A drop in the ocean: An art installation in Ramle takes a creative dip in the water

Daniel Rothbart has a thing about water, and with good reason. Water can be so many things. But one thing is undeniable: life here on Terra firma is unsustainable without it. 

We may merrily wash our cars, hose down the sidewalk in front of our home or store, and water our lawns and other vegetation that really shouldn’t grow here in the arid Middle East, but we simply cannot survive without the precious liquid that accounts for around 60% of the human body mass. 

Fifty-seven-year-old Jewish-American multidisciplinary artist Rothbart expresses his regard for water in his own inimitable way in the RamleAnthropocene installation, currently open to the public at the history-laden subterranean Pool of the Arches venue in Ramle, under the auspices of the Contemporary Art Center Ramle (CACR) and curator Dr. Smadar Sheffi.

There is often a significant thought-provoking subtext to Rothbart’s body of work, which has stretched this way and that in terms of theme, style, and discipline over the past three-plus decades. Water has made frequent appearances along the way, as have other components of this planet’s fragile ecology. His installation creations have appeared in bodies of water across the globe, with the raw material frequently consisting of weird-and-wacky glass and aluminum sculptures.

A few years back, he found out about the Pool of the Arches while researching ancient reservoirs on the Internet. RamleAnthropocene is the culmination of three years of research – and developing artwork that feeds off the history, dynamics, and unique aesthetics of the 1,200-year-old former cistern. 

Rothbart has plenty of previous artistic aquatic endeavors. One large-scale thematic exploration saw him immerse some of the artifacts that feature in the Ramle work at a spot close to his home patch in New York. Water Clocks: A Floating Sculptural Installation in the Hudson River featured aluminum arabesques bobbing quasi-amorphously around spheres of glass he picked up on his rounds, thus creating a snaking affair that constantly changed form with the bifurcating river currents. 

Rothbart has a portfolio of unorthodox aquatic works

That and a string of other water-related works were, inter alia, designed to draw attention to burning ecological issues and to try to connect us with the evolutionary continuum here on Earth. The strange-looking shapes Rothbart conjured up for the occasion also allude to the distant prehistoric past and offer an opportunity to ask questions about whence we come and where we are headed.

The creations are seemingly out of step with current life dynamics. In a digital communications and multitudinous TV channel age, our attention spans are increasingly on the wane, and our ability to focus on an image, particularly one that does not seem to be leading anywhere interesting or exciting, for more than a minute or two, is severely challenged. 

In Air de Venise, which Rothbart put together for the famous Italian seaside town in 2015, there does not seem to be an awful lot going on. The now familiar aluminum-and-glass concoction is just there, half-floating in the northwestern tip of the Adriatic Sea, not doing much very much. That is the case at Ramle too. But, if we can just get our breathing to settle a bit and our pulse to relax before we race off to yet another breaking news or social media item, we might find ourselves contemplating the weird-looking shapes, what they are doing there, and how they got there.

The latter is not just a matter of geography. There is a crucial timeline chain here too. The morphological aesthetics suggest some far-flung when the Earth was inhabited by very different life forms. Chronological and geographical continuums are referenced powerfully in RamleAnthropocene, as is the stage we are currently at in terms of how human intervention is impacting the world around us. That is front and center in the “Anthropocene” part of the work’s title, referencing the current age in which human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

Rothbart is looking to join up dots scattered across the ecological and human scene in more ways than one. That duly informed his choice of base physical material, which, he says, incorporates flotsam that broke free of nets in the Sea of Japan and was carried by tides, currents, and storms to beaches on the West Coast of the United States. The glass floats were all used by the Japanese fisheries. 

That suits the aquatic theme and substance. After all, if unimpeded, water flows every which way and will eventually find its way to the next stop in its ongoing fluid journey. Of course, the water in the Ramle cistern is not going anywhere but, as Rothbart and I make the short but delightful circuit around the arched and pillared pool, I get a notion of continuity and that, somehow, the lapping water of the cistern is indeed joined by some umbilical bond to all bodies of water, the world over. This is an enchanting idea that implies a sense of unison, but also of a common fate – for better or worse – and that we really need to get our collective act together if the planet is going to survive as a habitable entity.

That, as Rothbart sees it, is of particular importance in our own Middle Eastern homestead. As we have made aliyah in our millions, we have worked feverishly to adapt the physical lay of the land in order to accommodate the incremental rise in the local population. David Ben-Gurion famously talked about “making the desert bloom.” That was an alluring prospect as the Zionist state burgeoned, but the ecological aspects of imposing unnatural conditions on Mother Nature and tailoring it to our modern human requirements has undeniable repercussions.

Rothbart also dips immersively into historical, traditional, and mystical climes. “[The raw materials of the installation] are associated with the glass industry that was prevalent during the Muslim rule in Eretz, Israel. Many glass vessels were found in Ramle from that era. The glass balls are strung together, evoking broad associations from marine life and kabbalistic Sephirot,” he explains.

The RamleAnthropocene sensorial spread also takes in textual elements with several poets reciting from their and other works – in Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, and English – that focus on the relevant natural subject matter. The cast of the poetry presentation – screened on a wall of the cistern – includes Israeli poet Agi Mishol, Ben-Gurion University lecturer Marwa Saabni reading “To a Cloud” by late Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein; American art critic and writer Carter Ratcliff; and compatriot poet, critic and curator Richard Milazzo.

RamleAnthropocene is at once a powerful, incisive, yet soothing work that begs contemplation and action.

RamleAnthropocene closes in October 2024. For more information: en.goramla.com/