I went to a nearly one weeklong bar mitzvah in Israel, previously not one of my favorite destinations, for the daughter of a fabulous art collecting couple from the UK. It kicked off in Herzliya, a beach resort just outside Tel Aviv. To build up tolerance for the marathon parties that were to come I went running or should I say crawling the first few days. If you've ever seen Jeffrey Deitch’s daily turtle like trot along the Basel Miami beach, you know what it means to not be able to give him a chase. The politics in Israel are palpable in a way not many places feel, and feel as relentlessly. The moral and ethical weight of war and existence is felt at every dinner conversation. The planes flying overhead are usually not badged Delta. Hope? Perhaps Middle Eastern art (also good long term buy), better communication and political flexibility could at least help.
In London I am hosting an upcoming (Mid April) exhibit of young artists who have lived and worked in Tel Aviv which show would have had an altogether different meaning in New York, and one which I would probably not have considered staging there. In the UK sometimes there appears to be a subtle resistance to anything with the word Jew associated with it. In fact, the curators were denied a British Arts Council Grant on what I thought were clearly spurious grounds, when even I have received such a grant in the past! Thus my involvement by way of the exhibit in Rove Galley in London’s Hoxton Square for a month called Jaffa Cakes TLV.
Jaffa Cakes is actually the first ever exhibition in the UK devoted to contemporary art from Tel Aviv which will open on April 16 at 33–34 Hoxton Square and will showcase works by seven artists. Although artists from Tel Aviv have started to gain attention in the United States and Europe, they have not been shown as a group in the UK until now. The participating artists are: Maya Attoun, Michal Helfman, Nogah Engler, Know Hope, Yochai Matos, Naama Tsabar and Mika Rottenberg.
Regarding the show, a friend wrote: “Read about the upcoming exhibit and was thrilled that the UK Art community will finally see that there's an amazing creative energy in our city TA, and that we are not all about aggression, war etc.” Anyone who knows me knows I’m no proselytizer, but prejudice in any form, well; most of it anyway, makes my back go up. But in the end, we can all rest assured as Julian Schnabel has taken it upon himself to resolve the Arab Israeli conflict singlehandedly with his next film and affair with the Arab screenwriter.
From the first venue the party en massed picked up and move to another: Imagine floating like a basketball in a Jeff Koons tank. That’s the sensation of swimming in the Dead Sea; there is suspension, stillness and thick silence when you close your eyes and float. You feel resistance unwind out of your body. Like the new age suspension tanks they had in early 90s, it’s very meditative and peaceful. With closed eyes it could be between sleep and awareness.
At first your hear blood coursing through your circulatory system. Then one could sleep and drift off to Jordan just across the inlet to the sea. But the prevalent salt is like sandpaper rubbing on your eyeballs when it gets in, and its inevitable lying prone some will. You almost perversely want it to happen at first. When the sea is in your mouth it must be like ingesting millions of McDonald's French fries worth of salt.
To further prepare for the rollercoaster’s worth of partying, I went for a long hike and asked the security guard at the gated entrance of the hotel-a strange thing, that-and asked if it was dangerous to walk for a few miles outside the grounds, to which he replied in broken English "about 50/50". Nice, I imagined my escape route at the thought of getting kidnapped along the mountainous desert road. I was going to send a joke email to my wife that I was abducted but I was afraid I'd be disappointed by her response. I haven't seen so many hitchhikers since the 70s, there's still an unfortunate hippie residue here.
There is a military checkpoint for all to pass through along road leading to the resorts, I was given a sharp glance by a soldier-maybe my ugly MBT walking shoes didn't agree with him. But what a vivid, jarring landscape to have go in! When there are no cars on the highway, there is an eerie silence between sea and mountains. Especially when I am typing away on my Blackberry writing this. I should call my postings Blogberry.
A few guests I spoke to were largely strong supporters of Israel and ardent in their focus and determination. At one point I got into a fierce disagreement with a German who's family suffered in the Holocaust. The next morning I couldn't quite place what his position was, but maybe that was a good thing.
Sartre described the moment of embarrassment not in looking through someone’s keyhole but in being seen doing so. Sort of like my dancing with extra fervor at one of the parties filled with friends and business associates. What was I thinking? Being on a 5 day whirlwind party celebration with a few hundred people, more than a handful friends and acquaintances, is the closest I will get to a Scientology retreat. Hopefully by the end of the trip some of the many collectors of all stripes will become more than acquaintances. What a trip- jogging, floating, hiking -- then party, party, party.
In the final morning breakfast get together, with most of us on all fours from drink and exhaution, there was an under 10-year old kid industriously selling the costume jewelry trinkets they were giving away at the bash the previous night as party favors. My table mate tried to buy a necklace but had no change to which the kid replied, “I can break a hundred”. Only in Israel, keep obvious jokes to yourself. He will turn out to be the next Bill Gates or behind bars.
We ended the trip in Jerusalem, the old city of which is layered with a series of narrow nooks and crannies seemingly fit for the width of a moderately sized human, but actually serving as roadways. There is a potpourri of religions and their respective temples shoehorned in the old city with practitioners clad in exotic, flowing garb that made me envious for a robe of my own. In what sounds like a one liner, we dined in an Arab restaurant seated next to a table of priests. What is amazing about a city that appears frieze dried in a prior epoch is the promise and possibility it shows for coexistence. I saw a girl walking down the street and when she passed an empty packet of potato chips on the sidewalk she knelt and picked up the garbage. A minor, insignificant event yes, but one that was somehow magical (she should be invited to New York by Bloomberg). In the end if the extravaganza lasted any longer I don’t know if I’d have survived the food and drink, but surely it was something I will never forget.
No comments:
Post a Comment