Where Dadaism Settled in Israel

Yesterday, I spent the day in Ein Hod, a small Israeli village about an hour north of Tel Aviv. What makes Ein Hod so interesting is that supposedly all of its inhabitants are artists. Granted there are less than 600 of them, but it still makes for dense creativity. Ein Hod became an artists' colony in 1953. The driving spirit behind the project was Marcel Janco, who convinced the Israeli government to let him build the colony rather than destroy the village. Until few years before his arrival, the village had been home to 500-700 Arabs, who fled or escaped or were pushed out (depending on who you ask) after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Janco and its later residents renovated many of the pre-War buildings including the local mosque, which became of all things a bar.

Anyway, the place is rife with artist studios, many of them open and selling to the public. There is also a museum, which features the work of Janco and tells his and Ein Hod’s story. Janco was actually a fascinating character. He was a Romanian Jew, who spent much time in Zurich and Paris, and was one of the key characters in the Dadaist movement of the early 1900s. Janco’s paintings and illustrations from that period often depict the café and city life enjoyed by him and his compatriots. In addition, Janco illustrated poetic works by the likes of Tristan Tzava and Andre Breton, two leading Dada lights.

When Janco immigrated to Palestine in 1941, Dada didn’t come with him. Janco’s work took on a more figurative and narrative feel though later work tended toward the abstract. His subjects also tended to be of the local—immigrant camps, Arab and Jewish scenes, abstract Israeli landscapes.

As a historical note, most of the 700-900 Arab villagers of Ein Hod resettled in the West Bank. A group of 35 original inhabitants took shelter in a nearby wadi forming a new village called Ein Houd. It wasn’t until 2005 that Israel recognized the village and connected it to its electric grid. As in so many places in Israel, the conflict between the possibility of what is versus the loss of what was remains a constant presence.

If you do visit Ein Hod, there is a fabulous bookstore hidden down one of its small streets. The store is assembled of what looks like sheet metal, stone and wood remnants from demolished buildings, and a few nails. The floor is nothing but dirt and rock. The proprietor, who surrounds himself with at least four dogs and makes and sells some really terrible pottery, plays old Israeli and American LPs and might, if you look longingly enough at his coffee pot, offer you a cup. I found an out of print collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin as well as an ancient (and a bit water marked) edition of Octavio Paz.

Pop Art and Tony Hoagland's Poetry

This month, Tony Hoagland’s newest book of poems, "Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty," is finally hitting bookstore shelves. It’s been seven years since his last! Of course in our hyper accelerated everything world that only sounds like a long time. Anyway, his books are worth the wait. I just ordered mine. While The New York Times was not clapping with all four hands in its review, I can hardly wait.

As I was browsing the forever engrossing Pop Art section of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, I couldn’t help thinking about why I like Hoagland’s work. Like Pop Art, Tony Hoagland’s poems appropriate reality, pop culture, combine found objects with the constructed. Also like Pop Art, Hoagland’s poems are sleek, sexy, funny, sometimes sad, utilizing a seemingly accessible façade to convey political and emotional messages. His poems, in my mind, are commentaries on the state of poetry as well as being poetry.

Here’s Hoagland’s take on contemporary grocery storing (as excerpted from the NYT review) from a poem called "Dialectical Materialism." I included Tom Wesselman’s painting/collage called Still Life #30 above so you could see some of what I encountered at MOMA.

My god there is so much sorrow in the grocery store!
You would have to be high
on the fumes of the piped-in pan flutes
                      of commodified Peruvian folk music

not to be driven practically crazy
with awe and shame,
not to weep at the scale of subjected matter:

the ripped-up etymologies of kiwi fruit and bratwurst,
the roads paved with dead languages,
the jungles digested by foreign money.

Whether it’s Tony Hoagland, or Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselman, Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg, et al, close readings reveal multiple messages, not all of them easy.

Stepping on Orozco

I spent a few hours at New York's Museum of Modern Art checking out the Gabriel Orozco retrospective. Given all the hype and coverage, how could I not? To that point, here are a couple of the glowing critiques given by The New Yorker and The New York Times. Anyway, proving that I do actually agree with the critics once in a while, I quite loved it--it was funny and, at times, beautiful (e.g., the whale skeleton tattooed with seemingly-organic graphite abstractisms, the etched ceramic shells). Though there were a few found objects that I puzzled over (see the "Empty White Shoe Box" photo).


In honor of Orozco, and my experience with his white shoebox, I wrote a quick and slightly silly poem. Anyway, the exhibit is worth the trip but try and go at odd times to avoid the school kids and tourists. And no critiquing the poem, please, it's only for this page!


Modern Art

            It makes one appreciate the space around an artwork
            as much as the art itself.
                      - From artobserved.com, Dec 23, 2009

The guard grabbed my arm the moment I stumbled
on the small white box on the floor, crushing
one of its sides. Though it wasn’t until he whispered,
Good God!, that my eyes found the very tiny sign
on the wall behind, which read “Empty
Shoe Box,” Courtesy Marion Goodman Gallery, New York,
naming the object I’d just destroyed as Art.

It wasn’t my fault. A group of gangly girls
most likely on a school trip giddy with the scent
of each other or with being thirteen had pushed
past me, almost over me. Of course, I’d been absorbed
in a hunt for my glasses, one hand
holding the mouth of my messenger bag away
from my body, the other wrist-deep
in its depths. You see, I can’t really read
without them, actually without glasses
even familiar faces look fuzzy these days.

So perhaps it wasn’t odd that I overlooked
the white box on the floor
next to an equally white wall. I read later
that in ‘93, Gabriel Orozco, the artist, ran hours
through Venice’s dark flooded streets searching
for a similar box, after someone,
like me, kicked it during its first exhibition.

Less than two minutes later, a woman
in a black suit with creased edges and unexpected
purple punk hair emerged from a door etched
into a far wall. She held a brown paper bag
in one hand. The woman stepped quickly over
to us and without speaking to me
or the guards, reached down and picked up
the dented white box, tucked it under her left arm.

Then she reached into her brown paper bag,
extracted another white box exactly the same,
sans dent. She placed the box carefully
on the floor, turned it a few degrees
to the left, then stood and, still without saying
a word, returned through the door in the wall,
clicking it softly behind her. I wonder
what she told Marion Goodman.

The Blank Page

As I was surfing the Internet (or rather trying to distract myself from the blank page in front of me), I came across this piece of video art by Israeli artist Ariel Schlesinger. It captured my inability to put a single word on the page, the enervation, the attention/inattention I was paying to the page, the feeling of being on the cusp of inspiration only to have the flash snuffed out.


As one reviewer of her work wrote way way back in 2008 (doesn’t that seem a long time ago): Schlesinger’s works are weird science for the sake of the beautifully uncanny. In Forever Young (2005), a single ash burns perpetually in a cracked ashtray at the gallery entrance. A soggy cardboard box, Zu Erinnern und Zu Vergessen (To Remember and To Forget, 2008), holds a shallow puddle of water that somehow never seeps out onto the gallery floor. Rolls of masking tape, joined – like Siamese twins – at their cardboard cores, stand on a pedestal in Untitled (Masking Tape) (2008). Doesn’t that make you want to see more? Lots of her conceptual video is online on YouTube or other sources. Check it out.

"Real" Religion

Religion can be beautiful—the ritual, biblical poetry, and certainly it has inspired some of the most breath-taking works of art known to us. BUT, religion can also be brutal and its history reflects many of humankind’s basest impulses. As for the Christian Bible, whether one believes the text is received truth or largely human embellishment (as I do), even fabrication, to ignore the vile and violent means that half of the story, the human story, is lost.

So it is with some relish, I note two recent attempts at underscoring the ‘real’ of religion, or at least of Christianity. The first is an exhibit at London’s National Gallery called The Sacred Made Real and largely revolves around Spanish paintings (e.g., Velasquez and Zurbaron) of the 17th century. As you can see by the illustration I’ve included, the art looks almost contemporary, at least from the distance of my 17 inch computer screen. I hope to make it to London to see it up close.

The second effort I want to note is an illustrated Book of Genesis just released by controversial artist Robert Crumb. Not surprisingly (Crumb is the creator of Fritz the Cat, a sexually graphic "underground" comic strip) and according to reviews I’ve seen, the book is shock-your-grandmother explicit. The book depicts, as recorded in the Bible, people actually having sex (e.g., Lot does indeed have incestuous sex with his two daughters) and there is a lot of violence. Of course, these pictures have been greeted by hostility by most church leaders, but that they accurately depict the goings-on in Genesis cannot be denied.

I'm keeping my eye out for a cheap flight to London this Fall, and I am definitely ordering Robert Crumb's book, if just to support the author.

Damien Hirst Really Can't Paint

At first reading, I was a bit relieved, even a bit, OK, euphoric that the London Times trashed Damien Hirst’s newest art exhibit at the Wallace. The paintings as the critic states are “dreadful.” From the illustrations I’ve seen online, they resemble the velvet paintings my brother and I crafted during early adolescence. At the same time, I admire Hirst's return to actual painting, versus managing a warehouse of assistants who turned out replicas of his work. As has been much reported, the majority of the thousands of works Hirst ‘created’ over the past few years has been at the hands of some anonymous apprentice. Granted other artists use assistants, especially for large installations, but Hirst turned help to factory hands.

Hirst won’t be surprised at the responses. In an interview 10 days before the show opened, the interviewer asked, “How do you think the new paintings will be received?” Hirst's response? “I’m expecting to get slagged off,” he says under his breath, as if it would tempt fate to say it louder. “But you know what Warhol said, ‘If critics say they don’t like something, just make more.’ ”

Some of my snide euphoria may be because Hirst has made millions from his art. Just last year, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, Hirst’s sale of 223 works at Sotheby’s, raised £111m. For that sale, Hirst cut out his long-time galleries (and their respective margin) from the sale. The move did seem openly mercenary especially as Hirst didn’t need the money and a few of the galleries supported him when he was a nobody.

But, for Hirst, art might not have a goal more profound than profit. “There are lots of ways of measuring success beyond the financial,” explains Hirst. “It’s not really the money that I like, it’s the language of money. People understand money. There are people who might have dismissed my work who can’t any more.”

Well, maybe, but it sounds like this time around, money or no money, his art is being dissed if not dismissed.

Here's a short poem by Jennifer Harding titled "poem for the alter identity of damien hirst:"

he saw his friend
as a man who could talk openly
about his heart.
until one day,
he told himself that perhaps
he was mistaken
concerning the presumption put into his head.
making believe he knows alot
when in fact
he knows nothing.

The Art of Condoms

Art has been way under-used as a way to sell stuff. Take condoms, for instance. Who wants to buy a condom in a plain vanilla (or purple) wrapper? But encased in Rembrandt, Rodin, or a steamy photograph by Richard Avendon—well, sign me up! Not only do I get to prevent the spread of STDs and pregnancy, but I also receive a ‘free’ slice of culture. I'd go for the Rubens' Adam and Eve.

I guess the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid gets it, and according to The Guardian, where I saw the sales strategy described, the museum believes that while it may not be the first time condoms have been used in art, it may be the first time that art has been used to sell condoms.

The condoms in question are to go on sale at the museum shop, in packets specially decorated with works to be featured in the museum's Tears of Eros exhibition later this month. Potential wrapper art include works by Rodin, Rubens, Maillais and Bernini.

It’s not exactly poetry, but there must be a poem in there somewhere.

Truth in Video and Poetry

Jaffa (pronounced Yafo in Hebrew) is one of the oldest cities in Israel. It is also one of the only integrated Jewish/Arab towns in the country. However, there are two Jaffas—the one the tourists see and the one in which its inhabitants live. The second city, the second Jaffa, is not integrated and is separated by two truths--that of its Arab inhabitants and that of its Jewish.

I recently visited the Herzeliya Museum in Israel, which is a small museum located in a seaside town near Tel Aviv. The museum featured an exhibit titled “Men in the Sun,” which encompasses the work of twelve Arab-Israeli artists. One that particularly aroused me was a video piece by two artists—Scandar Copti and Rabia Buchari—called “Truth” (2003). In the piece, two Palestinians from Jaffa visit non-touristy sites (a water tower, a demolished vodka factory, a graveyard) and recount the ‘history’ of the places as if they were tour guides. However, their ‘history’ is fiction (or is it?) as potentially viewed by those living a different truth than the one recounted by the media and government.

You can view a few samples from Copti and Buchari's fabulous video installation online.

It inspired me to write a short poem:

Holy Site

She told the boy it was a water tower.
Concrete gray and green, it rises forty feet
on iron legs, egg-shaped lank and warped, its body
curves like a turned bell, the roof rusted through, it
holds water though only four feet deep, the rest, pours
as if molten from its metal shell. No one remembers
the year it was built, but it’s been standing there
a long time. At night, the boy hears the concrete fall
in wet chunks, the low wind that whines
through its wide cuts. And he can barely
sleep. In summer, the boy swims
in the dark water. He goes all the way under.
She never stops him though the water infested
with bird shit and invisible worms
will, by winter, tattoo itself in small red Os
on the inside of the boy’s wrists. And she won’t
repeat the whispers: it’s a messiah’s cup, a chalice
disguised as a tower, the water tinged brown
by something other than iron. The barbed wire
fence, the steel barriers, the danger signs
all a hoax. So that no one comes. What good
would it do? Even if the pilgrims appear
with antidote, even if a single dose could cure
the fatigue and fever. None of it’s for him.

Anyway, I suppose the idea behind the video and my poem revolves around ‘Truth.’ How is truth generated and for whom is it really true?