Want of Matter
"Want of Matter" is an Israeli style of art that existed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Characteristics of this style include the use of "meager" creative materials, artistic sloppiness, and criticism of the social reality and the myth of Israel society. Among the artists identified with "Want of Matter" are Raffi Lavie, Yair Garbuz, Michal Na'aman, Tamar Getter and Nahum Tevet.
History
The "Want of Matter" style grew out of a historical-retrospective view of Israeli art. The name originated in an exhibition called "The Want of Matter: A Quality in Israeli Art" curated by Sara Breitberg-Semel, which took place in March 1986 at the Tel Aviv Museum. Breitberg-Semel, then curator of Israeli art at the museum, mounted this exhibition as a summation and continuation of the exhibitions "Artist,Society,Artist" and "Different Spirit". It was an attempt to distinguish between local art and the style of international art of this period by means of a sociological and esthetic survey of Israeli artists and their attitude toward European artistic traditions. Breitberg-Semel saw the roots of the style in Pop Art, Arte Povera and Conceptual art. Another highly significant element in Breitberg-Semel's view was the concept "anesthetic," the roots of which could be found in the Jewish Talmudic tradition, which puts the text in the center of culture.Breitberg-Semel's attempt to trace the development of "Want of Matter" gave rise to a clear historical line, beginning with the painting of the "New Horizons" group. The members of this group developed an abstract style that came to be known as "lyrical abstract" within the framework of which the painters created an abstraction of form influenced by Expressionism. The artists who followed in the footsteps of these artists, Aviva Uri and Arie Aroch, used the artists of the "Want of Matter" group as their esthetic model with regard to their relationship to the materials they used in their paintings, to their ascetic materialism, and to their combined use of the abstract and veiled iconography.
The first generation of artists in the "Want of Matter" group in the 1960s were partners in a number of avant-garde artistic experiments, the most important of which were the activities of a group called "10+" This group, which never had a unified political or esthetic direction, united around the influences of international art and the use of new artistic materials such as photographs to create two dimensional art, artistic "activity," and even the use of the pioneering video art films in Israel.
Visually, "The Want of Matter" style distilled its characteristics from these diverse influences, preferring painting to three-dimensional sculpture. Overall, this style can be summed up as focusing on the use of low-cost materials identified with the establishment of Israel, such as plywood, cardboard, collages, photographs arranged as collages, industrial paints, and writing and scribbling within the work. The use of these materials reflected the "Ars Poetica" approach and gave an intentionally humble appearance to the surface of the paintings, a look which was meant to add a dimension of criticism by the artists toward Israeli society.
"But the word is very near you"
The caption on the exhibit "Want of Matter" included a quotation from the Book of Deuteronomy -- "But the word is very near you." This quotation captured the point of view of this group of artists, according to Breitberg-Semel, a secular, modernist point of view mixed with Jewish symbolism. The works were pointedly free of religious symbolism, as Breitberg –Semel notes, defining the works of Raffi Lavie: "There is no Western Wall, no Old City Wall, no Augusta Victoria," while on the other hand, the works were created "against the background of a religion whose esthetic and non-materialist point of view were its symbols." The development of this idea can be seen the article "Agrippas versus Nimrod", in which Breitberg-Semel expressed the desire to inculcate into their art a secular, pluralistic point of view influenced by Jewish tradition.The identification of Judaism with abstract art had already happened in the past, when it was based on the iconoclastic Orthodox tradition, in the spirit of the prohibition against the making of statues or masks that appears in The Ten Commandments. In 1976 this idea appeared in the Hebrew translation of an article by the American art critic Robert Pincus Witten, published in the first issue of the art journal Musag. The typical expression of this point of view on the Israeli artist can be found in an article on the work of Arie Aroch, who is considered the model for Raffi Lavie and his generation. The concept of "anestheticism" fueled the writings of the young artists, as an image within the works themselves, writing which relates to the relationship between the Jewish Talmudic tradition and a preoccupation with borders and national symbols as an expression of critical Zionist Judaism. In Breitberg-Semel's writing, these artists are portrayed as the "disinherited sabra," cut off from Jewish tradition to the same degree that they were cut off from the European Christian tradition.
Raffi Lavie – "Child of Tel Aviv"
In the article by Breitberg-Semel that accompanied the "Want of Matter" exhibition, the artist Raffi Lavie was presented as the typical representative of the style. Lavie's works put forth the idea of "The City of Tel Aviv" as a combination of European-Zionist modernism and neglect and abandonment. As the years passed, the image of Lavie himself, dressed sloppily in shorts, with rubber flip-flops on his feet, arrogant, "native," and "prickly," became the typical expression of this aesthetic school. Lavie's works, which included childish scribbles, collages of magazine illustrations, advertisements of Tel Aviv cultural events, stickers with words "head" or "geraniums" written on them, and above all the plywood sheet, sawed to a consistent size of 120 cm., and painted in whitewash, became the most recognizable symbols of "Want of Matter."In addition to developing a comprehensive visual style, Lavie encouraged discussion of his works on a formalist level. In interviews, Lavie refused to relate to any interpretations of his work other than "the language of art" in its modernist aesthetic incarnation. In spite of clearly iconographic images in his works, Lavie insisted that these images were of no historical significance. Furthermore, the use of collage and techniques that lacked an artistic "halo" were intended, according to both Lavie and Breitberg-Semel, to erode and undermine the significance of visual images. Lavie's students, however, continued to cultivate a preoccupation with form, as well as a continuing relationship with the modernist tradition, both of which caused problems for Lavie's didactic separation of "form" and "content."
Yair Garbuz formed a relationship with Lavie when he was just a young boy. For a number of years Lavie was Garbuz's private teacher. Later Garbuz went from being a student to being a senior instructor at the "HaMidrasha". His work from these years created a link between the symbols that connected the ethos of the Zionist undertaking, as reflected in popular culture, with social and political criticism.
His two-dimensional works from the 1970s and 1980s include a mix of newspaper photos, documentary photographs, texts and other objects, combined in compositions that have no clear hierarchy. Some of his works, such as "The Evenings Pass By Quietly" and "The Arab Village in Israel Very Much Resembles the Life of our Forefathers in Ancient Times", criticized stereotypes rampant in Israeli society. For the cover he designed for No. 11 of the journal Siman Kriah , Garbuz inserted a photograph from the newspaper Davar of a self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh captioned "Van Gogh in Tel Aviv." Under the reproduction, Garbuz added a sort of poem, complete with nikud and illustrations, discussing the significance of labor. This work was one of a number of his works in which he presented his artistic activity as an artist in Israel - which he perceived as a distant and outlying place — as a kind of anarchism. Along with these two-dimensional works, Garbuz produced art videos, installations, and other forms of artistic activities in this spirit.
Henry Schlesnyak, an American-born artist, juxtaposed collage with American Pop Art, and American symbolism—the most significant of which is his portrait of Abraham Lincoln – with scenes from Israeli art as reflected in various newspaper articles. Through this juxtaposition, Schlesnyak pointed out the moral aspect of artistic activity and his view of the place of Israeli art and the Israeli artist within it. Another layer of his work was composed of the "Tel Aviv" aesthetic, which played the role of critic in his works. For example, reproductions of famous works of art were painted over in industrial shellac to give them the feeling of paintings by the European "Old Masters." The "Hebrew translation" of this feeling included the devaluing of the paintings by "flashes of stains on the surface of the paintings, dirt, 'want of matter', thereby bringing it down to the level of what is appropriate to the experience of being here. " In a 1980 collage, Schlesnyak glued onto plywood a newspaper picture of the writer Irving Stone, author of popular novels about artists, positioned at the front of the Tel Aviv Museum. Next to him stands Marc Scheps, Director of the museum, with his head enclosed in a circle. Above this Schlesnyak glued an article by Adam Baruch describing an exhibition of the works of Ya'acov Dorchin, a friend of Schlesnyak, with a caption composed of letterset printing.
The works of Michal Na'aman from the 1970s used photography to create collages. In these works Naaman put together various expressions emphasizing the limitations of the language of description and of vision, as well as the possibilities of imagination and the difference in visual expression. The practice of combining conflicting axioms indicated the failure or distortion of the language of description. Against the background of the visual dimension that reflected the aesthetic principles of "Want of Matter," there appeared various representations and texts written in letterset printing or in handwriting that reflected the semiotic bankruptcy of the representation of images. Examples of this can be found in works such as "The Fish is the End of the Bird" and "The Gospel According to the Bird" in which Na'aman joined reproduced images of a fish and a bird into a kind of hybrid monster. In "Vanya " a conflict is created between the textual contents of the work with the visual contents, along with an emphasis on sexual motifs.
In spite of her feminist connections, Yehudit Levin's works are more personal and less intellectual than the works of most of Raffi Lavie's students. At the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, Levin created abstract compositions constructed from sawed and painted plywood, sometimes combined with photographs, then leaned against a wall. The names of these works, such as "Bicycle" and "Princess in a Palace" hint at a domestic connection. Even though these works appear in space as three-dimensional, their main interest lies in their complex relationship with the spaces seen within them. The "drawing" breaks out of the framework of the platform and flows over into space.
A similar approach, without the psychological baggage, can be seen in the works of the sculptor Nahum Tevet. In his minimalist works Tevet shows an ambivalent relationship with three-dimensional space. In a late interview Tevet defined the motivation behind these works as a reaction to his studying art with Lavie. "It might be that to a certain extent this is a reaction to the place where I studied painting, in Raffi Lavie's studio. He suggested painting in which the main interest was built around personal tensions and relationships, and I asked about the relationship between the painting as an object and the environment – the world."
His works from that period dealt with the division and organization of work surfaces. In an installation from 1973-1974, Tevet placed white-painted plywood boards on top of chairs. The work showed the influence of the aesthetic principles of minimalist art and emphasized the temporariness of the expression of an artistic experience. In another work, "Beds", Tevet displayed rectangular, white-painted plywood boards, with legs attached to them that turned the two-dimensional "painting" into a work of sculpture. The interpretation of this work that grew up over the years required that, in addition to the formalistic aspect of the work, the biographical background of Tevet, as a former kibbutz member, needed to be taken into account. Relating to plywood as a "painting" and to its placement as a work of art reflected the ambivalent relationship of Tevet to the surface of the painting.