Forest: November 4 - December 5, 2010
Julie M. Gallery, Toronto
Entering a
forest has a peculiar psychological effect on us since these dense
arboreal spaces are both primal and strikingly eternal. Civilizations
rely upon them for the most basic of materials, while forests also
provide essential spaces that allow individuals to meditate upon the
divide between nature and our constructed environment. They invoke a
sense of timelessness that simultaneously lends urgency to our daily
lives. Notable art critic John Berger weighed in that the temporal
qualities of forests, "oblige us to recognize how much is hidden" (143).
In Canada,
we take our temperate climate and densely forested landscape for
granted. Our abundant ecological heritage is reflected in the artwork of
the Group of Seven and the rich history of arboreal work at the core of
Quebecois painting. Choosing to curate an exhibit of Israeli paintings
and photographs titled Forest is fascinating in that it caters to
our Canadian national aesthetic; however, these landscapes by Maya Bar,
Anat Betzer, Dan Birenboim, Yehuda Porbuchrai, and Alina Speshilov are
gravid with a hidden history of Israel, Middle Eastern politics, and
foreign cultural significance.
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| FIGURE 1: Maya Bar, Trees in my Mirror, 2008 C-print, 50 x 70 cm |
The
significance of trees is woven deep into the sociocultural fabric of
Israel: from the near-mythic cultural memory of the lushly forested
Promised Land described in the Bible to the fact that tree-planting
provided jobs for the tides of mid-twentieth century immigrants setting
foot on the barren Galilean ground they inherited when Israel was
declared a state. As people from around the globe poured into this
desert land, a fundraising campaign by the Jewish National Fund reached
back across the oceans to buy the saplings necessary to revitalize the
land. In the introduction to his seminal tome, Landscape and Memory,
Simon Schama relates an awareness of the greening of Israel that began
to percolate, tightening the national ties of this far-flung diasporic
people.
All over North London, paper trees burst into
leaf to the sound of jingling sixpences, and the forests of Zion
thickened in happy response. And while we assumed that a pinewood was
more beautiful than a hill denuded by grazing flocks of goats and sheep,
we were never exactly sure what all the trees were for. What we
did know was that a rooted forest was the opposite landscape to a place
of drifting sand, of exposed brick and red dirt blown by the winds. The
diaspora was sand. So what should Israel be, if not a forest, fixed and
tall? [. . .] Once rooted, the irresistible cycle of vegetation, where
death merely composted the process of rebirth, seemed to promise true
national immortality. (5)
As
we can see from Schama's carefully wrought anecdote linking
afforestation to hopes for the future of Israel and a burgeoning local
and global nationalism, Israeli artists who choose trees and forests as
their subject are--often unintentionally--caught in the net of a larger
ecological, ethnic, and political dialogue. Over sixty years of
aggressive afforestation campaigns have transformed a denuded country of
five million trees into one boasting over 200 million, spread over
225,000 acres of land. Moshe Rivlin, world chairman of the Jewish
National Fund emphasizes the link of national sentiment to trees: "In
most countries people are born to forests, and forests are given to them
by nature. But here in this country… if you see a tree, it was
planted by somebody" (Lora 1). Trees are planted wherever civilian and
military settlements arise in order to provide social recreational
space, anchor the sandy soil and buffer searing desert winds. From a
global viewpoint, Israel's ecological agency is astonishing: at the end
of the twentieth century Israel was the only country in the world that
emerged with more trees than it had at the beginning (Stemple 16). It is
no wonder that the youngest contributor to Forest, photographer
and video artist Maya Bar, is fascinated by a landscape that evolved and
matured alongside her generation. As each year passed and childhood
resolved into adulthood, the rows of young trees and oases of limans
swelled into forests and groves which mapped the profusion of Israel's
settlements, delineated her borders, and altered the faces of her
cities [Figure 2].
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| FIGURE 2: examples of a liman. Photo credit: JNF documentation of advances in land stewardship, presented to the UN as "Exhibit of the Green Revolution in the Negev Desert including Forestry, Water and Agriculture." |
Born in 1979, Maya Bar lives and works in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, which is among Israel's greenest cities. Forest
is her inaugural show in Canada and focuses on one of her most
prevalent bodies of work, which records copses of trees either through
mirrored reflections captured in still photographs or using heavily
edited kaleidoscopic video. Her signature is a fragmented, fractal
quality or vibration that patterns the work, invoking a state akin to
delirium [Figure 1]. Toronto poet Alayna Munce described that gentle frisson of
unreality within the forest as a "generous and double-jointed vision of
time," while Maya Bar chooses to describe it as the unconscious of the
ordinary. The doubling and layering of the image amplifies the young,
sinewy forests of Israel into a profusion of trees——projecting forward
in time to envision a future landscape.
When
Simon Schama was still a child in London, he was one among millions of
diasporic Jewish people dispersed outside of their homeland and living
as a minorities who anticipated these future forests, dutifully
collecting the funds that would enable the crucial transformation of
Israel into a living, habitable landscape. The planting of trees was and
remains a nationalistic, culturally affirming action undertaken daily
by scores of tourists, and emphasized by the state holiday Tu B'Shevat,
The New Year of the Tree. However, with each step forward in the Middle
East come consequences: the trees and forests of Israel are rooted
within the complex political tensions of this volatile region. Annual
rainfall is so minimal that each planting is an engineered event, and
the act of sustaining the life of a single tree is implicated within
territorial claims. This has led to antagonism between the JNF and the
Bedouins, who feel that the greening program is a delegitimization
strategy forcing them to cede their traditional nomadic way of life.
Similarly, the JNF has come under fire for its use of afforestation to
efface vestiges of former Arab villages and to enforce the country's
unstable border. Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian from the University of
Exeter in England, argues that, "The 'green lungs' of Israel have been
created as part of the colonization of the country and the dispossession
of the Palestinian people" (Rinat & Aburawa). Though opinions
differ radically in this incendiary debate, trees are irrefutably
demarcations of ownership in a landscape torn by wars fed by territorial
dispute.
Due
to the unsavory shadow cast by land-claims, Israeli arboreal artworks
betray a darkness; yet they are inherently optimistic. Though every work
in this exhibit was created in Israel, several do not depict Israeli
forests at all, but are born of imported nostalgia and memories of
foreign political and ecological landscapes. Dan Birnenboim and Yehuda
Porbuchrai each lived in New York City and though their techniques and
the scale of their work differ, they share the choice of purely black
and white pigments. Paintings of trees constitute an important vein
coursing through both artists oeuvres. For Birenboim, who studied
architecture at Pratt, the subject of forests is meshed with a dialogue
of the greening of urban space, or the forest as a "green
lung"--exemplified by New York's Central Park. His trees are realistic,
often set against a still, stark white ground to emphasize his
impeccable control over the rich mercury pigment [Figure 3]. In "Land of Shadows:
Dan Birenboim", Neomi Shalev argues that through the radical essence of
black and white, Birenboim discusses, inter alia, Israel's
internal politics: extremist conduct, rash definitive decisions, [. . .]
and the lack of a moderate, compromising alternative. She continues,
"At the same time, the forest may represent a trap; a dark, mysterious,
tangled locus, an ideal place for dangerous and endangering activities"
(32).
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| FIGURE 3: Dan Birenboim, Untitled, 2008, from the Hanging Garden series acrylic on canvas, 100 x 70 cm |
Yehuda
Porbuchrai, who has been exhibiting internationally since the late
1970s, is recognized for his massive, intensely worked surfaces and
unconventional choice of materials. Working on industrial sackcloth
canvas, his methods have been described by Professor Mordechai Omer as
"a direct continuation of tachist-conceptual tendencies reflecting a
tactile approach: paint-covered finger-marks sweep across the surface,
disturbed by monochromatic scratches and scrapes that disfigure the
image" (44) [Figure 4]. Writer Adam Baruch conceptualizes the work as a
"soot-covered map which the artist tries to reconstruct," further
embedding the work in the realm of landscape (43). The importance of the
imported memories of forests which Porbuchrai and Birenboim carried
back with them to Israel cannot be underestimated: the spaces they paint
are inherently foreign to their native country. As such, not only do
images of forests represent maps of settlements within Israel, they also
trace the contemporary diasporic impulse of Israelis who choose to live
abroad during their artistic careers. Despite the return to the
homeland, there is a struggle to reconcile the nomadic history of the
Jewish people with a rooted locale--particularly one in which military
service is not a choice, but a difficult fact of life. Images of forests
by Israeli artists are engraved with hope for a peaceful and abundant
future landscape.
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| FIGURE 4: Yehuda Porbuchrai, Forest, undated acrylic on canvas, 160 x 265 cm |
The
impulse towards a high contrast canvas and impressions of stillness and
nostalgia are carried on in Anat Betzer's paintings of dark, ancient
deciduous forests. Her heavily wooded landscapes clearly reference a
Romantic lineage, informed by her time in England [Figure 5]. Betzer alone
introduces colour, though blacks invariably dominate. Unlike those
native to Israel, her forests are chillingly desolate, yet pregnant with
time. They connect intimately with John Berger's writing on the
subject:
What
is intangible and within touching distance in a forest may be the
presence of a kind of timelessness. [. . .] In the silence of a forest,
certain events are unaccommodated and cannot be placed in time. Being
like this, they both disconcert and entice the observer's imagination:
for they are like another creature's experience of duration. We feel
them occurring, we feel their presence, yet we cannot confront them, for
they are occurring for us somewhere between past, present and future.
(144)
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| FIGURE 5: Anat Betzer, Untitled, 2007 oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm |
Alina Speshilov's paintings also exist within artificially collapsed time, originating from childhood memories of the Siberian birch forests of Russia. Her canvases read like archetypes and balance precariously between technical prowess and childish naivete. As with Betzer, Speshilov casts her imagination deep into the heart of the forest, maintaining a human scale by floating the graphic trunks of birch trees on a receding grey ground, never once betraying a hint of sky.
Viewing Forest is a culminative experience that interlaces the importance of memory, mapping and Diaspora evident in its artworks. For Canadian viewers, it offers an opportunity to reflect on our landscape--its influence on Canadian art and a national aesthetic--as well as providing insight into cultural spaces vastly different from our own. Contemporary landscape's link to Diaspora is especially relevant to Canada considering that, like Israel, we are also a young country replete with immigrants whose experiences include drastic juxtapositions of natural environments, cultures, languages, value systems, and faiths. Let us return, finally, to Simon Schama, and consider the thesis of Landscape and Memory. He asks,
. . .if a child's vision of nature can already
be loaded with complicating memories, myths, and meanings, how much
more elaborately wrought must be the frame through which our adult eyes
survey the landscape. For although we are accustomed to separate nature
and human perception into two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible.
Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of
the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from
layers of rock. (6)
Leia Gore, 2010
Emerging art writer & cultural critic from Toronto.
* Note: Originally published November, 2010, by the Julie M. Gallery. Excepts of text appear at the Miles Nadal Gallery, as part of their February 2011 Anat Betzer solo exhibition.
Works Cited
Aburawa, Arwa. "JNF Plants Trees to Uproot Bedouin". The E.I. Oct 18, 2010.
Baruch, Adam. Yehuda Porbuchrai: The Plain Sense, A Selection of Works 1994-1997. Exhibition Catalogue. Tel Aviv Museum of Art. 1997.
Berger, John. "Looking Carefully: Two Women Photographers", Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, Vintage Books, New York: 2007.
Lora, Mary Elaine. "Israel: A National Passion for Trees". American Forests. FindArticles.com. 16 Oct, 2010.
Munce, Alayna. "At the Palace of Versailles". Presented at the AGO, ArtTalks. Sept 29, 2009.
Omer, Mordechai. "Forword". Yehuda Porbuchrai: The Plain Sense, A Selection of Works 1994-1997. Exhibition Catalogue. Tel Aviv Museum of Art: 1997.
Rinat, Zafrir. "JNF using trees to thwart Bedouin growth in Negev". Haaretz. Dec 8, 2008.
Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. Vintage Books, New York: 1996.
Shalev, Neomi. "Land of Shadows: Dan Birenboim." Exhibition Catalogue. Museum of Israeli Art: 2007.
Shalev, Neomi. "Land of Shadows: Dan Birenboim." Exhibition Catalogue. Museum of Israeli Art: 2007.
