Mifal Hapais Arts and Culture Council
"There’s a neighborhood not too far away…"[1]
Our neighborhood is our memories of childhood. The neighbors that were like family, the informal character of a small, warm community. Meir Tati wonders the streets of the Jessy Cohen neighborhood of Holon. His strides measure streets that have become familiar after two years of working there and meeting with the inhabitants—but familiar also from Tati’s own childhood memories. He remembers them as a kid who used to live in the last remaining shacks of Holon’s immigration camp (Ma’abara), and to visit his uncle’s house right by the Weizmann school, currently housing the Israeli Center for Digital Art.
The story of Jessy Cohen cannot be read apart from the story of Israel’s 1950s mass immigration wave. As Giora Yoseftal, then head of Immigrant Absorption at the Jewish Agency put it, "Israel wants immigration, but Israelis don’t want immigrants"—a phrase that captured the general attitude towards the newcomers, who included Holocaust survivors and Jewish immigrants of North African, Yemenite, and Iraqi origin. The challenge of absorbing such a huge population was met by several solutions. These included housing the immigrants in expropriated Palestinian homes, and flooding the country with immigrant camps, and later with cheap, hurriedly-built housing projects, which developed into an array of neighborhoods that did not develop organically, many of which turned into poverty-stricken areas.[2]
One of those neighborhoods was Jessy Cohen, which gradually became Holon’s back yard. Built on the south-western edge of the city with money donated by Jewish-American philanthropists Max and Jessica Cohen, it was later handed over to the public residence company of Amidar. It was clear from the beginning that the neighborhood was problematic compared with the five former neighborhoods that formed the basis of Holon—a power relation that remained even after the establishment of two new neighborhoods around Jessy Cohen, Kiryat Ben Gurion and Kiryat Rabin. Indeed, the very names are telling: the latter two neighborhoods being named after Israel’s mythical founding father and after one of the ultimate figures of "the New Jew" (the Sabra), whereas Jessy Cohen is named after its foreign philanthropists. As if to let us know who is here by right and who by virtue.
Little Big Brother
Tati examines the minute details that cross his path, clinging to sideways and personal narratives, and tracking them the way collectors do. Picking up fragments of reality even though—or perhaps precisely because—he realizes that even if he collects them all he will end up with no more than a shattered image. Thus Tati is moving between public and private space, above and below the surface, collecting his shards.
The chronology of journeying through the neighborhood is combined with the personal chronology of maturation. Tati’s first creative partners are children who also wonder the streets, helping him and his partner, Danish artist Søren Dahlgaard,[3] transport "mobile walls" through the neighborhood. The result is a clumsy choreography of grey walls, conducting a dialog with the color of the housing projects, and with the menacing concrete wall that slices the neighborhood in half for the benefit of the southern part of the Ayalon highway. A series of compositions taking place in neighborhood sites sets off a game in which almost every wall-arrangement generates a cliché of "public sculpture," along with an ironic gaze directed at the neighborhood’s local variant of modernism.
Another action by Tati and Dahlgaard is a series of "dough portraits": Dozens of neighborhood residents posing for portraits with a ten kilogram lump of dough on their heads. Dough and bread are basic, universal objects. We know what they feel like; we know how dough is formed, processed, and baked into bread. And yet, outside their context, these objects arouse our curiosity. Whereas there is something dissonant about a portrait of a covered face, covered in dough they appear almost mischievous.
Alongside the physical activities in the neighborhood, Tati is also scattering "eyes" throughout it: small boxes, each containing a small monitor, speaker, camera, and microphone. Their role is not that of remote supervision or disciplining. What we have here is not a "big brother" but a "little big brother." Unlike public-sphere art, in which the contact between viewer and artwork is limited, this project strives to establish a two-way relation between them. The monitors present various contents, including Tati’s activities, works by other artists operating in the neighborhood, interviews with residents, and various photographs taken by them. The cameras inside those boxes are constantly shooting and transmitting, making their gaze accessible to all residents, thereby undermining the hierarchical power-structure generated by other surveillance cameras in the urban space. The first locations of these input-output boxes include various public places around the neighborhood, such as the community center, the soup kitchen, and the localHashomer Hatzair youth movement branch.
The Shomer is Brave, Cheerful, and Fresh
Tati’s next partners are members of the local branch of Hashomer Hatzair youth movement. Tati tracks the Ten Commandments of the movement, first drafted in 1916, and graphically designed by Shraga Weil in 1946. These commandments paint a portrait of the model movement member (the Shomer) with such phrases as "the Shomer strives for Zionism, socialism, and peace among nations." Weil’s design is full of pathos, with the commandments being accompanied by wood carvings of characters wearing official Shomer uniform,[4] standing against the sun that rises from the lyrics to the movement’s anthem. Tati takes these original designs, blows them up, and sprays them over the walls of the local branch, with the characters being replaced by a large, opaque, yellow stain.
Following this, Tati together with Tali Tamir invited the local branch instructors to take part in the "Schooling" (Bristolim) exhibition at the Bat Yam Museum.[5] After their own home was turned into an artwork, the instructors enter Tati’s professional home, in order to spray-paint their movement’s ten commandments on the museum’s walls—this time without interfering with their original design. The next stage in this dialog is an official ceremony, in which Tati receivesHashomer uniform.
The Commercial Center Gallery
A chance meeting at the community center with Vered Levanon Parente, a local artist who operates in the neighborhood and teaches children, forms the basis for a dialog that develops between Tati and various other resident artists of Jessy Cohen. Vered takes Tati to meet Mimi Rosenberg, who in turn takes him to Genadhi (Gdalia) Zimmel. Each of the artists tells a travel story. Levanon Parante, granddaughter of painter Mordechai Levanon, "wounds the canvas," as she puts it, in order to make it human, thereby "making it carry my life burden." Rosenberg’s artistic career began with actions within the neighborhood, and with her involvement in Neighborhood Reconstruction projects. Finally, Zimmel recounts his fascinating journey beginning in Lvov in west Ukraine, followed by receiving the Lenin award for extraordinary service to the country, and ending in Jessy Cohen.
The input-output boxes are removed from their public locations and taken to the artists’ work areas, in order to record them over several long weeks. At the end of the process, Tati curates a one-man exhibit for each of the artists at an empty store in the commercial center—a space rented specifically for the neighborhood activity of the Israeli Center for Digital Art . Although not the first time the store turns into an exhibition hall, this is the first exhibition by neighborhood residents.
Meir Tati celebrates the neighborhood and its inhabitants. His viewpoint of it is not patronizing, and his intimate knowledge of it offers him a unique gaze that does not focus on its problems and on the baggage of disenfranchisement and failure that is all-too-easily associated with it. Tati is neither an "artistic tourist" nor a stranger to the neighborhood, which for him serves not as an exotic object. He wonders and observes it out of curiosity and intimacy, seeking and finding treasures in unexpected corners, belonging and not belonging to it at the same time.
This aspect of Tati’s journey does not comply with the etymology of the word nostalgia, which combines homecoming (nostos) and pain (algos). Tati does not look back in pain but rather examines the present with a loving yet sober gaze. One of the constitutive moments among Tati’s childhood memories that this gaze falls upon is that in which his teacher tells his mom "your boy will amount to nothing." This sentence accompanies both Tati and the neighborhood as a theme to revolt against: a cold gaze coming from the outside, and which can only be resisted through the power of a gaze from inside.
The exhibition was supported by Mifal Hapais Arts and Culture Council
Eyal Danon, Ran Kasmy-Ilan
[1] Opening line to the theme song of television show Sh’hunat Haim. See note 2.
[2] These neighborhood, housing a population that was the "other" of Israeli society at the time, were the breeding ground for many significant social developments: The Wadi Salib riots of 1951, the formation of the Black Panthers movement, the 1977 political overturn of the Right, the formation of the Tami party followed by the Shas party, and more. These processes increasingly received attention in the cultural sphere, including Yehoshua Sobol’s 1976 play Kriza, Nola Chelton’s Neighrborhood Theater, and the "Cassette Music" subculture that formed as an alternative to the musical consensus. Here one must add the fascinating attempt by the establishment to deal with the problem of such neighborhoods with the 1976 national television show Shchunat Haim. Written by Yossi Alfi, the show presented a neighborhood comprised mostly of people of Mizrahi origin (the Middle East or North Africa—although this is never explicitly stated by any of the characters). This was a fascinating experiment in creating a televised identification object with the "other" of a neighborhood, in which "the kids are just like you and I"—as the opening lyrics by Yoram Teharlev state.
[3] The Kaboom Process is a joint project of the Israeli Tati and the Danish Søren Dahlgaard, both of whom seek to challenge the absurdity of everyday life in their countries.
[4] Shraga Weil’s design of the Shomer commandments used marker-pen on paper, although in woodcarving style.
[5] The exhibition dealt with educational processes, societal mechanisms, and other ways in which the world of young citizens is being formed, focusing on the educational establishment, teacher-student relationship, and the relationship between students and the classroom spaces in which they spend most of their time. Bristolim ("Paperboards") was displayed at the Bat Yam Museum in 2012 and curated by Tali Amir and Meir Tati.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
