Dror Burstein

The Quiet Avant-Garde an introduction to the conversations

Take todays deadlock of sexuality or art: is there anything more

dull, opportunistic, and sterile than to succumb to the superego
injunction of incessantly inventing new artistic transgressions and
provocations (), or to the parallel injunction to engage in more and
more daring forms of sexuality? () And what if, in our postmodern
world of ordained transgression, in which the marital commitment
is perceived as ridiculously out of date, those who cling to it are the
true subversives?
Slavoj iek
1
The secrets of painting were lost at least three times since the Middle Ages.
The rst time it was the technique of Jan van Eyck (who is widely regarded as the
inventor of oil painting) that was lost. The second time it was the technique of the
Venetian painting of Giorgione, Titian, Veronese and others that was lost, when over
the years painters gradually ceased to work within this tradition. When painters of
the 19th century wanted to paint in the Venetian style, they discovered there was
no documentation of it, of its methods, or its secrets. The third loss was that of the
methods of the French Acadmie, as they had developed in the period before the
French Revolution.
2
As opposed to the arts of poetry and drama, about which classical treatises had
been preserved from antiquity, no similar treatise on painting has survived. Even the
later writings (such as the books by Alberti and Cennini) are rather limited as aides
to a contemporary painter. The paintings (and drawings) themselves might perhaps
have fullled this function; however, these paintings, given their very nature, have
proved very elusive and reticent as guides, with a dogged propensity for concealment.
How much silence and concealment concerning the art of painting is present in every
painting by van Eyck! There have been attempts to reconstruct the technique; some
achieved by imitating the style of the classical treatises on verbal arts, but it is clear
that something very fundamental has been lost to painting.
And yet, painting still exists, despite its losses; and perhaps it exists also thanks
to them, as something which is destined to re-discover itself, to re-create itself over
and over again. It is difcult to imagine the emergence of Degas, Monet and Czanne,
for example, without the decline of the French Acadmie. That decline brought about,
without any doubt, many inferior paintings, but the dividends thereof the need to
be reborn again in front of the canvas were tremendous. Similarly, it is difcult to
imagine the painters of the current exhibition, like other painters active in Israel today,
without the traditions of Western and Israeli painting during the second half of the
20th century, which are both the background forand the background against which
they work.
1
Slavoj iek, the Puppet and the
Dwarf: The Perverse Core of
Christianity
MIT Press 2003, pp. 35-36
2
James Elkins, What Painting Is
Routledge 2000, pp. 170-171.

Painting exists, but this exhibition does not present the taken-for-granted
expression of this existence. As will be explained below, the exhibition does not
represent contemporary painting, which speaks the language of contemporary art in
the medium of oil paint. Nor do these paintings speak the language of the great art of
the past, yet they draw concrete inspiration from it, they raise their eyes toward it. And
for precisely this reason, this is painting which is not taken for granted today. Therefore
this is painting which is in the throes of searching and becoming. It is painting which is
aware of its limitations and of its place in this process of becoming.
YZ
In the following pages the reader will nd a record of eleven encounters (two of
them conducted on-line) with the painters who are participants in this exhibition.
These meetings have been for me an enlightening, fascinating, and at times a truly
moving experience. Something I must stress at the outset: I believe that anyone who
reads the conversations will easily see to what extent what might supercially be
perceived as an exhibition of an artistic school, is in fact an exhibition of unique
individuals. Critical thought tends to search for commonalities, which even when
they dont exist, take on a reality, once the differences between the elements
of a group are reduced a reduction which renders them more similar than they
really are, and thus squeezes them into a rubric that critics nd easier to handle:
Impressionism, Realism, Abstract, etc. I am not saying that there is no common
denominator to this group of painters. If that were the case, there would have been no
justication for creating this exhibition or the accompanying catalog. But the interest
in these paintings lies not in their common premises, but in the distinctive execution,
sometimes emphatically distinctive, of these common premises.
The history of Israeli painting until the beginning of the 21st century cannot be
recounted even briey here in order to place these painters within its context. It cannot
be done, and it is not really necessary. And here arises a rst fundamental stance
which is common to all the painters taking part in this exhibition: the question of
loyalty, to the local heritage and to modernist and post-modernist painting. Indeed,
there is no need to recite here any kind of history of Israeli painting, because what
characterizes the painters in this exhibition most conspicuously are the leaps of various
kinds which they have taken over this history, with complete awareness of these leaps.
Each of the painters here has asked himself or herself what is the place of Israeli art,
of 20th century art, and of contemporary art in particular, in their work. Each of them
provides a different answer. Some of them have turned their back on the past hundred
years. Some attempt to nd sources of inspiration in them, especially in the gures of
some great and unusual painters (the names of Balthus and Morandi came up more
than once, but Hopper and Braque were also mentioned). Some try to rub against this
past, and to recreate the art of the past from nature, i.e. to observe nature with
the awareness of the lessons of painters like Mondrian, or with the model of a school
like Abstract Expressionism in mind. Some refuse the technologies of mechanical
reproduction (stills camera, video, etc.) and some accept them as a legitimate way of
seeing, which painting may assimilate.
The answers of each of the painters to the question of their position vis--vis
their place-in-time are different, sometimes only in nuances, sometimes dramatically
different. But the question from which all these answers derives is similar, and the
question is as follows: Can someone for whom the art of the great masters of the
past (from ancient Egypt till Hopper) is a live, powerful, exemplary, intelligent and
moving presence can such a someone enter their studio and work as though this

tradition does not in fact present him or her with a concrete claim? Is the admiration
of the outstanding masters of the past a matter of politesse, something that is
convenient to bandy about in conversation to demonstrate good taste in art, or is it
a real presence in the here-and-now, the imaginary eye of a teacher overhead, an
eye affecting the way in which I see and work? If you will, this is where everything
begins and ends, with the question of how seriously does one take the existence of
exemplary models in ones discipline, and does one take them into account as personal
tutors, rather than as ornaments.
This leads to the second question, which ows from the rst. Because turning to
the art of the past and to its masterpieces is not only a source of assistance, guidance,
trust, and support, but also a source of doubt and difculty. All of the artists in this
exhibition worry, some more or some less, about the question of whether it is possible
to create a painting today under the great shadow of a profession, many of whose
secrets have been lost. This is a question that affects very concrete choices in the
studio. For example, the choice of genre: is there a place today for historical painting?
Narrative painting? Mythological painting? Religious painting? Prosaic questions
like the format of the painting and the size of the canvas are derivatives of these
questions. The general tendency, at the present moment, is to answer these questions
in the negative and to turn to minor genres, such as still lifes, interiors, portraits and
landscapes.
The question of the synthesis and complexity of genres is another one that arises
immediately. For example, the tendency of some of the represented artists to place
at the center of the still life a single object, may be understood, among other things,
as the adoption of a minor stance, a minimalization of a genre to a single building
block, of the still life genre the single object. The choice of a minor genre and of
its minimalist manifestation cannot be understood without appreciating the difcult
position of these painters within a tradition, which already in the 17th century had
reached, so it seems, an unsurpassable zenith in the fashioning of the still life. This
diminutive manifestation of the still life should be understood much as the way in
which a hesitant bather might dip his/her toes into the waves of a stormy sea. The still
life is just one example: think, for instance, of the portraits of the represented painters,
which are mostly in a small format and feature one person, compared to the complex
group portraits of Rembrandt, Velzquez, Hals, Manet, or Sargent.
Another, third question, which cuts across the work of the painters exhibited here,
is the question of the essence of painting itself. What is the painters task? Those
who read the following conversations carefully will see how this group of painters
differs in their positions, and how they are conducting a hidden dialog with each
other. The positions can be divided, roughly, into two: those painters who believe in
the denition of painting as an aesthetic object, as an object whose meaning is in
the beauty which is perceptible to the eye (this too is a minor position), and those
painters whose vocabulary is more religious, and more verbal (narrative, symbolic)
the beautiful as a sort of instrument on the path to an experience which is not only
an ocular one. Despite these differences, there is something fundamental which all
the painters in this exhibition have in common. And this thing is the actual taken-for-
granted (and to my mind very moving) belief in the existence of the beautiful, as a
living, quotidian, and accessible daily reality. The beautiful is the a priori of all these
paintings and it is so taken for granted that there is no need to even speak about it.
A quick and random tour of Tel Avivs galleries will clarify against what background this
taken for granted, has sprung.
The beautiful of each of the painters is different (for example in the degree to

which they allow the presence of the sublime to appear alongside the beautiful, a
fairly rare presence). It includes, no doubt, also the beholding of the beautiful within
the ugly, the morbid. It is not the beautiful of Raphael; it is not ideal beauty, because
no such ideal exists today in the Israeli environment, not even in the imaginary one.
But beauty is never something that has to be debunked as a matter of ideology. It is
not a dirty word. Various modern traditions are present in the work of these painters
(e.g. Abstract Expressionism and Braque, even Warhol is mentioned by one of them),
but there is one tradition which is not a part of the world of any of these painters: the
tradition of Marcel Duchamp, of which I shall speak, for the present purpose, as the
tradition of art-making as an act of irony. This exhibition bespeaks a quiet refusal (and
an obvious one for the artists) of this ethic and aesthetic. The non-ironic belief in the
dialogical power of the beautiful image (and not that those two words are easy to
dene!) is something that all the artists in this exhibition share as a basic premise. The
paths that diverge from there are multifarious.
This exhibition can be characterized by a return to three kinds of observation
(each artist evincing a very different balance and mix of the three): observation of
reality, observation of the self, and a dialogical observation of great past artists. The
mainstream of contemporary Israeli art forgoes observation of reality, focuses on a
sometimes idiosyncratic self-observation, and its dialog with the art of the past is in
many cases non-existent, or in others, may be parodic or even violent.
YZ
The strived-for option that the artists in the current exhibition present, in different
ways, can be summed up by one word: permanence. This word is an ethos, and to my
mind it stands in opposition to consumption, in the artistic context as well, but not
uniquely. The ethic of permanence presents the term Pop-Art, for example, as an
oxymoron: if it is Pop it is not Art and vice versa. Orna Coussin writes: We live in
a culture that celebrates the disposable, and therefore materiality and consequently
also spirit lose their inherent value. We use and throw things out offhand, and leave
nothing behind for ourselves or for others apart from trash... we despise anything
that is durable: concepts such as veteran, old, or abiding;
3
and if we extend this
line of thought into the realm of art, with another quote: Permanent things can be
new; they can be old; but their relevance is measured not by the buzz they create but
by the silence they inspire
4
. The silence of which Roger Kimball speaks is the effect
of permanence.
The painters in this exhibition are an avant-garde whose rhetoric is not violent,
or terrorist. This is a quiet avant-garde. And here I return to the above quote from
iek, and the understanding that the urgent task of painting today is to perform an
aesthetic U-turn, and not to barrel headlong down the freeway that art has become.
Critical, radical painting cannot gallop forward and be an avant-garde in the old
modernist sense, because the contemporary art industry has long since taken over
the old avant-gardist molds and co-opted them for its uses. Todays most washed-
out art uses the rhetoric of rebellion, impulsive, non-conformist, subversive.
In a context in which militant subversive-ness has long since been branded by
corporations who market blue-jeans, the avant-garde can employ one of two tactics.
The rst is the enhancement of the always-already-enhanced, overtaking at 200
miles-per-hour the vehicle which is speeding at 160 mph; this is a parodic tactic which
becomes more and more difcult to pull off, and perhaps impossible in an aesthetic
and spiritual reality in which parody is the spiritual point-of-departure, the meat-and-
potatoes existence of mainstream art. The second tactic is quiet resistance, refusal,
3
Orna Coussin, Within a Walking
Distance
Babel 2004 [Hebrew]
4
Roger Kimball, Arts Prospect:
The Challenge of Tradition in an
Age of Celebrity
Ivan R. Dee 2003, p. x.

turning-away, slowing-down, going underground, and playing a minor key. Painting

today is a search for something that was lost: such is this exhibition. If, as iek says,
contemporary art is obsessively preoccupied with inventing new artistic transgressions
and provocations, the painters in this exhibition are occupied, each in their own
special way, in observing the commandments of painting.
August 2006