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TALYA HALKIN:
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Between oblivion and stardom

Etti Abergel is something of a late bloomer. In the five years since she completed the Bezalel art school’s graduate program, the 43-year old artist has been quietly working away in her Jerusalem studio, while remaining almost entirely unknown to the Israeli art establishment.

Enter Francesco Bonami, the artistic director of the 2003 Venice Biennial. Charged with planning one of the international art world’s most important events, Bonami made Israel among his first stops in his search for potential participants.

He came across Abergel’s work by chance in an exhibition organized by the Ministry of Culture, and was intrigued by what he saw. When he found out she was not on the list of artists prepared for him by the Foreign Ministry, he contacted her himself. To her complete surprise, Abergel was invited to participate in the biennial, which opened this past June. Her installation Salient, The Codshell Builder’s Workshop, was enthusiastically received in Venice.

Abergel’s dramatic debut, which catapulted her from near-anonymity to a prestigious showcase abroad, is far from typical.

Breaking through to the international art world has never been easy for Israeli artists. Yet despite strong anti-Israeli sentiment abroad and the feeling of cultural isolation and rejection it often entails at home, an exceptionally large number of them have exhibited their work overseas in the past year.

In an unusual gesture, Bonami chose seven other Israelis to exhibit in Venice this summer. These include sculptor Carmit Gil, painter Avner Ben Gal, video artists Amit Goren and Doron Solomons, photographer Efrat Shvily, sound and light artist Michal Helfman, and installation artist Nahum Tevet.

To top off this unprecedented Israeli presence at the biennial, Bonami also invited Dalia Levin, the director of the Herzliya Museum, to serve as one of its five jurors — underscoring Israel’s place in the international art community.

The prominent Israeli presence in the international section of the biennial went hand in hand with the positive attention given to artist Michal Rovner, who represented Israel in its national pavilion.

Rovner’s exposure in Venice, where a long line trailed outside the pavilion, came exactly one year after the Whitney Museum in New York (where Rovner has lived since 1985) awarded her the rare honor of a mid-career retrospective.

ALTHOUGH THE prominent Israeli presence at the biennial was certainly the high point of the past year’s art world calendar, it was not an isolated event. The nine Israeli participants in the biennial were among more than 20 Israeli artists whose work was recently exhibited at some of the contemporary art world’s most prestigious institutions. For a country the size of Israel, this is a remarkable achievement.

"This year, Israeli artists have certainly found themselves in the limelight," says museum director Levin.

"In the past year,"says independent curator Tami Katz-Freiman,"Israeli artists have been popping up in Europe and the US like mushrooms after the rain. Every good Israeli artist who has exhibited abroad has created a buzz, and I predict that exposure abroad will continue to grow.

"Nevertheless, it’s important to understand that this did not happen all of a sudden."

Desert Cliché, an exhibition of contemporary Israeli art curated by Katz-Freiman in 1997, while she was living in the US, generated a wave of enthusiasm when it was exhibited in Miami and New York. It has since been credited with initiating the slowly growing wave of interest in Israeli art outside of the circumscribed world of American Jewish cultural institutions. Since she has returned to Israel, she continues to foster the work of Israeli artists abroad.

"What we are witnessing now,"she explains,"are the results of long-term efforts that have been ongoing for several years despite the political situation here and the hostility it triggers abroad. The reception of Israeli art is a swinging pendulum, which depends on our portrayal in the international media at a given moment. The majority of foreign artists, curators and collectors are still reluctant to come here, and we have a long way to go.

"There is a great gap between the high quality of art being made here and the kind of exposure we would get under different political circumstances."

THE DECISIVE shift in the international status of Israeli artists began in the early 1990s, with the eruption of the Israeli version of post modernism.

Over the past decade, definitions of center and periphery, East and West, have increasingly lost their meaning in a more global cultural market. At the same time, the notion of authenticity still exercises a strong appeal.

It creates a demand for art that is built around local imagery, yet speaks an international language and lends itself to a wider context of associations.

During the last 10 years, a young generation of artists began voicing new aesthetic and cultural concerns. It defied the Israeli art establishment of the previous two decades, which had begun to lag significantly behind changing international trends, and turned to new styles of painting and installation art and to previously neglected mediums such as photography and video.

Irit Sommer, the owner and director of the Zommer Gallery for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, represents three of the Israeli artists participating in the Venice biennial, as well as a significant number of other artists high on the list of international visibility.

"There is now a serious number of Israeli artists exhibiting regularly abroad," says Zommer, who moved here from Switzerland in the early 1990s.

"About half of them are also represented by an American or European gallery committed to showing their work and to introducing them into important private and public collections. My goal is to create a space for Israeli artists in the international arena, but not necessarily under the rubric of ’Israeli art.’ I always try to emphasize the quality of the work and the artistic identity of its maker over their identity as a group."

The high degree of exposure that Israeli artists received at this year’s biennial was somewhat of a compensation for the exclusion of Israeli artists from the 2002 Documenta, another one of the international art world’s most important events, when Documenta’s artistic director unofficially boycotted Israel for political reasons.

Nevertheless, Zommer says, "I don’t experience the reception of Israeli artists abroad in terms of victimization. Obviously some doors have closed in the last two years, but overall there is a lot of interest and openness towards Israel. Interpretation depends on the context in which the works are exhibited, and it also changes from country to country. The English, for instance, are always looking for what is strange or different, and are very sensitive to political nuances. It’s all in the eye of the beholder."

INSTALLATION ARTIST Tevet, who is participating in the biennial, is also the director of Bezalel’s graduate program in Tel Aviv.

"Israeli art is one of our best kept secrets,‘ says Tevet. ’I often hear people abroad saying that they know about a lot of good Israeli artists, and are surprised that there isn’t more recognition of them in the international art world."

Tevet agrees that part of the interest in Israel is a result of a marketing art system that is always searching for the new and the unknown. At the same time, he points to a lingering inferiority complex that prevents some people here from recognizing that Israeli artists are on equal footing with their colleagues abroad. Another problem is the pervasive lack of funds to promote their work. In both cases, the result is a large gap between the level of art making and its promotion on the international market by museums and government agencies.

Rafi Gamzu served as Israel’s cultural attaché in the United States before taking charge of the art division in Israel’s Foreign Ministry. In the small, internally conflicted Israeli art community, Gamzu has received unusually unanimous praise for his commitment to promoting Israeli art abroad.

Gamzu agrees that funding, rather than hostile public opinion, is the main obstacle blocking the path of Israeli artists.

"During the years I spent in New York,‘ he says, ’I felt increasing openness and curiosity towards Israeli art, which has intensified in the last three years."

It is difficult to point to common thematic or aesthetic concerns that bind together this eclectic group of artists. In some cases, there is little about the works that discloses a specifically Israeli context. This is true, for instance, of works by Eliezer Sonnenschein, who has recently received a commission for the new BBC headquarters in London. His aggressively colorful paintings and installations often incorporate computer and television imagery into fantasy landscapes at once whimsical and ominous.

One could similarly point to the work of Miri Segal, whose video installations dealing with perception and cognition have been exhibited at the prestigious P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, and who will be exhibiting this coming winter at London’s highly esteemed Lisson Gallery.

Other artists engage more directly with the political sphere. Efrat Shvily’s photography project Palestinian Cabinet Ministers, which is currently on display at the Venice biennial, includes a series of portraits left uncompleted with the outbreak of a new cycle of violence three years ago.

This month, Shvily will also be exhibiting at the Istanbul Biennial along with another Israeli artist, Uri Tzaig.

IN A very different manner, Ori Gersht’s recent exhibition at the Tate Modern in London explored disputed Israeli territories in a series of landscape photographs. The relationship between history, landscape and politics is also the subject of Gilad Efrat’s paintings of archeological sites, which were recently exhibited at New York’s Art In General.

Nevertheless, Efrat does not see himself as an artist whose work is centered upon questions of place and identity.

"Obviously, since I live in Israel the problematic of this particular environment enters my work. Yet it is above all about my interests as a private individual."

Significantly, Efrat shares his interest in archeology with a artists from different countries, who infuse this overarching theme with local political and cultural concerns.

Sharon Ya’ari is high on the list of the Israeli artists for whom the past year has brought an impressive number of exhibitions abroad. In Ya’ari’s photographs, the politics of landscape take on a subtle, non-didactic meaning. Portraying shifting, ephemeral relations between people and their environments, his photographs convey a sense of instability and non-concrete anxiety that resonate beyond their immediate context.

In the work of other artists, personal memories intersect with the social and cultural environments that have shaped them. Yehidit Sasportas’s large-scale installations, which fuse drawing, painting, sculpture, and architecture, have been exhibited in New York, London, Basel, Berkeley and Berlin. In her 2001 installation The Carpenter and the Seamstress, for instance, she covered the gallery floor with the architectural layout of her parents’ public-housing apartment.

If these works have anything in common, it is a formal and thematic preoccupation with physical and emotional borders, displacement and instability, control and loss of control. These themes also pervade the work of the installation artist Gal Weinstein, who has exhibited, among other places, at the 2002 biennial in São Paolo.

"Two or three years ago,"says Weinstein,"I thought of art as a universal practice. Now I feel comfortable with defining myself as an ’Israeli artist.’ To a certain extent, this has to do with my exposure abroad, which has sharpened this aspect of my identity.

"I don’t know of another country that is constantly reflecting on existence with such a high degree of anxiety. Whatever is going on in Israel inevitably sinks in — you just can’t avoid it. Reality here is like a second skin, rather than an item of clothing you can remove at will."

Just beyone the horizon

"What happens to Israeli artists once they make the initial break through to the international art world?

For Etti Abergel, who exhibited for the first time at this year’s Venice Biennial, the main impact so far has been in Israel, where she has begun gaining recognition. Doron Solomons, who is also currently exhibiting in Venice, has already received some offers for future exhibitions abroad.

"It’s crucial to create continuity in terms of an artist’s exposure abroad, so that it doesn’t begin and end with a single exhibition," says gallery owner Irit Zommer.

At the same time, says artist Nahum Tevet, "I tell younger artists that success abroad often does not take place in immediate terms. Sometimes it takes a year or two until a curator who liked your work contacts you." Part of the immediate impact of the strong Israeli presence at the Venice biennial has been the arrival of a delegation of Los Angeles curators, who came here earlier this month under the auspices of the Los Angeles Tel Aviv partnership 2000. The delegation included representatives from such important institutions as the Los Angeles MOCA, the Santa Monica Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum.

"They were incredibly impressed by what they saw here,‘ Tevet adds. ’One of the crucial questions is whether the institutional art world in Israel will be smart enough to capitalize on this kind of interest."