Jerusalem state of mind

Bezalel greats Ezri Tarazi and Haim Parnas show off their unconventional housewares at the Tower of David.

By BARRY DAVIS
Haim Parnas and Ezri Taraza outside their exhibit at the Tower of David museum in Jerusalem. (photo credit: HAMUTAL WACHTAL)
Haim Parnas and Ezri Taraza outside their exhibit at the Tower of David museum in Jerusalem.
(photo credit: HAMUTAL WACHTAL)
In purely semantic terms, “Objective” – the name of the exhibition that opened Thursday at Jerusalem’s Tower of David Museum – is a contradiction in terms. There are plenty of objects in the new show, but the artists’ approach was entirely subjective.
The artists in question are Ezri Tarazi and Haim Parnas, who have a personal, emotional vested interest in the capital. They are both Jerusalemites by birth, and Parnas weighs in with 16 generations of Jerusalem lineage on his father’s side. Both are senior members of the local designer community, have burgeoning international portfolios, studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and are now members of that institution’s teaching staff. All of that makes them ideal professionals to offer their take on the history, and accumulated political and cultural vibe, of the capital.
The physical manifestations of the artists’ creative exertions are an intriguing array to behold. True to the multilayered character of the host city, all the items on display evince left-field thinking and a synergic mind-set.
Both the exhibitors specialize in industrial design, and that hands-on, street-level style permeates the entire exhibition. Military activity is an inescapable element of life – and the termination thereof – in these parts since time immemorial, and some of Parnas’s assemblage works come from the trench-art end of the artistic spectrum.
His lineup includes a threesome of shell cases that feature the iconic visage of Theodor Herzl, the less familiar face of Bezalel founder Boris Schatz – at whose institution Parnas heads the Industrial Design Department – and a cypress tree.
The makeover of military detritus is hardly a new idea – soldiers began breathing aesthetic life into spent shell and bullet cases as far back as World War I – but there is an endearing whimsical element to Parnas’s creations.
Take, for example, the transmogrification of a finjan – what is commonly, and erroneously, thought to be the name for a coffee pot. In fact, finjan in Arabic refers to the coffee cup; there are several other Arabic words for the receptacle in which the coffee is prepared, such as dalla and rakwa. In Sabra Picking Finjan, the familiar shape of a coffee pot is augmented by a rudimentary branch-like handle and a partially serrated rim – enabling the finjan to double as a means of detaching the sabra fruit from its natural cactus berth.
The 46-year-old Parnas is keenly aware of the seemingly contradictory theme of his works. Although he is a leading proponent of a here-and-now design philosophy, he says he always has at least one foot in the past. Part of that comes from his mother’s side of his family.
“My maternal grandfather was an upholsterer from Romania who had a business on Emek Refaim Street [in Jerusalem’s German Colony]. He made aliya from Romania and was always complaining about the heat. My father was a lawyer, but I didn’t find his office interesting, and as a kid, I would spend much of my summer vacation at my grandfather’s place. I was fascinated with all his implements and the way he worked.”
That childhood experience, he says, helps to bond him with artistic bygones.
“I can’t not look back. There is always something nostalgic in what I do. Why exhibit envelope-pushing technology that no one has ever seen?” Of course, it’s not as though he’s against venturing into uncharted creative waters. After all, the very essence of the academic framework he heads is innovation. But as far as he is concerned, you can’t make progress if you don’t know where you come from.
“I am now in my seventh year as a department head, and our workshops at Bezalel are the largest in the country in the field. We constantly engage in preserving know-how. There are things [from the past] which you simply have to know how to do, because they are the means for evaluating the new things.”
This, for him, involves getting down and dirty in areas of expertise that may appear to be completely incongruous.
“You can’t build a spaceship if you don’t know how to prepare bread,” he declares, adding that having a handle on the basics can only add to the inherent quality of the end product. “You can take the best chef in the world, who makes the most incredibly complex dishes, and his fried egg will be better than what you and I could make. If you want to create something new, you have to have this foundation.”
“OBJECTIVE” IS a thoroughly engaging display, including on an interactive level.
That is front and center, for example, in Tarazi’s Maqam Makom table. What appears to be an unusually designed piece of furniture turns out to offer some hidden sensory add-ons.
The name of the piece alludes to this multifarious approach: Makom is Hebrew for “place,” and maqam, the Arabic equivalent, is also the word for a musical mode. The table duly relates to two traditions that are often combined at social gatherings and haflot, or jam sessions – making music together and drinking coffee. A grid of squares crisscrosses the surface of the wooden table, and the intersections have shallow cavities where a couple of coffee cups can be placed at will. When the drinking implements make contact with the depression, it completes an electric circuit that activates a musical loop. Each juncture in the grid is connected to a different sonic genre, and by moving the cups around, you can fuse seemingly disparate sounds.
“And they all work together, don’t they?” says the 52-year-old Tarazi. He moves the cups around, and the sound system puts out a surprisingly attractive blend of classical Arabic music and electronica.
He’s right; it does work.
“I chose the table because it is not an object for one person,” he explains. “It’s not like, for example, a chair. A table is, in its very essence, for a group of people.
There are tables for individuals, but they are for practical work purposes, you know, like a writing desk. If you look at any of these tables [in the exhibition], you can see the phantom of the people sitting around them.”
All told, there are nine Tarazi tables in the exhibition lineup, made of a range of materials that includes wood, marble and various synthetic substances. They address several aspects of what Jerusalem means to the artist. The eye instantly notes the tables’ singular outline, which reflects the zigzag route of the Old City walls. The Tarazi creations also address the content of the walls, and the way the cultural-ethnic amalgam fuses and divides.
One of the more intriguing items is Divided City, which reflects the geopolitical situation of Jerusalem. The tabletop is a conglomerate of 20 typical objects from the Old City. The articles are dotted around the layout, a map of the capital. The top can be opened into two sections, “to produce a tangible expression of the divided city,” as curator Smadar Keren notes in the exhibition catalogue. In its closed state, Keren writes, the table conveys a sense of “the beauty of the city as a whole consisting of many multi-faceted parts.”
For Tarazi, the sociopolitical message is just as important as the aesthetics.
“The Old City has to be something that contains a range of ways of life.
No one can wrest ownership of the place – not the Jews, the Christians, the Muslims or the Armenians,” says the designer, citing the neighborhood’s four quarters. “It would be very painful if that happened, if something tried to take control of it all.”
According to the history books, of course, that has been happening for millennia, with a roll call of civilizations trying to make Jerusalem their own.
“I am not getting on a political soapbox here,” Tarazi cautions. “I am an artist offering ideas, but I am not suggesting solutions.”
Like Parnas, he is also offering an aesthetic, cerebral and emotive exhibition experience.
Visitors to “Objective” will also get to witness the fascinating creative process.
Augmenting the works are video clips that demonstrate how the exhibits came into being, from the sources of inspiration, through the work methods, to the final product.
Eilat Lieber, director and head curator of the Tower of David Museum, says that the new exhibition is an expression of an eclectic local attitude that first saw the light of day almost a century ago.
“In fact, we are going back to the vision of [British Mandate governor of Jerusalem Col.] Ronald Storrs of looking for special ways to show off this city,” Lieber says. “He saw the potential of the Old City to serve as a cultural focal point, with a cosmopolitan outlook.”
The museum director says the choice of Tarazi and Parnas for the exhibition reflects that “global village” ethos, but also the history of the place itself. “Today’s designers, like Ezri and Haim, grow up with a European approach.
They feed off the outside world, too. Ezri and Haim come from Jerusalem, and they look at the Old City as the source of their design perspective.”
That is quite a font to drink from.
“There are so many facets to this place,” continues Lieber, “and you can see in the exhibition that led the artists to use all kinds of materials, shapes and ideas.”
“Objective” will run until December. For more information: *2884, (02) 626-5333 or www.tod.org.il.