Subscribe to Print Edition | Thu., November 20, 2008 Cheshvan 22, 5769 | | Israel Time: 13:07 (EST+7)   Back to Homepage web haaretz.com Haaretz Toolbar Diplomacy Defense Jewish World Opinion National Print Edition Car Rental Books Haaretz Magazine Business Real Estate GA 2008 Travel Week's End Anglo File

The thought-catcher By Kobi Ben-Simhon Tags: Israel, Friday Magazine Once famed for her portrait photography, Michal Heiman has become what she calls a ?photography refusenik.? In her new exhibition she will try to turn the museum space into a therapy room, in order to draw viewers into revealing themselves through her works, most of them based on photos by unknown photographers. In Michal Heiman's studio on Yehuda Halevy Street in Tel Aviv, thousands of pictures are stored in drawers. For over 20 years she has been collecting newspaper clippings, copies of 19th-century paintings and pictures from unknown family albums she has come across. She knows it has become an obsession, but she is simply incapable of checking her tremendous urge to preserve and file such visual materials. "I have become used to living this way," she says. "There are a thousand drawers in my home, too." Heiman, an interdisciplinary artist, curator and lecturer on art, finds emotional serenity in her private documentary work. In the corner of the room is a small wooden bookshelf filled with American magazines, art books, clinical studies and psychoanalytical texts. It is important to her to display these, too, because everything was gathered according to her wishes and intermingles to become a ramified emotional document, without a beginning, middle or end. Part of her personality. "It's hard to explain what exactly all this does for me," she says, "but I can say that the archive gives me a sense of security." Advertisement Dressed in black, enthusiastic about the space she has created, she excitedly displays brown envelopes suspended on clothes hangers. Inside them are negatives and photos she took in the 1980s as a leading portrait photographer for the media and the music industry. Gently, she pulls out plastic hangers and looks warmly at the inscriptions on the envelopes: "Yael Dayan, Yehudit Ravitz: Ba'a Me'ahava, Tel Aviv: nighttime, Hebron and David Avidan," she reads, smiling to herself. "I once heard something really nice," she suddenly remarks, turning her glance to the window. "The researcher who discovered black holes discovered them by chance, he was actually looking for something else. But in the course of his work there were disturbances with the telescope and he decided to mark them with black dots. In effect his great discovery came from that, from the disturbances. For me the archive is the black holes, disturbances on the way to the goal. I feel that there is something right about this work of collecting on the way to the goal." A double life. In her new exhibition, 'Attacks on Linking,' opening next week at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the veteran artist releases the imprisoned fire from the archive of her thoughts. The exhibition will display a variety of her most recent works, including the 'Do-mino' series, which contrasts canonical works of art and newspaper photos. This is an animated series in which Heiman uses computerized animation on photos by unknown photographers, and two video presentations, in one of which Heiman will read aloud and act out a case study by Freud: the story of a girl whose father tried to rape her. It is a rainy evening and Heiman is deeply immersed in last-minute preparations, thoughtful and rushed, as thunder and lightning fills the air outside. While talking, together with a young assistant who is exhausted from a long day, she examines several works that are to be sent to the museum the next afternoon. From the ceiling the assistant pulls a string and reveals a huge print of a skinny girl in shades of orange-pink by the Expressionist artist Edward Munch. At the bottom of the painting Heiman has printed the question: 'Were you cold?' "I was born in this house," says Heiman, and then sits down on a wide brown armchair in the middle of the room. "In this room my mother took care of my grandmother, who died of cancer. At the age of 12, my mother had already left school and started taking care of her. Perhaps for that reason there was some inner cry in my mother. For too long a time she didn't do what she wanted-for example, play the piano or paint. I sometimes still experience her cries." Heiman often reminisces, burrowing into distant memories. "Today this area of Tel Aviv is the site of galleries, but it wasn't always like this. In my childhood in the 1960s, Yehuda Halevy Street was full of buses," she says. "It was quite a miserable neighborhood, quite sad. There was a lot of noise. Because there were no air conditioners, for eight months a year the windows were open. Otherwise it was impossible to breathe." She listened a great deal to the sounds of the neighborhood at the time, she says. "For example, to the neighbor Hadassah who shouted and walked back and forth on the street downstairs; to Geula, who was a friend of my mother's and one day left us her family photo album and disappeared. We never saw her again. I sensed the grayness of the neighborhood," Heiman says, squeezing her eyes shut. "Signs of a double life." That life hypnotized her; she became involved in it without being able to let go. "The people in the neighborhood were for the most part people who had come from Europe after World War II, people who had taken part in the War of Independence," says Heiman. "As a child I didn't live close to those events, but I felt them, they echoed strongly in me. There was an effect of apartness and disorder here. For example, we had a childless neighbor in the building; on the day he died they removed hundreds of books from his house, on which he had written comments in small handwriting. They threw them into the street. I was just a child, and yet I couldn't bear to see that. So I went downstairs and gathered 30 of his books and put them into my room: a prayer book for the Shavuot festival, Tchernichovsky and an atlas edited by Ze'ev Jabotinsky." In the exhibition you display several of his books. Why is it important to you to show them? "Some of those books of his will be displayed in the series 'Book Spines' in which I scan them together with parts of my body. It's like a medical examination, I lie down right on the scanner. For years I looked for a way to display those books. I have an inexplicable pain inside me about the lonely stranger who lived in our building with whom nobody sat and talked. Now these memories are coming back to me, after all those years I suddenly recalled his face. When I scan his books, or include in the exhibition photos from the album of our neighbor Geula who disappeared 30 years ago, I bring these people back to life. That's how I see it, because the photos and the books would have disappeared. In this way I'm stopping their process of death and oblivion." Artistic awareness 'Michal paints a complex awareness," says Dr. Moti Omer, director of the Tel Aviv Museum and curator of the exhibition. "For me, Michal Heiman is a post-conceptual artist, an artist who grew up on the conceptual art of the 1970s but has gone beyond that. She has succeeded in created an amazing bridge between textual and visual metaphor, that is her great strength," claims Omer. "She takes a text and with it connects us to photography. She has created a strange and amazing dialogue. When she creates a series like: 'Attacks on Linking;' 'Scrolls,' which consists of scans of paintings of women and girls by 19th-century artists and photos of hysterical women, and alongside them asks questions such as: 'What do you think?' or 'Did you tell the doctor?' she creates a question mark that stops the viewer. It creates a revolution in us in our attitude to photography. It?s almost an attack on photography, it contradicts and complements it. I like this dialectic." Surprisingly, although she often uses photography as her main raw material, during all the years of her childhood and adolescence Heiman did not like to take pictures. As though she was opposed to herself. "I wasn't interested in the camera," she reveals. "As a girl I preferred jumping from buildings into piles of sand. My father also hated to take pictures. His name was Naftali; he came to Tel Aviv from Lithuania after World War II. He was an engineer who in his free time used to do experiments with concrete and insulation on the roof of our house. He had an Exakta camera, but he didn?t like photographing us. Because mother didn?t think that as a woman she could take the camera without being reprimanded, she invited a photographer named Amilani from Allenby Street to our house. He took all of our family pictures." Heiman absorbed her artistic sensitivity through her mother, Miriam, born in Tel Aviv's Neve Tzedek neighborhood and the scion of a Polish family that came to Israel in the 1930s. "She had an artistic soul; she also painted beautifully," says Heiman. "She began to paint only after Father died; she didn't have a chance to paint within the family context. As a child, I remember that I tried to register her for an art course. Although she didn't want to go, she still infected me with her spirit. I remember, for example, when I was seven years old I went with her for the first time to choose a book to read. Together we chose an art book about the sculptor Auguste Rodin." But in effect, art remained distant from Heiman. "Perhaps I kept my distance from it because in our family there were dominant figures, like my mother's brother, the painter Uri Stettner," Heiman tries to explain. "He was a man with long hair, an adventurer, he returned to Tel Aviv from Paris after studying art there. As a child I was in his house a lot and he would talk to me about [Antonin] Artaud, the inventor of the Theater of Cruelty. From an early age I was exposed to the art world, but it wasn't clear to me that I belonged there. I had artistic awareness, but it was hidden and dormant." After her army service, as the personal registrar of Judge Dalia Dorner, a hidden desire began to emerge from her, slowly but surely. Heiman registered for art studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and thus began her journey. At the beginning of the winter she left Tel Aviv, but because she had trouble adjusting in the academic institution, she abandoned her studies after a short period. For lack of choice and because she had to support herself, she began to work in the Photo Prisma shop in Zion Square. That same year, 1978, she also registered to study photography at Hadassah College in the city. "In effect, until I registered to study photography, I didn?t take pictures," she says. "When they asked me in the admissions committee why I wanted to study photography, I replied: 'Because I love underwater photography.' The examiners almost fell out of their seats. But that was the only thing I knew. Five years earlier a friend of mine, who was an underwater photographer, was killed in the Yom Kippur War. I think that in the end I wandered into studying photography, it wasn?t a decision. It just happened." Two lamps Heiman is 54, twice divorced and the mother of two children, aged 11 and 15, from her second marriage. She lives today in central Tel Aviv. When she goes back to her days at the Jerusalem college, she recalls a feeling of dissatisfaction. "In the school I was a terrible failure, I was somewhat in shock there," she says. "When I finished my studies after two years I understood that I didn't really have enough knowledge to earn a living on my own, and that I didn't have a passion for photography. I didn?t even participate in the end-of-year exhibition at the college, because they claimed my photographs were blurry. I entered Hadassah College because I wanted to study artistic photography, but the school was professional. I wasn't interested in functional photography, I was interested in conceptual photography that wants to express itself, like painting.' When she finished school, Heiman returned to Tel Aviv and began working as an assistant to photographer Avi Ganor. A year later she opened an independent studio. Her first commission came from musician Yaakov Gilad, who introduced her to Yehuda Poliker, the soloist of the Benzene rock band that was being formed. Her success was meteoric, and orders for more work soon began to stream in. In her ascetic studio, with its two lamps and a background wall, dozens of unforgettable portraits of young musicians began to appear. Those were days of change in the Israeli music industry, the beginning of Hebrew rock ?n? roll, and Heiman became its principal photographer, supplying a substantial share of the photos for album jackets. Among other things, she photographed Yehudit Ravitz for the album 'Ba'a Me'ahava' ('Live in Caesarea'), Corinne Allal for 'Perot Asurim' ('Forbidden Fruits') and Shlomo Artzi for 'Tirkod' ('Dance'). "I went to the studios with Yaakov Gilad, but I didn't really fit into this scene," she says. "I was both inside and outside. I then began to study at the Midrasha School of Art in Ramat Hasharon, and that was the real thing. We started to study with Yair Garbuz, Rafi Lavie and Michal Neeman. Those were the days when painting was my entire world. I understood that the language I was seeking was in the Midrasha; I had never considered a commissioned photo of Yehuda Poliker as art. The year I started to study the first Lebanon War broke out, which made me think that I didn't want to work in my refined studio at all. I was 28 years old. It was hard for me to be part of the commercial world when outside there was such a difficult situation. I wanted to be totally involved in art." After completing her studies at the Midrasha, between 1984 and 1990 she exhibited paintings, mainly black and gloomy creations that in a sense challenged the glittering, smiling portraits she had supplied to the music industry. But Heiman did not abandon photography; an encounter with journalist Adam Baruch led her to a new and stormy chapter in her career. "Our story began after the photographer Vardi Kahana referred me to Adam, who had begun to edit the Seven Days weekly supplement in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth," recalls Heiman with a big smile. "That was in '85. I brought him a portfolio of my work and several weeks later he called and said that he wanted us to work together." Heiman provided Baruch with dozens of covers for the supplement, which gave her tremendous publicity. For three years she photographed one-of-a-kind portraits of intellectuals and artists like Zaharira Harifai, Pinhas Sadeh, Hanoch Levin, David Avidan, Amos Guttman and Yehoshua Sobol. "I did one portrait a week and it was a very good feeling that the newspaper was supporting me for that," she says. "It was an experience, not only the photography itself, mainly the closeness to Adam. Adam and I spent the nights together, we went out together to map Tel Aviv. We spent time in all the night clubs, we documented the Dan Cinema and the nightlife out of a belief that you have to convey something more profound, to pay attention to the fabric of the city." Looking inward Adam Baruch strengthened Heiman and in a sense became her artistic patron. In 1988 he curated the Israeli pavilion at the Photography Biennale in Ein Harod, where he exhibited portraits she had photographed for him. At the same exhibition, Heiman actually decided to challenge her partnership with the press. As a sign of protest against the intervention of the editors in her work, she refused to display her photos 'clean,' as she had photographed them, and demanded to display them along with the captions and headlines that had been printed on them in the newspaper. "This press photography, at a later date and in different circumstances," wrote Baruch about Heiman's work,-may be 'a symbol,' 'art,' part of a creative work. And in any case, this press photography is likely to be an 'evidentiary document' with a longer life than its press career, and will also function in a non-journalistic context." "Adam was extremely interested in having me continue with my art," says Heiman. "He brought everyone to my exhibitions. He also often made sure that people would buy my paintings. He helped me a great deal along the way. Through him I also met the curator Dr. Ariela Azulai, who was his assistant at the time. A different kind of relationship developed between us. She was the first to take an interest in my collections; many people before her had seen my archive, but she took an interest in it. I was dumbstruck when confronting the archive I had created, and she made it speak, took my collections out of their silence." The process in which Heiman began to use the visual archive in her works was also accompanied by psychological therapy. "I began therapy at the time because I felt I needed help," she explains. "I felt I had to reorganize something whose precise nature was unclear. I began psychotherapy and later went on to psychoanalysis. It was a period in which I had finished studying, had begun to work, to create and to attain recognition. But amid all this good, something had cracked. I thought that if I looked inward, if I went on a journey into my soul, I would be able to understand my art better." Her experience in the simple therapy room produced innovative and groundbreaking work. As a result of the therapy, Heiman began to bring psychoanalytic practice and art together. "During the therapy I learned a great deal," she says. "I was amazed, for example, how a place with only a table, two chairs and dialogue could bring about such great changes. At the time, I was also exposed to the TAT-[Thematic Apperception Test] and the Rorschach, which are based on sets of images that are displayed to the subject, and they draw out psychological diagnoses about him. I was interested in how psychoanalysts took pictures and thought that with their help they could read something about the soul. I was fascinated with the way they carry out this procedure by means of visual imagery, and I wanted to do something similar myself." "Michal Heiman's new exhibition combines a variety of techniques and levels of meaning that have been accumulating for 30 years," says Dr. Itamar Levy, a former art critic for Haaretz and a psychoanalyst. "I find her courageous. There is always a temptation to create beautiful, easily understood works, and she doesn't choose this path. She is an artist who is not at all easy, it took me many years to feel comfortable with her work. She does not entice the viewer, you need patience for her." Levy feels Heiman is different mainly in her degree of complexity. "I don't know many artists in Israel who have succeeded in freeing themselves of the intention to create a beautiful object. Michal shows us objects that are not necessarily beautiful. Many of the photographs that she displays are not even hers. It?s closely related to the viewpoint of the psychoanalyst who learns to listen. Michal wants to teach us how to look at photography, not only in a psychoanalytic manner; in other words to understand relationships and emotions through it, but to understand that photography is an infinite text, like everything in the life of the soul." The third form In her new exhibition, Heiman will try to turn the museum space into a therapy room. She wants to draw viewers into revealing themselves through her works. "I took the concept of 'the third form' from psychoanalysis; it relates to the fact that the therapy is no longer the therapist or the patient, but the symbiosis they create. In my opinion, it's the same in photography: It's not only the photographer or the subject, it's the third form that is created between them. The exhibition is an attempt to express this idea, to cause the viewer to think within the space of the museum, to delay him in order to create the third form. It will be a clinical-poetic exhibition," she declares, ?something very neat and organized. My goal is to break the silence in the museum space, to get the viewer to think, as in the therapy room. This exhibition is supposed to capture thoughts." The first time she made such an attempt was in 1997, when she represented Israel at the Documenta exhibition in Germany. Then, for the first time, under the influence of the TAT, she used a test she had composed herself. She created a box of images taken from her archive, mainly photographs by unknown photographers, and examiners working on her behalf asked the visitors at the exhibition to talk about those photographs. In the years since then, Heiman has focused on teaching in schools of art, such as Camera Obscura, the Department of Visual Communication at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School, and the Department of Art History at Tel Aviv University. This year she also began teaching at the university?s master?s degree program for therapists in the Faculty of the Arts and in the psychotherapy program in the Faculty of Medicine. "Artists were silenced for generations," she claims, getting ready to leave the studio. "We were educated to understand that there are curators and experts on visual culture, wise people who write about us, conceptualize us and serve as our mouthpiece," she says, going to turn out the light. "As a lecturer I want to educate differently, to create a system of speech, to end the silencing. That is another type of dialogue. The interest in the two disciplines is not only mine, it applies to the therapists as well." What do you talk to them about? "I show them films, tell them about unique artists who deal with issues similar to those with which psychoanalysis is involved. Psychoanalysts, I feel, have difficulty dealing with evil, with aggression, mainly their own, have difficulty looking evil in the eye the way art does. I show them art that raises questions they also deal with, questions of truth and fiction, questions of identity, I tell them about the analogy I draw between photographers-subjects and therapists-patients." Why do you prefer to draw this analogy with photos you didn't take? "My choice to take photos by unknown photographers stemmed at first from a photo I found of Bialik's death mask, in a drawer of photographs I discovered in a closet in my parents' home. I began to research my own family album, and in order to be able to talk about this research, I thought I should give credit to those anonymous photographers. In this way I created a joint work by them and me, a new combination. Over the years I stamped 'Unknown photographer' on all the works that I myself didn't photograph, that were taken by others whose identity is unknown, in order to speak about photography from its inception, in social, political and personal contexts." What did you understand from that? "I understood that when I use photographs that are not mine, I am actually involved in curating photographs, I can talk about the subjects that are important to me, the urgent ones, without the viewers being able to escape into compliments about taste, about beauty, or complimenting the artist. Without their being able to conceal the difficult content that I want them to think about." Is this something that will be reflected in the exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum? "The new exhibition is a partial continuation of previous exhibitions of mine, but it is different and more radical. It doesn't include a single picture of mine. There are scans and there are films. Except in my films, which I film in part by myself with a video camera, all the other works are scans and new techniques that I try with various devices. I move photos by technological means, I display a new series in which I?m traveling on a scanner. I interfere in the photos and paintings of others, introduce photos of my body parts, including my hand with a camera" Actually, for years you haven't photographed the way you did at the beginning of your career. Why? "I see myself in a way as a photography refusenik. 'In a way,' because not entirely. The complex situation of photography calls on me to talk about it, to think about it. What?s important to me is the dignity of photographers and subjects who have remained nameless. Writers about visual culture put words into their mouths as though there were no photographer there who could also share in constructing a discussion of the photograph. Who was the girl who sat there naked in front of Munch? What is her name? Did she get paid for this sitting? Did she share the check the artist received? How long did she sit there naked, on the sofa? Was she cold? The photograph is appropriate in practical terms in order to talk about this content, because of its complex situation of photographers, subjects and viewers. Bookmark to del.icio.us   The King is dead Archeologists find new evidence for King Herod's tomb site. Al-Hasbara Israel launches Arabic YouTube channel to bypass Arab media.

Read & React Israel to boycott 'Durban II' anti-racism conference Responses: 91 Latest poll gives Likud big edge over Kadima Responses: 49 Peres: Evacuation of settlements may lead to civil war Responses: 30 IAEA: Syria site bombed by Israel bore features of nuclear reactor Responses: 52 Defense Min. turns blind eye as Israelis sell arms to enemies Responses: 18 More Headlines 11:56 Violent clashes erupt at Hebron house slated for evacuation 03:31 Latest poll gives Likud big edge over Kadima 10:10 ANALYSIS / Obama embrace of Arab peace plan could benefit Livni 09:25 Defense Min. turns blind eye as Israelis sell arms to enemies 11:38 Peres: Evacuation of settlers may lead to civil war 11:58 In Gaza coffee shops, men and women break strict taboos 12:00 Letter to the Editor / Museum of Tolerance is a beacon of light, not a wall 06:09 PA to publish first-ever ads in Hebrew explaining Arab peace plan 08:16 IAEA: Syria site bombed by Israel bore features of nuclear reactor 08:39 Abdullah II warns Olmert, Barak: Gaza action could snowball into Jordanian instability 22:05 Israel to boycott 'Durban II' anti-racism conference 08:00 Top media executives protest Israel's ban on journalists' entry to Gaza 12:24 Palestinian witnesses: Hamas man killed in Gaza explosion 02:07 Warsaw completes restoration project marking Jewish Ghetto boundaries 07:14 Finance minister reveals NIS 25 billion stimulus plan Previous Editions Select Day 19 nov 18 nov 17 nov 16 nov 14 nov 13 nov 12 nov 11 nov 10 nov 09 nov 07 nov 06 nov

Special Offers Advertisement Living in Israel Studying in English Click & Meet our students from all around the world Dan Boutique Jerusalem New Dan Hotel in Jerusalem Young, Fun & Distinctively Dan Book Now Online! Fattal Hotel Chain Perfectly located hotels on best resorts of Israel. Car rental in Israel Shlomo Sixt Receive $15.00 from our low rates. Dial 013 for your long-distance calls and get all your money back US CITIZENS Vote for real change. Request your ballot today! Eldan Rent a Car Israel's leading car rental company offers you a 20% discount on all online reservations Jewish Singles Personal Ads Find the love of your life on JDate.com Israel's Premier Real Estate Website www. israel-property.com Hebrew Summer courses From $39.95 Junkyard Junk a car - get free towing nationwide and a tax-deductible receipt

Home | TV | Print Edition | Diplomacy | Opinion | Arts & Leisure | Sports | Jewish World | Underground | Site rules |

Real Estate in Israel | Travel to Israel with Haaretz | Hotels Israel | Restaurants Israel | Tourist attractions Israel | Shops Israel

birthright Israel | Search engine marketing

Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.

© Copyright  Haaretz. All rights reserved