Digital Dada

Written by Ari Miller

Israeli Video Artists, Current Events, and the Camera
A 35-year-old man in a green t-shirt is sitting on a folding chair. His hair is buzzed short and his face is covered in stubble. He introduces himself via voiceover: this is Doron Solomons, a video artist, born in London and currently living in Tel Aviv. Solomons’ lips remain static as his Hebrew voiceover narrates, and corresponding English subtitles appear at the bottom of the screen. He scratches his nose and rubs his mouth. He folds his arms as if anxious for his on-screen appearance to end.

So begins Inventory, a video piece produced by Solomons in 2001, in which he catalogues everything he has. The list begins with his wife and proceeds to his older daughter, then his younger one. Humans are followed by his dog, after which Solomons itemizes every object in his home: washing machine, blender, sofa, books, t-shirts, pornographic magazines, and gas masks each appear on the screen for a couple of seconds—only as long as it takes for Solomons to identify them for the viewer. The entire video runs for about four minutes.

Inventory was presented this November as part of VideoZone2, the second Israeli video art biennial, which screened 180 films in seven days at multiple locations across Israel. Solomons’ work, along with the biennial itself, is emblematic of a growing trend both in Israel and internationally: video art. Drawing on photography and filmmaking, video art—a half-century-old form given new life by advances in digital recording—has emerged as a genre all its own.

Video art has been on the rise for decades, explains Ken Feinstein, a professor of experimental video at New York’s School of Visual Arts and Parsons School of Design. But now, he says, “it’s kind of where photography was 100 years ago—less the bastard stepchild and more something that is seen as being a full genre.” Contemporary art museums from New York’s MoMA to Paris’ Centre Pompidou now include video work in their permanent collections. Over the last few years, explains Sergio Edelsztein—director of Tel Aviv’s Center for Contemporary Art and VideoZone2’s curator—the medium has become increasingly popular in Israel and its artists increasingly well-known.

Edelsztein’s festival screened artists’ work at several venues in Tel Aviv, as well as in Jerusalem, Sderot, and Herzliya—and these showings are hardly the extent to which Israel has welcomed the medium. The Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School, and the Universities of Haifa and Tel Aviv, among others, have all recently incorporated the genre into their programs or launched new programs devoted to it.

It’s no accident that video art is taking Israel by storm. With its combination of technological prowess, media obsession, and sociopolitical instability, the country has an atmosphere ripe for embracing the medium’s frequently confrontational tone. “All cinema…is a mosaic of human dreams and fears,” says Edelsztein in an introduction to his curatorial vision for VideoZone2. “It is only in their unrealized dreams that these people find solutions to conflicts and future lives for themselves.” By contrast, Edelsztein told New Voices, Israelis’ daily reality is often “crude and brutal.” To many Israeli artists, the camera is one way to filter current events and shape a personal response to the conflict. “The Israeli Jew [is] so utterly immersed in a political reality that leaves little room for identity issues other than those pertaining to his or her physical and moral existence,” explains Edelsztein. Art, he goes on, enables Israelis’ exploration of their personal and political identity, “and how that identity transcends location, situation and history.”

“I display in Tel Aviv and Haifa. I’m here, so I can’t just disengage,” agrees Manal Mahamid, a 28-year-old Palestinian-Israeli video artist in her first year at the University of Haifa’s MFA program. Originally from a suburb of the Arab city Umm al-Fahm in northern Israel, Mahamid has presented her art in both Israel and the neighboring Arab world. The bulk of her work is both distinctly Israeli and an exploration of her Palestinian identity: “My environment is Israel,” she says, noting that she often incorporates Israel’s rolling landscapes into her work.

Even given the left-wing bent of the Israeli arts community, Mahamid adds that she has encountered limits on her artistic exploration of identity. As a Palestinian-Israeli, she is part of a minority within Israel and its art scene, and feels that communal expectations sometimes restrict the acceptance of her work—unsurprising, as Palestinian and Israeli identities represent two narratives often painfully at odds with each other. Ultimately, Mahamid says, she sees herself as a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, implying that though she exhibits her work in Israel, she feels that in some way it is out of place there.

In Spilled Pool, a piece on which Mahamid collaborated with fellow student Yael Groman, she explores these issues of Arab/Israeli identity. The screen is split, the right side featuring a fixed photograph of the profiles of two young men from the Arab city of Tira. On the left side, a movie shows the same two in a swimming pool, where it is unclear whether they are playing or fighting. The entire video, accompanied by a soundtrack of heartbeats and splashing water, is three minutes long and looped: the viewer, Mahamid explains, can start and stop watching at any time. The combination of the two mens’ profiles —reminiscent of mug shots—with the ambiguous swimming pool scene, she says, is intended to inspire thought. She adds that it is important to her to use images that demand an active response from the viewer.

Doron Solomons’ Inventory sheds light on less political struggles, exploring the idea that personal identity is often comprised of—or confused with—possessions. Extrapolating the thought to a statement about national identity, the Israeli daily Ha’Aretz, in a discussion of the piece, postulates that Inventory is an attempt to deconstruct the rampant materialism prevalent in today’s Israel.

Materialism may be an Israeli subject, but it is also a universal one—as are many of the themes explored by Israel’s video artists, Ken Feinstein notes. “What are particularly Israeli themes?” he wonders, adding that many of the subjects prevalent in Israeli video art are typical of video art worldwide. Landscapes, frequently found in Israeli video art, are a staple of most types of Western art, and Feinstein points out that even specifically Jewish topics such as the Holocaust can be found in the work of artists worldwide. To him, the more significant trend is that the last few years have seen Israelis becoming increasingly visible in the mainstream international art world, exhibiting work on multiple continents and inviting international artists to present their work in Israel.

At the same time, topics highly specific to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not only ubiquitous in Israeli video art, but have also begun to crop up in video art from around the world. “Due to the very strong character of the conflict,” Edelsztein says, foreign video artists often work in Israel, and the separation barrier being constructed between Israel and the West Bank has provided many artists with a particularly powerful image. In particular, Santiago Sierra—a world-renowned Spanish artist known for controversial video pieces and installations—has recently exhibited works produced in Israel at the Herzliya Museum of Art and at VideoZone2.

Inventory also hints at another aspect of Solomons’ life as an Israeli artist: despite any cultural focus on possessions, it would be nearly impossible for an Israeli artist to bring in enough income to purchase all of the items shown in the video: Solomons supports his family by working as a video editor at a news outlet. Though many Israelis are artists, he says, “very few people in Israel live off their art.”

That may be one of the reasons that video art is gaining ground in the first place. Feinstein explains that the Holy Land hosts few film studios and the production costs for filmmaking are prohibitive to most aspiring artists. Video is cheaper to shoot, distribute, and display, and digital technology has made it easier to manipulate images. With the advent of software that gives many more people the opportunity to produce their own videos on a home computer, people are increasingly aware of the medium.

“Film and video is much more part of the daily consciousness and the language of our life,” says Feinstein, adding that, “there’s a certain amount of video art that is specifically made to comment on that.” Israelis rely heavily on TV for news and entertainment, adds Solomons, and much social interaction revolves around the latest offerings from television. Audio/visual saturation is furthered through hourly radio news reports, print media and, most recently, cell phones that offer streaming video.

In exploring setting and identity, Edelsztein says, video art is no different from painting or sculpture. But as an art form that’s still developing, working within it involves exploring the potential of the medium itself. “It took me two years to understand you could do art that’s not painting,” says Solomons. When he did begin working with video, he found it an open field with plenty of possibilities. “It was the right tool at the right time for the right person,” he says.

For many, it’s also the right tool with which to tackle controversial subjects and to portray immediate, even violent events. Through video, Israeli artists struggle with personal and political realities—a struggle that, Edelsztein argues, is the essence of art itself. What is unique to Israel are the details. For him, Solomons says, this is the struggle between personal and national identity. “Since Israel is Israel,” he adds, “there’s a lot of mess here.”

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Ari Miller
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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.