Exhibitions

Prima Facie considers how a portrait can act as a document or as an artistic expression in Western art. Presenting over 70 artworks by Israeli and international artists, dating from the beginning of the previous century to the present day, “Prima facie” seeks to understand how artists create portraits: whom they choose as their subjects, the ways in which portraiture is employed, and the meanings artists seek to convey.

Portraits do not exist as independent entities, rather, they depend on who we are and show where we belong. Portraits surround us everywhere, in social networks, on our bills, in advertising and media. They prompt us to act via a ceaseless reproduction of faces. Through documentary portraiture, the portrait as artwork has long existed. The pose, composition, selection of objects and setting inform us of historical changes in social values and constructions of subjectivity. They examine whom we choose to elevate, whom we choose to ignore, our attitude towards death, sexuality, desire, and consumption. As opposed to other artistic genres, the portrait forms a threefold relationship between the artist, sitter, and viewer.

The invention of photography liberated faces from anonymity and allowed them to be known publicly. This has resulted in a diminishing of the symbolic power and status of the painted portrait. Since visual identity is measurable by means of biometric identification, the importance of similitude in portraiture has become redundant. The recognition of the sitter by merely suggestive artistic means and motifs has become more prominent. This transition from the private to the public inspired a change in the way many artists approached portraiture.

Today, perhaps more than ever, the portrait continues to fascinate artists who are conscious of its limitations as a descriptive tool but value it as a form of artistic expression. By understanding the significance of portraits and their role as a reflection of the zeitgeist, artists are redefining the portrait’s artistic construction, choosing strategies such as appropriation, staging, digital image manipulation, exacerbation of stereotypes, and even a return to classical principles and traditional artistic techniques. The works in Prima Facie highlight how portraiture has been freed from the fetters of history, liberated from the sea of faces that surround us. The exhibition is a unique opportunity to see how artists have moved portraiture from a functional method of representation to a new context emphasizing artistic vision and awareness of its current audience.

The importance of Sigalit Landau and Moshe Kupferman to Israeli culture in general and to Israeli art in particular is indisputable; hence they are among the cornerstones of our collection. A profound encounter with Kupferman’s and Landau’s unique aesthetic is an exceptional experience, and perhaps their most prominent shared trait is that they prove that nothing in art is self-evident. Their art is not reliant on others – everything there is to know in order to understand and experience Landau’s and Kupferman’s works can be found in the works themselves.

Landau’s installation Dish Washer of Kibbutz Machine, which should perhaps be defined as a musical installation, was first shown as part of Landau’s solo exhibition “The Dining Hall” at the KW in Berlin. The work is based on the dishwashing machine of Kibbutz Manara, which was decommissioned after the kibbutz was privatized. The machine is the instrument that facilitates the utopias of modern man, including the kibbutz. However, the machine does not allow room for imagination, creativity and diversity; in the dishwashing machine, if one element moves out of place or a piece of tableware is placed incorrectly, the machine will stop working. As part of her concern with collecting and accumulation, Landau has equipped the machine with numerous parts and materials, which move purposelessly in an endless circle (rather than being washed). Or perhaps there is, after all, a purpose to the circular, seemingly unproductive motion? Each part in its turn produces an orchestrated sound, and together with the music composed by the musician Yarden Erez, they turn the dishwashing machine into a music machine, based on almost impossible combinations that create hegemony within chaos.

Kupferman’s Works on Paper feature a working method that the artist engaged in from the 1980’s on. It is ‘work’ in the physical sense of the word. Kupferman used graphite, pencils, oil and acrylic, erasures, sandpaper and rulers, and performed numerous mechanical actions such as pressing, drawing straight lines and erasing, actions that were performed on both sides of the paper. Kupferman’s physical presence is clearly visible in these works, as is his much discussed signature, which confirms the moment of finishing the work. The pieces shown in the exhibition are only a small part of a rich and diverse body of work, which to our mind has not received the exposure it deserves.

The music and the movement of the dishwashing machine breathe new life into the works on paper. These, in turn, stop being exhibits that merely reveal their own layers, and become a new display of rhythm and drama. If Landau’s and Kupferman’s art feeds on a strict modernist tradition of constant innovation and boundary-breaking, the exhibition is also concerned with breaking the boundaries between the works themselves and between the works and the viewer. It invites the viewers to see the featured pieces as relational works, which share with them the principles of their production, revealing themselves and the knowledge and memory they have accumulated. Thus, the moment of connection between art and the audience marks the creation of an experiential performance that takes place each time anew.

The tempestuous storm which meant to wreak havoc on modernity’s ideologies in the early and mid-twentieth century has turned in the current millennium into a hurricane of terror and counter-terror, throwing the world into a frenzied whirlpool. The question at the heart of Melting Walls, the third and last chapter in the Babel trilogy, is whether contemporary art seeks to join this turmoil and even make use of it to nourish the nihilism that has been part of art since early modernism, thereby demolishing all Babylonian towers and eminence – or does this art serves as a refuge for remnants of languages, discourses and structures, a sanctuary enlivened by winds of fantasy, utopias and rising anew as an artistic “ivory tower.”

Some works choose the optimistic route by “homeopathically” intensifying the sense of pessimism and groping through darkness in order to achieve a utopian re-birth. This route is still drawn to the “black hole” set before art some hundred years ago by Kazimir Malevich’s Black Suprematic Square (1915). Other pieces home in on the stagnated elements in systems: rigid architecture and superstructures (archi-tecture), stilled figures, reproduced and frozen objects. At these points they offer acts of softening, tempering, melting, curving, and increasing elasticity, which enable revitalization and rising to new heights. The white paleness and other characteristics of the cubic, engineered, industrialized products and reproductions of minimalism are quite apparent in these works. But being post-minimalist, they stress the qualities that make their components distinct. They are charged with chromatic light, granted the semblance of fiction, and given a picturesque appearance which recalls the magical colorfulness of early modernist moments (Matisse or Rothko, for instance) – all of which serve a heightening of the senses and increase the viewer’s willingness to collaborate with the imaginary.

Some of the works chart their paths of illusion and fiction, suppleness and soaring, by the compass of history and modernism’s canonical discourse. Others refer to traditional cultures that adhere to a nomadic way of life and are characterized by desert cloth structures that blow in the wind, soft boundaries and sandy contents. Along these various softened and elastic roads, this art occasionally evokes female figures from different cultures, both occidental and oriental, phantoms of those who were repressed by the former world order. They are ready to take their place center stage once again and reestablish a matriarchy – accompanied by elastic, softened figures, forms, and structures which confront the architecture of towers and its accompanying patriarchal, phallic order. This artistic arena inscribes in the annals of history a new Babylonian chapter, in which there is no real difference between what rises and what falls, hot and cold, constructed and deconstructed, strong and weak, apocalyptic and utopian, losing one’s firm boundaries and being redeemed through the reviving power of liquid and melting forces.

The second part of the Babel exhibitions trilogy engages the scorched earth left after the fall of the towers, that in the modern age signify an overhead position of control and a belief in progress, growth and development from the bottom up. The works in the exhibition are therefore entrenched on the surface, which is understood as a full stop or a zero degree and often takes the shape of the X sign – the conventional sign for erasure, crossing out or removal. This ascetic language, descendant of conceptualism and minimalism, employs diverse artistic means (painting, drawing, photography, video, installation) to discover or allude to a series of disasters and moments of crisis – yet always in hindsight, from the distance of time, as a memory picture that incorporates processes of forgetting and partial effacement of the trauma. Thus memories of the Holocaust are conjured in works by second-generation artists – and when its echoes are evoked by the works of a first-generation artist, such as Moshe Kupferman, they seem to re-immerse the tangibility of memory in processes of erasure and abstraction.

This disillusioned and melancholy world, depleted of its heroes and certainties, seeks to enhance wisdom and knowledge by means of research and science, in the shape of the laboratory, Maimonides, the Jewish bookshelf, or the synagogue. These tokens of knowledge bring to mind the Babylonian exile, with its immense project of casuistry and exegesis and the colonies of wisdom it established and bequeathed to the future generations. Similarly, the exhibition is populated by images of nomads and wandering, which are central to contemporary art and culture and are here associated with the ancient biblical myth – the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis, where the tower’s construction is thwarted and humans are scattered all over the face of the earth. These nomadic regions are joined by the figures of the coachman, the airplane, the nomad carrying his satchel on his shoulders, or a night ride on unending roads. The nocturnal journey conjures a host of images of blindness in contemporary art, which constitute the terrible act in itself as well as a defense against observing the atrocities of the past, and of present times.

Potent Wilderness is also frequented by strange creatures, monsters and hybrids. Many of them were created through the crossbreeding of avant-garde drives and mass-media images, evidence of a contemporary reality which – like Babylon – is also made up of fragments of languages and races which have become mixed together. It is a chaotic, noisy, lost world, but at the same time its potent anarchy offers a fertile ground for imagination and creation. Sometimes, unawares, creation sends its envoys – in the form of Beuys’ hare – to summon the life that burrows under the surface and awaken the land’s fertility.

The Babel Trilogy wishes to display the blessing and the curse held in the tremendous diversity and decentralized multiplicity that characterize contemporary art. The saga is woven from a selection of works from the Igal Ahouvi Art Collection, which serve as a touchstone for phenomena, patterns and views that the scholarship has long identified as characteristic of culture in general, and of art within it. The biblical myth of Babylon, which speaks of one language confused into many, serves as a model for the state of culture today. Against this state of multiplicity the exhibition is structured as a trilogy, each of the unresolved chapters leading into the next: The Towering Inferno will be followed by the chapters Potent Wilderness and Melting Walls.

Like an additional layer on previous philosophical, literary and cinematic texts, the exhibition The Towering Inferno wishes to reassemble the myth from the data, means and procedures of contemporary art, while also enhancing it with new aspects. Many works project images of chaos on the traumatic disasters of the modern age, its executioners and victims, its perversions and technologies. Some of the works refer to the Holocaust while others evoke the apocalyptic fall of the Twin Towers and with them the Western sense of hegemony, which went up in flames and smoke on September 11, 2001.

The story of the biblical Babel, a tower-city whose construction was abruptly halted, serves in The Towering Inferno as a marker-icon for one of the prominent moves of Modernism, which (mainly in sculpture) “knocked down” the vertical striving upwards and replaced it with a horizontal movement extending over the floor’s
surface. Sculptural bodies in transition from erection to a limp and drooping position are presented in the exhibition alongside works that express the shift “from up to down” through images of severed heads, or by substituting the head image with legs and shoes that fix the body to the ground. Processes of disurbanization, trespassing and de-territorialization, extremely common in contemporary art alongside an inflation of urban images, appear in the exhibition in the form of “maps” of bombarded cities, quasi-cinematic scenes of the moments preceding a disaster, or the fictional architectural remains of modern cities.

Is there anything left of the hope, meaning and noble genealogy of the tower (and the culture) whose authority and splendor have lost their vitality? These questions are examined in the current exhibition through the very act of presenting art which continues, in spite of everything, to evoke images of speaking and communication, head and tower. Even if these are all merely retrospective views, specters of Modernism, they continue to chart a course to utopia, a possibility that from the very heart of chaos and dispersion, they too will be recreated and reassembled again.