Last update - 00:00 01/01/2007
One curator, thousands of Israeli artists
Amitai Mendelson, the new curator of Israeli art at the Israel Museum, intends to visit the periphery a lot. At least, this is what he is saying now, as he starts his tenure.
"Though most of the important artists are in the center of the country, it is important to also go to less obvious places," says Mendelson, 36. "If somewhat less well-known artists were to contact me, I would be interested in meeting them. I definitely see them and hear them, and I'm also prepared to consider exhibiting them. The museum can serve as a stage for talented people, even if they haven't exhibited in the key places. I'm not afraid of trying to reach the less so-called accepted people."
The announcement of Mendelson's appointment is surprising. This is not because Mendelson is unworthy, but because four years ago, after Sarit Shapira's departure, the museum announced there was no need for a full-time curator for Israeli art, and moreover, Israeli art could not be specifically defined.
The museum decided to regard Israeli art as part of contemporary art, for which curator Suzanne Landau is responsible. Shapira was appointed "curatorial fellow," a non-tenured curator. Since then she has curated only one exhibition at the museum, the Nahum Tevet exhibition, which will be shown this year.
What happened now to make them reinstate the position?
"It was simply a bureaucratic solution to allow a colleague a promotion," said Landau about a month ago. Mendelson himself has no answer: "The truth is that until the last minute, this appointment was surrounded with uncertainty, and suddenly I realized they were about to approve the slot."
So there is place at the museum for a curator of Israeli art?
"I think there is. First of all, someone at the museum has to be responsible for this area and respond to all those thousands of Israeli artists. Somebody has to be in contact with the field and to do this as a full-time job. It's clear we are working with the international department. We will show exhibitions that connect Israeli art with international art, and we will show the links between them. Israeli art doesn't exist in a vacuum, and the artists themselves create like any artist based in Paris, New York or Turkey. There are many Israeli artists whom it is difficult to define as local artists in the old sense of the word. Of course there will also be exhibitions of only Israeli art."
But even before the official announcement, Mendelson, who started to work at the museum in 1995, was running the Israeli art department for all intents and purposes. During this period, he curated a number of exhibitions, including the Michael Sgan-Cohen retrospective, the Adi Prize's Lights exhibition, the Avraham Ofek exhibition at the Anna Ticho House, and the Reuven Rubin exhibition, which is currently on display and includes early, unknown paintings by the artist.
He holds a master's in art studies from the Hebrew University, and pursued museology studies at the University of Haifa and doctoral studies at Ben-Gurion University. He is interested in the history of Israeli art as well as current work, and seeks to combine the past with the present, and create an intergenerational dialogue with continuum and contexts. Examples of this can be found in a current exhibition in which a sculpture by Sigalit Landau, for example, is shown next to Yitzhak Danziger's mythological "Nimrod."
Alongside contemporary artists like Michal Helfman, whom Mendelson will exhibit in the near future, the curator intends to show historical artists as well.
"I am in favor of continuing real and serious historical research into classical artists," he says. "One of a curator's important roles is to examine the narrative that has been created, discover those things that didn't suit the canonical Zionist story and reveal them. For example, in the Reuven Rubin exhibition, I chose to show works from one of his very unknown periods. This is connected to the discussion of how we see Israeli art's history. It's precisely those things from the Diaspora, which have remained beneath the surface, that I find much more fascinating than his Israeli paintings."