Time is Out of Joint - ARTLV 1
Curator: Hadas Kedar
Yochai Avrahami, Ben Ben Ron, Kegham Djeghalian, Reut Eiron & Jonathan Gold, Maurice Ganis ,Fahed Halabi, Hadas Kedar, Roy Menachem Markovich, Lea Nickel, Nimrod Reuveni, Guy Sagee, Pesach Slabosky, Igal Tumarkin.
Tel Aviv- Jaffa, Israel
2008
Art Purifies / Dr. Dror Pimentel
The exhibition "Time is Out of Joint", part of the ARTLV event, is sponsored by a bank and a real estate company, and is taking place in a historical building that, no doubt, post-renovation will become one of the most expensive spots in Tel Aviv. Sponsoring art has become one of the main methods by which affluent people pay their debt to society and engage in the community. This linkage between money and art – the behind the scenes of the ARTLV event at large – must raise a question concerning the current status and position of art in the capitalist food chain.
This is precisely the thematic pole around which Hadas Kedar's exhibition revolves. The exhibition's upstairs ('Tfachot') and downstairs ('Massad)' embody art's double bind relation to capitalist economy. The lower space exhibits current Kibbutz art collected by Jonathan Gold and Reut Iron. This type of art is absent from the commercial gallery and museum scene. In this art, one finds a mixture of remnants of a shattered socialist utopia, alongside individualism, back-to-naturism, and values of the hippie generation imported from America. Pesach Slabosky and Yochai Avrahami exhibit In the 'Masad' as well - both have secured their place in the commercial art scene, although continue to engage in a dialog with values manifested in art that is situated outside the capitalist economy.
The upper space, 'Tfachot', exhibits art that has managed to pass the commercial threshold, being capable of serving as an object of desire for art consumers. But the passage of this threshold takes its toll. The exhibited works embody various strategies of the price artists must pay for commercialization of their work. One can find, for example, works that lure art consumers with aesthetic seduction; works that deduce an economic value from authenticity; works that turn primordial creative energies into a kind of aesthetics accessible for the large public; and works that brand protest.
An overall look at the works may give rise to the conclusion that capitalist economy's attempt to conduct art as a link in the consuming cycle is met with a resistance: but fundamental values of authenticity and originality, as well as aspiration for justice and utopia, still have their spectral presence in the art that has been crushed by the money machine. Art cannot find itself outside the economy. Neither can it be dissolved within it completely. Spectrality is perhaps the only possibility for art to sustain the capitalist machine.
