Take, for instance, Robert Rauschenberg, the young American who was awarded the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale. What does he paint? Coca-Cola bottles. A symbol of the habitual, of the American way of life. And I accept it as art in his case; I agree with him. [\u2026] But here in Israel, a Coke bottle does not have the same status, the same significance. Those who want to be abreast of the times here must seek symbols of our own. Had someone taken medallions issued locally for publicity purposes, instruction brochures such as \u2018Come to Israel,\u2019 and other such senseless items, and assembled them into a large-scale collage, into a jumble encompassing this entire mess, including Rachel\u2019s Tomb, etc., I would say that this is a local equivalent to the Coca-Cola bottle. Incidentally, it is only a matter of time before someone is going to do that here. Then we will be able to be free about things for which we are now forced to have mixed feelings.
\nYitzhak Danziger1The exhibition An Israeli Object: A Matter of Time sets out to present objects, installations, video pieces and architectural models that represent identity in an attempt to pinpoint a local formal code \u2013 with all the similarities, differences and controversies entailed. It does not purport to represent all the fields of visual art in Israel, but rather to touch upon its subject matter through a multi-disciplinary dialogue among artists, designers and architects. The discussion will revolve around the discourse pertaining to Israeli identity and the interrelations between that identity and the local visual creation. In some respects, this is the completion of a cycle that began at the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts (1906-1926) founded by Boris Schatz in Jerusalem in order to bring together East and West as well as past and present, in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts Movement,2 and continued with the sweeping pioneering process spurred by the members of the Second and Third Aliya (immigration waves), who endeavored to create a Hebrew Culture and model the \u201cHebrew Individual,\u201d a \u201cJew of the Land of Israel, that is, a non-Diaspora Jew,\u201d3
\nin keeping with the \u201cnegation of exile\u201d that was at the very core of the Zionist ethos.
\nThe \u201cnegation of exile\u201d was never finalized, and the conflict between \u201chere\u201d and \u201cthere\u201d thus continues to loom over the ongoing constitution of Israeli identity.4 Historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin attributes the failure of that process to \u201cthe definition of existence as an exilic reality,\u201d which he perceives as \u201ca psycho-political state of consciousness\u201d originating in the halachic discourse. In contemporary discourse the exilic consciousness informs \u201cthe existence of the Jew as member of a minority group that challenges the basic assumptions of the dominant majority.\u201d Unlike Jewish existence, Zionist existence and assimilative existence rely on a shared point of departure that embeds a negation of the dimension of foreignness. This negation, however, conceals the very dimension it negates.5 The existential conflict diagnosed by Raz-Krakotzkin may be ascribed to the universalist-assimilative tendency of Israeli art with which the current show is concerned.<\/p>\n
Before a Statue of ApolloThe founders of Bezalel regarded it as a school of applied arts and crafts destined to generate an entire field of occupation and work, or as Schatz himself put it in 1914: \u201cIn Palestine, art must go hand in hand with industry.\u201d6 On the other hand, Schatz wanted to hire well-known Jewish artists, mostly from western countries, as teachers in Bezalel. His goal was to expose them to the culture of the place, thus creating an atmosphere of cultural cross-fertilization, and to establish
\na museum for Jewish motifs from which the students at Bezalel would extract basic forms.7
\nAlongside the multi-cultural encounter, Schatz and his colleagues wanted to create a distinction (albeit not sharp) between \u201csacred\u201d and \u201cprofane,\u201d which corresponded to the class (and ethnic) division created at Bezalel:8 The \u201csacred,\u201d namely art, was intended for the art practitioners who hailed from the West, whereas the \u201cprofane\u201d \u2013 popular arts and crafts, primarily carpet weaving, gold and silversmithing \u2013 were reserved for the \u201cfemale laborers\u201d, local inhabitants, immigrants from \u201cEastern\u201d countries (i.e. North Africa and the Middle East), Yemenites, etc. Thus they perpetuated not only the lower status of women in comparison to men, but also the superiority of the students of the \u201cfine arts\u201d who engaged in the \u201cpure\u201d and \u201cuniversal,\u201d or the \u201cideological-humanistic,\u201d in relation to the Sephardic, the Orthodox-Jewish, and subsequently the Arab-Israeli sectors. The latter were forced to opt for a \u201cservice-minded\u201d craft concerned with \u201cmodes of behavior and sets of symbols.\u201d9<\/p>\n
Current research exposes a repressive social structure under an ideological guise of a society-in-the-making at the roots of the Bezalel system, manifested by visual representations that contributed only to the continued \u201creinforcement of the superiority of the Western position.\u201d10 Sara Chinski in her essay \u201cThe Lacemakers from Bezalel ,\u201d for instance, maintains that popular crafts were identified with marginal sectors outside the universalist center, and their constituents were signified as \u201ccounter-modernization\u201d and as \u201csites of cultural and technological backwardness\u201d that must be contested, and only at best are they treasured in a reservoir of objects intended for preservation. Chinski goes on to analyze the power relations in Schatz\u2019s Bezalel, diagnosing an intricate relationship where \u201cpeople transform entities into objects\u201d and \u201cobjects create people.\u201d11 Her conclusions shed light on the hierarchical and discriminatory world view that guided the acculturating-corrective activity of the Bezalel founders, and was perpetuated by the system they established. In Marxist terms one may say that such discrimination is inevitable in a condition of conflicting interests that typify a non-egalitarian class-oriented society, \u201ca self-developing set of forces of production, embodied in basic patterns of economic division between oppressors and oppressed, and the resulting social classes.\u201d12 For the mechanism underpinning capitalist progress is not based on a continual development of skill as part of stable, evolving systems, but rather on series of transformations founded on the desire to control the means of production.<\/p>\n
Ariel Hirschfeld blames the patronizing attitude towards the East in those days, which was bound up with the rejection of traditional Judaism, on the country\u2019s deteriorating state after years of inept Ottoman rule that became a paradigm of corruption and backwardness. He perceives Tchernichovsky\u2019s poem \u201cBefore a Statue of Apollo\u201c (1899) as a quintessential formulation of the \u201cHellenistic revolution\u201d: \u201cHellenism, Judaism\u2019s traditional enemy, was called upon to join the Hebrew Culture in the Levant not in order to inspire a European Renaissance, but in order to start it anew, differently.\u201d13 Tchernichovsky\u2019s poem exposes the foreign origin of images of revival and renaissance, models \u201cthat have been the traditional enemies of the classical Jewish identity\u201d \u2013 as well as Zionism\u2019s tendency, in its revival, to turn its back on abstract monotheism and bind it with \u201cphylacteries\u201d. The Ancient East can thus be \u201cre-learned only through the non-Jewish East,\u201d Hirschfeld adds.14<\/p>\n
What does Hirschfeld protest? The continued process of Hellenization, alongside manifestations of Jewish self-hatred prevalent in today\u2019s secular Israeli society. The practice of the first Bezalel generation is typified by direct imitation of the human images, landscape and color palette characteristic of the tradition of European Orientalist painting. This indicates that Zionism has inherited the European blindness towards the East intrinsic in the Western idea of the \u201cEast,\u201d which is based, in Friedrich Schiller\u2019s terms, on the distinction between the naive and the sentimental. It was in these terms that the East was perceived as \u201caccepting its natural essence,\u201d in a way wholly unrelated to the \u201cself and essence of Eastern existence.\u201d15 The Western point of view, Hirschfeld further argues, has \u201cdropped\u201d a \u201cscreen on which the yearnings of European civilization were shown, [\u2026] as the sexual fantasy of the decent bourgeois person on the \u2018real face\u2019 of the East.\u201d16<\/p>\n
Hirschfeld\u2019s discussion of \u201cHellenization\u201d may be enhanced by Ahad Ha\u2019am\u2019s notion of \u201cassimilation,\u201d whereby Dr. Malka Ben-Peshat in her essay \u201cMaterial Culture and Cultural Identity in Israel\u201d examines the attributes of culture in Israel. Ben-Peshat clearly relies on Ahad Ha\u2019am\u2019s seminal essay \u201cImitation and Assimilation,\u201d adopting his assertion that assimilation results from \u201cimitation out of self-deprecation\u201d rather than \u201cimitation out of competition,\u201d which generates an independent culture that marches ahead.17 The assimilative tendency in the West may further be ascribed, as Chinski argues in another essay, to the complex the European Jews brought with them to the country. These Jews regarded Western values as \u201cthe coveted whitener that can restore the
\ninferior self-perception of Ashkenazi Jews and deliver them from their Asian lot.\u201d18<\/p>\n
These tendencies were articulated in the reflections of the fathers of Zionism, and primarily Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, who combined the ideologies of the new European nationalism and the universalism of anti-national modernist movements, such as Communism, that crystallized in late 19th century Europe. These leaders envisioned that the Jewish land would form a buffer between Europe and the East \u2013 an opportunity for Western influence on the East on one hand, and a floodgate that would prevent the Eastern backwardness from flowing into the West, on the other. In light of this, they feared a cultural retreat from the \u201cWestern enlightenment\u201d to the barbarism of the East.19<\/p>\n
From Oriental to UniversalWhy have we insisted on adhering to Western universalism for so many years (and explicitly, for over half a century, ever since New Horizons), while denying the place that was a source of \u201cideology, power and moral renewal\u201d for generations of exile?20 This question has occupied a great many cultural researchers and art critics. Thus, in their discussion of the double meaning of \u201cPlace\u201d in the Israeli experience, Zali Gurevitch and Gideon Aran distinguish between the Why have we insisted on adhering to Western universalism for so many years (and explicitly, for over half a century, ever since New Horizons), while denying the place that was a source of \u201cideology, power and moral renewal\u201d for generations of exile?20 This question has occupied a great many cultural researchers and art critics. Thus, in their discussion of the double meaning of \u201cPlace\u201d in the Israeli experience, Zali Gurevitch and Gideon Aran distinguish between the physical place and the spiritual place: \u201cOn one hand, the place is The Land, and any other place is an \u2018elsewhere\u2019. On the other hand, the place is outside the place \u2013 in the Jewish people and its philosophy-faith, which are not congruent with the land.\u201d21 The current exhibition too settles an account with the prevalent modernist inclination to look up, longingly, to the West as an idea;
\nwith the approach that everything that comes from \u201cthere\u201d is equivalent to the \u201chere.\u201d
\nThe propensity toward the West characterized all fields of creation in the country throughout the years. In the 1930s, architecture, for example, explicitly adopted the International Style and the Bauhaus principles.22 This was in the wake of an essentially eclectic architecture created here during the 1910s and 1920s (exemplified by the Bialik House in Tel Aviv constructed by Joseph Minor between 1922-25), that borrowed from both West and East, thus reminding us from whence we came, as well as paying lip service to \u201cassimilation into the place.\u201d<\/p>\n
The architects who came from Europe left a discernible impact on Israel\u2019s large cities seen to this day. In Jerusalem, these were, among others, Leopold Krakauer, an architect and artist born in Vienna, one of the pioneers of the International Style in the country, who planned the Bunem House in Rehavia (1935). Another was the well-known international architect, Erich Mendelsohn, member of the New Bezalel board of directors, who worked in the country from 1936-1941. Mendelsohn\u2019s architectural works \u2013 that evolved from German Expressionism through Russian Constructivism to Modernist Functionalism \u2013 embellish Jerusalem (The Schocken Library,
\n1934-36), Rehovot (Weitzmann House, 1936), etc.23<\/p>\n
Tel Aviv in those years was dominated by the \u201canimal\u201d trio \u2013 Ze\u2019ev Rechter, Dov Karmi and Arieh Sharon \u2013 who planned not only residential and public buildings, but also entire residential neighborhoods.24 These architects were trained in Europe, mostly in Germany, and brought with them to the country technological messages and advanced theories that were remarkably congruent with the socialist Zionist ethos. In retrospect it turned out that their style was received enthusiastically not only because of the principles it represented, but also since it was consistent with the local needs in material, economic and social terms (cheap local building materials and simple construction for quick housing of mass immigration.)<\/p>\n
Plastic art and design turned to methodical exploration of the influences of the West only at a later phase \u2013 whether within the frame of the New Bezalel in Jerusalem,25 or amongst the Bezalel dissidents who moved to Tel Aviv and later founded New Horizons. The New Bezalel was opened in its new format (1935) some six years after the closing of Schatz\u2019s Bezalel (1929). The new management headed by Joseph Budko (1935-1940) and later Mordechai Ardon (1940-1952), set out to remodel Bezalel after the German Bauhaus (1919-1932), whose principles were harnessed to serve the new Hebrew ideals and to train high-quality professionals. Design took the place of popular craft, innovative means of production replaced small industry, and \u201cthe beautiful\u201d was now required to be functional. Despite the inclination westward, the New Bezalel sought to preserve its affinity to tradition to some extent, especially as it pertained to design of Jewish holy implements created by modern techniques and in the spirit of the time. In effect, the New Bezalel functioned as a delicate bridge between the East-European Orientalist romanticism
\nof the old institution and the expressly Western modernism of the State\u2019s beginnings.26
\nEven though instruction at the New Bezalel turned away from the \u201cEastern\u201d ambience of the Schatz period, exhibition and commercial spaces as well as key institutions identified with \u201cIsraeli design,\u201d primarily Maskit (founded in 1954), continued to put \u201cOrientalist\u201d works created by craftsmen of various immigration waves at the forefront. Only occasionally did Maskit promote original Israeli creation, such as that of Fini Leitersdorf, the unique fashion designer whose works assimilated the country\u2019s landscapes (primarily the desert), and gained not just recognition but an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (1983).<\/p>\n
The penchant westward in the local aesthetic was boosted in 1948 with the inauguration of the New Horizons movement under the determined and uncompromising leadership of Joseph Zaritsky.27 The charismatic Zaritsky, a forerunner of the abstract in Israel, endeavored to liberate the local art from the \u201cnarrativity\u201d and \u201cIsraeliness\u201d in favor of the universal;28 or as another pivotal New Horizons artist, Yehezkel Streichman, explained: \u201cModern art strives to draw nearer to abstract, and there are no Israeli elements there.\u201d29<\/p>\n
The transformation inspired by New Horizons, which sought to distinguish itself from the conservative approach that characterized the Yishuv period, and thus trained the spotlight on the West \u2013 had left its impression on the history of Israeli art. Later, once the appeal of Paris and the center shifted from Europe to New York, the attention of Israeli artists shifted with it, and they became interested in the New York School, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual art, Earth art, Body art, etc. In Israel, each of these tendencies then became a model for imitation or a source of influence.<\/p>\n
A concurrent tendency evolved in Israeli art at the time, whose representatives \u2013 artists such as Naftali Bezem, Avraham Ofek or Dani Karavan \u2013 were rooted in the nascent, changing Israeli society and committed to issues of social justice. This tendency, however, was pushed out of the center in the course of time, and was ignored by the artistic establishment.30 The story of exclusion repeats itself time and again in the history of the visual arts in Israel. Pious modernists, who dictated the canon from their strongholds, pushed artists who wanted to integrate in the local setting and were opened to the unique texture formed locally, to the margins for many years. The first Bezalel generation \u2013 people hailing from the West who lived in today\u2019s East, yet perceived it as yesterday\u2019s biblical world \u2013 were pushed aside by the second Bezalel generation who strove to integrate into the East as \u201ca source of power for national and existential renewal.\u201d31 The \u201clocal\u201d inclination that still characterized artistic production of that generation was rejected by the third generation, that uncompromisingly believed in universalism (Western, of course). As part of the power relations created here, the fear of being affiliated with the Old Bezalel reinforced the scope of Westernization and increased the gap between craft and art, local and universal, Eastern and Western.<\/p>\n
Post factum, the image of the artisan or craftsman, who was perceived as inferior along with the skills he represented, suffered in particular. Haim Gamzu \u2013 a theater and art critic, and the Director of the Tel Aviv Museum from 1962-1977 \u2013 held that Israeli art ought to be modern and contemporary. The local artists, he maintained, have \u201cfrom the very beginning\u2026 renounced useful or merely practical work and handicraft.\u201d The machine has inherited the Eastern exoticism, the donkey and the camel, and the Australian Eucalyptus tree has joined the olive and palm trees as a full-fledged member in the array of Israeli landscape assets.32<\/p>\n
Introduction of architecture, art and design into the modernist \u201cWhite Cube\u201d (a la De Stijl, and in the spirit of modernist architects such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe), led to zealous responses pertaining to the elimination of historical or national contexts. The local, insofar as it was articulated, was a \u201cself-evident consequence, rather than a professed goal.\u201d33 This tendency is masterfully captured by Dan Tsalka who fabricates a dialogue between dancer, painter and filmmaker Baruch Agadati and an architect named Marinsky on the ship Ruslan on the way to Tel Aviv:<\/p>\n
But first I shall draw a new Hebrew font, unlike any other that has ever existed. No more frills, no more decoration, no ambiguity, no twisting, no big letters, no small letters; a simple square letter, clear, Euclidean, right angle; circle, arch, like a rainbow. And the rest of the letters we shall be bury in the ground, throw to the sea, say Kaddish after them. We need new letters, straight letters, lucid and solid, without Talmudic embellishments, no stale arabesques, no arching wings. [\u2026] Like the giant letters with which the Futurist poems of large cities are written.34<\/p>\n
The story of Igael Tumarkin\u2019s Holocaust Monument at Rabin Square, Tel Aviv illustrates the modernist tyranny that governed the local art milieu. A piercing debate evolved around the monument\u2019s installation in the square in 1961, which Adam Baruch reviews in his book Hayeinu (\u2018Our Life\u2019). The controversy between its supporters (\u201ctext-oriented\u201d figures on behalf of modernist art and architecture) and the \u201cJewish\u201d group that raised mainly \u201csentimental arguments\u201d, reflected the state-of-affairs: \u201cThe monument phenomenon was an integral part of the power codex (and its activation) of a Tel Aviv elite in the 1960s and 1970s that aspired to the West: Europe in Tel Aviv.\u201d35 The art world\u2019s field of political power is mirrored in the subtitles crowning the chapter where Baruch discusses the monument\u2019s mounting: \u201cIsraeli Modernism as a Foreign Western Consulate in the Middle East\u201d; \u201cWestern Modernism in the service of \u2018the Negation of Exile\u2019\u201d; \u201cIsraeli Modernism: From Authenticity to a Culture Police\u201d; \u201cLocal Modernism as the Stupefied Agent of the Project of Western Enlightenment.\u201d36<\/p>\n
The scholarly interest in the excluded trends of Israeli art has increased in recent years. In this frame, the place of the Bezalel heritage (both the Old and the New Bezalel) in the local culture is also reconsidered. Artists such as Ze\u2019ev Raban (who was among the founders of the Old Bezalel), Miron Sima and Yohanan Simon were granted comprehensive solo exhibitions. These, together with a thesis exhibition such as Hebrew Work (1998) curated by Galia Bar Or at the Mishkan Le\u2019Omanut, Museum of Art, Ein Harod, or To the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel (1998) curated by Yigal Zalmona, and To the Tombs of the Righteous (1998) curated by Rivka Gonen \u2013 both at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, attempt to re-map the field, thus taking an affirmative action (\u201ccorrective discrimination\u201d).<\/p>\n
In the book of the aforementioned exhibition Hebrew Work: The Disregarded Gaze in the Canon of Israeli Art, Galia Bar Or describes the situation that enabled the exclusion of social tendencies typified by a local quality (among them the Old Bezalel) from the canon of Israeli art. Bar Or points at the part of \u201ctrendsetters\u201d (artists, curators and critics) in the crime, as they did not hide their intention to adapt to the international center, and consciously doomed several important artists to oblivion: \u201cThe Israeli elite interiorized a functional-centralist position, saw itself as a copy of a comfortable elite in Paris, for example, and provided a basis for universal values and their institutions,\u201d37 she accuses. Modernist architects and designers, the artists of New Horizons and their followers, indeed manned the key positions in the ruling and budgeting institutions for a long
\ntime before the implementation of today\u2019s \u201ccorrective\u201d or positive discrimination.<\/p>\n
It is to the aforementioned simultaneously staged pair of exhibitions at the Israel Museum, that Sara Chinski refers in her essay \u201cEyes Wide Shut\u201d that addresses the constitution of identity in the field of Israeli art. The gaze embedded in these shows, she asserts, surrenders a tendentious corrective treatment of the issue of the East, which in fact continues the tendencies of repression and the ambiguity built into Israeli society. It is manifested in the targeting of audiences for these two shows: To the East was designed for Western eyes, whereas To the Tombs of the Righteous was intended for an ethno-Moroccan audience.38<\/p>\n
You are All EarsItzhak Danziger was an exception in the art scene. He was a modernist and regionalist whose appearance and way of life were consistent with the myth of the \u201cNew Jew\u201d of the \u201cSabra\u201d.39 (Berlin-born) Danziger gained sweeping recognition. Even though he was well versed in Western art, having studied in London, and although he was a member of New Horizons, Danziger endeavored to relate to the place and its origins by means of outdoor environmental works (Rehabilitation of the Nesher Quarry, 1971) or works inspired by the landscape (Sheep, 1964). The yearning for the ancient, pre-Jewish or Canaanite East was already discernible in his early work, and especially in the celebrated sculpture Nimrod (1939). Made of Nubian sandstone brought from Petra, the sculpture, with its semi-archaic, semi-athletic shape, has become one of the expressions most distinctively identified with the discourse of Israeli identity. It has become associated with the Canaanite movement that operated in Israel during the 1940s and engaged mainly in sculpture in stone, wood, concrete and clay, in ancient ritualistic style. Actively inspired by poet Yonatan Ratosh who advocated the \u201cpromotion of the native culture based on a Hebrew national revival that draws upon the original values of the land, and its dissemination to all the country\u2019s inhabitats\u00a8\u201d40 the Canaanites were a counterweight to the tendency of universalism and abstraction.
\nThe oscillation between East and West continued to characterize Israeli art in all its manifestations as long as the tendency of \u201cassimilation\u201d and self-deprecation vis-\u00e0-vis the West had a place of honor in Jewish-Israeli existence. Danziger was among the few who identified the phenomenon and criticized it in real time: \u201cThere is something almost tragic about this country. You are on the \u2018side,\u2019 in the periphery, so to speak; you are not at the center of things. […] If you live permanently elsewhere, you lose your local identity, here. So you live here, in an \u2018eary\u2019 atmosphere: You are all ears.\u201d41
\nOver the years, similar feelings haunted architects such as Alexander Baerwald, planner of the old Technion \u2013 Israeli Institute of Technology building (1912-24) in Haifa, whose style was influenced by Near Eastern motifs, and Zvi Hecker, who attempts to implement a type of organic architecture (his Spiral Apartment House in Ramat Gan, 1982-89 was inspired by Islamic minarets, and built using local materials). This was also true of designers such as Zelig Segal who lent refined modern form to Jewish \u201choly vessels\u201d that do not deny their origins.<\/p>\n
Let us elaborate on \u201cThe Group of Ten\u201d established in the late 1950s as a reaction to the prevailing universalist tendency of New Horizons. The group members, mainly former students of Streichman and Stematsky, endeavored to make art \u201cthat draws upon the Israeli landscape and Israeli individual.\u201d42 The reaction was controlled, and was thus supported by the teachers, themselves among the leaders of New Horizons. The group included \u201crealist\u201d artists who sought a place for themselves in the major display spaces of the time, among them Zvi Tadmor, Shimon Tzabar and Moshe Propes, who were later joined by Ori Reisman and Yitzhak (Itche) Mambush. The members of \u201cThe Group of Ten\u201d received favorable reviews from the critics and were praised by the artistic establishment, at least as long as their work displayed some measure of innovation. The innovativeness gradually weakened under the pressure of abstraction. Critical reviews cited by curator Gila Ballas in the catalogue of the historical exhibition about the group43 (1992), indicate that most of its members settled for realistic observation of the local landscape and lifestyle; they eschewed themes that could have been interpreted as traditional or Jewish, and avoided taking a stand on social and political issues. In a period dominated in Israel by an integrative \u201cmelting pot\u201d policy, essentially underlain by an \u201cacculturation\u201d of the world, to use Yaacov Shavit\u2019s term, internal rifts and social tensions began to bud. These explicitly surfaced in the late 1950s.44 The significance of \u201cThe Group of Ten\u201d lies, I believe, in the very admittance of artists who deviate from the modernist mainstream.45<\/p>\n
Unlike the European-elitist aura that engulfed New Horizons, the Group of Ten was identified with the Palmah generation and with the sabra \u2013 the native-born Israeli, who was as prickly and rough as the plant after which he was named. The image of the sabra \u2013 an intriguing representation of conflictual local identities \u2013 was often employed in the local discourse of culture, and later on emerged in the work of political artists and designers, such as David Tartakover, David Reeb and his student, Asim Abu Shakra.46 After 1967 the sabra\u2019s figure gradually put on weight and began to kick; following the trauma of the Yom Kippur war, it was presented as pathetic and farcical.<\/p>\n
In the late 1970s, under the impact of post-modernism \u2013 perceived in the world as an antithesis to the imperviousness and rigidity of modernist art and international architecture \u2013 the tendency of commitment to local identity (multiculturalism, in this case) in all its diverse manifestations had been reinforced in Israel too. Alongside modernism, internalizing and processing the banal and everyday as well as experiential and sensory values were also made possible. The inclination towards absolute forms was substituted by formal frenzy typified by accumulation, fragmentation and quotation; as Moshe Zuckermann notes in his book On the Fabrication of Israelism: Myths and Ideology in a Society at Conflict\u00a8, \u201cthe ideological relativism of post-modernism is presented by its more moderate representatives as a necessary weapon against the \u2018essentialist\u2019 absolutism of modernism.\u201d47
\nThis was also the nature of the students\u2019 revolt at the Bezalel Academy in the 1970s. The \u201cgraduates\u201d of that revolt were those who in 1985 founded Rega, a group whose members were guided by \u201caffinity to the East.\u201d The founding artists \u2013 David Wakstein, Avishai Ayal, Yoram Kupermintz and Asad Azi \u2013 opened a gallery in Tel Aviv aiming to create \u201cobjects infused with local cultural heritage.\u201d Together with David Reeb (who joined at a later stage), they strove to explore the way in which \u201cthe West perceives the East, and the way in which it in fact invents it,
\nso that it will reflect its own image inversely, as a diametrically opposed identity.\u201d48<\/p>\n
In the course of time, other \u201ccasualties of the place\u201d, such as Tsibi Geva, Naomi Siman Tov, Pinchas Cohen Gan, Israel Rabinovitch, and Jack Jano, joined the move launched by Danziger \u2013 whom Zalmona regards as the artist who has had the greatest impact on the \u201cEastern gaze\u201d in later Israeli art. Geva delves into local images such as the kaffiyeh, chess board, and terrazzo floor-tile balata). Siman Tov experientially analyzes the eastern rug pattern. Cohen Gan engages in a personal-conceptual dialogue with the Dead Sea and refugee camps. Rabinovitch settles an account with the Bezalel epoch, and with modern local myths that are blended into tradition.
\nJano conjures up childhood memories involving the tombs of the righteous.<\/p>\n
Design: Present and FutureArthur Goldreich, Director of the Department of Environmental and Industrial Design at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, between 1965-1979, formulated a modernist declaration of intent in the spirit of the time and place. It was published in 1973 in the catalogue of the opening exhibition of the new Design and Architecture Pavilion at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Goldreich\u2019s didactic declaration hopes that \u201cthe term \u2018design\u2019 be understood in its broadest context, i.e. it should comprise industrial design, architectural design, as well as design for the street, and should include sociological, aesthetic, and practical aspects of the design process,\u201d further recommending that \u201cthe department be oriented toward the present and future, rather than emphasize a historical approach.\u201d49 The strict modernist line was discernible in the first exhibitions curated in the new department by Izzika Gaon. It is not clear why the local representation was so limited, but it may be due to Goldreich\u2019s guidelines. Gaon\u2019s display policy \u2013 staging numerous shows dedicated to the fathers of Modernism and to international Dutch, Scandinavian and Italian design \u2013 surrenders a didactic tendency for bringing the Western message to the Middle East. Until that \u201cexposure\u201d yields results, the pavilion housed exhibitions by De Stijl, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Alvar Alto, and some of the pioneers of post-modernist design (the Milan-based Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis group).
\nThe return to contexts and affinities pertaining to place in 20th century culture was analyzed by architecture theorist Kenneth Frampton, following observations made by Paul Ricoeur, who as early as 1961 called attention to the built-in ambiguity underpinning modernism\u2019s reference to the place. A solution to the internal contradiction, Frampton maintained, would be made possible not by sweeping adoption of existing vernacular versions (popular culture, myth, craft), but rather by what he calls \u201cCritical Regionalism\u201d \u2013 a critical approach to place, setting and tradition, which replaces the tendency for imitation on one hand, and disregard and alienation on the other.50 In Israel this approach was adopted by only a few architects, mostly Jerusalem-based, who wanted to continue the local construction tradition without deserting their modernist heritage. This was the case of Moshe Safdie and the Hebrew Union College campus (1976-1989), and David Resnik in the Center for Near Eastern Studies (1987). The two buildings converse with their environs but not from a position of imitation or self-deprecation; they fit into their settings, but not at the cost of the heritage of modernist functionalism. Architect Nili Portugali took a slightly different approach, importing the organic-holistic method of Christopher Alexander, her teacher at the University of California at Berkeley. Portugali applied the rudiments of Alexander\u2019s doctrine in buildings she
\ndesigned in Tel Aviv, such as the Day Center for the Aged on Rashi Street (1988).51<\/p>\n
In 1976 the Design Department at the Israel Museum held the first one-person exhibition of an Israeli artist \u2013 architect Zvi Hecker and the polyhedric architecture applied to the Ramot Polin neighborhood in Jerusalem (late 1970s). It was followed by an exhibition of designer Dan Reisinger, at the time in charge of creating corporate identities for leading companies such as El-Al, Delek Fuel Corporation, etc., whose work strives to formulate the mundane. The next show, held in 1978, was dedicated to a collection of Jewish New Year Cards compiled by graphic designer David Tartakover, who often employs early Israeli icons in his work. During the 1980s too, the department staged only a few solo exhibitions by local designers, such as Yitzhak Yoresh (Flag, 1988) or Israel Hadani (Jewelry, 1989). Occasionally, local artists were incorporated into group exhibitions about architecture, the environment, or textile design. At times, local design received the stamp of approval from the \u201coutside,\u201d as in the case of the competition (and exhibition) for the design of the Supreme Court building in Jerusalem (1987) with the participation of numerous international architects (where the winners were Ada Karmi-Melamede and Ram Karmi). The trickle is particularly conspicuous vis-\u00e0-vis the scores of group and solo exhibitions of international designers: in the period in question, the department staged over 120 exhibitions altogether, fewer than 20 percent of them by local artists.52 The rate was accelerated in the 1990s, a fact discernible in the list of participants and exhibitions in the various fields of design, among them: Yaacov Kaufman (1991) \u2013 industrial development of lighting fixtures and chairs later manufactured in Italy; Vered Kaminski (1991) and Esther Knobl (1995) \u2013 jewelry design; Lidia Zavadsky (1993) \u2013 ceramic sculpture; projects by architects Ilan Pivko (1991), Eli Attia (1992), Daniel Libeskind (1992). This is little comfort, however, in comparison to the exposure enjoyed by Israeli plastic artists over the years.53<\/p>\n
The opening of the Department of Design and Architecture at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in the mid-1980s slightly improved the situation. Alongside exhibitions of international design, it held a few solo shows by Israeli artists, among them the London-based Ron Arad (1990), Chanan de Lange (1994), Dora Gad (1994), Shai Barkan (1995) and Zvi Hecker (1996). In addition, the department staged group exhibitions such as White City: International Style Architecture in Israel (1984, curator: Micha Levin); Plastic Times (1998, curator: Meira Yagid-Haimovich), featuring fifteen Israeli designers alongside scores of international designers, and The Israeli Project: Building and Architecture 1948-1973 (2000, curator: Zvi Efrat), that offered a retrospective of Israeli architecture after the establishment of the State. The 1980s saw the emergence of support frame and private display venues, such as Cactus (Gad Charni and Tali Lev, among others) or Plastic Plus (Ilana Herschenberg and Hans Pallada), that commented on the events in the economic-social-political setting. Some presented in commercial galleries (Artifact, Ami Steinitz), and later, in the galleries of the various schools of design (The Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem; Vital and Ascola schools of design in Tel Aviv), and most recently \u2013 in new venues dedicated to design exhibitions (Periscope Gallery for Contemporary Design, Tel Aviv; Urian Gallery, Ramat Hasharon).<\/p>\n
The above list is intended to attest to the poor condition of the field of design in comparison to art, and even to architecture, in terms of presentation and discussion. Architecture, in essence, does not require display spaces, for it is exposed in the physical public sphere and takes part in the political and economic discussion by its very existence. Design, on the other hand, requires the support of a fruitful, enriching discourse. Thus it is surprising that there is not a single magazine in Israel that focuses on theoretical discussion or critical writing concerning design.<\/p>\n
Outward Gaze or Point of DepartureUnlike Israeli music that has blended with the local Eastern atmosphere, Israel design generally looks outward, maintains Ido Bruno.54 Bruno identifies an Israeli uniqueness precisely in the contingent design, what he terms \u201cdesign without designers,\u201d such as the \u201cagalool \u2013 a combination of baby carriage and playpen\u201d developed on kibbutzim, \u201cBiblical\u201d sandals, the plastic shutters and aluminum framing (trisol) used to block balconies, or local objects appropriated from the Arab and Druse sectors, such as colorful plastic or wicker baskets, jugs (jarras), coffeepots, etc. Ayelet Zohar, in her essay on the myth of authenticity, identifies ambivalence in our attitude towards the \u201cArab taste,\u201d which has become synonymous with bad taste, yet this fact does not eliminate our penchant for Arab houses or the color turquoise. Turquoise stone is \u201camong the most popular stones in Israeli jewelry design,\u201d55 and the use of the color turquoise has been prevalent since
\nthe 1990s on the facades and window frames of private homes in Israel.
\nIt seems that despite the \u201coutward gaze\u201d of trendsetters in Israeli culture, the local setting has become a \u201cpoint of departure\u201d that permeates design through the indirect paths of popular translation. My discussion of the local environment as a \u201cpoint of departure\u201d for a chain of formal translations is indebted to Mordechai Omer\u2019s study on Zaritsky, the quintessential representative of Israeli abstract and universalism. Zaritsky\u2019s work, however, while addressing issues of color and form, originates at the window opening to Tel Aviv, and later to the landscapes of Zichron Ya\u2019acov, Tsova and Yechiam, thus refining Israeliness to the issue of local light and climate. \u201dWhen I came to this country,\u201d Zaritsky told Omer in 1984, \u201cI didn\u2019t so quickly wish to believe and to agree that Israeli art exists. Quite a few years have passed but now as I stand here, I say that Israeli art does exist. I became aware of the fact that it exists not by symbols but rather by the
\nlight, the light that defines our climate. Today I am sure that Israeli art exists.\u201d56<\/p>\n
And if the mighty have succumbed\u2026 Without doubt, along the way, the unconscious of artistic and design practice in Israel has been attentive to local and traditional influences, even if our consciousness refused to acknowledge their value or admit their existence.<\/p>\n
Between Earth and World (57)The ambivalence described above \u2013 or, to quote Sara Breitberg-Semel, \u201cIsraeli art\u2019s built-in complex\u201d \u2013 accounts for the strident absence of artists who represent the \u201clocalist-Arab stream,\u201d which deserves independent treatment within a separate frame, as Breitberg-Semel points out in the catalogue of the exhibition A Turning Point she curated in 1981. \u201cThis turning point,\u201c she admits, \u201cis not an Israeli phenomenon necessarily. Its origins can be found in New York of a few years ago.\u201d58 Several years later, in the catalogue of the exhibition The Want of Matter: A Quality in Israeli Art, Breitberg-Semel refers to those absent others as an antithesis to the trend on which she herself chose to focus, a trend that developed at the Midrasha \u2013 Art Teachers\u2019 Training College, Ramat Hasharon during the 1960s and 1970s under Raffi Lavie. That trend was defined as Tel Avivian, and was identified with the \u201chow\u201d rather than the \u201cwhat\u201d; it was typified by a conscious aesthetic choice of frugal \u201cpoor\u201d materials (plywood, collage). The description of the participating artists as \u201cdescendants of the Labour movement\u2019s members. [\u2026] a part of the youth or the kibbutz movement,\u201d59 was congruent with the ethos of the \u201csabra\u00a8\u201d albeit already in its demise. The conflict between \u201chere\u201d and \u201cthere\u201d was channeled in The Want of Matter into the opposition between the secular Tel Aviv \u2013 \u201cFor the \u2018Tel Aviv child\u2019 there is no \u2018religion,\u2019 no \u2018nation,\u2019 no \u2018land,\u2019 there is only the concrete city. There is no ideology, but true vitality\u201d60\u2013 and everything that represents the list of counter values \u2013 religion, people, land, ideology. Among them were artists such as Danziger, Michael Gross (whose landscapes are anchored in the place and in childhood experiences), Micha Ullman (who perceives himself as a \u201cdigger\u201d), Moshe Kupferman (the professed \u201cJew\u201d), Moshe Gershuni (who settles an account with \u201cGod\u201d) and Pinchas Cohen Gan (the others\u2019 representative) were gathered by Breitberg-Semel under the title \u201cOther Approaches.\u201d
\nThe very contrast between the various trends conceals recognition of trends that are not \u201cthe want of matter\u201d and their modes of engagement with questions of locality. Nevertheless, Breitberg-Semel\u2019s discussion \u2013 of Arie Aroch\u2019s work, for example \u2013 employs formalist terms of matter, form and color, disregarding the \u201cwhat\u201d. As Aroch himself asserted: \u201c\u2026I understood that one must conserve the what, all the experiences that emanate from the objects that I loved, inside [\u2026] that one had to give oneself to the how of a work, to the love of the touch of the brush, the scribble and the small lines, and then all the necessary and appropriate what will surface of itself.\u201d61I did not arrive at the subject of this exhibition through the academic route,\u201d Breitberg-Semel reveals in the introduction. \u201cHaving worked extensively with Israeli art over a long period, I intuitively came to the conclusion that a segment of our art [\u2026] had an inner code significantly different from that of European and American art\u201d62 [my emphasis, S.D.]. Further study of these issues beyond intuitive observations may reveal in the work of these same artists deep structures that were not identified at first, and possibly contribute to a different mapping of Israeli art. A more semiotic discussion of the \u201cpoint of departure\u201d may lead to descriptions that take into account the internal politics of the fortified art field and identify qualities of a foreign, rational, alienating conqueror in the universalistic modernism of the \u201ccenter.\u201d For \u201cIsraeli identity as \u2018Western\u2019 assumes a \u2018normative\u2019 stamp, thus transforming itself into a cultural yardstick, terrorizing due to its very ability to indicate the existence of the \u2018non-normative\u2019\u00a8\u201d as Sara Chinski maintains.63<\/p>\n
Traces in the Collective MemoryFrom the 1980s onward one witnesses acceleration in the study of Israeli aesthetic heritage, which indicates some measure of acceptance \u2013 not uncritical \u2013 of the manifestations of the place. The rhetorical defensive was substituted by overture attempts in the form of field studies, akin to preliminary surface scans that review the existing inventory. Unlike the Orientalism that characterized the gaze in the past, today\u2019s gaze is not impressed but rather critical and subversive. The discourse of plastic art has preceded the discourse of architecture in this respect, and the latter, in turn, has preceded the discourse of design.
\nBezalel\u2019s Zionist-artistic project suffered from an internal contradiction, since it was formulated as a project intended to ameliorate \u201cothers\u201d. The project, in fact, strove to perpetuate the existing hierarchy. The post-modern \u2013 or post-Zionist, as it is dubbed in recent years \u2013 artistic project is typified by personal tikkun (expiation) stemming from a critical view, that includes the political, economic and social. Even though the echoes of Modernism are still heard, they have shed the markers of hierarchical exclusivity, and exhibit signs of a refreshing renewal, akin to \u201cneo-modernism\u201d or a continuation of the unfinished project of modernism, to use J\u00f6rgen Habermas\u2019s terms.64<\/p>\n
Modernist practice has left its traces on the environment and made itself a local phenomenon that was appropriated and transformed into a source of influence and reference \u2013 this applies to the Eucalyptus trees, the plastic shuttered balconies, the Bauhaus buildings of Tel Aviv. Unlike members of the Old Bezalel who strove to assimilate in the East out of a Western-romantic Orientalism, or the members of New Horizons and their successors who strove to assimilate in the West, contemporary artists endeavor to link to the place without losing their affinity to international art. Just as local music has lovingly become \u201cEasternalized,\u201d perhaps a mote of the
\nEast\u2019s dust will also cling to an Israeli art still waddling in the Western swamp.<\/p>\n
A repeated, post-modernist use of local phenomena was evident in what Israel Kolatt calls \u201cnuclear works\u201d66 and Sara Chinski calls \u201cnatural resource.\u201d65 These are products of modernist art and design that have become \u201clandscape\u201d phenomena in the local setting and left traces in the collective memory that constitutes the multi-cultural Israeli experience.<\/p>\n
Notes1. From an interview with Yitzhak Danziger, Clitertan: Art, Literature, Debate, a special issue edited by Nahum Kane and Maxime Gillan (January 1964).
\n2. The Arts and Crafts Movement began in England in the mid-19th century, and was led by William Morris and theorist John Ruskin. It strove to promote the traditional arts and crafts vis-\u00e0-vis the growing industrialization.<\/p>\n
3. See Itamar Even-Zohar: \u201cThe Emergence of a Native Hebrew Culture in Palestine, 1882-1948.\u201d Poetics Today 11:1 (1990), p. 176.<\/p>\n
4. Edmond Jab\u00e8s specifies ambivalence as an attribute of Jewish existence: \u201cThe Jews \u2013 even when they were dispersed throughout the world, and wherever they are now \u2013 have always been in exile in relation to the place they were in before. What are the dreams of the Israelis? One of them dreams about Morocco, another about Poland, another about Germany. Even the younger generations don\u2019t actually lose that. There is a kind of melancholia, a nostalgia for something which, finally, is the world.\u201c
\nSee: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, \u201cThis is the desert. Nothing strikes root here,\u201dRoutes of Wandering: Nomadism, Voyages and Transitions in Contemporary Israeli Art, curator: Sarit Shapira, trans: Richard Flantz. (exh. cat., Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1991), p. 253.<\/p>\n
5. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, \u201cExile within Sovereignty,\u201d Theory and Criticism 4 (Autumn 1993), pp. 27-30 [Hebrew]<\/p>\n
6. See Gideon Ofrat, \u201cThe Utopist Art of Bezalel,\u201d in Benjamin Tammuz (ed.), The Story of Art in Israel (Tel Aviv: Modan, 1980), p. 16 [Hebrew]. According to Ofrat, Schatz\u2019s Bezalel brought together the utopias of Buber, Herzl and William Morris (pp. 17-18).<\/p>\n
7. Ibid., p. 24. The Bezalel National Museum was the predecessor of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.<\/p>\n
8. Initially, Boris Schatz believed that one cannot be an artist if he is not an artisan; see Nurit Shilo-Cohen, Schatz\u2019s Bezalel, 1906-1929 exh. cat., Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1983), p. 19 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
9. Israel Kolatt\u00a8 \u201cIntroductory remarks for the 7th World Congress of Jewish Studies,\u201dCathedra 16 (1980), p. 164 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
10. Sara Chinski, \u201cEyes Wide Shut: The Acquired Albino Syndrome of the Israeli Art Field,\u201d Theory and Criticism 20 (Spring 2002), p. 59 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
11. Sara Chinski, \u201cThe Lacemakers from Bezalel\u201c, Theory and Criticism 11 (Winter 1997), pp. 177, 193 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
12. See Moshe Zuckermann, Topics in Sociology of Art (Tel Aviv: Broadcast University Series, Ministry of Defense Publishing House, 1996), p. 25 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
13. Ariel Hirschfeld, \u201cOn the Perception of the East in Israeli Culture,\u201dTo the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel, curator: Yigal Zalmona (exh. cat., Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1998), p. 12 [Hebrew]. Hirschfeld analyzes the origins and derivatives of the Hebrew word denoting East \u2013 kadima (kadim, kedem) \u2013 lending it a wider meaning as representing a romantic yearning for the ancient, for the tikkun inherent in the primordial, and mainly a fascination with \u201cHellenistic\u201d Paganism (pp. 11-12).<\/p>\n
14. Ibid., p. 13.<\/p>\n
15. Ibid., p. 21.<\/p>\n
16. Ibid., p. 16. Hirschfeld maintains that Israeli novelists such as Amos Oz (My Michael) and David Grossman (Smile of the Lamb) continue to vest the Arab and Beduin with mystery and sexual potency, continuing the \u201cprojection of the European yearnings on the East.\u201d<\/p>\n
17. Malka Ben Peshat, \u201cMaterial Culture and Cultural Identity in Israel,\u201d in Giora Urian (ed.) From the Israel Museum to the Carmel Market: Israeli Design (Ramat Hasharon: Urian, 2002), p. 360; Ahad Ha\u2019am, \u201cImitation and Assimilation,\u201d (1893) trans. and ed. L. Simon, in Ahad Ha\u2019am: Essays, Letters, Memoirs (Oxford: East and West Library, 1946), pp. 71\u20135.<\/p>\n
18. Chinski (see n. 10), p. 67.<\/p>\n
19. See Yigal Zalmona, To the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel exh. cat., Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1998), p. IX & p. 48 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
20. Ibid., p. 56. Zalmona discusses the \u201cEasternism\u201d attributed to European Jews, since there, in the West, they were considered foreigners, further quoting M. L. Lilienblum: \u201cWe are putting amidst the Aryans, the sons of Shem, Ham and Japheth; a Palestinian tribe from Asia in the countries of Europe. We are foreigners and will forever remain foreigners.\u201d (p. 47).<\/p>\n
21. Zali Gurevitch and Gideon Aran, \u201cAl Hamakom (About Place: Israeli Anthropology),\u201d Alpayim 4 (1991), p. 9 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
22. The first large architectural project incorporating Bauhaus principles \u2013 Weissenhofsiedlung in Stutgart (1927) \u2013 was
\ndisparagingly likened at the time to an \u201cArab village.\u201d<\/p>\n
23. Erich Mendelsohn strove for Jewish-Arab collaboration as part of his membership in the Brit Shalom movement.<\/p>\n
24. Ze\u2019ev Rechter, for example, planned the Engel House on Rothschild Blvd., Tel Aviv (1933), which is considered the first modernist building in the Hebrew city. Arieh Sharon planned several complexes of \u201cWorkers\u2019 Condominiums\u201d throughout the city; after the founding of the State of Israel, he was entrusted with the first comprehensive plan for Israel known as the \u201cSharon Plan.\u201d
\n* The designation \u201canimal\u201d trio refers to the denotations of their first names in Hebrew: Ze\u2019ev \u2013 wolf, Dov \u2013 bear, and Arieh \u2013 lion.<\/p>\n
25. See Gideon Ofrat, \u201cThe 1930s: The German Influence,\u201d in The Story of Israeli Art (see n. 6), pp. 85-88. The chapter deals with painters who came from Germany, were rejected by the local art world, and created for themselves an enclave in the New Bezalel. Their teachings were based on German Expressionism, were influenced by Vassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, and relied on the Bauhaus mode of art instruction, that was characterized by expressive lines a la woodcuts.<\/p>\n
26. See Gideon Ofrat, \u201cZionist Bauhaus: The Ideology of the New Bezalel,\u201d New Bezalel: 1935-1955 (Jerusalem: Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, 1987), p. 12 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
27. The movement\u2019s codex emphasized the need to foster original art with affinity to the art of the time and the idea of progress; see Gila Ballas, New Horizons (Tel Aviv: Papirus and Reshafim, 1979), p. 40 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
28. See Ibid., p. 13.<\/p>\n
29. Streichman as quoted in Ballas, ibid., p. 42. Ballas adds that the members of New Horizons regarded the heritage of the Bauhaus (which in Israel was represented by Mordechai Ardon) and Dada (Marcel Janco, member of New Horizons, was also among the founders of Dada) as part of the \u201chistory of abstract art\u201d (ibid., p.15).<\/p>\n
30. See Gideon Ofrat, \u201cFrom Social Realism to National Symbolism,\u201d in The Story of Israeli Art (n. 6), pp. 213-246.<\/p>\n
31. See Zalmona (n. 19 above), p. 56.<\/p>\n
32. Haim Gamzu, Painting and Sculpture in Israel: Plastic Art from the Bezalel Period to the Present (Tel Aviv: Eshkol, 1951), pp. 58 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
33. See Dorith Levit\u00e9, \u201d1948-1964 New Horizons,\u201d in The Story of Israeli Art (see n. 6), p. 184.<\/p>\n
34. Dan Tsalka, A Thousand Hearts (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1991), pp. 51-53 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
35. Adam Baruch, Hayeinu (Jerusalem: Keter, 2002), p. 256 [Hebrew]. Tumarkin often uses images of altars and sacrifices in his oeuvre. The Holocaust Monument was designed as an upturned pyramid that hints at the modernist penchant for geometric shapes as well as at the architectural achievements of the ancient Egyptians.<\/p>\n
36. Ibid., p. 254.<\/p>\n
37. Galia Bar Or, Hebrew Work: The Disregarded Gaze in the Canon of Israeli Art (exh. cat., Ein Harod: Mishkan Le\u2019omanut, Museum of Art, 1998), p. 156.<\/p>\n
38. See Chinski (n. 10 above), pp. 58-59.<\/p>\n
39. Oz Almog, The Sabra: A Portrait (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2001) [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
40. See Gideon Ofrat, \u201cThe 1940s: Canaanite Art,\u201d in The Story of Israeli Art (see n. 6), p. 130.<\/p>\n
41. Danziger (see n. 1).<\/p>\n
42. From the group\u2019s credo published in the catalogue of their 8th exhibition (1956-57) at the Tel Aviv Museum; see: Gila Ballas, The Group of Ten, 1951-1960 (exh. cat., Ramat Gan: The Museum of Israeli Art, 1992), p. 17 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
43. Ballas, ibid., ibid.<\/p>\n
44. Yaacov Shavit, \u201cIntellectual Groupings in 1950s Plastic Art,\u201d exh. cat. The Group of Ten (see n. 42), pp. 34 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
45. This refers to groups such as Tazpit (\u2018View\u2019) that operated in the early 1960s; Eser Plus (\u2018Ten Plus\u2019), which began operating in the mid-1960s, with artists who gathered around Raffi Lavie; and Aklim (\u2018Climate\u2019) founded in 1973 by Eliyahu Gat, Rachel Shavit, Hanna Levi and Ori Reisman, later joined by Avraham Ofek, Michael Gross, and others; see Ballas (n.
\n42 above), pp. 13-18.<\/p>\n
46. Sarit Shapira compares the rough, masculine \u201csabra\u201d in Israeli art with the softened, refined, skeptical \u201csabra\u201d in the work of Asim Abu-Shakra; see Sarit Shapira, \u201cPotted Sabra,\u201d Kav 10 (July 1990), p. 41 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
47. Moshe Zuckermann, On the Fabrication of Israelism: Myths and Ideology in a Society at Conflict (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2001), p. 21 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
48. See Zalmona (see n. 19), pp. 8-47. Zalmona uses the term \u201cOrientalism\u201d as coined by Edward Said in his celebrated book Orientalism (New York: Pantheon books, 1978).<\/p>\n
49. Arthur Goldreich, Design and Architecture at the Israel Museum: Portrait of a Department, 1973-1997 (exh. cat.,
\nJerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1999), p. 21.<\/p>\n
50. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980) pp. 314-315.<\/p>\n
51. Alexander\u2019s language was described in his book A Pattern Language (1978) as stemming from basic human needs and the functional demands of the building. It is linked to the surrounding culture, the climate, and similar factors; see Nili Portugali, \u201cHolistic Approach to Planning and Construction,\u201d Kav 9 (January 1989), p. 92 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
52. The data was, for the most part, extracted from a catalogue published on the second anniversary of Gaon\u2019s death (see n. 49).<\/p>\n
53. Another point emerging from the above review is the scarce exposure of artists who explicitly engaged with local identity. Apart from Pivko\u2019s exhibition (which addressed the preservation of construction traditions in the neighborhood of Agami in Jaffa), Zavadsky\u2019s exhibition (that featured monumental vases with a ritualistic dimension) or that of Kaminski (whose jewels are made of rough local materials such as rubble and stone) \u2013 quintessential attributes of the place were not articulated.<\/p>\n
54. Ido Bruno, \u201cIsraeli Design or Design in Israel?,\u201d in From the Israel Museum to the Carmel Market: Israeli Design (see n. 17), p. 353-346.<\/p>\n
55. Ayelet Zohar, \u201cThe myth of \u2018Authenticity\u2019: Israeli Design as a Tapestry of Influences,\u201d in From the Israel Museum to the Carmel Market: Israeli Design (see n. 17), p. 4 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
56. See Mordechai Omer, Zaritsky: Views of Tel Aviv from the Roof and the Window, trans.: Rochalle Himelfarb (exh. cat., Tel Aviv: The Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, 1984), unpaginated.<\/p>\n
57. The title echoes Heideger\u2019s description of Van Gogh\u2019s painting of the peasant shoes, maintaining that \u201cthe work of art emerges within the gap between Earth and World\u201d; see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or Cultural Logic of
\nLate Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), p. 7.<\/p>\n
58. Sara Breitberg-Semel, Turning Point: 12 Israeli Artists,trans: Mooky Dagan (exh. cat., Tel Aviv Museum, 1981), p.36.<\/p>\n
59. Sara Breitberg-Semel, The Want of Matter: A Quality in Israeli Art, trans: Susann Codish (exh. cat., Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1986), p. 185.<\/p>\n
60. Ibid., p. 182.<\/p>\n
61. See Yona Fischer, Arie Aroch: Itineraries and Forms (exh.
\ncat., Tel Aviv Museum, 1976-1977), unpaginated.<\/p>\n
62. Breitberg-Semel (see n. 57), p. 186.<\/p>\n
63. Chinski (see n. 10), p. 72.<\/p>\n
64. See Jurgen Habermas, \u201cModernity: An Incomplete Project,\u201d in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 3-15.<\/p>\n
65. Kolatt (see n. 9), p. 163.<\/p>\n
66. Chinski (see n. 11), p. 185.<\/p>\n
\n
Back to the \u201cScene of the Crime\u201d<\/p>\n
Sophia Dekel\u201cSometimes it seems as though today\u2019s Israeliness has no one to care for it.\u201d
\nDoron Rosenblum1
\nIn 1994, when I curated the exhibition Object\/Object2 I asked the participants to walk the thin grayish line winding between design and art. The sources of inspiration invoked were mostly foreign. The exhibition, which explored the intra-artistic boundaries, disregarded the boundaries of the place. It gave precedence to general, universal notions such as art vs. craft, unique vs. industrialized. We did not touch upon the work\u2019s origin, nor did we tackle it as a regulating idea
\nused to criticize the existent or as an ideological means for its preservation.<\/p>\n
Our attempts to create a representation according to a rational, well-reasoned formula failed, when the global-virtual world we modeled slapped us in the face: we have been and remain strangers. Frustration forced us to reconsider the constituent elements that make up the whole without repression, without denial. Effacement was delayed. We contemplated and challenged \u2013 first amongst ourselves, later (somewhat apologetically) in a whisper among friends \u2013 that perhaps there is, after all, something in the nostalgia, the eclecticism, the general (Jewish and \u201cIsraeli\u201d), tribal (Moroccan, Polish, German, Georgian), \u201clocal\u201d (Arab) tradition, something significant that nests within us or testifies about us.<\/p>\n
At a certain point we realized that we have not rid ourselves of the Diaspora. The \u201cNegation of Exile\u201d project \u2013 at the heart of the Zionist ethos, founded on the constitution of a New Hebrew-\u201cSabra\u201d Jew \u2013 has not been completed and will probably never come to a conclusion. The tendency to assimilate is ingrained in us. The adherence to universalism \u2013 the modern extension of the assimilationist tendency that characterized the secular stream in the Diaspora \u2013 has been shifted from the territorial-national microcosm to the global-western a-territorial macrocosm precisely in the State of Israel in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
In recent years an acceptance is discernible. Artists and curators return to the \u201cscene of the crime,\u201d striving to fathom it. \u201cIsraeliness,\u201d as Doron Rosenblum asserts, has become \u201cin,\u201d even if at times it seems as though there is no one to care for it. The renewed encounter emerges from a vantage point of recognition, of understanding our committed situation to a place that is split both physically and conceptually; any attempt to evade confrontation magnifies the degree of alienation. Only a direct approach to this great deficiency may bring some relief, for one thing depends on another.3<\/p>\n
Staging the current exhibition at the Jerusalem Artists\u2019 House, the historical building of Schatz\u2019s Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, is not accidental: it strives to complete a circle. The show is a collection of deliberations and references alluding to the local visual dictionary (that has accumulated over more than a century of eclecticism, modernism and post-modernism); thus it encompasses the conceptual and the aesthetic, the high and the low (art and craft), the secular and the religious, the central and the peripheral, the Western and the local, the Eastern other and the proximate, the Russian. It is a (partial) inventory of what we have had, what we appropriated and what we abandoned.
\nAn artist\u2019s decision to deal with a specific symbol or sign is not accidental either. The current viewpoint articulates the post-melting-pot, post-Hi-Tech-economy, post-al-Aqsa-Intifada zeitgeist. The resulting discourse begins at home. It is critical and peppered with more than an ounce of self-irony. It is somewhat conciliatory, somewhat vanquished. There are no sounds of victory, no sense of \u201cI am the best.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wallowing in the past characterizes many of the works in the show, but the \u201chomecoming\u201d does not attest to naivete; it is usually a disillusioned, realistic default option. The icons are not fixated in their given form, as they are part of our cultural assets, words in the language, like the historical masterpieces that have lost their authority and turned into images.4 Thus, the division into chapters is not definitive. It is intended to help in orientation, to facilitate the encounter with the works and with the questions they elicit.<\/p>\n
Rift-Death-Memory\u201cWith no deep sorrow, with no dismal grief, for time buries sadness next to the deceased.\u201d
\n-Hanoch Levin5
\nGideon Gechtman\u2019s mausoleum is the existential experience of an artist who simulates his own death, layer upon layer, as part of a documentation of the \u201cVia Dolorosa\u201d of his life \u2013 his illness and the illness of his son Yotam, which ended in premature death. Shifting it to the national sphere expands the ironic gaze, reinforcing the measure of alienation.<\/p>\n
Gechtman employs the conventional formulation of obituaries \u2013 a unique local custom \u2013 to create Pyramid I (1982-2002). The four photographs (from 1975) of billboards on which the obituary notice was planted, announcing Gechtman\u2019s \u201cpremature\u201d death, were mounted in the 1980s on the sides of Pyramid, and reconstructed for the current show via digital print on a new plastic envelope that protects the old one.<\/p>\n
Similarly, Pyramid II (1982-2002) documents the destruction of a charged site: a house that belonged to his wife Batsheva Zeisler\u2019s parents, where son Yotam spent most his childhood. The documentation of the house\u2019s destruction brings Gechtman closer to the experience of his late son. On the other hand, we are concerned with a familiar local ritual in our public agenda: constructing, razing and constructing once again. The sum total is a virtual reality of ingredients for the formation of collective memory: a historical icon (an Egyptian pyramid, one of the wonders of ancient architecture), a pedagogical symbol (from slavery to freedom, destruction for the sake of construction), and a local phenomenon (the publication of death or perpetuation of destruction).<\/p>\n
Erez Komarovsky (Who Brings Forth Bread) opted for a ready-made, an antique piece of furniture: a long wooden trough (madia) where dough is kneaded and left to rise. Reminiscent of a coffin, the piece is filled with sifted flour. The loaf of bread was grounded to the white surface with an Ottoman iron sword. The stump of a felled citrus tree used in wood-fired ovens is inserted into the loaf. The result \u2013 a sarcophagus whose back is ridged with the grooves of time \u2013 is used to
\ninsert requests scribbled on scraps of paper (hope). \u201cTo bring forth bread,\u201d Komarovsky explains, \u201cis to give life, even if despite our requests it ends in death.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rachel Cohen-Kedar (Crate with Flowers) uses a crate of military ammunition that instead of storing ordnance becomes a site of intimate memory containing fossils \u2013 dried flowers that were lined with concrete in plastic containers. The banality of death is arranged in columns, as if it were a production line.<\/p>\n
Object\u201cThe form, nature, and use of all artifacts are as influenced by politics, manners, and personal preferences as by that nebulous entity, technology. And the evolution of the artifacts in turns
\nhas profound influences on manners and social intercourse.\u201d Henri Petroski6
\nShai Barkan (Chess) employs chessboards to explore form, texture and movement, while tracing functional processes that generate a class hierarchy. The two chessboards and their pieces (1 king, 1 queen, 2 rooks, 2 bishops, 2 knights, and 8 pawns) represent two trends in local aesthetics: One clings to the ancient, to the archaeology of the place (ancient coins, traces), and is obtained via handiwork that leaves a plastic impression on the radiant texture; the other has appropriated a modernist, narrative-rejecting, geometric aesthetic (like International Style urbanism that worships skyscrapers and exalts function), a quintessential technological product that indirectly attests to a cultural environment and the realm of thought accompanying it.<\/p>\n
In contrast, Eliahou Eric Bokobza (Salt-Pepper, Art for Tourists) is not afraid to adopt the unpopular image of a \u201cBezalel artist\u201d. This is how he would have been classified, he says \u201chad the institution still existed in that format and had I been a painter there.\u201d Bokobza created an object from Sterling silver and olive wood \u2013 two raw materials typical of Bezalel pieces in Schatz\u2019s time. He embellished it with embroidered filigree as in the olden days. Into the Eastern motifs, such as an arch and a palm tree, he inserted (as was done in the country in the 1930s) a Trojan horse in the form of a straight-line structure, a typical Bauhaus building: salt (\u2018Salt of the Earth,\u2019 the white, the Ashkenazi) and pepper (the other, Eastern\/Sephardi, black) that have maintained their unique attributes rather than being fused into a single image.<\/p>\n
as a local brand, through fetishization of the banal (the cheap, common hanger) as a proposal for environmental sculpture \u00e0 la Claes Oldenburg.<\/p>\n
Hanan Pomagrin, Brad Pinchuk and Boubi Luxembourg\u2019s Work Number Eight \u2013 a chair made of sesame patterned floor tiles \u2013 continues a series of research works centered on the architectural space; works that put an old (yet not too old), banal material from a period we love to love (the 1950s and 1960s) to a new use. Taking the tile out of its floor context and introducing it to the context of carpentry, of chair building, requires the incorporation of ergonomic considerations into the engineering-technological structuring. Since human engineering was not taken into account, the stiffness of the seat represents the devotion to matter at the expense of the human purpose. The second development phase has yielded growths in the form of softening upholstery, in an attempt to create a relationship between the human body, the space and the object.<\/p>\n
In Keter Barbie, Gideon Gechtman mounts a chair (commodity) on a pedestal as an analogy to the production of a cultural icon: a miniature casting of an item drawn from a series of garden furniture (\u201cKeter Plastic\u201d) in Israeli design. The popular, mobile, accessible and cheap product is categorized as a value amongst the assets of local culture, the ultimate Israeli chair.<\/p>\n
Chanan de Lange presents a lighting fixture, Self-Portrait in anti-design. The portrait was created with basic, plain materials, both natural and industrial, partly recycled, through intimate and intuitive handiwork. The use of plastic paper in red and blue implies a commitment to three-dimensionality \u2013 prestige that bursts forth through the \u201cwant of matter\u201d and the knack for improvisation.<\/p>\n
Raviv Lifshitz\u2019s Undressed Room is a cluster of images of small, conventional white metal hangers, sheltered by a father-hanger enclosing them \u2013 one in a series of objects through which Lifshitz examines the identities of matter. Lifshitz believes \u201cone ought to preserve, or re-create, the structure of a familiar object by accurate shifting\u201d in order to obtain a better understanding of it. The present (the hanger) attests to the absent (the costume); it represents states of mobility and transience<\/p>\n
Nostalgia-Myth\u201cThe best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth.\u201d Roland Barthes7
\nJoseph Dadoune used postcards from his private collection (Hard Wheat Flour) to create an object that functions as an invitation to the show. Ordinarily known as an extroverted, blatant artist, Dadoune opted for the idea, for the fantasy: the pastoral ambience of a kindergarten in Eilat, a convalescent home on Kibbutz Hafetz Haim, camel riders, landscapes in Tiberias, the snowy Mt. Meron, the Tanur waterfall, Sahne national park, Nachal (wadi) Arugot. These elusive worlds were framed with strips of color inspired by the colors of Bamba (Israeli peanut snack) packs, bringing us back to reality (the commodity).<\/p>\n
In the case of Reut Ferster (Jerusalem of Gold) the choice of ready-made is not mere chance. The gilded metal circles are linked to her biography, calling to mind a product in the family\u2019s fashion accessories shop. The popular-tourist postcard \u2013 featuring an enchanting view of Jerusalem (The Old City, The Tower of David) by night, from an awe-inspiring, magnifying photographic angle \u2013 invokes the mystical, heavenly and utopian promise embodied in the city within the mass image.
\nFerster, however, chooses to appropriate the icon with Sisyphean manual dexterity, deconstructing, reassembling and gluing. The postcard was photographed, enlarged, cut to round pieces that were glued in a format that matches the reproduced \u201coriginal\u201d postcard. The dream fragments come together to form a whole, reproduced 16 times in Ferster\u2019s reconstruction work and once again in the viewer\u2019s eyes, but the burden is invisible to the eye preoccupied with the vision. The city \u2013 that has been a site of bloody battles from time immemorial \u2013 is concealed behind a<\/p>\n
Israel Rabinovitz\u2019s series The Turiya [Hoe] Theater (Tamhuyini, As a Holy Plough) continues to enact the agricultural ethos of divided Zionism, from the point of view of the New Global Order or the old-new chaos. A work tool (pickax), values (Hebrew Work), landscape details (palm tree, camel, fence) and candle remains (Rabin\u2019s assassination) are used to dramatize the heroics
\ninherent in the local carnival. As in the Theater of the Absurd, here too, scale plays a role.<\/p>\n
Noam Rabinovich\u2019s gesture (Yehoshua Margolin\u2019s Chair) sums up a series of booklets he published with inspiration from Margolin\u2019s studies about Israel\u2019s indigenous plants. The empty chair \u2013 an artistic icon with a history \u2013 attests to the \u201cpresence of the absent.\u201d8 The fabric gowns dressing the chair \u2013 a library of pockets and hand-embroidered feather cushions \u2013 give off scents of asceticism, innocence and modesty; Margolin\u2019s old shabby books stick out of their pockets alongside Rabinovich\u2019s new books. \u201cAll I wanted was to sit in the chair once in a while,\u201d Rabinovich writes with yearning for days imbued with ideology.<\/p>\n
Rivka Potchebutzky (The Juggler\u2019s House) chose a mobile, miniaturized, a-territorial house. The yearning for a home is expressed through the miniaturized image, fluctuating in mid-air on a thin rope, trying, like an acrobat, to keep its balance. The primary architectural plan of the house meets the basic criteria of a home in universal terms: simple, accessible, industrialized construction. The intricate manual construction (a crisscross of paper strips and poles wrapped with fabric bands, inlaid with tiny weights and old watches), however, requires sophistication, sensitivity and creativity. The encounter generates tension between the permanent and the transient, between the sophisticated and the simple, between the technological and the manual, between sublime principles and a gray reality. The miniaturization calls Hanoch Levin\u2019s discussion of the National Library building to mind, likened to a tiny matchbox hung on a thread: \u201cNot too big and not too small. Precisely our size.\u201d9<\/p>\n
The changing world of values preoccupies Boris Lecar (Scale of Values): a print of a famous drawing by Leonardo da Vinci (Canon of Proportion, 1490), is glued to the back of a box. The New Shekel is pushed to the foreground. The Golden Section (of ideal proportions) loses priority
\nto the Shekel (the modern \u2018golden calf\u2019).10 Consumerism replaces the idea.<\/p>\n
Ilana and Hans Pallada\u2019s Flaglobalization deals with vision, its realization and the gap between them. The two illustrate a statement made by the visionary of the State of Israel, Theodor Herzl, that refers to motifs in the future flag of the Jewish State. Herzl envisioned a white surface embellished with seven golden stars, the sign of new life and labor. In reality we got a Star of David. Ilana and Hans Pallada offer a new visual interpretation: seven stars in the form of a crescent moon, as on the flag of the European Union, the same union we are so eager to join, although (to paraphrase Woody Allen) it refuses to accept us as a member.
\nThe flag is made in China \u2013 evidence of the globalization that under the guise of free economy undermines the foundations of our existence as a unique and free nation in its land. The transient installation, on a block and a mound of sand, is a homage to the ceremonies that marked the establishment of new settlements in the early days of the State, that culminated when the flag was raised.
\nsophisticated marketing mechanism. Proximity has a price, and so does distance.<\/p>\n
Ezri Tarazi (Ma\u2019aseh Hoshev: Cunning Work) makes a statement about skilled craft. The chosen image \u2013 a chair decorated with a running pattern reminiscent of a brain scan, inspired by Damascene fabric \u2013 was digitally manipulated. The object\u2019s abstraction exposes a basic structure, functional-modernist in form. The color is pressed into a sheet of paper, rendering them a single substance. The use of different materials, such as wood, metal and clay, in current technology, as opposed to the patterned traditional technique, raises new possibilities without relinquishing the old ones.<\/p>\n
Phenomenon\u201cZionism is a case of particular interest because it practices architecture to the extreme; it compensates for historical lacuna by hyper-planning; it denies stable form by maintaining an open-ended process of morphing; it draws maps of masquerade over and over again to measure the vulnerability and negotiability of spaces.\u201d Zvi Efrat11
\nMarilou Levin takes the place of the anticipating viewer standing in the Arrivals Hall (from the series Gotta Go, 1999). Anticipation turns into observation. The viewer follows the people arriving; he notices a sense of relief once they identify acquaintances, and a sense of disappointment when they discover no one is waiting for them. Most of them are not afraid to show their feelings, to express happiness. Some pretend to be indifferent. Those who expect no one are baffled by the bustle, and hurriedly leave the place. The absent is present through the gaze of the returnees, when in the saga of anticipation an Israeli entity comes to life: the eternal traveler, the Israeli consumer, who returns home laden with packages.<\/p>\n
Adam Berg (Sheinkin\u2019s Heavens after a poem by Maya Bejerano) presents the poetry of Sheinkin Street, a stronghold of Tel Avivianism. Berg read Bejerano\u2019s poem and suggested she photograph herself in her favorite locations along the street. The words, most of them referring to the atmosphere of the place (street signs, advertisements, posters, graffiti), do not illustrate the place, but rather function as ready-mades. Berg merely edited them, intervening in the inner rhythm and composing music, bringing the words and the place together in the viewer\u2019s memory. Out of the vocal and visual discord emerges a cacophony of forms, colors and textures; amiable antiquity alongside images extracted from the Sheinkin culture industry. Occasionally the other, the stranger, the religious bursts forth, attempting to float through the street swiftly.<\/p>\n
Hagar Goren (The Stranger or Is Anyone Listening to Me?) explores the appropriation of language in her sound and text installations. The first attempt takes place at the Musrara Ulpan (intensive Hebrew language course) where a decision was made to make life easy for the immigrants and teach them Hebrew in Russian \u2013 basic, useful Hebrew needed to fill out forms, to read want ads\u2026 No longer a melting pot whose goal is assimilation in the \u201cSabra\u201d myth. The act of reciting the material emanating from the two loudspeakers that pivot around a central axis, is neither spiritual nor religious nor intellectual. The newcomers adopt the practical facet from their new environment, without replacing old cultural assets with new ones or trying to decipher the gap between sign and signified. Goren\u2019s second piece too pertains to language: a whistling gramophone plays tunes originating in four languages \u2013 English, Arabic, Russian and Hebrew: a Tower of Babel or Noah\u2019s Ark.<\/p>\n
Belu-Simion Fainaro (Auschwitz, Ruin, Tikkun Kalah \u2013 Bridal Correction) compiles notions (death and wedding) that have become industrialized, commercialized; notions that have been cheapened while fostering the industry that nourishes them (marketing vs. consumption, production vs. commodity). The Auschwitz deeds are packed in the freezer as a perpetual memory, goods for good. For the wedding chapter, he is joined by his partner, Avital Bar-Shay (The Lace Maker). Her work is inserted in the merger dance: a soft female character leaning on a wooden door, embroidered with red thread on Plexiglas, is juxtaposed to Fainaro\u2019s fabric envelope and cold neon light, infusing it with life.<\/p>\n
Nekoda and Dana Singer illustrate an Aramaic phrase \u2013 \u201cIn Sodom they had a special guest bed. Whoever was too tall for it would be sliced down to the right size. Whoever was too short was stretched to size.\u201d (Tractate Sanhedrin 109:62). This Procrustean bed embodies the initiation process the artist must undergo in his encounter with the local art scene, which according to this artist couple (who emigrated from Russia), \u201cits major quality is meeting standards.\u201d
\nThe painting is traditional, acrylic on canvas, and is accompanied by instructions for use (\u201cto praise the artist, measure him, shrink\/stretch, stop taking notice\u201d). Ready-made \u2013 a Sochnut (\u2018Jewish Agency\u2019) bed whose springs are broken \u2013 conceals plastic dolls painted white in odd hybridizations, somewhat surreal as a result of over-stretching (whether necessary or unnecessary). \u201cThe authenticity of the autonomous work of art is essentially confronted with the lack of authenticity characterizing the objectified consciousness.\u201d13<\/p>\n
Tal Amitai (Untitled) explores visual-cultural phenomena: bumper-stickers bearing clich\u00e9s that are reproduced in thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Their displacement to a one-off acrylic painting on wood, in a rectangular format and traditional technique, takes them out of their mass setting \u2013 the rear window of a car \u2013 and frames them on the wall of an institutionalized exhibition space. Amitai extracts an existing text from the field: humane (\u201cShalom Haver\u201d) and ethical (\u201cAn Entire Generation Demands Peace\u201d) messages, alongside aggressive (\u201cIt\u2019s all your fault\u201d), racist (\u201cI love any Jew,\u201d \u201cOnly Transfer will Bring Peace\u201d) or colonialist (\u201cThe Nation with the Golan\u201d) verbal attacks, fuse into a short, simple and catchy eclectic blend. Their creators are quick to react, enveloping-attacking us in the public sphere, violently penetrating our private sphere. The old, familiar populist text recounts our chronicles with an aggressive font, blatant coloration and mechanized design, whether professional or amateur, meant to ensnare us. The act of removing it from its popular context strives to lend the sticker a uniqueness that contradicts the indefinable authenticity of the reproduced object (which is the \u201coriginal\u201c in this case) that lacks the \u201chere-and-now\u201d of the work of art.12<\/p>\n
Environments\u201cI ask a pretty ancient woman and find out that the Rasko Gimel public-housing neighborhood
\nis gone, that it has now become the Savionim Heights.\u201d Gabriela Avigur-Rotem14
\nDavid Guggenheim and Yoav Molcho (Cheap Water) try to penetrate the local urban skin with a preventive act against water import. Their method relates to the place via an act of tikkun (expiation) a la Danziger (who was Guggenheim\u2019s teacher), one that strives to blend the advantages of past and present rather than return the situation to the way it had been. This holistic approach brings together four layers \u2013 sky, built-up area, earth and water \u2013 through ancient technologies of water reserving and channeling, that combine protection of nature with technological development.<\/p>\n
The fence stretched by Meirav Davish Ben-Moshe (Peace and Security) across one of the gates of the Artists\u2019 House, is a standard wire mesh that had undergone obsessive manipulation in the studio. Each rhombus was cut and re-attached with cellophane tape to the adjacent rhombus, as a comment about the protective fence, \u201cthe Good Fence,\u201d and the ultimate promise of \u201cpeace and security,\u201d as well as the improvisation capacity and short-term planning (protective fence, the Maccabiah bridge, the Versailles wedding hall).<\/p>\n
Eri Goshen (Single Line) adopts an asset of modernism that has distinctively become naturalized here: the simple, applicable design solution that is anchored in a monolithic idea. Hashalom Train Station in Tel Aviv was designed in this spirit (one flowing line, with a double arching s-shape) as well as the eSSe door (an industrial item manufactured in sophisticated production-line methods in Italy). Goshen\u2019s proposal to forest the Ayalon Highway strives to blur the advertising squall on both sides of what used to be the Musrara wadi.<\/p>\n
Mapping of the public sphere according to the indefatigable spread of Ackerstein interlocking paving stones guides Yael Klain-Moriah, Sigal Barnir and Anat Even\u2019s Interlocking in the Landscape: a comparative study of a political, economic and social reality, as manifested in the landscape in object-space and center-periphery relations. The questions revolve around the self-evident which is not at all obvious. The film accompanying the installation documents a sandy-mortar wall that stretches along the road in the Caesaria-Or-Akiva area, like a far-fetched aqueduct that unsuccessfully strives to integrate into the landscape.<\/p>\n
Block, a video excerpt from Shlomo Vazana\u2019s piece Inheriting Son, was created from the perspective of a resident of Jerusalem\u2019s Katamon neighborhood. Modern architecture (essentially political) promised quality of popular habitation (fit for all). In actuality, with the fast transition to capitalist society, the attempt failed: cheap construction, poor maintenance and lack of support for stood in the theory\u2019s way. There is Me\u2019onot Ovdim (workers\u2019 housing cooperatives), there is Nayot (a quarter for Anglo-Saxon immigrants planned by David Resnik in Jerusalem) \u2013 and there is Katamon.<\/p>\n
Gilad Ophir and Rivka Potchebutzky conduct a dialogue in Clay Garden: \u201cNot a park but a garden \u2013 a small area of play and clay, water and light, an Israeli dream.\u201d Intimacy is the key word, for work with clay requires exposure and avoids mediation: you knead the material with your hands, attentive to it and to yourself, to the drying rate, the processing time; playing, feeling, wondering and straying. In the work, a house-with-a-garden is replaced by earth on a roof transpiring on an infrastructure of old roof-shingles \u2013 a ready-made that bears the traces of place and time. The use of light and water \u2013 elements that infuse the material with life \u2013 examines transparency and imperviousness, illumination and moisture, in order to distinguish between a living place and an archaeological site. Israeli aridity is reflected in Sunflowers, four photographs taken by Gilad Ophir in a withering sunflower field.<\/p>\n
Hanna Parah and Dina Shoham (Block) conduct a dialogue of another kind. The banal, gray, unsophisticated, basic apartment block is at the core, charged for one, aesthetic for another. When it is bare and unfinished \u2013 it is Arab; when it is covered and smoothed \u2013 it is Israeli: Hebrew-Arabic work rather than a summit conference or a symposium of the well informed; talk about life.<\/p>\n
Orit Siman-Tov and Doron Pinchas delve into fragments that reflect an entire society (Bougainvillea, Mosaic). The mosaic represents the \u201cyuppie\u201d scene that evolved here in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is characterized by the conscious, planned nonchalance of collecting the \u201cright things\u201d. These are ostensibly simple and cheap, but in fact highly sophisticated: Erich Mendelsohn (Wiezmann Residence, Rehovot), Danziger\u2019s Nimrod, Tumarkin, abstract, Turkish bath (hammam), Mediterraneanism, Hi-Tech, Bauhaus, an anthroposophic kindergarten, a workout gym, a poem by Alterman, celebrities in VIP seats, The Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, vine, fig, sunflower and garlic, for the sake of health and heritage, when the dimension of time raises questions pertaining to place, tradition and identity.<\/p>\n
Notes1. Doron Rosenblum, Israeli Blues (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 1996), p. 247 [Hebrew].
\n2. See Sophia (Tsofia) Dekel, exh. cat. Object\/Object: Dialogue between Art & Design (The Forum of Art Museums, 1994).<\/p>\n
3. See Moshe Zuckermann, On the Fabrication of Israelism: Myths and Ideology in a Society at Conflict (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2001), p. 34 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
4. See John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 33.<\/p>\n
5. Hanoch Levin, \u201cWith No Deep Sorrow, With No Dismal Grief\u201d, What Does the Bird Care: Songs, Sketches and Satires (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hame\u2019uchad, 1987), p. 49 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n
6. Henry Petroski, The Evolution Of Useful Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 20.<\/p>\n
7. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans.: Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 135.<\/p>\n
8. See Mordechai Omer, exh. cat. The Presence of the Absent: The Empty Chair in Israeli Art (Tel Aviv: The Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, 1991).<\/p>\n
9. Hanoch Levin, \u201cThe National Library,\u201d What Does the Bird Care: Songs, Sketches and Satires (see n. 5), p. 76.<\/p>\n
10. The principle of the Golden Section (based on the ratio between the human head and the body) was used by the ancient Egyptians and the Greek sculptors in the 5th century B.C. in order to obtain anatomical likeness of the sculpted figures.<\/p>\n
11. Zvi Efrat, \u201cborderlinedisorder,\u201d exh. cat. borderlinedisorder, The Israeli Pavilion, The 8th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale, 2002, p. 21.<\/p>\n
12. See Walter Benjamin, \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,\u201d in G. Mast and M. Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).<\/p>\n
13. See Zuckermann (n. 3), p. 181.<\/p>\n
14. Gabriela Avigur-Rotem, Heatwave and Crazy Birds (Tel Aviv: Keshet, 2001), p. 14 [Hebrew].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":9341,"template":"","categories":[205],"artists":[],"exhibition":[450],"curator":[451],"years":[452,453],"class_list":["post-1492","exhibitions","type-exhibitions","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-theme-exhibition","exhibition-israeli-object-a-matter-of-time","curator-sophia-dekel","years-2002-en","years-2003-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibitions\/1492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibitions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/exhibitions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1492"},{"taxonomy":"artists","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artists?post=1492"},{"taxonomy":"exhibition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibition?post=1492"},{"taxonomy":"curator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/curator?post=1492"},{"taxonomy":"years","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/years?post=1492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}