Visual Arts in Israel 1995-1998

From its very first issues, successive editors of Ariel have tried to ensure that the visual material offered in the journal represents the best of Israeli art. The selection usually reflects a professional consensus which has developed and changed here over the years.

In the 1990s, the quality and complexity of the plastic arts increased, as can be seen in the type of museums, the composition of the public visiting them, the character and size of exhibition spaces, the quality of collections, the exhibitions themselves and the research and accompanying publications.

The painter Joseph Zaritsky (1891-1985) always wanted his paintings to be hung not in the Israel art section of museums, but in the international section. For him there was no "Israeli art" and "international art," but modern art, and he saw himself as part of both.

Recently, the curator of contemporary international art at the Israel Museum, Suzanne Landau, invited the Jerusalem artist Zvi Goldstein to exhibit some of his new work alongside a selection of international works, thus highlighting the need for a dialogue between contemporary art being created in Israel and abroad.

The erection of sculptures in public spaces began nearly 30 years ago. In Jerusalem this was done on a large scale with the placing of international sculptures. Side by side with works by Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Jean Miro, Max Bill, Jean Arp, and Niki de St. Phalle were those by Dov Feigin, Israel Hadany, Yigael Tumarkin, Michael Gross and Dani Karavan. Later on, many Israel sculptors had their works displayed in Tel Aviv, exposing a wider public to contemporary Israeli sculpture. Among these were the works of younger Israeli sculptors such as Dvora Dominey, Yuval Rimon, Isaak Golombek, Zadok Ben-David, Ilan Averbuch, Sigal Primor, Motti Mizrachi and Gideon Gechtman. Simultaneously, museums specialising in exhibiting sculptures were founded: the Open-Air Museum at Tefen and the Herzliya Museum.

Similarly, comprehensive exhibitions of sculptures were mounted at the major museums: "80 Years of Sculpture" at the Israel Museum (1984), "A Century of Modern Sculpture" from the international collection of Patsy and Raymond Nasher of Dallas, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (1989), as well as exhibits in places far from the main towns, where the surrounding nature and landscape allowed the erection of site-specific sculptures, such as Tel Hai in the Upper Galilee (since 1980), Mitzpe Ramon in the Negev (1962) and the Sculpture Biennale in Ein Hod (1990). These exhibits drew large and varied crowds.

The involvement in landscape painting in the 1930s and 1940s was to a great extent a reflection of the wish to give a local content to art in Israel. Many artists attempted to give expression in their work to the special quality of light which characterizes the country. In the 1950s, the focus shifted to abstraction, part of which had its origin in figurative painting. The initial expression, if such a thing existed, came mainly through colour and through the way it was applied to the canvas. Few painters dealt with social or political themes, and if they did they were only part of a wide range of subject matters.

Against this background, the work of Tel Aviv artist David Reeb (b. 1952) stands out starkly in that he chose politics and social comment as the central theme of his work. If at the outset it appeared that Reeb wished to change political processes, after a short while he stressed in interviews that he no longer believed in the power of art to change politics.

Reeb bases his paintings on newspaper photographs on the Israel-Arab conflict. One also finds in his work a general critique of society. A motif used in advertising Camel cigarettes is connected to an advertisement for Time cigarettes. This configuration of motifs juxtaposes a local brand of cigarettes, with its English brand name which is also the title of the well-known weekly news magazine and an American brand which uses as its logo an animal expressly identified with this region, thus creating a paradoxical situation in which the local item appears to be western, and the western one, eastern. For Reeb, the camel motif also carries with it artistic connotations connected to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Reebs use of the abstracted logo, or geometric forms resembling a logo, relates perhaps to the fact that a large percentage of the source of visual images which we accumulate through viewing television, reading newspapers, visiting supermarkets and so on, form a conglomeration of commercial, visual images which compete with personal images of "High Art" which are produced by local and international artists. "Lets Have Another War" is the title of a large wall ensemblage of several paintings, for Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, 1997. This monochrome work is also based on photographs relating to the Arab-Israel conflict.

In the 1980s, Tsibi Geva (b. 1951) painted names of Arab and Jewish cities in Israel. Thereafter, the artists political message was conveyed in images such as the backgammon board, a widely-popular game in this region and a particular favourite among Arabs, and a series on the kaffiyeh (Arab head-dress), which he has been painting for more than five years. The two series like the series based on floor tiles that preceded them are stylized and deal with the subject matter on the level of abstract painting and pattern.

For Geva, "the obsessive repetition of this symbol [the kaffiyeh] simultaneously provides meaning and yet renders it meaningless because it is only a decorative pattern. For me, this is a kind of attempt to understand and converse. As time passes, I try less to represent knowledge in my work; I simply make things. The meaning only emerges in retrospect."

In many of his works, Gabi Klasmer (b. 1951) integrates Hebrew words written in Latin characters. In most cases, reading the words does not offer a key to understanding the content of the work. Words were already used in cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque. Through words, the surrealists Miro and Magritte highlighted the lyrical and enigmatic side of their work. The inclusion of a Hebrew word in Latin characters in Klasmers work is an anomalous combination of something local camouflaged in an international code. Klasmers recent work is abstract. He represented Israel in the 1998 San Paulo Biennale, with large monochrome paintings and drawings in graphite using the mechanical device of a potters wheel.

There is a sense among artists, collectors, curators, and many art lovers, that the criteria of evaluation are being created elsewhere, in another place, which is identified as the "centre." Once this was Paris; in the 1950s it was thought of as New York. To be more precise, the situation today would appear to be more complex in that few major artists now live and work in Paris or New York, although they are still centres for art journals, sale rooms and galleries.

The idea of centre and periphery is the focal point in the work of the conceptual artist Zvi Goldstein (b. 1947). He tries to find ways by which the periphery, or to use his term the Third World, can engage in a dialogue of contemporary artists. At one point, he suggested a "lexicon of forms," which developed in Russia in the framework of Constructivism, as a model for artists in the Third World. One of his typical works, for example, is entitled "Function, Progess and Universalism in the Third World." He too is showing in the 1998 San Paulo Biennale.

Parallel to these developments, there has been a blurring of the lines between different areas of art painting/sculpture, painting/ photography, photography/computer, sculpture/relief, environmental sculpture/architecture, landscape/architecture, etc.

The photographer Simcha Shirman recently exhibited works based on photographs but which were, in reality, installations which combine photography, painting and collage. The painter Dganit Berest has mounted an exhibition of photographs and her exhibition of paintings is based on photographic techniques. Raffi Lavie integrates photographs from newspapers and posters. Motti Mizrachi began his artistic activities with happenings and installations documented by photographs, while today he concentrates on threedimensional sculpture. The site-specific environmental sculptures of Dani Karavan combine architectural sculpture and landscape architecture.

From the point of view of styles, it is possible to say that pluralism still has the upper hand. Typifying Israeli art today is a great variety of styles, no one of which is dominant or leads the others. Among artists there is a great desire to be au courant with what is happening in the art world at large as well as wishing to create something rooted in the local situation and environment. While we may already be living in Marshall McLuhans "Global Village," it is it evident that a definite wish persists to conserve a regional identity.

On a rainy day in December, 1993, AKIM-ISRAEL (The National Association for Habilitation of the Mentally Handicapped) organized a creative workshop for 20 people with mental disabilities from the Tel Aviv area. The objective was to create a clay mask. The result, after four hours of work, was a fascinating array of masks. From this array, a committee of Friends of AKIM-ISRAEL chose an abstract mask with minimalistic features.

The mask was duplicated in white clay and sent to 200 famous personalities in the fields of politics, finance, culture and arts in Israel and abroad. They were asked to pain the decorate the masks, giving free reign to their imagination. The masks were to be returned to be aucioned for the benefit of the AKIM Arts Center for the Mentally Handicapped. "Beneath our masks," read AKIM's letter, "we are all the same." Some of the results appear here.

Michael Levin is head of general studies at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. He has served as art advisor to the mayors of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and as chairman of the Tel Aviv Art Committee. He was chief curator of the Tel Aviv Museum. He is a frequent contributor to Ariel.