Crossposted from Haaretz
A huge, interactive movie screen made by Israeli designer Ron Arad will be the backdrop to films and performances at the Israel Museum in August.
The cylindrical installation at the Jerusalem museum is one of dozens of exhibits, events and activities that make up this year’s Jerusalem Season of Culture, which begins in late July.
Arad’s installation, called “Curtain Call,” was made for the Roundhouse cultural venue in London. It is a curtain made of 5,600 silicon rods suspended from a ring that is 18 meters in diameter and serves as a “canvas for films, live performance and audience interaction,” according to the Roundhouse.
Crossposted from Haaretz
When Kobi Ben Meir was working on the Israel Museum’s new “Good Night” exhibition, he constantly had the song “Layla, Layla” playing in his head. In the end, the curator chose to sing the song on camera, in a hesitant voice and with a very embarrassed expression. It’s now part of the video artwork “Lullaby” and displayed as part of the exhibition.
In this marvelous video work, artists Hadassa Goldvicht and Anat Vovnoboy filmed visitors and the museum staff — from the director and the curators to the security guards and the sanitation workers — singing their own private lullaby: The one that their mother sang to them in childhood. The two artists set up a small room in the museum, and for months invited people to enter and be filmed. The enclosed space gave the participants a sense of privacy and allowed them to surrender to both the camera and their feelings while singing.
Crossposted from Haaretz
More than an exhibition, “Iran” is a gag. Most of the works featured and meant to warn of war, are of a kind of intentional, aware subconscious. The problem is that they really are substandard.
“Iran” is an annoying exhibition. Usually annoying exhibitions are much more interesting than ordinary fine, tight exhibitions that are easily digested. The controversial ones are the ones that liven up the occupation with art much more than those that are wary of confrontation. Events that embarrass, infuriate and confuse are rare and welcome.
But “Iran” — showing at the Spaceship Gallery in Tel Aviv — is annoying in a different way. It is annoying because of its tremendous self-confidence that it is just such an exhibit — without any clear signs of an effort made to warrant this. And the exhibit lacks integrity and awareness. It seems like a rowdy late-night event, but one that takes itself seriously.
“Distorting (a messiah project, 13C),” an installation by artist R. Justin Stewart, is a technically ambitious representation of that most elusive of subjects: the Jewish concept of the Messiah.
On view until May 5 at the industrial-chic Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, the large-scale installation is composed of an elaborate web of blue, green and turquoise fleece pods interconnected by rope and plastic stretching from floor to ceiling. It invites the viewer to draw close and interact directly with the art, as well as with the artist’s thought process.
This second element is thanks to a technical twist: On each of the fleece pods, there is a QR (Quick Response) code which viewers are invited to scan using their smart phones, giving them access to a different piece of research Stewart undertook for the project, which draws on 13th-century Jewish scholarly sources.
In tandem with three New York concerts given by the Berlin Philharmonic in February, New York University’s Deutsches Haus has opened an exhibition of Holocaust survivor David Friedmann’s “Lost Musician Portraits” from the 1920s. These sketches of Berlin Philharmonic members were drawn from life, and captured each of the artists in the act of performing. Before World War II Friedmann’s sketches of various personalities in all fields appeared in hundreds of newspapers, but have only recently been rediscovered. His talent helped him survive Auschwitz, where he drew portraits of SS guards, their families, and even their dogs.
The exhibit, which is also sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute and the consulate general of Germany, includes short biographies as well as recordings of all the musicians shown in the sketches, many of whom were Jewish. It is on view until March 30. (WNYC broadcast a substantial interview about the artist with his daughter, which can be heard here.)
The Berlin Philharmonic has always been one of the finest orchestras in the world. But only since 1989, when Claudio Abbado took over from Herbert von Karajan, and more recently under the direction of its current music director, Sir Simon Rattle (whose contract has just been extended to 2018), has the orchestra once again begun to have the kind of adventurousness it was known for at the time these portraits were made. It is currently a surprisingly young orchestra — the average age of its musicians is 38 — and almost half the members are not German.
Crossposted from Haaretz
The name of a new art exhibition opening tonight in Tel Aviv — “Search Engine” — reflects a behavior pattern that has been prevalent since the birth of the Internet. But the works chosen for the “Search Engine” exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art were actually created in more classical art forms — painting, photography and sculpture — in order to provide a stronger illustration of our complex relationship with the virtual world.
The chosen art forms also represent something of a break with the center’s manifesto, which usually favors the advancement of video art and new media. The choice of classical art forms, rather than video and new media, in which the use of search engines and the virtual space is more common, is deliberate, and behind it lies the idea of presenting a tension between the fields.
From 2006 to 2011, artist and journalist Leah Kohlenberg lived in a handful of former Soviet countries. While there, a fascination with societies in transition took hold, and she became “obsessed with the wreckage, ruins and signs of life” that she saw in those places, as well as in others she visited. She began to see evidence of both decay and revitalization everywhere. Out of this came “Ruin: Rebirth,” a series of 30 photographs currently on view at Brooklyn’s Hadas Gallery through March 19.
The pictures are mostly cityscapes taken in Eastern Europe, with a little bit of Greece and even a shot from Brooklyn thrown in. They depict scenes that anyone interested in the paradoxes and complexities of urban life would find compelling: flowering vines creeping over a wall, an ornate banister in a run-down stairwell that’s held in place with the help of string, a public sculpture of the word “newborn” with each of its letters covered in graffiti.
Crossposted from Haaretz
A Beethoven symphony plays in the background as light rain falls. Artist Ruth Schloss, wrapped in a blanket, reclines in a lounge chair. Now at the age of 90, she drifts in and out of sleep during the course of the day. She is living her life in the present continuous with few memories and no tasks left to accomplish.
“At the moment there is nothing I have to do,” she says quietly and with acceptance. For several years now she has not been painting at all: The German-born artist whose hands never rested over a period of 70 years was forced into retirement by poor health. Schloss’s hands — “my tools,” she calls them — gradually lost their control and strength. The artist fought the degeneration as well as she could and even invented new techniques for drawing and painting until she became too tired to press on. Thus, there will be no more new art by Ruth Schloss. Indeed, this is also why her current solo show at the Zaritsky Artists House in Tel Aviv has been called “First and Last Works.”
The small but impressive exhibition consists of about 30 drawings and paintings on canvas as well as one film, a documentary about Schloss’s life, made by Peter Dudzig in 2008. The show is curated by Irit Levin, an independent curator who since 2001 has been accompanying Schloss and her family, helping with exhibitions and connections in the art world.
Painting can be a lot like playing music. Just as a jazz musician riffs on a standard, so too a painter can create a scene on canvas that evokes familiarity but still contains creative flourishes and emotional depth. That’s the notion behind Israeli artist Ishay Rossano’s latest series of paintings, first displayed in a solo exhibition at the Ori Ostreicher Gallery in Tel Aviv last summer.
Rossano, a neo-impressionist painter who has been developing a reputation in Israel and abroad, conveys the commonality of music and painting through the entertaining images of his oil-based works. Over the past few months Rossano’s paintings have gone to auction in both Paris and Tel Aviv, first at Pierre Cardin’s Salon Business Art Espace in October, followed by the Montefiore and Tirosh auction houses in Tel Aviv in November, and at an AIDS victim benefit auction in December organized by Bank HaPoalim.
Photo by Neta Alonim
The iconography of fashion is perhaps not the most obvious tool with which to parse the complexities of the Middle East. Still, everything else seems to have failed; more to the point, style does shares a common vocabulary. So, why not?
“InSALAAM, InSHALOM,” a fashion collection and multimedia exhibit curated by the New York based fashion house threeASFOUR, is an ambitious exploration of the visual cues that establish a kinship between the diverse cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. That “visual vocabulary” is the starting point for a consideration of the less-obvious ties between Jewish and Arab cultures; “by presenting these different cultural talismans as a unity, the collection forms an aesthetic expression of sensitive coexistence.”
There’s no harm in observing that “InSALAAM, InSHALOM” states something of the obvious — at least up to a point. Despite the fractious relationship between the two tribes through the ages, it’s only reasonable to expect some cultural cross-pollination. To its credit, however, the exhibition — spread across four floors of Beit Ha’ir, the elegant mandate-era building in Tel Aviv that was the home of the city’s first mayors — doesn’t merely join the dots, but strives towards a meaningful statement about relations across the cultural and political divide.
“What does it mean to be British and Jewish in this century?” That’s the question that photojournalist Judah Passow asked himself when formulating the guiding principles for “No Place Like Home,” his photographic exhibition that opened at the Jewish Museum London on February 1.
A winner of four World Press Photo awards, Passow was born in Israel of American parentage. He has lived in the U.K. for 30 years, yet he rarely takes photographs in England. Instead, his work has taken him to many of the world’s conflict zones.
But after completing “Shattered Dreams,” a collection of 25 years of newspaper and magazine coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, published in 2008, Passow decided to “take a look at where I live.”
In conjunction with the annual International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust on January 27, two Holocaust-based art exhibits opened at the United Nations.
“A Monument of Good Deeds: Dreams and Hopes of Children During the Holocaust,” curated by Yehudit Inbar, Director of the Museums Division at Yad Vashem, includes photographs, paintings and illustrations of ordeals experienced by children during the Holocaust.
One such child, Nelly Toll, who was born in Lviv, Poland, was present at the opening with her sister, who beamed with happiness at seeing an old photograph of Nelly and their mother on display.
Toll’s series of six gouache paintings, created when she was in hiding with a Christian family in Lviv after a failed attempt to escape to Hungary, illustrate the idyllic life “where children played freely” before the war. When complimented on her paintings, Toll said, “I still remember painting these.”
Subverted representations of the Holocaust, the Israeli army, and gender roles characterize a new photography exhibit at The Jewish Museum in New York.
“Composed: Identity, Politics, Sex,” showing until June 30, incorporates works by seven artists from Israel, the United States and elsewhere, and challenges viewers’ perceptions by confronting pillars of Jewish identity.
The first work we see in the exhibit, “Martha Bouke and Andy’s Flowers, Visit at the Museum” (2011), by Israeli artist Rona Yefman, sets the scene with its transgressive tone. Here, Yefman portrays Martha Bouke, the female persona adopted by an 80-year-old male Holocaust survivor, posing in front of an iconic Andy Warhol painting. The striking, sexualized figure of the masked, bewigged Bouke, dressed in a pretty dress, bright red tights and matching red lipstick, radically plays with viewers’ expectations of an octogenarian great-grandfather and Holocaust survivor.
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree
I’m often asked how to go about extending the shelf life of yesteryear’s Jewish cultural treasures. It seems to me that studying them in class is one way to keep them fresh and evergreen. Another is through creative recycling.
A lively, smart example of how to preserve Jewish culture by rethinking and extending its meaning, context and form can be found these days at Sixth and I synagogue, where a modest and unassuming exhibition, “Liana Finck: The Bintel Brief,” has just opened.
Taking her cue — and her material — from the Forward’s pioneering, and justly celebrated, advice column, Bintel Brief, which debuted in 1906, Liana Finck offers a decidedly postmodern interpretation.
That’s not just vibrant color peeking out through artist Isaac Brynjegard-Bialik’s papercuts — that’s Flash Gordon, the Green Lantern, Spiderman and Wolverine. Brynjegard-Bialik, whose “Paper Tefillah” exhibition opens January 10 at Temple Israel in Memphis, Tenn., combines the traditional art of papercutting with the power of comics to explore prayer and the human striving for connection with God.
Temple Israel commissioned Brynjegard-Bialik to create 16 works exploring the Jewish liturgy, covering the key components of the prayer service, from Barchu to Aleinu. Brynjegard-Bialik, 39, poured himself into studying the texts and reflecting on his own prayer experience. He looked through genizot to salvage pages from worn out siddurim, and raided his childhood comic book collection for the right colors and images to convey the ideas and feelings that were percolating in his imagination.
In this, the third annual Forward Fives selection, we celebrate the year’s cultural output with a series of deliberately eclectic choices in music, performance, exhibitions, books and film. Here we present five of the most important exhibits of 2011. Feel free to argue with and add to our selections in the comments.
“The Sota Project”
In “The Sota Project,” which appeared this year at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn before traveling to Rothschild 69 in Tel Aviv, artist Ofri Cnaani used a 22-minute video installation to examine the depiction of adulteresses in biblical and rabbinic literature. Though Cnaani’s work used hi-tech means, it also drew on traditions of fresco and tableau vivant to tell the story of a woman who is accused of adultery by her husband and is subsequently protected by her sister. As Forward reviewer Cheryl Kaplan writes, “Cnaani’s installation, at times overly complex, ultimately delivers an exquisite corpse that is visually and conceptually rare.”
Read the Forward’s review of ‘The Sota Project’ here.
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree
When American Jews first discovered the Jewish community center, or JCC, way back in the 1920s, what drew them in droves was the novelty of its indoor pool and well-equipped gym.
Today, the JCC’s constituents are just as likely to be drawn by the art on the walls as they are by the prospect of exercise. Two current exhibitions, one at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan and the other at the Washington District of Columbia Jewish Community Center, underscore the increasing importance of the gallery to Jewish communal life.
At the Upper West Side home of the JCC, photographer Lori Grinker, in collaboration with her cousin, Richard Grinker, an anthropologist at the George Washington University, takes the measure of her far-flung family. Grinker’s aptly-named show, “Distant Relations,” which runs through January 5th, focuses on the ways in which her relatives, citizens of Ukraine, South Africa, England and the United States, come to be at home in today’s world.
Crossposted from Haaretz
When Sharon Lockhart was 22 and backpacking in Israel, in the early ’80s, she spent two months tomato-picking in a moshav in southern Israel, saving up for her next destination — India. Back then, one could hardly guess that decades later she would return, a successful artist, studying Noa Eshkol’s work and translating it into two exhibits: one in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, which opened on Tuesday, and one in Tel Aviv’s Museum of Modern Art, which opens on Thursday.
In fact, Lockhart had never even heard of Noa Eshkol until a few years ago. In 2008 she came to Israel for a short visit, part of a joint venture between the cities of Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, in order to examine ideas that might inform her work as an artist. Among them were museum preservation, anthropology, Bauhaus, textiles and post-modern dance. She rummaged in the textile division of the Israel Museum’s storeroom for an entire day. It was great, she says, but Lockhart didn’t really know what she was looking for.
Michael Rice grew up hearing stories about his mother’s early life as a dancer in New York City, but they never meant all that much to him. “I paid attention, but it was just my mom…my brother and I had a different life,” the now adult Rice reflected.
But when he and his wife Jane unpacked a long-forgotten box his mother, Paula Yasgour, had left behind following her death from cancer in 1993, he realized how significant those stories were. In the box he found the unbound pages of a scrapbook chronicling Yasgour’s career during the nascent years of modern American dance, from 1928 to 1933.
Programs, clippings, photographs and other memorabilia relating to Yasgour’s dance career are now on display at the Bureau of Jewish Education’s Jewish Community Library in San Francisco until February 23. “A Dancer’s Scrapbook” is a glimpse into the life of the young Yasgour at a time when Jewish women fought on various fronts to take part in this new American art form.
Wherever we go this time of year, we can’t escape hearing Christmas songs — be they on the radio, sung by carolers, or piped in as Muzak in stores and public spaces. It gets to the point at which it seems there is an audio loop of holiday classics running non-stop in our heads.
What many people may not realize is that many of these classic Christmas songs were written by Jews. For instance, “White Christmas” was written by Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser wrote “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and “Silver Bells” was by Jay Livingston (born Jacob Levison). Given their authorship, it is not surprising that these songs were heavy on the cold weather, family and friends, and devoid of traditional Christian religious iconography.
Visitors to “A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs 1910-1965,” a travelling exhibition showing until December 22 at the Bureau of Jewish Education’s Jewish Community Library in San Francisco, can learn about these and other Jewish composers and lyricists who dominated on Broadway and in Hollywood during the middle decades of the 20th century. The exhibition, curated by David Lehman, was developed by Nextbook, Inc. and based on Lehman’s 2009 book of the same name.
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