Culture Report: A tale of two women

TWO CONTROVERSIAL female artists have recently had their work exhibited in major retrospectives, one at the Israel Museum and the other at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Though they come from different hemispheres – Zoya Zerkosky is from the Ukraine, and Pamela Levy hails from the Midwest in the US – there are some striking similarities in their work. The most obvious is that they are realistic as opposed to abstract artists. Zerkosky's paintings are, by her own admission, on the edge of caricatures, whereas Levy's major paintings are in-your-face realistic. On a personal level, too, they both have non-Jewish roots. Zerkosky comes from a mixed marriage. “My father is Jewish, my mother half-Jewish,” she explains, then adds cheekily, “That makes me a quarter-Jewish on my mother's side!” Although she had the opportunity to convert, she gave up after meeting with Orthodox rabbis and hearing the conditions for converting. “As someone brought up in an atheist state, I found it impossible to accept the Orthodox lifestyle demanded by the rabbis, particularly as I don't believe in God and all of what I perceive as the nonsense that goes with this belief.” Central to both artists is their critical view of Israel. Levy paints pictures of young pre-pubescent girls alongside adults, many of them naked, some of them dead. Zerkosky depicts the second wave of Russian immigration in the 1990s, in ways that are not only graphic but also disturbing, despite their sometime darkly humorous side. Levy (1949-2004) was born to a Baptist family in Iowa, and after gaining her art degrees, moved to Mexico where she joined an artists' colony and met her husband-to-be, Israeli psychoanalyst Itamar Levy. Moving to Israel, Levy converted and began her career as a painter and printer of woodcuts. With a few notable exceptions, there is little that is specifically Jewish in her work, though there is much that is Israeli. Levy brought with her the influence of early feminism from the States and it became a central theme in her work. Her earlier collages of fabrics and mixed media on muslin show stereotypical female activity, here converted into powerful abstract art. Soon, however, she began her figurative period, and showed her unique take on what she was witnessing in her new surroundings. The move to Israel seems to have released something within her that she expressed time and again in her paintings and prints. Israel was a place of freedom, as opposed to her traditional Christian background, with its negative attitude toward the body. Central to much of her later work is the naked or near-naked body, as if to say that this is a form of liberation from her early background. Simultaneously, she is acutely aware of the dangers of exposure. The bodies she paints are both objects of beauty and symbols of vulnerability, the source of human fear. This sense of fear is underscored by Levy's depiction of tigers and vicious-looking dogs, whose beauty is belied by the strong sense of potential violence. An early series of large paintings, for example, is called dead bodies and it is just that. Where others might laud the strong Israeli soldier, the ultimate “new Jew” of the Zionist ideology, Levy paints the opposite: Israeli soldiers, limbs torn, exposed to the elements, as sacrifices in a war that is seemingly endless. This is the outsider's view – war is war, whatever your race or religion. In war there are winners and losers, and these corpses are losers. Though she is not the first to associate such gruesome images with soldiers (Goya executed a series of etchings “The Disasters of War”), this is one of the few times that Israeli Jews have been so depicted. LEVY'S TECHNIQUE of painting vibrant flesh is extraordinarily well-realized throughout her latter work. Her paintings were often taken from her photographs and then translated and transformed onto canvas or wood. In this “conversion,” she emphasized the two-sided nature of our daily experience: the superficial and the unspoken Beneath the surfaces of her work, which are typically smooth, even bland, lies tension, even a threat. Levy sets up the sense of potential or actual violence, especially against women (in particular, her canvases depicting rape) or arising from war (especially her large canvases depicting dead soldiers). Yet even in apparently domestic scenes, such as kids at the pool, by the sea or at the playground on swings, she introduces a sense of existential angst. Partly, as in some of her most successful life-size canvases, it emerges when she juxtaposes her figures against unfamiliar backgrounds, such as a broker's yard or a rubbish dump. Suddenly, the familiar takes on a nightmarish quality. The familiar is anything but, it is just a convention, not to be trusted. Similarly she strips her subjects of their clothes, rendering them vulnerable and open to unwanted penetration, both in the sexual and social sense. Again, reality is not to be trusted. There is an underlying power much stronger than that which appears to the eye. Behind every appearance is an unnameable force ready to take over, often forcefully, from what we experience as reality. This stripping away was, according to Levy, influenced by “Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe,” Manet's famous painting of a bucolic scene in which two respectfully clothed men are having a picnic with a naked woman. The painting awakened in her two responses. One was her strong and early commitment to feminism in all its cultural expressions, challenging the traditionally male role of viewer and the female as the object of his scrutiny. Hence the presence of naked men in many of her most mature paintings and prints. If men can look, why not women? Her second response was to explore the idea of nakedness as a human and social reality, juxtaposing it with its social and even political context. Clothes are symbolic signs of class and status, whereas nakedness transforms the human being into objects of lust and, simultaneously, of embarrassment, of not having anything to defend “our presentation of self in everyday life” (to use Irving Goffman's redolent phrase). The choice of size of her canvases is crucial. These paintings work best when they are full size; they carry a weight that a smaller sized canvas neither would or could. This is real, the large canvases seem to say. This is man, woman or child unadorned. It is true that Levy does have some direct references to Biblical themes, such as her work “Lot and his Daughters,” and “Cain and Abel.” She also refers to Greek myths, as in her “Minotaur” and “Centaur.” But generally, her oeuvre is the contemporary scene, one that she witnessed and commented on with striking images. Her comparatively early demise means that she may have had more surprises to offer. As it is, the vulnerability that she expressed in her art points to a very central theme in Israeli life: the underlying fear and insecurity that pursues us night and day. ZERKOSKY FACED a different kind of experience when she arrived at age 14 to the Promised Land. Part of the second wave of aliya from the Former Soviet Union, she was one of several million immigrants who were brought to Israel in the biggest group to arrive since the founding of the state in 1948. Unlike many former immigrants, these ex-Soviets had little Zionism and even less Judaism to bolster their journey. They came on the promise of a new life, free of the oppression of their former homes. What they received was a new life, but not one that they could have anticipated. Old oppressions disappeared, but new ones took their place Firstly, many of these immigrants were academics, doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers in the FSU, but the Israeli authorities sent most of them to small, outlying towns, the majority of whose inhabitants were the least educated traditionalists, with few means of communication with the newcomers. They saw the new immigrants as fair game to exploit. Thus began the trials of the new Soviet immigrant, trials that the young Zerkosky recorded with meticulous detail. In painting after painting, she exposes the frustrations and humiliations that she and her fellow newcomers underwent. She had one major advantage, and that was her strong self-confidence as an artist and as a woman. “I started my training as an artist already at the age of four or five. In Russia you could do this. At the age of 10, you could go to a professional school, although you had to be prepared. I had been prepared from the age of four! As soon as my family – which included people in the arts – my father, for example, was an architect – saw that I had an inclination towards art, they encouraged me,” she recalls. “It meant that by the age of 14, when I arrived in Israel, I was well on the way to becoming a professional painter. I went almost immediately to the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts. Since I was not converted, I was exempted from army service. After studying at HaMidrasha (the Faculty of Arts, Beit Berl College), I worked in animation for four years. Between 2005 and 2010 I resided in Germany, since I wanted to be close to a center of art.” Two of the most controversial paintings in her exhibition at the Israel Museum deal with the difficulties of the Russian immigration. One painting, “Yitzhak,” shows a dark, Middle Eastern-looking male Israeli trying to seduce a young, blond Russian immigrant woman. The effect is both revolting and funny at the same time. “I never witnessed a scene like this,” says Zerkosky, “although the situation is close to what we experienced. For example, when we were at high school, we looked for holiday jobs in the summer. One of my friends told me how she took a job in a shoe shop. The owner kept asking her to climb a ladder to retrieve some shoes. It was then that she noticed him looking up her skirt. So this scene that I painted is not very far from the truth.” Incidentally, the name of the exhibition is “Pravda,” which, of course, is the Russian word for the truth and was the name of the famous Soviet newspaper that was meant to be a mirror of Soviet life. The irony is not lost on the visitors. Another disturbing painting shows a mature man undergoing circumcision, a common enough practice for many Soviets coming to Israel. There is blood everywhere – not a very uplifting scene. “I based this painting on a film by Larry Lipsker, which followed the immigrant process. This particular scene lent itself to a tragi-comic treatment, although I'm not sure that the person being circumcised saw it as such. “Actually the prejudice came from both sides. One the one hand, we looked down on the Mizrahim (Jews from Arab and Muslim lands) as being wild animals (she uses the Yiddish term 'vilda chayas'), but the Mizrahim looked upon us as people with no money, and no Jewish or religious culture. For them the Russians were dirty atheists. Despite this, there were a number of marriages between the two communities,” she says. “The real prejudice was economic. Even though my parents, for example, were able to work in their professions, they were paid maybe a third of the official wage. I, too, experienced this. We had a neighbor who had a print workshop, he employed us and though the official wage was five shekels an hour, he offered me only three shekels an hours on the basis that I could not do the work of an adult. In any case, this was less than the minimum wage, which was illegal.” Zerkosky's penchant for caricature is also very Russian. “In Russia, caricature is taken very seriously. There used to be two magazines in Russia and the Ukraine, which carried only caricatures and I subscribed to both of them. I was very influenced by many of these artists who are little known outside Russia. I certainly used the methods I had learned in the Ukraine. We used to do sketches during the summer holiday, which we then turn into full-scale works at school. “When I asked myself what I wanted to paint, I knew that I had to paint what I had experienced in Israel, which meant working from the sketches that I made. I have done other types of paintings, landscapes for example, but they were not appropriate for this exhibition.” Zerkosky describes her exhibition at one of Israel's premier galleries as a stroke of luck, particularly at her young age of 43. But she admits knowing the curator, Amitai Mendelsohn, from an earlier exhibition of young Soviet immigrant artists, in which she participated when she was 23, and with whom she has kept in contact. She is very pleased that there has been such a strong response to her Israel Museum exhibit. “Of course there have been those who were upset by what they saw. 'Hanging our dirty clothes in public, etc.' But by and large, my fellow immigrants were glad that we had come out of the box and shown exactly what we had to experience in order to become Israelis.”

Culture Report: A tale of two women

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Culture Report: A tale of two women

“As someone brought up in an atheist state, I found it impossible to accept the Orthodox lifestyle demanded by the rabbis."

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