Artis

The concluding decade of both a century and a millennium, the 1990s in Israel were characterized by a cultural boom, fueled by the euphoria over the Oslo Accords and the dream of a New Middle East, and by an opening to and cultural simultaneity with the world at large. This decade will also be remembered as the unrequited moment of this hope regime; a decade saturated with turn-of-the-century existential anxieties, bracketed by two intifadas (Palestinian uprisings), and split open by the jolting, formative event of a Prime Minister's assassination. Within this range, and in the face of a near-total absence of real market economy, Israel saw the emergence of art centered on cosmopolitan concerns, art which stepped on the affectivity pedal with full force, spectacularizing and fetishizing the art object. This passion for visibility and spectacle gave rise to art which was, at the same time, rife with catastrophe, bodily desistence, and fear of death, with alertness to the horrors of the Occupation, the killing, and the humiliation. The 1990s were also the decade in which Israeli art (set against a considerable hostility between theory and praxis) most distinctively assimilated the postmodern discourse, in the form of extensive preoccupation with the politics of identity, feminism, Mizrahi identity and Orientalism, homosexuality, the subject's deconstruction as a cohesive, homogenous construct, preoccupation with the body in its most inferior, abject contexts, and critical engagement with the field's power structures, art's interrelations with capital, and art's affinities with design, technology, politics, and architecture. This is also the decade which marked the return of video as a major artistic medium alongside a prosperity of photography and a sweeping presence of the installation medium, especially site-specific installations.

 

These traits find their called-for place in the show, yet their manifestation and charting are not its foremost aspirations.

 

"Eventually We'll Die: Young Art in Israel of the Nineties" views the relationship between art and time frames and the association between art and the division of time into decades, with suspicion and critical skepticism. It rejects the modernist pretense to sum up, with a single move, an entire web of artistic and cultural narratives and developments under the chronological frame of a "decade." It does not strive to be "historical" (namely, to introduce an authoritative, chronological, reconstructive summation), or to enforce disillusioned power of the retrospective gaze. Rather, it endeavors to profit from the sense of present (being a show concerned with active artists and with works whose existence is still fresh in our cultural memory), with the vivacity it allows and the trail of ideological disorientation it leaves behind—that is to say, it sets out to preserve the blind spot always introduced by observation of the "now." It strives to replace the notion of "recent past" with that of a "continuous present," and discuss the previous decade as generating—rather than as decodable by—a gaze.
 

The decision to focus on the young art of the 1990s is a continuation of this very concept. The first and foremost premise of the show is its partiality—the decision to address only a part of what "had happened." At the same time, it also stems from the understanding that the notions of "young artist" and "youngness" are emblematic of the art of this decade. In the 1990s, both locally and internationally, the turning of the gaze to artistic endeavors at the originary moment of eruption, to their Eros and innovation, and to the fact that they were unburdened by past excesses—qualities associated with youngness—was sweeping and border-crossing, attesting to the field's need to cling to an occurrence fundamentally linked with "nascence" in an era infused with the logic of "end": "While in previous decades, the concept of a 'young artist' was part of a logic of 'promise and fulfillment' … during the 1990s, … the conceptual chain that tied the concept 'young' to the past (since a young artist is traditionally conceived of as an outcome of an apprentice system, i.e., as the achievement of his/her teachers) and to the future (inasmuch as "being young" is conceived of in terms of a potential, awaiting the right conditions for fulfillment) had been broken. What became clearer was a new, paradoxical conception of temporality, where the symmetrical relations—characteristic of the rationalistic-modernistic tradition—between beginning and end, potential and fulfillment, apprenticeship and maturity, no longer held as such" (Nimrod Matan, "The Face," see English synopsis in this catalog).

 

The show's clinging to partiality, to that which is partial, facilitates the precedence of the syntactic part over the full sentence formulating the "spirit of the time." By presenting "fragments" of overall artistic projects (in most cases, a single work by each artist) and constituting a syntax from these fragments, the exhibition strives to refine the vibration of an alert, brittle existence, a moment of revolt against the burden of over-culturalism, against the coagulation of identity within the hermetic boundaries of the art object, against the end. It strives to expose the consciousness of death with which the art of the 1990s is replete, the attempt to hold onto youngness as a timeless moment, as "non-time," as constant awareness of the inferno of sequentiality and the joy inherent in its interruption.

 

The exhibition juxtaposes canonical works that have cumulated intense visibility with works that have remained hidden and marginal, even if they efficiently represent the artistic endeavor of a given artist; it showcases well-known works alongside new variations on old works, reference alongside reconstruction, mapping alongside distortion. Artists who have, over time, come to be identified with a specific medium, are represented by works in other media in which they engaged during the 1990s, and artists who have left the field of art altogether return to exhibit in this show. The exhibition further presents works from the 1990s by two artists who do not belong to the generational cross-section of the participating artists—Arnon Ben-David and Michael Sgan-Cohen. Their presentation is a necessary interruption of the generational order, underscoring themes whose presence deviates from its bounds.

 

In addition, the exhibition spans diverse documentary materials: a PDP presentation unfolding a wide spectrum of art works and documentation of exhibitions created and staged during the 1990s by artists of various generations, documents, catalogues of pivotal exhibitions and art events. Another part of the exhibition features the "Twilight Zone" columns by Gideon Levy and Miki Kratsman published in Haaretz Weekend Supplement from the mid-1990s to the present decade. Moreover, the show offers documentation of artistic actions initiated by artists during the 1990s, such as a documentation of a performance by Avi Pitchon in Mitzpe Ramon, a video of a live concert of Pitchon's group, Nisrefet, across the street from Borochov Gallery, Tel Aviv, and mail art created by Daniel Sack.

 

In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, the model of a monolithic curatorial thesis was replaced by a polyphony of voices by approaching a motley array of writers who were asked to refer to the art for the 1990s and the notion of "youngness" as a point of departure for a discussion of aspects pertaining to the decade, its art and visual culture.

 

Participating Artists:

Jasser Abu Rabia, Asim Abu-Shakra, Orit Adar Bechar, Ariel Asseo, Aya & Gal, Jumana Emil 'Abboud, Avner Ben-Gal, Arnon Ben-David, Guy Ben-Ner, Guy Bar Amotz, Anat Betzer, Yossi Breger, Miriam Cabessa, Shibetz Cohen, Elisha Dagan, Bracha Ettinger, Yoav Efrati, Max Friedman, Eli Gur Arie, Meir Gal, Uri Gershuni, Irit Hemmo, Nir Hod, Noam Holdengreber, Neta Harari Navon, Eti Jacobi, Roi Kuper, Tzur Kotzer, Miki Kratsman and Gideon Levy, Hila Lulu Lin, Sigalit Landau, Yaacov Ronen Morad, Tamara Masel,  Tal Matzliah, Ohad Meromi, Nir Nader and Erez Harodi, Adi Nes, Gilad Ophir, Avi Pitchon, Doron Rabina, Ilya Rabinovich, Roee Rosen, Guy Raz, Daniel Sack,

Hanna Sahar, Yehudit Sasportas, Efrat Shvily, Gil Shachar, Yoav Shmueli, Meira Shemesh, Dina Shenhav, Michael Sgan-Cohen, Doron Solomons, Eliezer Sonnenschein, Uri Tzaig, Pavel Wolberg, Sharon Ya'ari, Galia Yahav,

Dana and Boaz Zonshine