Edom

Part 1 (pictured here) of the immersive art installation Red Shift (1967–84) by Cildo Meireles (b.1948, Rio de Janeiro) is a room with white walls in which everything else—fans, lamps, bookcases and books, art, fruit, flowers, the fish and the water in the fish tank, the tank itself—is bright red. Part 2 is a passage in which a large quantity of bright red liquid spills from a bottle far too small to contain it. Part 3 is a room with a tilting sink from whose tap flows a continuous stream of bright red liquid. By now, viewers have identified the source of the faint pouring sound they heard when they entered the installation. And, with the artist’s help, they have created their own circuit from the tap’s endlessly flowing liquid to the colour that permeates the first room.

Since Meireles was known as a fierce opponent of his country’s former fascist regime, critics speculate that he intended Red Shift to evoke the innocent blood that flowed in 1960s and 70s Brazil. But in a short-lived yet influential art journal he co-edited, Meireles resisted what he saw as a limiting tendency to label his work and that of his contemporaries as ‘political conceptualism’. Perhaps with this in mind, he described Red Shift as ‘chromo-poetics’ (Maroja 2016: 31).

Chromo-poetics, with Red Shift its flag-ship exemplar, could have been created as a hermeneutic tool to interpret biblical representations of the people and land of Edom, where redness is ubiquitous, but its source unclear. ‘Edom’ means ‘red’ in Hebrew. The biblical kingdom, located in what is now Jordan, included a valley flanked by red, purple, and yellow sandstone cliffs. In his 1845 poem, English Bible scholar John William Burgon called Petra, the capital city of the Nabateans, who gradually supplanted the Edomites in that region, a ‘rose-red city half as old as Time’ (Britannica 2021). 

Esau, Edom’s founding father, came out of the womb ‘all red’ (Genesis 25:25) and famously sold his birthright for a bowl of ‘red, red stuff’ (Genesis 25:30). Jacob’s usurpation of his brother’s rights (including their father Isaac’s blessing) creates another source of redness in their destiny: revenge—for revenge (a dish usually served hot in the Bible) is the colour of blood (see, e.g., Numbers 35:33–34).  

References

Maroja, Camila. 2016. ‘Red Shift. Cildo Meireles and the Definition of the Political-Conceptual’, ARTMargins 5.1: 30–58

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2021. ‘Petra’, www.Britannica.com, available at https://www.britannica.com/place/Petra-ancient-city-Jordan, [accessed 1 April 2022]

Where Edom is concerned, the Bible presents a distinctive blend of person and landscape. Esau’s genealogy in Genesis 36 mentions Edom eleven times, three times with the emphatic ‘Esau, that [or ‘he’] is, Edom’ (vv.1, 3, 8), and concluding with the epithet ‘father of Edom’ (v.43). It is the inseparability of Esau the man from Edom the land that makes Edom unique and significant.

The fusion of man and landscape is a theme of a massive sculpture known as the Appennino (1579–80), created by Giambologna (Jean de Boulogne) for the garden of the Villa Pratalino in tribute to the nearby Appenine Mountain range.

The garden of Villa Pratolino, a residence built just outside Florence for Francesco de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, was designed and executed by the Medici’s court architect, designer and engineer Bernardo Buontalenti. At the time of completion, (c.1581), the garden privileged surprise, drama, and novelty over natural harmony.

Following a visit to Pratolino in 1580, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote that the Medici duke must have ‘expressly selected an inconvenient site, sterile and rugged, and utterly without water, merely that he might have the pleasure of bringing the water from five miles off’ (Montaigne 1887: 282). Montaigne was amazed by the:

various musical instruments, which perform a variety of pieces, by the agency of the water; which also, by a hidden machinery, gives motion to several statues, single and in groups, opens doors, and gives apparent animation to the figures of various animals, that seem to jump into the water, to drink, to swim about, and so on (Montaigne 1887: 283).

The villa was abandoned and eventually demolished, but in 1820 the garden was re-designed in the English Romantic landscape style. Although many of its original statues were removed, the Appennino remained. Detached from the naturalistic man-made rocky promontory from which it once emerged, the colossus had also lost some of the features that no doubt impressed Montaigne: the jewel and shell encrusted grottoes (his internal organs?); a water organ (his voice?); and hidden jets that soaked unsuspecting visitors. But its striking blend of assertively man-made artifice and subtle imitations of nature survived.

Esau has long been separated from Edom, but his presence in that red landscape is indelible.

References

Hazlitt, William (trans.) and Orlando Williams Wight (eds). 1887. Works of Michael de Montaigne: Comprising His Essays, Journey Into Italy, and Letters, vol. 4, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company), pp. 282–84

Smith, Webster. 1961. ‘Pratolino’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 20.4: 155–168

According to the prophet Obadiah, the Edomites failed to come to Israel’s aid when the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple (Obadiah 1:11). They stood by gloating and then rushed to join the looters (v.12). Worst of all, they prevented survivors from leaving the war-torn city (v.14). In short, the Edomites were callously indifferent to the plight of displaced people.

The events described in Obadiah resonate with ‘Heat Maps’, an ambitious documentation project by photographer Richard Mosse, first shown in New York and London in 2016. Mosse deploys a military-grade infrared camera, designed as a weapon of war, to capture scenes from the migrant trail, from the Persian Gulf to Germany and from northern sub-Sahara Africa to France.

Cameras usually record light and shadow. Mosse’s infrared camera used heat, rendering humans and animals as glowing figures. ‘Heat Maps’ is not Mosse’s first experiment with infrared. In ‘Infra’, a series about war-torn Congo exhibited in 2011, he used Kodak Aerochrome, a type of film intended for aerial reconnaissance that registers a spectrum of light invisible to the naked human eye. It renders usually green landscapes in jarring shades of pink and red.

Mosse created Idomeni Camp, Greece by blending hundreds of shots into a single image. The backdrop of campaign tents and scrubland could be almost anywhere. As for the figures, details are blurred, and individuality erased. Are we viewing migrants or citizens, aid workers or security officials? Our inability to gauge what’s happening is exacerbated by another feature of this series: almost every image is shot from far away and above eye-level. We’re seeing displacement and despair from a safe distance, but at the same time, we’re looking from an unfamiliar, and unsettling, perspective. Photographers who want to awaken viewers to the plight of migrants often focus on individuals—a mother, a child. Mosse makes us see the big picture, the terrain. It’s not enough to make a donation to help a single family. We’ve been drawn into a military-style campaign that demands a broader sense of collusion and responsibility.   

Numbers 20:14–21 reports that, despite their promise to keep to the highway and pay for water, the king of Edom refused to let the Israelites pass through his territory on their way to the Promised Land. Indeed, in stark contrast to Mosse’s compassionate visual embrace of the plight of refugees, he came out armed for attack.