Want of Matter
Characteristics of this style include the use of "meager" creative materials, artistic sloppiness, and criticism of the social reality and the myth of Israel society.
Among the artists identified with "Want of Matter" are Raffi Lavie, Yair Garbuz, Michal Na'aman, Tamar Getter and Nahum Tevet.
The name originated in an exhibition called "The Want of Matter: A Quality in Israeli Art" curated by Sara Breitberg-Semel, which took place in March 1986 at the Tel Aviv Museum.
Another highly significant element in Breitberg-Semel's view was the concept "anesthetic," the roots of which could be found in the Jewish Talmudic tradition, which puts the text in the center of culture.
Breitberg-Semel's attempt to trace the development of "Want of Matter" gave rise to a clear historical line, beginning with the painting of the "New Horizons" group.
The use of these materials reflected the "Ars Poetica" approach and gave an intentionally humble appearance to the surface of the paintings, a look which was meant to add a dimension of criticism by the artists toward Israeli society.
The development of this idea can be seen the article "Agrippas versus Nimrod" (1988), in which Breitberg-Semel expressed the desire to inculcate into their art a secular, pluralistic point of view influenced by Jewish tradition.
The identification of Judaism with abstract art had already happened in the past, when it was based on the iconoclastic Orthodox tradition, in the spirit of the prohibition against the making of statues or masks that appears in The Ten Commandments.
[1] The typical expression of this point of view on the Israeli artist can be found in an article on the work of Arie Aroch, who is considered the model for Raffi Lavie and his generation.
As the years passed, the image of Lavie himself, dressed sloppily in shorts, with rubber flip-flops on his feet, arrogant, "native," and "prickly," became the typical expression of this aesthetic school.
[2] Lavie's works, which included childish scribbles, collages of magazine illustrations, advertisements of Tel Aviv cultural events, stickers with words "head" or "geraniums" written on them, and above all the plywood sheet, sawed to a consistent size of 120 cm., and painted in whitewash,[3] became the most recognizable symbols of "Want of Matter."
Furthermore, the use of collage and techniques that lacked an artistic "halo" were intended, according to both Lavie and Breitberg-Semel, to erode and undermine the significance of visual images.
His work from these years created a link between the symbols that connected the ethos of the Zionist undertaking, as reflected in popular culture, with social and political criticism.
His two-dimensional works from the 1970s and 1980s include a mix of newspaper photos, documentary photographs, texts and other objects, combined in compositions that have no clear hierarchy.
Under the reproduction, Garbuz added a sort of poem, complete with nikud [vocalization] and illustrations, discussing the significance of labor.
"[7] In a 1980 collage, Schlesnyak glued onto plywood a newspaper picture of the writer Irving Stone, author of popular novels about artists, positioned at the front of the Tel Aviv Museum.
At the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, Levin created abstract compositions constructed from sawed and painted plywood, sometimes combined with photographs, then leaned against a wall.
The work showed the influence of the aesthetic principles of minimalist art and emphasized the temporariness of the expression of an artistic experience.
Therefore, the school tried to educate its art students first and foremost as "artists" and assumed that they would develop their technical skills independently, in accordance with their individual needs.
"[12] As an answer to the inability to make judgments about art, which Lavie pointed out, the institution developed "public" criticism.
In May 1974 Lavie distributed a "pamphlet" in which he presented works by students who were close to him, such as Naaman, Tevet, David Ginton, etc., and aroused a storm of negative criticism.
[20] Only in the 1980s, Azoulay contends, with the weakening of the status of the central museums, did these trends, that were suppressed until then, rise to the top of Israeli art.
"[23] In the exhibition "Eyes of the Nation," held at the Tel Aviv Museum in 1998, Ellen Ginton viewed the art of the period as a reaction to the political and social problems in Israeli society.
In this new introduction she attempted to clarify the critical dimension of her thesis, declaring that "the generation that grew up after 1967 encountered a new ethos – the rule by occupation, with all its moral and material implications, and with all its enormous social changes, of which the bourgeois existence as the leading way of life, is only one aspect.
[25] The division in "want of matter" between "ethos" and "aethestics" is presented in the introduction as a fleeting moment, since the use that was made of it later cut it off from the social and political field in which it originated.
In 1993, an article by Sarah Chinski entitled "Silence of the Fish: The Local versus the Universal in the Israeli Discourse on Art" was published in the journal Theory and Criticism.
"The 'dispossessed sabra'," writes Chinski, "has been so focused on self-pity for his imaginary losses, he hasn't noticed that in his name massive expulsions of huge numbers of people have taken place throughout all the glorious history of the Palmach and the youth movement he has created in his heart.
