Kibbutz reframed

There was a minor storm on Kibbutz Be'eri last Friday. Dudu Bareket's exhibition, "Disorder," which was to open in the kibbutz gallery on Saturday, was changed at the last minute. Bareket intended to install closed-circuit television cameras in the kibbutz dining hall and broadcast the footage into the museum space. Kibbutz residents were upset about the invasion of their privacy and asked to know where the cameras would be placed.

"I don't know, maybe they were afraid the camera would catch those who steal from the dining hall or record conversations that should not be heard," says Bareket.

The opposition of kibbutz members led to a compromise between Ziva Yellin, the gallery's curator, and the kibbutz secretary. The two decided that only one camera would be placed in the dining hall and its location, next to the tea-serving area, would be known to all entering it. But a day before the opening, Bareket was informed that a press release issued by Yellin, with the knowledge of the kibbutz secretary, stated that the camera hovering over the dining hall would be a decoy - to restore calm. In so doing, Bareket said, Yellin decisively neutralized the meaning of the exhibit. The editors, he said, exercised censorship so that the artist would not be able to criticize her and expose her unpleasant side.

In response, Bareket decided to put the exhibit in storage. Several hours before the opening, he took a camera, went into the chicken coop in Kibbutz Be'eri's petting zoo and like the German artist Joseph Boyce, who held a dead rabbit in his arms and explained to it what art is, Bareket explained the reasons for the exhibit's cancellation to the chickens.

Bareket's conversation with the chickens is now on display in the gallery instead of the originally planned exhibition.

The current incident is reminiscent of Dov Or Ner and Tamar Dubrovsky's exhibition "Have You Ever Considered Suicide?" featured at the Be'eri Gallery some six months ago. That exhibition was also changed and toned down following pressure from kibbutz members. But Bareket's current exhibition also engages in a fascinating dialog with Erella Horowitz's exhibition, "Illustrations and Paper Cutouts, which was showing until the beginning of the month at the Ein Harod Museum of Art.

Fiction comes to life

The focus of both exhibitions - both taking place, coincidentally or not, in kibbutzim that have yet to undergo privatization - is the dining hall. This space, more than anywhere else, represents the kibbutz collective and the relationships between the society and the individual. This space was the first to lose some of its meaning in kibbutzim that were privatized. Bareket tried to expose via the dining hall the weak points of kibbutz society, whereas Horowitz, one of the founders of Kibbutz Netiv Halamed Heh, who died in 1994, tried to make its walls look nicer with decorations and black-and-white paper cutouts. With these decorations, kibbutz society was presented at its best - a society full of joie de vivre and a sense of partnership.

Bareket failed in his attempt to break through, but succeeded in exposing the intense sensitivity of the society that is still trying to preserve fraternity at all costs. He tried to expose the fiction of the collective, the fiction that was given a breath of life by the illustrations of Horowitz, who was born in 1929 and believed in the ideology of the kibbutz vision. Horowitz became known for her book illustrations, including "Aya Ha'gingit," and "Aba Shel Efrat" and books by leading children's authors, including A. Hillel, Dvora Omer, Nira Harel and Uriel Ofek, and was above all else a kibbutz artist. She made the announcements for kibbutz events and parties, prepared the decorations for the holidays, designed costumes, organized and designed gatherings and conferences and built exhibitions. Her total identification with the place can also be seen in the way she signed most of her illustrations, Erella Netiv Halamed Heh.

The dining hall, according to Bareket, is a place where interesting and secretive things occur. It is the place where disputes, tensions, gaps and rifts are likely to surface. According to Horowitz's illustrations and paper-cuts, which occasionally adorned its walls, the dining hall was a vibrant gathering place, a place where kibbutz meetings were held and in Horowitz's illustrations these were depicted as enjoyable and moving social gatherings, where even if no agreement was reached, there was still a prevailing sense of unity and fraternity.

"Horowitz's drawings make no mention of the sense of excommunication and loneliness that is very much highlighted in that same shared space," noted one visitor to her exhibition, also a kibbutz native. According to her, "Horowitz's illustrations do not reveal the fear we felt upon entering the dining hall when it was clear that everyone was gossiping about you. It is the place where parents and children gathered in the afternoons, but that's also where we parted - parents went to their rooms, and we went to the children's houses."

Children's trauma

The children's houses - one of the most loaded issues in kibbutz history - are not mentioned in Horowitz's illustrations. This is surprising: "Horowitz's great love was the kibbutz children, who saw her as a second mother," Galia Bar writes in the Ein Harod exhibition catalog.

"Basically, we grew up alone," says the kibbutz native. "No one knew where we were and what we were doing. They abandoned us. She didn't draw the nights, the neglect, the loneliness, the tears, the nightmares, the sense of being crowded, the lack of privacy, the longing for one's parents. She didn't draw the babysitter - the intercom that called the night monitor - and she also didn't draw the night monitor. In her world, the children were always outside, on the grass, happy, playing. Whoever wasn't part of the `togetherness' is not in the frame."

It seems that Horowitz's illustrations are read by two types of crowds: Those who know, for example, how to analyze the drawings in illustrated letters she sent to her friends on the kibbutz, and that appear in the beginning of the catalog, and those who have a hard time grasping their exact meaning; those who have trouble guessing who is the man she drew in one letter walking with a magnifying glass over his head and appears in the middle of the sentence "don't upset our (...) too much" - and those who know that the illustrated sign means "rosh gadol" (i.e., "big shot"); those who view from the outside the pictures of bubbly children and melt at the site of them, as opposed to those who are kibbutz natives, but were never included in the illustrated frame. Horowitz's illustrations, then and now, continue to zealously preserve the spirit of the 1950s and 1960s. Bareket's installation, peeping in from the outside, has attempted to ask questions and momentarily disrupt that euphoria, but it encountered opposition.