One of the country’s preeminent art institutions reveals details about its rich history, how the joining of renowned artist Raffi Lavie was a game-changer, and the significant rise in Arab students.
By BARRY DAVISMiri Segal's work ‘It Depends’ seen in action at the exhibition marking the institution’s 70th anniversary(photo credit: GONI RISKIN)
Hamidrasha art school is getting on a bit, at least in chronological terms. For the past seven decades, the Faculty of Arts – Hamidrasha, at Beit Berl College, to give the institution its full titular due – has held a front grid position among the country’s arts schools, nurturing young artists, training art educators, and prompting fresh discourse in the fields of painting, sculpture and photography, as well as more contemporary disciplines such as video art, digital media, and film.Over the years, the school, near Kfar Saba, has churned out thousands of gifted and well-trained graduates who have gone on to carve their own niches on the local and international arts scene.Judging by the roll call of the school’s illustrious alumni over the years, Hamidrasha is doing its bit to keep creative levels up in the loftier regions. Consider the names of Michal Na’aman, Tzibi Geva, Anat Betzer, Deganit Berest and Said Abu Shakra, all of whom have gone on to make their mark on the domestic scene, as well as in foreign climes.They are also doing their utmost to pass the baton on to the younger generations coming through, a theme that is currently very much in evidence at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion offshoot of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where the Art School exhibition and hands-on program of events is in full flow.Visitors to the facility can catch any of a wide range of slots, which take in getting an intimate handle on the way an artist goes about his creative business, including when Dr. Gabriel Klasmer uses a purpose-built gizmo to produce new works of art. Klasmer also happens to be the Hamidrasha dean, and says that enlightenment has been the faculty’s guiding light since the get go.“Hamidrasha was originally set up to train art teachers,” he explains.Lithuanian-born arts teacher Eliyahu Beiles established Hamidrasha in 1946.It operated as an evening facility from an elementary school in Tel Aviv and taught arts-and-crafts professionals how to impart the wisdom of their experience and accumulated know-how. Crafts instruction was subsequently separated from painting and drawing, and official supervision of Hamidrasha was reassigned to the Education Committee of the Knesset until 1964, when it came under the authority of the Education and Culture Ministry.Hamidrasha.(photo credit: MICHAL HEYMAN)Klasmer says the educational orientation changed when renowned artist Raffi Lavie joined the teaching staff in the 1960s.“Raffi was never head of the faculty, but he was a key teacher and had a powerful influence on the students and on the direction Hamidrasha took.”That involved moving away from nurturing arts instructors and more towards actual art education.“Training arts teachers became less central to Hamidrasha and, in a sense, became a sort of ad hoc activity. It became a center in which the art element was very strong.”Hamidrasha was also a beacon of local artistic industry. That is pretty remarkable considering the fact that, when Lavie came on board, there was a strong universality theme to art endeavor here, as evidenced for example by the eclectic ethos the Israel Museum adopted when it first opened its doors in Jerusalem in 1965.“Hamidrasha has always been very Israeli,” Klasmer notes. “Raffi Lavie was always very Israeli, and he believed in developing a local culture here. The element that people always strongly identify with Hamidrasha is arte povera.”The latter refers to an art movement that emerged in Italy in the 1960s that called for a return to simplicity in terms of materials, concepts and execution.Those who followed the arte povera – literally “poor art” – lead began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry and culture. Here, the approach was known here as dalut hahomer.“That started against a backdrop of what was happening elsewhere around the world at that time, but it took hold in various places in Israel and most prominently at Hamidrasha,” explains Klasmer.Over the years things have evolved in ever-widening circles.“The emphasis on art education has become stronger, and the connection with the community at large has also become more accentuated,” the dean continues. “We look at community arts, and the attitude to art and society is important.”Klasmer says that he and the other members of staff at Hamidrasha do their best to provide their students with a beneficial, positive and enjoyable learning experience. “You know, many of us have an ambivalent perspective on education per se,” he surprisingly notes.“That is, I believe, primarily due to the official education system, and the Education Ministry which, for many years, took something of a paternalistic position in the socialist state, which we were for a long time. Most of us did not have wonderful experiences at school, and we were a bit wary of the term ‘education,’ and its connotations.”Things have changed.“I think that, today, the matter of education at Hamidrasha has taken on a completely different outlook,” Klasmer states. “Being a teacher today entails very different factors. You come out of a teachers’ training program with a certificate to teach, but many of our graduates, in time, become social entrepreneurs and open up their own galleries.”That is an across the board, pan-social line of thought.“Today, around 25% of our students are Arabs,” the dean says, “mostly from the local region – Tira, Taibe and the Triangle, and that is rising.”This aspect comes through in the Art School exhibition, which incorporates an Arabic language classroom setting, complete with chairs, desks and a blackboard.Several lessons have already taken place there since the beginning of the month, and that is just one of the interactive, get-down-and-dirty items in the monthlong educational offering at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion. Naturally, the exhibition is also designed to get as many people as possible interested in what the faculty is up to, and in art in general.There are some striking, eye-catching and even eyebrow-raising works dotted around the exhibition spaces. As you enter and glance up the stairs to your right, you cannot help but be struck by the enormous predominantly blackand- yellow dystopian-looking work by Anisa Ashkar, which goes by the evocative no-nonsense name of In the Wake of Van Gogh, Miro and the Month of August. It references the Operation Protective Edge military campaign in Gaza in summer 2014. Over the past three weeks, the work has gradually evolved and lively discussions have been held in its environs.Anisa Ashkar, ‘In the Wake of Van Gogh, Miro and the Month of August.’ (photo credit: GONI RISKIN)According to Klasmer, politics of various shades and stripes have always been in and around the school. Identity, too, and its various angles, permutations and connotations, is also an important theme.“We had a student who changed her sex during her studies and came to me and asked to be written down as male.We have lots of challenges, on all sorts of levels,” he notes.Klasmer is, of course, delighted with the monthlong “Art School” show, although he is somewhat ambivalent about the accessibility element of the items on view.“I think this exhibition reflects what Hamidrasha is about, but I don’t think it is entirely amenable to the person on the street.” That said, the intention was never really about targeting the lowest common denominator.“Art is not a community center,” declares Klasmer, “and, maybe, it is good that it is not [accessible to all]. There is an almost imperceptible step you have to cross to enter the world of art, but it is still a step you have to climb. It is not simple and it requires education, just like you can’t fly a plane without training for it. You can’t just get into a plane and fly it, and you can’t just enter [the art world] and become an artist. You may be very talented, but you need to acquire the education, too.”The dean is certainly doing his bit to offer some insider information about the mysteries of creating art.“I am running a workshop during this month in which I make paintings.During the process, I talk to people about what I do, and there other workshops like mine.”It is a rare treat to be privy to the fruits of the creative process, and one which Klasmer hopes will help to open up the world of art, a mite, to the non-cognoscenti.“This is an exhibition that you enter and you don’t exactly encounter artistic representations that make you experience something in response. You have to think about what you find here. You don’t really have in-your-face things here, which are exciting finished articles.I think that is a good thing. It’s not like an exhibition whereby the artist has worked for a long time and, hey presto, the finished items are all there in front of you, in a neat, orderly and well-lit manner.”“Art School” is, intentionally, a very different kettle of fish.“I think this is an evolving exhibition, and I think that is its secret. Someone who stands in front of a work will react to it, and the work will react to the observer too,” Klasmer continues.“There are some entirely interactive works here; there is music, there are things you have to activate yourself.”That is clearly a premeditated move to draw people into the spirit of the show, and of the school itself.”One of the proactive works is Miri Segal’s It Depends. The title in English – a play on the Hebrew talui, which can also mean suspended – offers you the opportunity to sit on a chair opposite the artist with a table between you. Segal then operates a lifting mechanism that takes you up approximately two meters into the air. Once settled at above-head height – unless, that is, you are of basketball player proportions – you can enjoy a nice chat with Segal about this and that without being bothered by other gravitation- challenged Homo sapiens.Klasmer says that the whole monthlong shebang is set to put the cat among the pigeons, and to keep us on our own toes.“The exhibition generates a bit of conflict between an exhibition format and the dynamics of an artist talking about the state of affairs here. This is a sort of hyper-art school.”For his part, Art School curator Avi Lubin, who is a department head at the Hamidrasha, didn’t want the weight of the last threescore and 10 years to hang too heavily on the exhibition or, naturally, on the faculty itself.“I wasn’t interested in having a historic exhibition,” says Lubin. “I didn’t want to get involved in hierarchies, and to dig back into the history and have to judge what is important and what isn’t, or to obey some sort of hegemony.”Lubin wanted to challenge us and Hamidrasha, and to possibly generate a new mind-set.“I am not interested in politics,” he says, adding that he wasn’t looking to merely document Hamidrasha’s output to date and blow its trumpet. “I didn’t want to have just a load of works by the former students and teachers on the walls. I don’t think that is very interesting at all. I wanted to ask questions, and to consider what Hamidrasha needs to do today.”Not that Lubin wants to wipe the slate clean and forget about Hamidrasha’s accrued endeavor.“The school has been around for 70 successful years and its achievements are not in question, but the field has changed. New schools have emerged and every school, including long-established ones like Hamidrasha and [110-year-old] Bezalel [Academy of Arts and Design], and the newer ones have to understand what the school ideology is and what its approach to teaching arts is.”The curator believes that art schools also have to take a stand on seemingly extracurricular issues.“They have to consider whether they can afford to be neutral with regard to certain matters that come up.”There are more gray areas. “If you study mathematics or law, you know more or less what that entails, but what does being an art student exactly mean? It is a far more amorphous area.”It is safe to say that, by the end of the month, the school staff, students and the members of the public who wander into the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion will have a better grasp of the aforementioned topics, and should keep going along that learning curve further down the line.