Ein Harod Against the Consensus

An interview with Galia Bar-Or
conducted by Monica Lavi, editor of Muse
which was published In Muse No 2, page 42

Naftali Bezem, 1953

From a perspective of time, the Director of the Museum of Art in Ein Harod, Galia Bar Or, examines the exhibition in which she attempted to formulate an alternative proposal for the Israeli artistic canon. In a period in which the traditional power centers are losing their centrality, Bar Or attempts to interpret the influence of the political consensus on the artistic taste of her own generation.

Two years ago, at the Museum of Art in Ein Harod, I curated the "Hebrew Work" exhibition, in which I showed the work of artists who had been distanced from the canon of Israeli art, such as Naftali Bezem, Moshe Gat, Leo Rot, Yohanan Simon, Bezalel Tzuri and others. The decision did not stem from a desire to save these artists from oblivion. My motives were quite different. The only kind of work I am capable of involves a connection to my own private mental activity: what engages me today, and why. This is accompanied by the wish that others too will find interest in this and perhaps do likewise for the same

Naftali Bezem, 1957

reasons. My engagement with these matters came as a continuation to questions that are connected with my own biography. I grew up in Ein Harod, a kibbutz which was part of the consensus in this country, and in the course of time I became aware that I had developed in an environment that was apolitical in a profound sense. In my opinion, politicality is not situated in focused sites; rather, it is anchored in personal experience, it is dependent on individual social awareness, and does not operate to a constant formula. In other words: I am speaking about the impossibility of living in a bubble - here, or in Beit-She'an or in Tel Aviv. As I matured I was accompanied more and more by the troubling feeling that my personality had been formed in a place that was neutralized in terms of politics, a place where social feelings of one kind or another did not flow to, indeed, a place which to a certain extent did not even allow such feelings to exist. Perhaps this is not so fascinating as a private case, but I believed that the environment I grew up in represented something fundamental that had happened to us in this country.

Dani Karavan, 1955

This was the origin of the exhibition and the book titled "Hebrew Work". I began thinking about the consensus into which my generation had grown up. I felt that this "agreement", which had served as a guiding social-political principle, had influenced Israeli art and contributed to the shaping and of what is called "the Israeli taste", or, alternatively, "our taste". I felt that there was a need to examine what had guided the shaping and consolidation of "the Israeli taste" in art, and to ask who were the Israeli artists who had not attained to recognition by the establishment because they had not suited the demands of the consensus, and how this had influenced us. From the second half of the 1950s on, an agreement crystallized that the general national, economic, and security interests push aside private interests, which were perceived as a threat to immediate existence. In principle, we still have not liberated ourselves from this conception, and it guides us today too. Not because there exists direct repression, but because the consensus has seeped in very powerfully - into the intelligentsia, the museums, and even the community of Ein Harod. We are all convinced that the story as it is brought to us is the only story - but what interests me are the subjects that are not spoken about and the aspects that are not presented.

The Dream and the Reality

Yehoshua Eshel, 1925

When I think about the displaying of forgotten artists and connect this to my own private consciousness, I do not set out from a place that divides into camps of repressors and repressed. A simplistic story of repression cannot be a fertile one, even if it contains a reversal in which those who were the bad guys in the past have today become the good guys, or the oppressed have become oppressors. The 1950s were very difficult years, and it is a miracle that we survived them. This is not just a trite saying; it is the historical facts themselves. In that period the Jewish population in Israel numbered 600,000 people, and was composed mostly of new immigrants who had arrived a short time before this, without families. In spite of this, Israel absorbed one million and two hundred thousand Jewish refugees, half of whom had lived through the nightmare of the Holocaust, while another half came from "Eastern" - Arab and North African - countries. All of them had to be fed and given a place to sleep in and a workplace. In addition to all this, one third of the young leadership had been killed in the War of Liberation; and we were not here alone - opposite us stood 250,000 Arab refugees. Thus we can say that objectively this was a society in danger of collapse.

David Goss, 1995

During this difficult period, a certain channel of discussion about art and the exhibiting of art and of what we call "the Israeli artistic canon" developed in the major museums, in the literature, and among central figures in Israeli culture. For quite a long period we believed that these authoritative voices represented Israeli art in an objective manner (and that such a thing existed), and the values of art. We thought that it was not for us to check whether the line-up of stars presented to us by the Israeli art books were the only significant artists, or whether there were also others, of whom we were kept ignorant. The genealogical progress that Israeli art sketched out began with the dream and concluded with Raffi Lavie. We received a structuring of a narrative that begins with a dream (for the State of Israel was constituted upon a dream) - in other words: Nachum Gutman and Reuven Rubin, while what preceded them - the old "Bezalel" school and Herman Struck or Ephraim Moshe Lilien - we buried in prehistory: they were stuck in the gloomy rock of Jerusalem with all the artists from Germany (many of the artists who came to this country from Germany -Steinhardt, Budko, Ardon, Ticho, among others - chose to settle in Jerusalem; their painting had a more serious character than what was common in Tel Aviv at this time: dark colors, and charged subjects) and the distinctly anachronistic styles. From the dream, history continued, to 1948 and the founding of the "New Horizons" group, whose members saw themselves as free citizens of the art world, and not necessarily as citizens of the local art.

Miron Sima, 1930

It is no coincidence that a painting by Raffi Lavie bears the inscription "Raffi Lavie, a twenty-year-old child". In this way we preserve a perpetual state of adolescence: the "lad from Tel Aviv" is not obliged to take a stand, and does not deal with his own biography; we also create a new metaphor for the human condition - we do not deal with man, nor with a concrete person. The artistic establishment chose to canonize the remote, the abstract, the lyrical, and fled from social realism. In my perception, this is the embodiment of the consensus in the domain of the plastic arts.

My argument is directed at ourselves, at the canon, at the "taste" that we have developed, which blinds us, and not at the artists. The need for escapism is perhaps understandable, but it is not justifiable. If, for example, we take Zaritsky, whose rich and scintillating watercolors I like very much, we will find that concurrently, in the fifties, there were artists, such as Miron Sima, Shalom Sebba or Avraham Ofek, who did entirely different things. Their works, however, went against the grain of the consensus, which insinuated itself through ideological aspects that were absorbed into the art by way of aesthetic "taste".

Beyond the Horizon

Fine capillaries connect the engine that draws the train of society at a given time to mental agreements, and of course to social ones as well. From childhood on we learn to identify the frequency of what is "correct", while another is rejected on the grounds that he is anachronistic and a nuisance because he mixes things that don't go together. This is why in those days they abhorred the concrete - if what was desired was the abstract, then certainly a dialogue with the expressive and political Otto Dix was perceived as irrelevant here. For some reason it was C?zanne who was chosen to express what was quintessentially Israeli. Does C?zanne belong "naturally" to the Israel of the 1950s more than Otto Dix does? Or: Is it self-evident that the story of Israeli art should begin from the ostensible primacy of the innocent eye, through which every donkey is the donkey and every hill is the hill, and perhaps this is actually a reflection of the "innocent" seeing - this country is empty and we give it a meaning, from A to Z? Some time ago I organized a symposium day in honor of Miron Soma, and someone came up to me and said: "Everything's very fine and nice, but don't you think that it would be natural to the climate of the country, to the Middle East, to adopt Fauvism or French abstract art, rather than German Expressionism, which is not suitable to this place?". I answered: "Imagine yourself after a ship journey to this country. You arrive, and after you've been dumped on the shore at Jaffa with all your suitcases carried by porters, you sit in isolation for fear of infection from epidemics, you see around you the other refugee-immigrants, and wonder about your place among them. Why is German Expressionism less relevant to the charged experience of this century?"

Miron Sima, 1931

I disagree with the view that there is a "natural" order from the beginning of the discussion to the contemporary conclusions. Adoption of the relevant language always occurs out of a range of possibilities at a given time. The option adopted is always the one the reflects certain positions towards the reality, and within this option both the past and the perception of the future are shaped. If we thought that the "official" story gradually adopts the best artists, in the "Hebrew Work" exhibition I tried to return to the twenties, the fifties, and the nineties, and to examine a few things. For example, the accepted view in the fifties posited the free citizen of "New Horizons" against the ostensibly social-Zionist engagement. It turns out that the "engaged" artists were essentially young artists with a far from simple life story, who wanted their art to reflect their life experiences. They began developing a pictorial language, but their language did not suit the option of "Lyrical Abstraction" proposed by "New Horizons". They felt an inner demand, a wish, for the art of our times not to sever itself from man and society. They sought a way, an up-to-date language which would speak about the most acute matters, as in Picasso's Guernica. It was not for nothing that our taste was shaped in such a way that it would reject outright anything that smelled of Guernica - Guernica was perceived as a threat, as symbolizing the counter-option to the consensus that had evolved here.

Miron Sima, 1945

As I stated previously, my argument is not directed at the "New Horizons" artists, who felt that they had to distance themselves from the painful reality. I respect their choice and love their work. My argument is directed at the art establishment, for not devoting thought to the concept of "post-Second-World-War". I am referring to a terrible rupture of identity, a private past that eludes any reconstruction of memory, but cannot be given up because it is there we can find the end of the thread, a key to our understanding of ourselves. I am referring to a the need to rebuild a connection between the private domain and the social agenda.

Naftali Bezem's works from the fifties depicted these lost people - the refugees who filled the country during the fifties. In the "Hebrew Work" exhibition, we showed about 60 of his drawings depicting transition camps [ma'abarot] with blue skies above them - blue above; and below, inside the camps - coal black. They contained so much pain, and yearning too. These "engaged" painters dealt with their own lives. I think that today we can already listen to complexity; we can listen to Arie Aroch, who tried to grapple with the black hole - to seek traces of a "parental home" that had perished, and not to relate only to the Arochian formal aspect of Israeli child-like negligence, which is the accepted way of looking at his art. These artists sought to confront things - not because someone had called them to the flag, but because they could not do otherwise. It was difficult to convey a narrative, a story, in a society that believed so much in Modernism. The general aspiration was to transcend biographical details of any kind. Yet it turns out that man cannot give up on self-searching: the impulse to connect the ends of the threads and to reconstruct our way is imprinted in us, as in the saying "Know where you have come from and where you are going to". And even if the threads are unraveled there remains the need to mark the gaps, for they are an inseparable part of the story. I think that if we look at the works in a different light we will discover that there exists a possibility of building alternative routes, which are no less of the essence.

Outside the Game

The cultural discourse today deals extensively with questions that appeal against the hegemony of the consensus, and accords a place to the culture of the "Eastern" Jews, to feminism, and to other groups. These are topics that interest me but I arrive at them in my own way - I am not "engaged", and I will not do this for reasons of political correctness; I will not mark one as an "Arab", another as "Eastern", and yet another as "a woman". This, in my view, expresses a somewhat patronizing approach - it comes not from an egalitarianism but from a place of corrective discrimination. Work with Palestinian artists interests me but it matters to me that this be done from reciprocity, not from a patronizing position. Some time ago I began a project of this kind, but to my regret I understood at a certain stage that in the current political situation reciprocity is impossible; that despite all the good intentions, an Israeli-Jewish museum that initiates a project with Palestinian artists cannot avoid taking a patronizing stance. This was a situation that was not right for me and also not right in terms of the Palestinian artists' own interests. No good things come from patronizing. That project folded, and currently I am working on another one, and hope with all my heart that this time we will succeed.

This rule also applies to the "engaged" approach - it cannot yield good and right results. The connection between a person and what he does needs to be examined continuously. We constantly have to examine whether something has indeed kindled in us, and to get used to the idea that sometimes we have to give up on something. There is a price for doing something that does not burn in our bones, that do not constitute part of our backbone - otherwise something in us gradually wears out. This kind of doing injures the intellectual and psychic sensibility, and has a heavy price. I am not willing to pay the price of dulled sensibility, nor do I believe that it is of use to anyone. Building a perspective in a museum is a personal process of walking a path that also has an institutional significance; every choice entails missing out on something, as well as an opening for something new.

We cannot promise that there will not be an enclave that our eyes have not registered and that will finally turn out to have been relevant. Structured within everything that we see there is always what we don't see, but with the aid of consciousness and experience we are able to be more accurate. As much as possible, we have to safeguard the possibility that the response will be relevant on the psychic level and on the situational level. This is our responsibility; no-one can do this for us, and we must be conscious of this. We are working in a reality that is far from simple, and there are no discounts. Even in an exhausting reality we need to preserve a spiritual vitality and to find a way to act not only on the bureaucratic level. Someone who cannot cope with all the institutional, financial, and other constraints that exist everywhere, including Ein Harod, needs to know that this is not for him.

I don't think in terms of "in the historical perspective". We don't do something now out of a knowledge that its results will only be seen in another fifty years. We do things in order to "save a moment of now", as Gershom Scholem interpreted Walter Benjamin's thesis about the Angel of History. Alertness to the "moment of now" is all that we can do as human beings. This is a process of intentionality that never arrives at rest or certainty. It is personal and private but not egocentric. To do something in order to get a good mark in forty years time means to fall into ambitions which are both groundless and motivated by an egocentric impulse. We have to content ourselves with much less, and that is not easier.

* Galia Bar Or is Director of The Museum of Art, Ein Harod.

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