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The bank job
By Ellie Armon Azoulay
Tags: Nahum Tevet, Israel News

I had two objections," says artist Nahum Tevet of his weighing whether or not to place his large work, "Ursa," on the wall of the new First International Bank of Israel headquarters on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. Tevet, who has just completed the installation of the work and has included in its new version chairs and boats as well, explains:

"One objection is fundamental to the kind of work I do, and I think it is connected to a very intimate kind of experience of very prolonged viewing, like what I did at the exhibition at the Israel Museum, which was very alienated but at the same time built a space of its own.

The second objection is the repugnance from all this 'site-specific' rhetoric and suiting work to a city, to urbanism and all the rest of that blather the art world is full of. These are things I really don't like and I think are a bunch of malarkey."
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Tevet, 63, an esteemed artist, a teacher and the head of the master's degree program at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, has taken on a number of challenges in the past few years. He put on an exhibition in Italy at which he agreed to work within a short time frame, placed works in a sculpture garden in the prestigious neighborhood of Savyon and now there is the mural at the First International. The challenge goes beyond tight time frame or the size of the works and their technical specifications and has to do with the nature of the works and with the question of how people respond to them.

Tevet sees himself as a rebel against the conventions and an iconoclast of ethos. His warm attitude toward art suggests seriousness tinged with humor. Several times during the conversation he refers to the Tel Aviv Museum in various contexts, including that of art in the public space. "With regard to exposure and presence in Tel Aviv, this wall (at the bank) is worth more than an exhibition at the museum that will run for three months," he says.

A maze that leaves you outside

When the curators of the art collection at the First International headquarters building, Noa Aviram and Edia Swari, contacted Tevet and suggested he show at the site, Tevet realized the time had come to grapple with the difficulties, or as he says, "to overcome." He suggested to them that he show a wall sculpture on a very large scale that he had made several years ago and that later developed into "Ursa Major." The entire sculpture is made of wood and was designed, constructed and painted as directed by Tevet, who presided over a work crew of seven people. Among them were Gad Zukin, a technical expert on construction, who was responsible for the building and positioning, and artist Yuval Sharon, who did the painting.

"I didn't have the faintest notion that to set up this sculpture I would be getting into such a technological adventure," laughs Tevet. What is his attitude to the problematics inherent in art that serves commercial organizations?

"Bank art is a particularly loathsome genre, works on the facades of company buildings that function as decoration to glorify the institution," he says, but then immediately adds a qualification: "I am aware of the problematics of this, but I want people to look at my work as an independent piece of art. I want the work to send out a message of strength, uniqueness, authority, daring and imagination, along with risk and a connection to something that is contemporary."

He rejects the preoccupation with site-specific art and believes it is not contemporary at all, and even banal.

"All the 'site-specific' talk was resurrected in recent years, but it really has been around since the 1970. And there was a moment when I think I identified it as having become something very academic. All the talk there was at that time about 'structures for behavior,' sculptural motifs that supposedly dictate a choreography. For example, you had to go down a ladder, walk bent over inside a tunnel - what is this stuff?" he asks in consternation. But precisely because of such sculptures, he adds, "I started to think about a maze that is inside your head and leaves you outside. You stand on the outside and there is a sort of tension in the space. In the work there is something that lures you to come inside and you are prevented from doing so. This developed into a kind of key strategy in the later works. So in some way it creates a response. If I think about putting a sculpture in a city or a public space, then by and large it turns its back on the world because it creates a world of its own. Therefore I always said. 'Leave me alone - I'm not there.'"

The bank's approach last year, he says, came at a propitious time. "It was after the exhibitions I had at the Israel Museum in 2006 and the Herzliya Museum in 2008, and then the curators came and at about the same time Ory Dessau also came along with the proposal for the project in Savyon. He had been approached to curate a sculpture garden in Savyon. This is Savyon, serious people with money. So I decided they should do it the way it should be done, so they brought in Gideon Sarig, an important garden designer, who has also designed at the Israel Museum. Dessau, in an admirable move, succeeded in convincing them they should make a serious sculpture garden out of it and get rid of most of the garbage there. They scattered the rest around in all kinds of corners, and it became a very beautiful garden. They agreed that every year they would obtain a budget and add works.

"At first he approached Adam Rabinovitch and me, and I put up my sculpture 'Still Waters' in the summer of 2008. Suddenly a kind of situation developed in which I said, 'Heck, I'm already a big boy and the time has come for me to start thinking about works like that again.' Also out of thoughts about survival, so the works will be preserved. What really happens to works of yours that have been shown in exhibitions? My works are very problematic for preserving or for displaying. In 2003, I exhibited a work at the Tal Esther Gallery in Tel Aviv. A lot of people 35 and younger, among them important artists, came up to me and said, 'Do you know that this is the first time we've seen your work in real life, and not in books?; That fact suddenly hit me."

Apart from the fact that site-specific works are banal in your opinion, what other objections do you have to them?

"I once read that somebody wrote it's strange that anyone who puts a sculpture in a city gives up on 50 percent of his own intelligence and that of the work. To what extent can I penetrate this system, in a way that takes into account the public's expectations, from within a profound understanding of the gap between what happens in a museum - where a person has to buy a ticket, is prepared and knows where he is going - and a situation you force on yourself? How to lure is a central question, how do I make something with a dimension that creates communication without giving up 50 percent of my intelligence?"

That depends on how you relate to the masses and how you evaluate people.

"It isn't to be taken for granted that I need to play the fool because I am talking to fools. My assumption is that people are intelligent. Here too, when people come and ask what they are seeing, my answer is to ask them back, 'Look and tell me - what do you see?' And then they start to reply, 'I see a boat, a book, a chair, a cube.' Then I say, 'So you are seeing something. Now start to think.'"
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