Absalon

Disposition, 1988

The Israeli artist Absalon’s designs for living are sculptural and architectural implementations of existential physical experience, as anchored in Minimal Art’s intellectual processes. In the early 1980s, Absalon started to plaster objects around him in white and to arrange them in shallow white boxes. This first exploration of structure ‘en miniature’ was followed by little dwelling units, so-called ‘cells’, which Absalon tailored to suit his own size and fitted out to meet life’s basic needs. As a set of shelves Disposition, 1988, is functional – and equally, if detached from the context of living, it can be read as a minimalist object. The video work Proposal for a Habitat, 1991, shows how life can be lived with cubic objects if they are used as desks for reading while standing up, as a chair or as a bench for sitting and lying down. Absalon intended to build his living-cells into urban structures all over the world, and to live in them temporarily. This did not come about because of his early death.