אנה פרומצ’נקו – מה קורה אחי

Anna Fromchenko’s EJECTION SEAT

The ejection seat placed at the center of the exhibition space seems to have been retrieved from the depths of the sea or perhaps discovered deep in the earth. It projects a sense of unrest, ambivalence, a juncture of eras encapsulated in an object that looks as if it were taken from an old science fiction film, an artifact from the future transformed into the past. Despite its shabby appearance, it embodies a promise of immediate deliverance from jeopardy danger which has not been tested, or perhaps it failed, its promise failed: the seat is undamaged, the parachute still folded at the top, unopened.

Anna Fromchenko’s chair has a disturbing resemblance to other generic chairs, an electric chair, a torture chamber chair. With its straps and closures, clasps and buttons, it becomes clear to viewers that this chair is designed for the opposed purposes of rescue or death.
The ejection seat image has been reappearing in Fromchenko’s work over the past several years. She explored its history, became familiar with several different models, and realized that the issue of its efficacy has not been clearly resolved. An earlier painting of an ejection seat shown in her exhibition Iran, Iran about two years ago engaged in the way in which Iran became the image of ultimate evil for some sectors of the Israeli establishment. Fear of Iran serves as a pretext for certain political and military actions. The ejection seat refers to the illusion of security built on military ascendancy.

Fromchenko created her own version, a synthesis of several chairs, using a 3-D printer. The small model made of ceramic powder is not on view in the current exhibition, but details from its preparatory model have been printed and hung on the walls. The details do more than just show and explain the attractive/repellent object; they add layers of ambiguity through their beauty, set against a background of deep velvety black, shining like stars in the darkness of the universe. The nuts and bolts and detailsof the various wiring elements look like precious items of antique jewelry, relics of lost civilizations, of material cultures whose richness, tasteful aesthetics, and the belief in their own superiority did not ensure their survival.
The chair on view looks as if were made of rusty metal but was actually constructed by traditional carpentry and painted in grainy earth colors reminiscent of mud and rust. Its color and materiality encode hints of human fragility, the motif of human beings’ creation from earth appearing in myths across the world. Despite this, paradoxically, the chair’s over life-size scale invests it with a magnificence associated with royal thrones. Thus, with unconcealed irony, Fromchenko refers to the special place and admired status reserved for pilots.

Since the very beginning of modern flight in the early 20^th century, pilots have always had a special aura, helped by the age-old longing to fly. Fromchenko’s isolated and scarred Ejection Seat brings to mind the Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus, who succeeded in flying but fell after hubris led them to fly too high, without any illusion of safety that would save them.
Hubris, illusory security, and vulnerability are linked to earlier works from Israeli and international art engaged in the ejection seat and the figure of “the pilot.” Since the 1970s, Joram Rozov has been painting air force pilots “shackled” by the safety straps of their ejection seats; in 1988, he painted the diptych Sphinx I and Sphinx II, the titles a reminder of the Sphinx’s lack of mercy in Greek mythology (a female figure) and in Egypt (a male figure). Pilot error almost always costs the pilot his life, similar to the way an incorrect answer to the Sphinx meant death for the traveler attempting to cross the desert.

eath and salvation constituted the pillars of the myth Joseph Beuys wove around himself. He was a navigator in the Nazi Luftwaffe who became one of the most decorated international artists of the second half of the 20^th century. Beuys, wounded when his fighter plane crashed while returning from a bombing mission, metaphorically transformed his injury into his personal ejection seat, the very foundation of his private myth of transformation from Nazi to shaman. He created several versions of a chair covered with fat, the material in which he was wrapped by the Tatar shamans who rescued him, according to his own invented myth. Beuys reduced the chair to its most basic elements, abstracted from any technological characteristics. (It is interesting to note that it was the Nazi Luftwaffe which first made successful use of the ejection seat).
Igal Tumarkin examined the image of the Israeli soldier in a violent, painful sculpture that externalized the body’s vulnerability, the gap between idealized image and reality. As early as 1967 in his sculpture He Walked in the Fields, Tumarkin’s  his  repeated attack on Israeli male courage and manliness stands out in the way he empties these values of glory and depicts them as an empty, wounded, gaping, ugly vessel. Fromchenko’s ejection seat, with its oversize scale and similarity to rusted metal, has associations to Tumarkin’s aggressive sculpture, however, the thin plywood of which it is made distances her work from being clear-cut and unambiguous. Fromchenko’s sculpture remains in the realm of doubt.
The enlargement of the chair opens a channel for observing it through the prism of the Pop Art tradition. It links to its dark, morbid side of the movement which was often classified as no more than a call for criticism of consumer culture. The context that immediately comes to mind is the two-dimensional Pop works, especially Andy Warhol’s series of electric chairs. The first series was made in 1964, based on a photograph of the electric chair used to execute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused in 1953 of espionage on behalf of the USSR. Warhol returned to the subject in 1971 and created a more extended series.
Peter Hennessey, an Australian artist who has not yet exhibited in Israel, creates large-scale sculptures of objects used in space research and exploration. In My Ejector Chair (2006), the chair is upside-down, while the parachute is open, spread on the floor. Visitors, exposed to the rescue mechanism, remain without a hint as to the fate of the missing pilot.
Fromchenko, a woman artist, addresses an entire array of axioms of manhood and masculinity embodied in the figure of “the pilot.” Not by chance is the male hero of the film Wonder Woman a pilot named Steve, a nod to Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, pilot and astronaut of the iconic American television show of that name. Fromchenko situates the ejection seat as a mythical object in a past-future with a promise, but the generic figure of the pilot embodying the finest young men of the Israeli military, is missing. The ejection seat has rusted. Only the close-up photographs of the details on the wall reveal just how splendid were its components.

the text was published in the catalogue of Anna Fromchenko’s  exhbition at the The Artists House Tel Aviv

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