The Israel Museum

2008 is Israel's 60th birthday, and in celebration six different museums are each hosting an exhibition throughout the year, each representing a decade of Israel's artistic existence. I have a brochure with all the different hosting museums and exhibitions, but it's in Hebrew, as is the website information, so i would butcher it if I tried to translate. I think I'm going to try to catch a few more of them, since I absolutely loved my time exploring the Israel Museum's contibution of the most recent decade, entitled "Real Time: Art in Israel 1998-2008."

The art reflected the decade with recurring themes of conflict, whether between groups of people or nature vs. modern artificiality, apocalyptic symbols were often imbedded within the pieces, and obviously many biblical allusions. I was struck by many of the pieces, very few left me ambivalent, and I was pleased to find that I recognized many of the artists; Sigalit Landau (recently had work exhibited at MOMA), Adi Nes (famous for using soldiers as his models, and for his homosexuals themes), Ohad Meromi (his The Boy from South Tel Aviv was part of the show) , Masha Zosman (I saw her exhibition in Tel Aviv 2 years ago). I'm going to note a few of my favorites, but the pictures are small, and I really recommend you check out other websites if you're interested.

One of the first pieces in the exhibit is Shahr Marcus' video Freeze. The artist brought two professional chess players to the Shrine of the Book (it houeses the Dead Sea Scrolls) at the Israel Museum. The scrolls were written by an aesthetic groups of Jews during the Roman occupation who fortold of a war between good and evil, light and dark, and is well played out on the checkered board of chess. The large pieces that the professionals had to play with were made of clear and muddy ice, which melted as the game progressed. Adding to the tension, the artist was in the large hourglass (filled with table-tennis balls) and was alternately on his head or feet for each person's turn.

Adi Nes' famous Untitled piece is obviously a play on the Last Supper. Rather than Jesus and his followers, averge (ok, maybe slightly more attractive than average) Israeli soldiers eat in an army cafeteria, and they all seem to be enjoying themselves except for the one in the center who stares off into space. It made me think if this was those soldiers' last meal, and they unlike Jesus, had no sense of their impending deaths. It is also interesting to me that in Israel, which is so very secular, religious iconography is translated into the military, perhaps the nearest modern equivalent? And then I think about sacrifice, which is what I suppose the original Last Supper and Jesus' decision is about, and the sacrifice that soliders make, or are, in Israel. And then I'm reminded of the poem, The Silver Platter by Natan Alterman, which incorporates for me all of these ideas.

Barry Frydlender's The Flood was done in 2003, and so it does not reference Hurrican Katrina, although as an American it's my first connotation. In fact, it took me several minutes of looking at this piece to realize that "the flood" was really just a very rainy day and no one was in real danger. In fact it was only after I was prompted that I saw that this seemingly single photograph is actually several seamlessly pieced together (if it's large enough you can see several people twice). And anywhere else in the world (although perhaps Mt. Ararat) a rainy day would be just that, but in Israel it can be reminiscent of the flood. Do we really know the rain will stop? And in this poor Tel Aviv neighborhood with dilapidated housing, will they survive in their modern, ugly cement arks?

There were many others. Doron Solomons' Shopping Day recorded 6 minutes of a man in an Israeli supermarket, and I think I enjoyed it more than most because I found the experience so exotic here myself. Jan Tichy's piece Dimona translated the "secret" nuclear plant in Israel into a simple model on paper that each visitor can take home and construct himself, making us the artist as well as challenging many ideas held in post Cold-War times about nuclear power and its invincability, or at least its distance from our own lives. Gilm Marcus Shai's Untitled landscape on black background with simple white curving lines almost completely disguises the two camels within the piece, and which reminds me of pictures I've taken in the Negev desert when real camels blend into the sandy mountains.

I also went to see another temporary exhibit, Orphaned Art:Looted Art from the Holocaust in the Israel Museum. Sadly there's no good website to direct you to beyond this one. The exhibition is made up of art that was hoarded by the Nazi regime during their reign, which was not claimed after World War II because the former owners had been killed or were uknown. The exhibition is very small, just one room, but it's interesting on several levels. First, it tells about Hitler's dream of creating a Fuhrer Museum in his hometown of Linz on the Austrian-German border filled with the greatest art of Europe, plundered during the war from other museums. It then goes on to detail how the plundering was carried out, with many top Gestapo men involved. Although it is not discussed in the exhibition, it is interesting to note that th Nazis divied up what they stole to either be used int heir museums and private collections, or those that were not considered good were to be sold or bartered during war time, highlighting the cultural aspects of the Nazi regime; the love of Flemmish and German classic art and their disgust for modern styles such as impressionism and expressionism, which culminated in the Nazi's Degenrate Art Exhibition. From the paintings on view that were stolen from Jewish homes, such as several from the Rothschild family, one could also learn about the ways in which Jews were presented in paintings at the time (totally assimilated) and what their collecting tastes were as well.

In the same area was a small gallery of art done in the Triptychon program at the Israel Museum. This program provides art education for 10th-12th graders who go to schools without art programs. I was very impressed by the work, which ranged from pencil self-portraits to collections of photography and life-sized clay statues. I also strolled through the sculpture gardens, which I had not realized before was designed by Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi! You may remember (oh loyal reader) that I visited his former studio and current museum in Queens with my wonderful museum education class. If you want to read it look for the entry titled "Fall 2007 Coursework" or search "Noguchi" on my blog (for some reason I can't make the link work).

Having been to the Shrine of the Book many times before, I stopped in for a small temporary exhibit aptly enough about peace. Swords into Plowshares: Visions of Peace in the Isaiah Scroll. The name of the exhibition is bigger than the it is. It gives a historical understanding of the phrase of beating swords into plowshares, with an actual sword and agricultural tools from Isaiah's time on display. In short, both military and agricultural tools were made of the same materials, and so in deciding which to make, a person was choosing between life and death, militarism and peace. a large piece of the actual Isaiah scroll found in the Qumran caves in 1947 was on display as well, one of the best perserved scrolls in the collection. It was written in 120 CE, about 600 years after Isaiah's time and over 2,100 years ago. This was the first time it was on display in 40 years, and it will probably be another 40 before it is out again. In their examination of the scroll, they found it was written by 5 different scribes, with mistakes corrected by one another. On display as well was a scimitar, a sword from Isaiah's time, which ad been purposely bent to be unusable in ancient times in honor of the death of the warrior who carried it. A similar sword was presented to Egyptian President Sadat on his first trip to Israel in 1977 by the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in recognition of their choice to jointly pursue peace.