When one thinks about Israeli culture, it's easy to overlook the people behind our most iconic symbols.
By MICHELE KLEINYarom Vardimom 88 248(photo credit: Courtesy of Shenkar Design Archive & Research Cent)
It's easy to make a Web site, according to the Internet. There are step-by-step instructions and one can choose from a wealth of ready-made designs. But a design that suits one organization doesn't necessarily suit another. The design of a Web site carries its own messages, beyond the words and the images that go into a Web page. Moreover, when communicating one's ideas and work visually, one has to think about fonts, colors, composition and page layout, as well as the texts and images. One needs to be creative and original. So one consults a graphic designer. If anyone in Israel knows anything about design, it is Prof. Yarom Vardimon, Head of the Faculty of Design at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Ramat Gan, who has taught many of Israel's young graphic artists, at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, at Tel Aviv's School of Architecture, and at Shenkar.
Vardimon, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1941, is both an original designer, whose works appear in New York's Museum of Modern Art and London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and Israel's leading teacher in modern graphic communication. Graphic design is a field that has changed considerably since the early days of the Yishuv but has significantly shaped Israeli material culture. "Some 40 designers have shaped our culture through the images that we now take for granted in our daily life," says Ruben Kohn, a lecturer in design at Shenkar. "The hand-made emblem of the State of Israel, the images on our paper currency, the symbols of our companies and institutions, the Hebrew fonts of our books and newspapers, even the electoral posters on our billboards are only a few elements of the graphic designers' rich visual legacy that makes our culture so unique."
As Kohn researched the work and influence of the founding fathers of Israeli design, he stored his findings on his computer. He was one of the first artists in Israel to use computers in his work and in teaching graphic design. Four years ago, with the encouragement and support of Shenkar's president, Prof. Amotz Weinberg, and Prof Hanan Laskin, then head of the college's Design Faculty, Kohn began to set up the interactive software and data bank that has become the Shenkar Design Archive and Research Center. He has fashioned a design resource that is a teaching tool, a research tool, and now a national treasure. He designed the archive so that students and other researchers could use it. In fact, he has created a state-of-the-art online museum.
"You have to understand the past in order to understand where you are today," he says. "To become a designer today, you have to understand your visual environment. The visual world is as important as the world of texts. Our visual heritage is as important as our literary heritage."
Every university and city in the country boasts a library with large collections of books and texts and every school child has to read key texts that have formed our culture. However, few universities feature art archives and school pupils get very little education in the visual arts. While commercial art has shaped our cultural history, it mostly gets trashed as soon as it becomes out of date. And yet, the chocolate wrappers, the printed tissue paper around each exported Jaffa orange, the labels on our Kiddush wine bottles, the stamps and aerograms, train tickets, Rosh Hashana cards, posters and much else - the disposable "junk" of daily life - form our collective graphic memory. And as Eva Hoffman has pointed out (in Lost in Translation), our memory of our past re-emerges as our own continuous present.
According to the British Council Arts Group, "From own-brand sardine packaging to fancy matchbooks, from restaurant interiors to shopping Web sites, from gourmet magazines to delivery trucks, Britain's designers have transformed Britain from a nation that ate to live into one that lives to eat." While contemporary British graphic design was born in the late 1950s, Israeli graphic design took off in the 1920s and strengthened the Zionist state. By 1906, Boris Schatz had already opened the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts to enable Jewish artists in Palestine to make a living from their talents, but he also intended to steer their art toward promoting the Jewish national identity and the Zionist endeavor. By the 1920s Bezalel's artists produced a distinctive style that combined Jewish, Persian, Syrian, Yemenite and European design traditions. Their work set the foundation and the tone of Israeli commercial art. It helped to shape who we are today and how we present ourselves to the world.
Kohn points out how the branding of modern Israeli products and their packaging reflect our modern, egoistical culture. "While our founding fathers ate fresh beigalakh, kneidalakh, and rogalakh together around a kitchen or dining room table," says Kohn, stressing the diminutive Yiddish suffix of each food and recalling the foods of his childhood, "our kids eat bissli, fun candy called kef-li, and fruit yogurt called prili" [he stresses again the suffix] which are packaged for individual consumption. In Hebrew, 'lakh' means 'to you,' while 'li' means 'to me.'"
The Shenkar Design Archive and Research Center documents the designers who have been active here in each decade since the first waves of aliya in the late 19th century until now. It also highlights the historical events that occurred here in each of those decades, since these events often provided the context for the artists' work and inevitably influenced them. Commercial designers have used their trade to help us understand social and political causes, such as Latvian-born, Berlin-trained brothers Gabriel and Max Shamir, who opened their Tel Aviv studio in Tel Aviv in 1935 and immediately joined the nationalistic cause. They made posters to encourage Palestine's Jews to join the military effort and the labor force as well as settle the land, which were urgent needs in the pre-state years. They went on to design the state's emblems (see images), its medals, bank notes and Hebrew fonts, and posters about food rationing and condemning black marketeering.
Kohn draws out another example from the archive: Dan Reisinger, born in 1934 in Yugoslavia, who opened his studio in Israel in 1966. In 1971, this artist shaped the corporate image of El Al Israel Airlines (see images), including its logo, uniforms, interiors, ground equipment and catering accessories. He went on to design the logo and packaging of Teva Pharmaceuticals, Carmel Agrexco agricultural exports, Tambour paints and other Israeli brands. Reisinger's other design projects include work with the Habima Theater, Bat Sheva Dance Company, the Israel Stock Exchange and Israel Railways. He helped each company to communicate to the public its unique complex identity through simple but striking visual imagery.
Kohn skips to his archive's last decade and chooses the work of another design giant, David Tartakover, b. 1944, who opened his studio in Tel Aviv in 1975 after studying at the Bezalel Academy and the London College of Printing, and in 1978 designed the logo for Peace Now. He used the daring combination of two very different fonts - "Peace" appears in black, in a classical, biblical-style Hebrew font, while "Now" is bright red, in a modern font (see images). In the '80s Tartakover began to design and produce personal posters commenting on political events in Israel, such as the first Lebanon War, the Intifada, 40 years of Israeli presence in the territories, then 30. Tartakover's political posters reveal how free graphic expression is in Israel, even in the political sphere.
Kohn has developed the Archive and Research Center over the past four years and has built an impressive database of Israeli graphic design. The archive classifies artists' work in many fields: calligraphy, branding, stamps, money, medals, packaging, advertising, politics, the book trade, and children's games. It also classifies work by design subject; topics such as industry, science, politics, education, religion, the Holocaust and the environment. The database contains digital images of thousands of these designers' works, which the teacher or researcher can access and use to build a personalized portfolio of images and texts.
The work is still very much in progress, as Kohn's research group continues to add more artists, more works, and more documentation every week. However, he sees this as only the first chapter of the project, which - if the college finds the funds - he plans to extend to Israeli fashion design, textile design, jewelry design, ceramic design, industrial design, and building and environmental design. When this work is complete, Israel will have a thorough catalogue of some of its most creative citizens as well as their oeuvre.
To contact the archive, e-mail sidar@shenkar.ac.il or phone: (03) 613-1884
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