There’s a lot going on at the moment over at the Israel Museum.
As one of the world’s leading repositories of art, blessed with a sprawling display capacity, that doesn’t exactly sound like breaking news. Still, there are a couple of photography exhibitions currently on display there that run the gamut of the emotional and cerebral spectrum, and then some.
Let’s kick off with “Field” by Gaston Zvi Ickowicz. An initial glance around the main exhibition area reveals a number of almost exclusively monochromic large prints of landscapes. The first impression is likely one of tranquility, or at least of stillness, in which Mother Nature clearly rules the roost.
But the quiet is soon replaced by a feeling of unease and encroaching disquiet which, considering the complete absence of any disturbing or incongruous elements in the photographs, is puzzling. “This is a question about imagination and memory,” Ickowicz advises. “Here, memory is omnipresent.”
Gradually it dawns on you that the memory in question is connected to one of the most horrific and tragic events in this country’s history. The exhibition title lays it all out in plain thematic sight.
The eponymous field is the site of the Supernova music festival, across which the young festival goers ran in panic as the Hamas terrorists aimed their guns and savagely mowed them down. The images of spindly trees leaning at all kinds of unlikely angles, almost as if they are swaying to some lilting Middle Eastern air, were captured in the Re’im parking lot, where the youngsters who had traveled south for an interlude of love, peace, and music set up camp for the festival.
Anyone with some knowledge of Ickowicz’s portfolio to date will not be surprised by the lack of human figures and objects in the frames. As curators Tamara Abramovitch and Gilad Reich note in their essay “The Last Portrait of a Landscape,” Ickowicz engages in “landscape photography.”
He is no stranger to political flashpoints and interfaces between parties of vastly divergent ideological standpoints. Rather than spell out the subtext to his work, he offers us a seemingly objective form of expression whose images gain political meaning precisely from what is absent from them.
WE STAND in the exhibition space viewing ostensibly vacant landscapes that nonetheless harbor palpable, almost poetic, energy gently but not entirely innocently, purring beneath the classic-looking exterior.
In so doing, Ickowicz deftly and subliminally draws us into the thick of the action, taking us back to the drama that unfolded so rapidly and brutally. In simple words, he leaves us to complete the picture.
“As soon as I leave out the things we saw, they move into the memory banks, and we encounter the works at the base of those memories, images, and sounds.” We then get on with connecting the dots between what we perceived in the photographs and what we witnessed in those challenging media bulletins on Simchat Torah last year.
That can serve to make the flashbacks all the more tangible and provide us with an opportunity for sober reflection, perchance even a healing furlough. “The proposition of this exhibition is to look at and observe this story of Oct. 7, but in peace and in conditions that are not charged,” says Ickowicz.
That makes for a radical change in our current thought patterns. Often, especially over the past 13 or so months, it is hard to envisage the simplicity of a life devoid of tensions and violence, and “conditions that are not charged.”
But perhaps this is just one more example whereby art and its purveyors hold at least one of the keys to such a seemingly fantastic utopian state of mind and allow us to benefit from a moment in which it is possible to take a step back and try to dispassionately mull over last year’s cataclysm.
The perspective of time is pivotal here and was central to Ickowicz’s plan of artistic action. I learn this is nothing new. “I left the country with my family immediately after Oct. 7,” he says. “I went there [to the Gaza border area] for the first time on October 26.”
By that time, the army had cleared away much of the human and other fallout of the massacre, leaving Ickowicz to fill in the visual and emotive blanks. “My basic practice is to go to places and not take pictures right from the start. I go to see the places and experience them.”
But this time was different for the photographer. “First of all, there were three weeks during which I was not here. That already gave me [the advantage of] distance, even though I was constantly tuned in to the news.”
It was a creatively gestative breather, which offered Ickowicz the opportunity to accumulate the requisite raw materials for the job at hand. “While I was abroad, I created for myself a sort of database of images, knowing that when I returned to Israel I would want to visit these locations.
“There are the images of people fleeing across the fields, for example.” Hence the exhibition moniker.
Here I got a handle on Ickowicz’s singular line of thought and the way he views his artistic prey. “When I see people running, I see the landscape. What interests me is the field conditions, the view.”
Those sensibilities and aesthetics duly imbibed, he then goes about setting up his stall in situ. “I was sent location points where people hid during the attack,” he says as we take another look at his Hideout series, which mainly shows trees and other Mother Nature “folk” just getting on with the business of growing.
“I spent time there, absorbing the place.” And, of course, the echoes of the horrendous dynamics of only a few weeks earlier.
What else is on display at the Israel Museum?
THERE ARE other items in “Field” that require us to do some of the work ourselves, such as the Highway series that depicts the road to which many of the Nova partygoers were drawn to try to escape the attack.
There is, of course, nothing obvious from that time in the prints, but if you take a minute or two to observe, you begin to discern the skeletal shape of an oblong where a charred vehicle once stood.
That absent-yet-very-present theme springs out at you even more startlingly when you round a corner and come across the Object series of five amorphous silvery-gray items which, as co-curator Gilad Reich explained, pack several latent punches. “Gaston found these small objects lying around there. They are very strange, and it was impossible to fathom them.”
The photographer turned to archaeologists and other professionals for help, and it eventually transpired that these were all that remained of vehicles parked in the area. “The terrorists used very powerful combustible agents when they set the houses and cars on fire. This is all that remains of five cars. They shrank so much,” he says.
The physical downscaling is quite frankly mind-boggling and, as with all the items on display, conveys that which you don’t see – like the sunrise on Oct. 7, with its promise of hope – in a jarring, almost corporeal, manner.
THE TRANSITION to the exhibition titled “Transparent Secrets” could not have been sharper or more incongruous. While Tomer Ganihar’s expansive spread also pertains to the photographic discipline, the aesthetics, dynamics, and themes are worlds away from the Ickowicz spread.
Ganihar, 54, is a larger-than-life character in several ways. He is physically imposing and constantly exudes high energy as he eloquently expounds his credo and the subject matter on show at the museum.
The full title of the exhibition, with Reich once again in a co-curatorial role alongside former dean of the School of Art at Yale University Robert Storr, incorporates the artist’s name and that of a certain Philip Johnson. Johnson was a celebrated and equally notorious American modernist architect who became both the megastar and the enfant terrible of the field in the 1930s.
The translucent titular component is also a layered affair. Johnson’s most acclaimed work, one of the most iconic structures in the United States to this day, is his Glass House residence located in, of all places, New Canaan in Connecticut. That lends itself to numerous interpretive strands and begets a plethora of takes on the appellative ambit. There are also various links with this part of the world, some more than a little distasteful.
Johnson, who died in 2005 at the age of 98, had so many strings to his personal and professional bows. His architectural designs – which include the Sculpture Garden at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where he was appointed the institution’s first curator of architecture at the extremely tender age of 24 – have been lauded and castigated in equal parts.
His bio reads like a dream script for any filmmaker looking to wow audiences. He was a homosexual, a fact that would not have sat well with his friends in American aristocratic circles had it been leaked. He also gave up his prestigious job at MoMA to devote his time and energies to establishing a substantial political Nazi presence in the States. He was, of course, also a devout antisemite.
That reprehensible activity ended with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which dragged the US into World War II. Johnson’s political past, naturally, did not endear him to his rudely awakened well-heeled pals and, after the war, he attempted to rehabilitate his societal position by volunteering his services as architect of what Ganihar calls “an inconsequential design of a synagogue” in New Jersey.
However, his most significant step back into the fold came courtesy of Shimon Peres, the initiator of Israel’s Soreq Nuclear Research Center (SNRC), who, in the 1950s turned to the renowned and reviled American architect and asked him to design the nuclear facility.
“I have no idea whether Peres knew about Johnson’s Nazi past,” Ganihar tells me.
What we do know is that the SNRC is one of Israel’s most closely guarded secrets, which is subject to all kinds of security screening strictures. But now, miraculously, if you want to get a good idea of what the center looks like, from the outside and the inside, all you have to do is pop along to the Israel Museum, where Ganihar has a slew of alluring and intriguing shots of the building and its environs on glorious outsized polychromic display.
“I am obstinate,” he says. “If someone tells me something can’t be done, I look for a way to get around that.” That facility certainly came in handy for the “Transparent Secrets” venture. Ganihar says he worked on snapping the SNRC for a whole decade, and that was after gaining an international reputation as the go-to photographer of the global trance party scene. “I was very successful at that,” he notes.
In the highly competitive cultural sphere, where artists scramble for recognition and a living, most would have rubbed their hands with glee and cashed in. Not Ganihar, a definitively anti-establishment character who prefers to swim against the tide and set himself new goals in uncharted waters.
“I thought: ‘This is no good. I don’t want to be swept away by success,’” he laughs, although taking pains to roll off some of the concomitant kudos. “I exhibited at the UN and at the Venice Biennale. I was doing well.”
HIS ROAD to Johnson was eased by a notable relative.
Ganihar’s beloved uncle Daniel Havkin, who died in 1993, was a towering figure of the Israeli architectural community, serving two stints as dean of architecture at the Technion. “He introduced brutalism to this country [in the 1950s]. I looked up to him. I was his favorite nephew. Actually, I was his only nephew,” Ganihar adds with riotous laughter.
The initial idea was for Ganihar to follow in his illustrious relation’s footsteps. “I wanted to do that. I still do, but I just don’t have the faculty for it.”
The next best thing, it appears, was to not only apply his self-taught photographic skills and aesthetic acumen but also to do his utmost to document the nuclear center. The gauntlet was well and truly cast.
“When I was a kid, Danny told me about a special mysterious building near Yavne,” Ganihar recalls. “He said it was the only building here built by a foreign superstar architect, and that he wasn’t able to gain access to it, despite all his connections.”
That gestated in Ganihar’s project bucket list for a long time until a fortuitous confluence with Robert Storr, who became the photographer’s “rabbi.” “I don’t call him my guru or mentor. I call him my rabbi,” Ganihar chuckles. A highly successful exhibition in Venice, curated by Storr, soon followed.
After Uncle Danny passed away, Ganihar inherited his library and, on a domestic furlough in his 10-year sojourn in New York, came across a retrospective tome about Johnson. “In the introduction to the book, he writes: ‘The nuclear reactor in Israel is my temple in the desert; it’s the best design of my career.’ But there are no photos of that high point in his career.”
That set Ganihar’s wheels a-whirring, and he embarked on a protracted and meandering odyssey to eventually achieve the seemingly impossible. He not only got permission to snap the SNRC, but he also managed to get tacit permission to display some of the results on the walls of the Israel Museum. “A month before the exhibition opened, I got a call [from some national security official] and was told I couldn’t go ahead with it. I didn’t know if it would work out until two days before the opening,” Ganihar smiles.
Fortune favors the brave, and Ganihar has the requisite guts. That also includes his unapologetic unconventional photographic line of attack, clearly spelled out in his Glass House prints. “There are two temples in this exhibition – the one in the desert and this one. Look at the reflections I have from the windows!” he exclaims.
“Photographers who go to shoot the Glass House make sterile pictures because they kowtow to the master architect. But this is the best quality glass I have ever encountered. The other photographers don’t work with the best thing Johnson gave them – the reflections,” he says.
Ganihar wants to spread the word of this beauty as far and wide as he possibly can, regardless of the challenges and the cost.
“I want there to be discussion about all of this,” he states, referencing all kinds of issues. There is Johnson’s rabid antisemitism and Peres’s invitation to design our most clandestine project, and the fact that a building that was not supposed to be shown to anyone was designed so beautifully.
“This whole [photographic] project is about concealment and exposure, concealment and exposure, again and again. We, as a country, want to flaunt our achievements, including our nuclear reactor, but that’s forbidden,” Ganihar beams. “Zvi Efrat, an architecture historian, calls this ‘ostentatious concealment.’”
Now, with “Transparent Secrets” in full public view, that ostentatiousness is a little less hidden.■
For more information: www.imj.org.il/en/current-exhibitions
