Kibbutz Night

Hi Avishai, it's really nice to talk to you a few days before the launch of your first artist's book. You are an artist with an impressive exhibition record, what they call overseas a “mid-career,” and here I discover that you haven't made any books yet, not even catalogs. And this book, Kibbutz Night, self-published, is a modest concertina, which houses a single body of work and is both impressive and beautiful. So I'll start as I always do: how was the book born?

Wow, I thought that if I didn't have at least three books by the age of 50, it would be a huge failure.

Wait, explain that dramatic statement :)

In my youth, I was very involved in printing, particularly art catalogs. After the army, I ended up working in design and layout, hardcore manual typography, print production, color separation, scanning, etc. I was in the paratroopers, and at some point in the army, I was diagnosed with a disease called Crohn's, so I spent the last part of my army service in the Air Force magazine. It was like a school among the fine printing machines of "Grafolit" with mythical prints that were already dinosaurs back then. I also worked alongside senior graphic designers from whom I learned a lot. We used bromides (photographic paper) even before computers were used, and we would paste the running text and headlines with wax on millimeter paper, so I have a real intimacy with this world. It was the time of the security zone in Lebanon, and suddenly, I found myself in the journalism scene in Tel Aviv.

During my discharge leave, at the age of 20, I was appointed as the last graphic editor of the newspaper Davar, which was then the oldest newspaper in the country. I was a perfectionist back then, always carrying a ruler, or rather a set square and a protractor, with which I measured everything to make sure it was straight. I could spot double spacing in small text from the other end of the room.

As mentioned, this was the pre-computer era of printing, and every day I designed multiple pages and the front page under time pressure. The editorial office was located in the old Davar building on Shenkin-Melchett Street. I had to chase after union workers my grandfather's age to get them to give me photos for the article. I wanted to compete with the big rival newspapers and save Davar from closure, so I said we should put girls in bikinis in the article. You have to understand that this was a time when, in order to print color photos with the subject cut out from the background, you had to cut four transparencies with a utility knife with perfect precision, and then project four panels, one for each primary color.

Yaki Molcho and Yoram Rubinger redesigned the newspaper in its latest incarnation, called "Davar Rishon." They wanted me as the chief designer, but I was very young, and they had to convince Ron Ben-Yishai, who was the editor-in-chief. The one who convinced him was Rubik Rosenthal, editor of the daily supplement (Dvar Sheni), who knew me through my parents. He is originally from Kibbutz Nahshon, and I am from Kibbutz Nahshonim.

In the last issue of "Dvar Sheni," which really closed the newspaper, we put Yael Bar-Zohar and another model in bikinis on the cover. Later, I met Michael Gordon, a senior designer of art books in Israel. He interviewed me for a job, but it didn't suit him that it was for a short period because he knew I was in the process of being accepted to a bachelor's degree program at Bezalel. So I went to work at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, in the department that makes invitations and catalogs for exhibitions.

That was in 1999. There, too, I had to convince the chief financial officer, Prof. Mordechai Omer. The architect Dan Eitan, who designed the museum, knew me and spoke to Moti, saying that even though I didn't have a bachelor's degree, I was fine. So I designed and supervised the printing of the museum's exhibition catalogs, and then I went to Bezalel.

And what happened in the Bezalel Academy?

I was very interested in artistic printing, both in my studies at Bezalel and during my student exchange at Central Saint Martins College in London. I worked in the printing workshops all day and night. At the end of my studies at Bezalel, I received the Herman Struck Award for printmaking (and I still work in the print workshop in Jerusalem today). I continued to be interested in typography, designing logos that are still alive and kicking today, and I wanted to design my own font, etc. But painting took up more and more of my time. It was something from my childhood, and I wanted it more. Many years passed, and I let go of that world and my interest in it. I told myself, who needs these books? It's so unecological, and one day my children will dismantle the studio and have to throw all the copies away.

Hahaha. Do you still think that way today?

To a certain extent, yes, a complete failure, but after I let it go, this year I also published a catalog for my exhibition at the Maya Gallery, and now the artist's book. Sometimes when I teach, I tell my students that the name of the course is “Failing Better.” This is a quote from Samuel Beckett's last book, by the way. Through this, we can be creative and offer new interpretations of things we seem to encounter again and again. The idea that destruction or disaster fosters creation is central to modernity. Progress brings catastrophes and also something truly “new.” This is a theme that has interested me greatly in my painting for a number of years.

So, how did this book come about?

The practical reason was that there was a call for submissions to the Pais Foundation, and Noga Litman, who was the director of my studio before she was appointed assistant curator to Aya Lurie at the Herzliya Museum, suggested that I submit a proposal for the artist's book category with the series “Night in the Kibbutz.” That's how it started. It was her idea.

Wait a minute, but the series started before October 7, right? Put us on the timeline.

Yes. Many people think I did the series after October 7, but it actually began in 2015. We were walking around Kibbutz Maagan Michael in the evening, and as usual, I was taking flash photos with my digital camera of all kinds of weeds, and along the way, I also photographed the lanterns standing on the edge of the fish ponds there. I often paint “landscapes,” especially animals and plants, populations that often remain hidden from view and consciousness. That same year, I also decided that it was a “dark” period, and I wanted to paint pictures about it. Since then, I started painting night scenes, and it is still relevant to me.

This streetlight is a childhood landscape, so ingrained in me, and when I looked at the pictures on the computer, I immediately saw that it was a painting. It is a well-known model of streetlight found in all kibbutzim. You can see the guiding hand of the construction departments of the Kibbutz Movement, the Takam, etc. It is a standard. From this photograph, “The First Streetlight” was created. Starting in 2016, I exhibited it in various kibbutz galleries such as Cabri, Yad Mordechai, and Be'eri. The local audience especially identified with it, and it evoked emotion. After the tragedy, I dedicated this particular painting to Kibbutz Be'eri. I have a number of acquaintances there, and it is also the image on the cover of the book.

And how did this series actually develop?

In 2017, it was decided to close the Kibbutz Gallery in Tel Aviv, one of the oldest and most important galleries in Israel. Yael Kenny, its curator at the time, invited me to hold a solo exhibition there in the year leading up to the gallery's closure. Ever since that first painting, I wanted to do a series of paintings of lanterns, a kind of requiem for the kibbutz. I photographed different kibbutzim around the country and collected references from Ein Gedi in the south to Kabri in the north, so when the invitation to exhibit there came, it was perfect for that.

My art always deals with appearance and disappearance, with the simultaneous existence of both. I also create video works in which I actually appear (and, in my opinion, sometimes manage to disappear). The exhibition at the Kibbutz Gallery also featured video works I created in collaboration with Nava Frenkel. In these works, we blacken our field of vision, the floor, and more. A few months before the exhibition at Kibbutz, they were shown at the Be'eri Gallery, which in retrospect, is crazy in light of what happened there a few years later.

I think the theme of disappearing and appearing simultaneously is related to my personal biography. In my paintings, this theme is very clear, embodied as darkness and light, and in the context of the series “Kibbutz Night,” among other things, it is about ideology and entire lives that have passed from the world.

During those years, I continued to paint, using photos I took on my phone, automatic cameras of the Nature and Parks Authority inspectors, images from YouTube, and so on. Photography was very present in my painting. Photography brings with it violence and arbitrariness, mechanicality, things that are erased with technology. And through the subjects of second-class citizens, such as animals and plants, I was able to say things about us humans.

After the exhibition, Amir Lev chose to use this entire series to accompany the cover and booklet of his album “Electricity from the Sun,” so this series had a life of its own even before October 7. Since that date, the kibbutzim have been receiving a great deal of renewed interest, precisely because of Hamas's attempt to destroy them.

Speaking of renewed interest in kibbutzim, you moved with your family to Kibbutz Cabri in August 2023.

On August 23, just before the war, we moved to live near the northern border. Incidentally, on October 23, an exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War opened at the Cabri Cooperative Gallery, dedicated to the residents of the area who fell in that war. In the end, almost no one visited it, except for the soldiers who slept on the gallery floor and in the surrounding area. You can see the cycle: once every 20 years, war in the north; once every 50 years, a monumental tragedy in which so few people cause so much suffering to so many.

Explain to the interviewer who is afraid of painting what “from description to action” means.

My painting is of a local landscape, depicting local plants, local animals, and so on. And for me, landscape is not a naive thing. As an artist, I am also interested in politics, and once that enters the painting, I feel that I have arrived, that this is it. At the same time, it is important to me that it be “painting,” that the brushstrokes be dominant, to show the unique marks of the medium of painting. And regarding what we talked about—the act of painting that both erases and creates—you could say that Gerhard Richter is the grandfather of this tradition. He currently has a retrospective exhibition in Paris. You could also say that painters like Luc Tuymans and Wilhelm Sasnal are his successors. This is the kind of painting that interests me. There is a clear connection between the content of the painting and how it is made.

In this series, I worked in a similar way to this tradition. Among other things, I tried to paint in one go, and sometimes when it didn't work out, I would do the painting again. As always in painting, no matter what kind, painting is about reaching new places. The painter Philip Guston said, “The best paintings are those that I don't know how I did and can't do again,” so I try to achieve that, a painting that no longer has me in it. In the series, there was one painting in which I managed to beautifully capture the light shining on a cypress tree and the sidewalk. It was good, but not really radical in my opinion. I finished it and knew that I hadn't reached a new place with it. I know how I did it, and it sucked because you have something beautiful in your hands and you don't want to ruin it. You could lose everything. I put it off for a few days and walked around it, until I gathered my courage and went for it. Luckily, it somehow worked out. I didn't know beforehand how it would look, but it happened, and that's that.

So, you've actually done quite a few series in recent years, and you decided to focus this book, like a haiku poem, on one series, just standing lanterns.

Yes, these paintings also have a strong focus, and all the parts of the painting "deal" with the “contrapunto,” which is the shining circle. For something to shine very brightly, you need a lot of darkness, both in intensity and in space. Soon we will celebrate Hanukkah, which, as we know, is an ancient holiday in many cultures. Long before the Jewish Hanukkah, people celebrated the festival of light. Of course, it is not just by chance that it is celebrated at a time when the days are short and the nights are longest. It is a human need to mark the light at this time.

Aesthetically, darkness is very important to this painting, and in addition, I make all kinds of gestures in the painting to make it shine more. I was also interested in trying to produce very saturated colors like those of an iPhone, so I also painted in front of an iPad screen. So, yes, as you said, at the end of the book, there are standing flashlights.

It's wonderful that you and the designer Noa Schwartz chose to display them standing up, inside a concertina. It's an almost extinct medium, and you're reusing it in a way that's so appropriate for the paintings. You can also flip through the book and display it as an object.

In my mind's eye, when I painted them, I saw them standing in a row next to each other, and I really wanted to see them like that and see how effective it would be. That hasn't happened yet, and in particular, in the exhibition at the Kibbutz Gallery, Yael Kenny hung them at different heights. She created a kind of performative space in which light was very present. We built special, selective lighting fixtures so that they resembled stage lighting. The light was present, and so were the spaces between the works; the black spaces were very active.

It was great. Yael succeeded in “giving new life” to the hanging works, as she had intended, but the idea of the “row” was preserved and waited for a few good years. Noa Schwartz, who also designed and produced the book, suggested the idea of the concertina.

Last Saturday, I gave the book to someone I met at the opening in Cabri to look at. He leafed through the entire book and didn't realize that there was also a second side and that it opened like an accordion. He was very excited but leafed through it like a “regular” book, and it was a magical moment when I showed him the other dimensions of the book.

It's really beautiful because the book actually becomes a path.

Absolutely, that's exactly what we wanted at the beginning when we talked about the book. We wanted to create a nighttime stroll in the kibbutz. You walk, and suddenly you encounter light, then darkness again, then a hedgehog, a bench, darkness, a firefly... It's important to note that the kibbutz's streetlights have seen everything beneath them: joys, disappointments, tragedies, and also a lot of boredom, endless silence. It's a very specific kind of silence that is almost impossible to find today, even in kibbutzim.

How did you decide on the texts in the book?

We started with the idea that the text would be about the kibbutzim and would create the aforementioned night trip, and we approached several writers, some of whom were acquaintances of mine from the western Negev. The initial attempts were unsuccessful; it was challenging to compose, and I thought it would be better for someone who was an authority on writing and editing to do it. In the end, we received a recommendation from someone with whom it didn't work out. She connected us with Dror Burstein, a writer and poet, translator, and professor of literature at the Hebrew University. I knew him to some extent and definitely liked his writing, his observations on nature, and his elegant writing on art. You mentioned haiku, so he also translated haiku and Far Eastern thought, including translating Yoel Hoffmann from English to Hebrew. At first, he didn't understand what we wanted from him... We continued to correspond by email and gave him free rein. He suggested that the texts be from different and varied sources and all about light. He said, “We will add light to light.”

So he chose the texts?

Yes, he collected or curated them. We decided they should be short but with a specific weight that would make people want to read them again and again. Some of them are very short, two words in the case of Zeli Gurevich, and some are longer—from the New Testament, from medieval Jewish poetry in Spain, Virginia Woolf, contemporary poets, and also older poets such as Avot Yeshurun and Israel Eliraz. It took more time because it was important to me to translate everything into English; I didn't want it to be only in Hebrew. The poet Hadas Gilad recommended Johanna Chen, who translated the entire text. She did a wonderful job translating texts from hundreds and thousands of years ago, as well as those written just a year ago.

You have created an interesting interplay between image and picture in the concertina format, which is a kind of archetypal format for artists' books. Concertinas remind me of 19th-century panoramic photography, which created an experience of image over time, before the invention of cinema.

Yes, there is a kind of suspension in time here. In a book, you don't see everything at once, as you do in a painting. One word comes after another, one page after another. But here, when you open the book, you see everything together, side by side, and the book becomes both a sculptural object and a panorama, in a sense.

The texts that Dror chose have something “archetypal” about them. Light is something universal that one can connect to regardless of a particular time and place. For example, the very specific text by Avot Yeshurun, a simple event that takes place in a Tel Aviv stairwell in the 1970s, a friend holding the stairwell light button for him as he climbs the stairs. It is a text about friendship, about intention.

Our conversation makes me rethink the words “kibbutz,” "night" as abstract concepts rather than the specific context in which the series deals with them. Night is perceived as a “different” time, a dark time of demons and ghosts, or a time when the subconscious is freed from the grip and control of the day. “Kibbutz”—a gathering of separations or connections within myself, can enable the crossing of complexity, provide an outline, a contour, like in a drawing.

It's really a physical sensation that I can relate to, from the two times I slept in a kibbutz as a city girl. A feeling of security that surely no longer exists.

Yes, after October 7, everything was shaken up, and everything was awakened—the kibbutzim returned to the stage, their image and their physical body, standing at the borders of the state. In search of text, I wrote to the author Yael Neeman, who writes so beautifully and humorously about the kibbutz. To my delight, she even replied, and we corresponded a little. In her book Once Upon a Time, she writes that when someone screams in the city, the scream is anonymous, but in the kibbutz, every scream has an address. What can I say, everything has its pros and cons.

What you said reminds me of a poem by Rachel Halfi that I really love, and which fits your book:

Short / Rachel Halfi

I still find it hard to comprehend,

That behind every lit window,

There is a life story

No less

Profound

Than my own.

To whom did you dedicate the book?

It says:

“To my first home, Kibbutz Nahshonim, with love.

To Dudu, who always comes first.”

Which book would you recommend to our magazine?

All the books by Ron Bartos.

See you at the launch!

The launch of the book Kibbutz Night will be held at Be'eri Gallery in Tel Aviv, Beit Romano, 9 Jaffa Road, 1st floor, on Friday, November 14 (10:30 a.m.–2:00 p.m.). The book will be sold at the event in a numbered and signed edition, and prints from the series will also be available for purchase.