealing with poverty and with every man’s right for happiness. And what about animals? Is “Purgatory is fellowman” the answer?

In the majority of works the association between animal and text is only implied and exists on the philosophical level, but in some of them Shaul presents the problem directly: “Many foals died whose hides became saddles on their dam’s backs”. Every word in this gruesome sentence is printed separately on the skin of a cow and is elegantly framed. “To live they do not wish, to die they don’t know how” is stamped in a circle on a stretched round –framed cattle skin.

Shaul prints the sayings in large, distinct and well-marked letters, as befits a civilized person. The skins, on the other hand, hang loosely in most of the cases. Man’s strong point in his spirituality; the animal only supplies the base. The writing is sometimes applied obliquely, as if on delivery boxes, apparently to suggest that men treats cattle as goods. 

The artist thinks that the work bearing the inscription “Emotions are the natural substitute to intelligence” presents the problem in the most blatant way. Even though opinions vary as to whether animals have feelings, man indisputably differs from them in his superior intelligence, thanks to which he has become the most powerful creature on earth, while using and abusing the animals to his advantage. If man had assimilated this saying, he might have treated animal as creatures with equal rights to his own.

Shaul also uses humor, in sentences like “ The one who has no salt in his tears has no sugar in his laughs”, or “Silence is the beloved food of sorrow”. But his humor is mostly apparent in the series of maps, in which, using the titles “Asia”, Europe”, etc. he associates the natural spots and splashes on the cattle’s skin with the geographical division of the world by man. However, the use of humor, the elegance and the meticulous writing do not obscure the principal message of the exhibition. The artist’s gentle handling of the cattle’s hide is rather unlike man’s rough handling of animals.

Yuval Shaul juxtaposes in his works culture and sophistication with beastliness and wildness. The works are minimalist, but the conjunction between the words and the material gives rise to a charged, thought provoking and irritating effect. Ultimately we are left with a question whether a work of art made of the skin of animals is not in itself an act of exploitation. The artist has chosen to express himself and present the problem by using the genuine material, and thus radicalizing his message. It is a sort of protest and a way to bring up the issue for public debate. The question itself remains open.  

Raya Zommer , Museum Director ,Ein Hod, Summer 1999