Following the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s belief that ‘a great mind is androgynous’, in her eponymous essay A Room of One’s Own, the English novelist Virginia Woolf argues that creativity occurs in a great union between the masculine and the feminine, a melding intercourse between two opposites. In Drawing the Waves, a collaborative project between contemporary artists Diana Blok (b. 1952, Uruguay) and Ruthi Helbitz Cohen (b. 1969, Israel), Woolf’s experimental and ‘mystic’ novel The Waves (1931), is the starting point for an exploration of identity existing beyond the Cartesian dualism and gender binary.
Watery beginnings
Set in the cold waters of the English coast, nature is a vehicle for deconstructing the self in The Waves. ‘We may sink and settle on the waves’, Rhoda exalts in one of six dramatic soliloquies, pondering the dissolving of the self into nature’s makeup. Mythology, so rich in allegory spanning the skies and the seas, also reveals the artifice of our corporeal borders in its illustrious descriptions of the births of its gods and goddesses. Take for instance, Aphrodite’s exquisite birth; as the daughter of Ouranus (the Sky), her universal inception merged the land and waters – sunrises and sunsets, the marked breaking of polar elements, are her favoured times of the day.
Blok and Helbitz have long turned to mythological archetypes, such as Aphrodite, to explore the performativity of gender and deconstruction of the body in their respective practices. After meeting through a chance encounter with a photograph of Marina Abramovic taken by Blok in 1996, the artists found a kindred common ground, in spite of their differing locations, cultural backgrounds and upbringings.
Blok, a self-taught visual artist and photographer, was born in Montevideo, Uruguay to a Dutch-Jewish diplomat father and a Catholic Argentinian mother. Her mobile upbringing spent navigating Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia, before arriving in Amsterdam in the early 1970s, played a huge role in her exploration of identity. Helbitz, on the other hand, received a formal arts education in her home country of Israel. A painting and installation artist, her interests in the arts and psychology lead her to carving an academic route throughout the country in Haifa, Ramat Hasharon, Tivon and Jerusalem. She currently resides and works in Tel Aviv.
Taking into account the above circumstances, as well as the impossible to ignore, ongoing socio-political unrest in Israel, one could easily reduce this collaboration to a binary interpretation. One artist is operating from Amsterdam, the self-proclaimed beacon of the liberal west; the other, from the authoritarian and unsettled east. However, just as in what Blok describes as an infinite ping-pong of sketches, snapshots, photographs, found objects, films and prints shared back and forth between the artists transcends any linear reading, so too do the artists’ identities and backgrounds resist any reductive labelling. They cannot be pinned down; like women in flight.
Uniting through the figure of the wayward witch
In her reading of Serinity Young’s book Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics and Other Airborne Females, the art historian Marina Warner, observes how ‘Women who fly want to be somewhere else to stay there; they do not want to return to conventional experience, which they view as captivity. They require us to rethink our ideas about female waywardness.’ Through their respective artistic mediums, both artists turn to these winged mythical women to deviate from conventional representations of the body.
Take for instance, Blok’s uncanny black-and-white self-portraiture series Flight of Folly (1985), which subverts Francisco de Goya’s fantastical beings in flight in Los Disparates (The Follies) (1815-1824). The melding of the curved spines of Blok and her trusted model companion, while they straddle a broomstick, references the twisted bodies that mingle in Goya’s chaotic tableaus, while ridiculing binary gender representations. The androgyne silhouette that Blok and her partner cut ‘enters a nearly symbolical realm where duality and social-role playing are left behind.’
The myth of the winged woman and her capacity to create new dialogues of the body is frequently explored in Helbitz’s large canvas works. In a six by three metre canvas bricolage, Egyptian Magician (2018), a chorus of ghostly sybils emerges from a merging of goauche, inks and ready-made materials, such as laundry softeners and tape from her family’s construction business. With Helbitz’s distinctive puddles of paint, the ambiguously sexed forms twist and distort like a Schiele or Kokoshka, dismembering the human form and distinct markers of gender. Devoid of depth of field and perspective, the phantasms float on the canvas; their weightlessness calling to mind Leonara Carrington’s phantasmagorical creatures. Helbitz recalls a how an early childhood encounter with a Marc Chagall painting of a white bride suspended in the sky spurred an intense desire of flying within her. She tells me, “I love the idea of being above the ground as high as I can be… I had a repetitive dream when I was a child that I teach people how to fly, I even remember the technique!” To fly, to become a witch, is an intoxicating archetype that challenges gender assumptions. After all, these mythological beings override and subvert the silencing of women that has happened over the centuries. A woman in flight is victorious over the systemic mistrust she has been subject to throughout history; the grimmest instance being the practice of burning witches.
Rewriting the word through a performative baptism
It comes as no surprise then, that Drawing the Waves began in the air. Its aerial roots trace back to 2021, when Helbitz began drawing on an edition of The Waves she was gifted from a friend, while suspended 36,000 ft in the sky. She produced instinctive, sensual pen drawings from snippets, utterances and passages that beckoned her attention. Anamorphic forms glide over the uniform black typeface: hermaphroditic seraphs, biblical succubus and bare-breasted torsos, recalling the representations of the body in mythology, religious iconography and the classical arts. Sharing these drawings with Blok spurred an immediate and intense interaction between the two artists. Thus, a co-conspiring waywardness was born mid-air.
The artists share with me the countless scans, pages of books, photographs and short films which form their cross-disciplinary project. These works took on a performative element, as the artists united in the Netherlands to return the physical copy of The Waves to its birthplace – the sea. Just like the poet Jean Cocteau, who roused Greek mythological characters like Orpheus, from the seabed of the Mediterranean, with the result of works such as Le Testament d’Orphée (1959), Blok and Helbitz excavate the roots of Woolf’s work, by returning it to its ontological roots. They bathed the prints they had created from the pages of The Waves in the salty waters of the North Sea, and later, repeated this baptism of the body on the Greek Mediterranean island of Milos. The artists worked on a further three books in this immediate, tactile manner – the Old Testament’s The Book of Judith, which also happens to bear the name of Helbitz’s mother; the Song of Songs, the erotic poem found in the Hebrew Bible; and poems by Hafiz, 14th century Iran’s most lauded lyric poet.
Deconstructing the cult of Aphrodite
The encounter of the natural elements of water cascading with ambiguous human forms on paper produced delightful and unexpected results; muddling mythological archetypes before the artists’ eyes and bringing contemporary meaning to them. The legend of Aphrodite, continues to attract us, and Blok and Helbitz have equally been fascinated by the goddess and the pearls. When cults of cosmetic surgery, fad diets, fitness gurus and clean eating devotees continue to aspire towards society’s thirst for the unattainable – of eternal youth and beauty – the story of Aphrodite is still relevant for deconstructing our concepts of gender today.
Aphrodite’s pearls symbolise tears of joy wept by the goddess of sexual love and beauty. According to the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, the goddess was born from the white foam produced by the severed genitals of Uranus (Heaven), after his son Cronus threw them into the sea. Her name derives from this ecstatic birth – aphros signifying ‘foam’. Pearls are therefore inherently erotic. In a portrait Diana made of her mother in 1996, a string of pearls drapes over her neckline and cleavage. The passage of time is marked in the creases, jutting collarbones and streams of bloodlines which make their presence known on delicate skin. Blok’s Aphrodite problematises societal stereotypes surrounding beauty, aging and sexuality, as flesh and bones, reminders of our mortality, dance together with beauty.
Helbitz also visits the figure of Aphrodite to flirt with the borders of death and beauty in a series of visceral paintings of the 20th century sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, seen in The Book of Ruth. Unlike Bert Stern’s black and white 1962 photographic series of the actress taken in her final living months which captures her familiar Hollywood glamour, here, Monroe is dismembered by Helbitz’s expressive lines, which strike through pools of watercolours on her skin. Our gaze lands onto the pearl necklace trailing from her puffed scarlet lips: an irrefutably phallic image; like the cigarettes pursed between the lips of ingenues from the French New Wave. Death and pleasure intertwine as the 20th century Aphrodite strangles herself with the chain; pearls are both sexually charged talismans and the messengers of death. Like the grotesque allure of Carol Rama’s portraits, or the wistful melancholia of Tracey Emin’s drawings, the bodily forms in Helbitz’s works contradict any societal conventions of femininity.
Gender troublemaking with the androgyne
The figures in Drawing the Waves float in liminal waters: they are neither male nor female. Androgynes, ambiguously sexed creatures and hermaphroditic angels spill over the borders of gender, entering what Woolf posits ‘a nearly symbolical realm where duality and social-role playing are left behind.’ The early Christian martyr Saint Sebastian perhaps most captures this hermaphroditic state, and is a key inspiration for both artists. Irrevocably androgynous, he is often pictured tied to a tree, torso skewed in a delightfully camp air. Helbitz and Blok consider him a key reference for resisting societal categorisations and exploring different ways of being.
In an earlier black and white self-portrait from 1992, Blok embodies the iconic figure, throwing her head back in a dynamic fashion typical of the medieval and Italian Renaissance paintings of him. The artist tells me that she ‘has always felt an intuitive pull towards the many representations of St. Sebastian in churches large and small across the whole of Latin America, documented a large diversity as well.’ Indeed, Saint Sebastian also nods to the plurality of cultural identity, how different cultures and religions diverge and intersect, producing new readings on bodies.
Helbitz has also long been mesmerised by religious icons and their capacities for exploring identity. Video calling from her home in Israel, Helbitz recalls her childhood fantasy of becoming a nun. She tells me that despite being raised in a Jewish family, she was always titillated by this possibility of becoming – a wish that was fulfilled when she was invited to stay with nuns at a monastery in Jerusalem during the pandemic. Religion weaves its way through Helbitz’s practice, with frequent references to art history and Christian iconography. For Helbitz, Saint Sebastian stands for Tikun Olam, the Jewish concept of correction, in regards to victim women.
Revisiting the waters to make sense of the present
Helbitz’s 3rd century Roman Christian martyr is a doe-eyed androgyne, neither distinctly male nor female; they occupy an in-between territory. This gender-nonconforming being is nothing new. As a tide of far-right ideology grapples Europe, those in the far-right seats of power like to cry out loud and rage that gender politics is a new ideology, when in fact, the ambiguously sexed hybrid being has roamed the pages of antiquity. As the scholar Dennis Young observes while writing about Virgina Woolf, ‘Among the ancient Greeks not only Hermaphrodite (child of Hermes and Aphrodite) but Eros too, the divinity of love, were in sex both female and male.’ It is therefore by looking to the past, unearthing age-old allegories of the world that Drawing the Waves makes sense of the patchwork of identity, the performativity of gender. Following the self-dubbed imaginative feminism of the French psychologist and writer Ginette Paris, as humans, we are inextricably linked to the natural world around us, and possess an ontological connection to the sea:
“do we not feel, in going to the sea, a sense of return to our origin, to the rhythm of the waves, and to the moist?”
Dipping the pages into the waters, Blok and Helbitz not only add another dimension to their living archive of performativity and the deconstruction of identity, but also force us to address our very essence. I write this from my current home by the Mediterranean Sea; the waves rocking back and forth, returning me to my origins, whether I am man, woman, living being, or a cluster of atoms swimming in the universe.
Drawing the Waves by Diana Blok and Ruthi Helbitz Cohen will be exhibited for the very first time as a six-screen video installation at the Museum de Fundatie, the Netherlands in October 2023. Helbitz’s solo exhibition will be running in the museum at the same time. Meanwhile, Blok welcomes a retrospective exhibition at the COBRA Museum, Amstelveen, the Netherlands in 2024. Drawing the Waves will travel to the Ramat Gan Museum, Israel in autumn 2025.
- Ginette Paris, Pagan Meditations: The Worlds of Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia, (Thomspon, Conn.: Spring Publications, 2022), 18.
- Marina Warner, Flightiness, Vol. 40, No. 16, 30 August 2018, London Review of Books, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n16/marina-warner/flightiness [last accessed: 03/07/2023].
- Dennis Young, The Mythological Element in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: Bernard’s Vision, (Iowa Journal of Literary Studies 7(1), 94-104., 1986) doi: https://doi.org/10.17077/0743-2747.1195
- ibid, 95.
- ibid.
- Ginette Paris, Pagan Meditations: The Worlds of Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia, Thompson, Conn.: Spring Publications, 2022), 17.
