When the art school becomes the subject of its own art
A Tel Aviv Museum exhibition on Beit Berl College’s 70-year-old Midrasha questions the role schools play in teaching the next generation of artists
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
Israel likes its art schools, and the Midrasha at Beit Berl College in Kfar Saba is known for being an art teacher’s art school, with a particular focus on filmmaking and contemporary art.
Now the art school is the subject of its own exhibit, opening Thursday, December 1 at the Helena Rubinstein Art Pavilion for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, in which the participating artists look at how art is taught, and whether that process makes sense in today’s world.
It also celebrates 70 years since the founding of the art school.
“We’re here to ask questions,” said Avi Lubin, the curator of the exhibit and the head of theoretical studies and visiting artists at the postgraduate program at the Midrasha. “We’re looking at the here and now, to understand art, to see whether a school of art even makes sense?”
Situated on the three floors of the art pavilion that is a branch of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, located behind the HaBima performance complex, the exhibit turned the site into a school of art, featuring the works of more than a dozen Midrasha artists and teachers.
There’s the Cafeteria on the first floor, an Astroturfed corner of the room, complete with a wooden picnic table and garbage bin, the kind seen in most Israeli picnic grounds, and, more importantly, a state-of-the-art espresso machine that will provide free cups of coffee to visitors over the course of the month-long exhibit.
“My aim is that all of this is open to the public,” said Lubin. “It’s not to bring the Midrasha to here or just for artists.”
The idea of the exhibit was also to invite artists, not according to their importance or hierarchy, but whether they could ask the right questions of how art fits in to today’s work, added Lubin.
Whether the exhibit answers all the questions posed remains to be seen. Its broad, intuitive installations offer the opportunity for both art lovers and passersby to actively engage in concepts of art, what forms art, what does it all mean, when can it be made.
There are the set of headphones linked to folk songs with a spiral rendition of each song running on a screen behind, an old-fashioned slide show, massive canvases to be filled with broad strokes of paint, or a chance to sit with artist Miri Segal at the table and chairs that are lifted, ever so slowly, up toward the ceiling in what she calls a contact point meant to “change perspective.”
The splashes of bold Van Gogh yellow, gray and Miro black canvas painted onto the museum staircase were another artist’s reaction to the difficult events of the summer of 2014, during Israel’s war in Gaza.
And there are quieter, easier pieces to contemplate, like the desks set up at the entrance of the exhibit, meant to echo the admissions desk of any school and whether one feels welcomed, or a sense of belonging, upon entering.
A row of jars holding pickled vegetables are another contribution, the artist’s reenactment of what happened in a recurring sculpture class, while Keren Gueller’s Library is an organized work of puzzle-like files, made of car and bank advertisements on cardboard, carefully filed to conjure questions about commercialism versus art.
Efrat Galnoor’s oil painting of the water tower at the center of the Beit Berl Midrasha features a dark-skinned boy in his skivvies, carrying a water can, showing the architecture and history of the school, before it was Beit Berl, said Lubin.
There is Lior Shvil’s theater set, a rough skeleton of a stage that will host three days of a play, rehearsed in a series of workshops during the exhibition. And Rafat Khattab’s Arabic class, “The Arabic Teacher,” will be a political provocation, said Lubin, pulling the Arabic language into the conversation.
“Are any of these things art?” asked Lubin, a lawyer who switched gears and is now at Beit Berl, while working on his PhD in psychology. “You can ask that of all of it. How do these things look when no one’s here?”
The mornings, afternoons and evenings during the exhibition run will be filled with presentations, activities and workshops open to the public, with the intention of bringing in all kinds of participants.
“Art School, HaMidrasha Faculty of Arts at Seventy,” December 1-31, Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.
