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Troubling beauty.
If art is a reflection of society, Israelis for the past 10 years have been filled with anxiety and dread.
In a major 60-year retrospective, six Israeli museums are showcasing six decades of Israeli art.
The Israel Museum in Jerusalem is displaying the decade 1998-2008. “Troubling beauty,” is how curator Amitai Mendelsohn characterized much of the work.
One of the most talked-about pieces is a staged photograph of Israeli soldiers at a mess table arranged as the Twelve Apostles in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.
“Is this their last supper? Who has betrayed them?” Mendelsohn told a group of foreign correspondents the other day. He called the large photograph a “powerful political statement on sacrifice and betrayal.”
The exhibit, which will be up until mid-August, features young Israeli artists, some of whom have received acclaim abroad. In one piece that appears as a child’s giant diorama underneath a glass case, red tile rooftops rise above a wasteland of ash.
Mendelsohn said the rooftops may represent the bourgeois dream. Pitched terracotta roofs are also the architectural trademark of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
In perhaps the most disturbing work, a 2006 installation titled Tardemon, by Adam Rabinowitz, a papier-mache creature that could be a monkey or a mutated human, is hunched on a windowsill in a dark room, staring at a deep blue sky and a full moon. His head randomly ticks and pivots.
“You wonder,” Mendelsohn said, “if he is the first human or the last human.”
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