Learning about manners and customs in Tel Aviv
Group exhibition offers a generous, and at times ironic, perspective into Israeli society and art
the façade of the edmond de rothschild Foundation (edrF) now shows two massive photographs of a sickly man, which invite the viewer inside to see the collected works in the Manners and Customs group exhibition.
on the left is the 2018 work The Hand of Insulin with the man, abraham seri, reaching out as the first-made human in the 1512 fresco The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo. on the right, the elder seri is laid out with his wife rivka gazing at him and the artist dekel seri, his son, gazing. the work refers to the 1490 painting The Lamentation by andrea Mantegna, a first hint that a much larger maneuver is occurring inside.
“For me, this empty book is full,” the young seri says while discussing a siddur [prayer book] with blank pages shown at the edrF, “because this is the only word he [his late father] could write.”
the elder seri suffered from a childhood inflammation of the brain, which left him unable to learn how to read and write. the only word he could scribble down was his own name – abraham. this name appears on the cover of the siddur. he was the fourth out of eleven children, his son told the Post, “two of them were abducted at the ein shemer transit camp.”
jews are expected to read from the torah when they reach their bar mitzvah at age 13. For seri, growing up with a father unable to participate in jewish community life was a burden.
“My dream was,” he said, “to hear the cantor call out: ‘abraham seri will step up [to read
the torah] with honor.’”
in his 2020 art video Zafa, he realized that wish in a visually elaborate recording of a faux bar mitzvah he arranged for his father. the title refers to the traditional music yemenite jews perform and enjoy at weddings and celebrations.
the cantor, ezra, is the elder brother of the man being honored. seri shared how he had to approach his uncle repeatedly until he agreed to this project. the soundtrack to the celebration includes seri’s grandmother, saaida, reciting psalms. illiterate herself, she learned it from hearing. the elder seri, wearing a suit and tie, is met by dancing women, flowers and the blowing of horns. he seems to beam with surprise and delight.
“For most of his life,” seri told me, “my father lived with suffering, at times it was lack of money and at times it was how he was invisible to those
around him. i felt offended on behalf of my parents.”
the end result is screened on shrouds, real ones. to help his family make ends meet, seri dug graves as a teenager and so had the contacts needed to purchase actual shrouds from a small factory in netivot.
this offers his work a uniquely powerful touch. it is deeply personal, a life-time of honoring a father who passed away several months ago. it touches on a sort of pain most art patrons do not experience in their own lives. it is deeply jewish and, at the same time, engages a very Christian visual tradition of attempting to grasp divine grace. the shroud of turin, which some say displays the face of Christ, is one example.
the Curator of the exhibition, tali Kayam, quotes from the 1971 book The Secrets of Good Hospitality by aura herzog
in the exhibition text. this juxtaposition of half-a-century old concepts of what is tactful or the importance of keeping an immaculate house, with brief descriptions of the works on offer lends a somewhat ironic tone to the exhibition.
“What function did manners and customs fulfil when we were under the CoVid-19 lockdown?” Kayam asks. “in a situation where you cannot meet people and,” she adds, “if you happen to meet someone, he is a threat to you?”
israelis are not famous for good manners. in fact, the hebrew word for manners, nimosin, hails from the Greek nomos (law, custom), pointing to its borrowed status. in the early years of the state, hanna Bavli became the grand dame of high society by holding workshops for diplomats and airlines workers on how to behave in places where abiding the nomos is expected.
a stunning work by tomer Fruchter, a Hunter-Gatherer Table, allows the viewer to encounter something which, at first inspection, seems truly bizarre.
“When we took our workers to a guided tour of the exhibition,” edFr managing director tal sagi Faran told the Post, “one of them really had issues with this work and asked: ‘Why is this even art?’”
Fruchter constructed a makeshift work table that collects very specific artifacts. an urn from ein Gedi, which is actually a plastic bottle, is presented on a smartphone screen, plastic forks are placed in a neat row as if in an anthropology class. Below the table is a torn piece of cardboard with the words “the usage of the poetics of the water bottle.”
the work invites us to pause, squat and look around it in an attempt to make sense of what this is.
it serves as a jumping board to many memories at once; the sort of make-do aesthetics common to art schools here; the collections by the late artist Meir agassi, left behind after his death in 1998; the visual poverty embraced, even celebrated, by a generation of israeli artists led by raffi lavie.
By placing The Dawn of Everything on the table, Fruchteris is both living within this cultural moment of questioning the origin of the modern nation state by looking into human societies that predate it and also pokes fun at the 2021 book and our attitude to it. did you read it? he seems to ask, or just read a review on a smartphone while walking to a meeting?
an erudite artist, Fruchter continues a path he began with his 2018 work Chinese Scientists Have Successfully Cloned Monkeys. it is a very israeli version of the Kunstkabinett, which Bavli might have suggested every
home should have.
When it comes to the customs which shape societies and art circles, Kayam says, “the rules keep changing and today, artists who did works which were too personal back then are now being rediscovered.”
in her own work as curator, she explains, patrons are invited to encounter works – even if they lack previous knowledge about the art world.
“the fact identity politics is not without its problems,” she points out, “does not mean identities do not exist.”
Manners and Customs also includes works by stav tal, tair almor, ronel pines, Karin elmkies, penina simkovitz and david (duchi) Cohen. the exhibition ends on sunday, May 1.
Opening Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Friday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
104 Rothschild Blvd. Tel Aviv.