Chaos – by design

What do you get when you combine an old cassette tape, a cafe, two friends, some inspiration and a bunch of designers?

By CARL HOFFMAN
Nomi Maaravi designs (photo credit: Courtesy of Shir Dekel)
Nomi Maaravi designs
(photo credit: Courtesy of Shir Dekel)
Did you ever play the game called “broken telephone” when you were a kid? A group of children stand in a line, side by side. The child at one end of the line whispers something into the ear of the child next to him. That child then whispers what he heard, or what he thinks he heard, into the ear of the next kid in line. She then whispers the message to the next child, and so on until the message reaches the last child in line, who says the message out loud.
Almost invariably, the final message bears little or no resemblance to the original message. The message has changed and changed again, as each child filters it through his or her own perceptions and personality.
Two up-and-coming young Israeli designers have accomplished something strikingly similar in an extraordinary exhibition set to open this weekend at the Hahava Gallery in Holon.
Called “Pass Forward,” the exhibition seeks to explore how a bit of creative inspiration travels from one artist to another, from one field of art to another, until it has generated a wide variety of new art, most of it bearing little or no obvious resemblance to the original source of inspiration.
The two curators and guiding spirits of the exhibition, both interior designers, decided to focus specifically on inspiration and creativity within the world of design. Their exhibition, the result of five months of relentless endeavor, will effectively kick off this year’s design season in Holon, Israel’s rapidly emerging design city.
We caught up with Ehud Raz, 37, and Gil Royter, 35, at the same Tel Aviv café that has served as their office, think tank and command post for the duration of the project. Initiating the introductions, Royter says, “Ehud is a graduate of industrial design from Bezalel Academy, and I’m a graduate in communications from Shenkar College of Engineering and Design.
Later on I practiced all kinds of styling and forecasting in London, where I lived for three and a half years. I also studied at St. Martin’s University of the Arts. Now both of us work at the same place. I’m the business development manager of Penthouse Furniture, and Ehud works there in the interior design field. That’s our day job. We met at work.”
Raz adds, “We met less than a year ago, and we found we had a lot in common, about the things we both love – various fields of design, ranging from fashion design, interior design, architecture, ceramics, primitive art, craftsmanship...
really all sorts of design.”
Royter concludes, “and we sat here, in this café, talking about the need to create something involving multiple forms of design. We initiated the idea of the exhibition. We initiated, curated, and did everything to do with the exhibition.
And it’s definitely quite exciting, because this is the first time anything like this has been done on such a scale. It’s a great experience. We engaged in several meetings here at this café and asked ourselves what we were going to do. Both of us admire the same kinds of design and work in the same kinds of design fields, and we want to encourage young Israeli designers to do something.
We didn’t really have any exact ideas, but we knew we wanted to do something. So we threw all kinds of ideas on the table, broke them down, and went over them again and again, until we came up with the final concept.”
Interestingly enough, that “final concept” ultimately came from a game the two had both played as children in Israel, a game similar to the broken telephone game once popular in the US.
“In our game, a piece of paper was passed from one participant to the next. Each participant wrote only one line, and the next participant saw only the last word of the sentence written by the previous participant. This created a fantastic new story,” Royter recalls.
THE RESULTING idea was ambitious and, to say the least, different.
Says Raz, “What we decided to do is make a kind of experimental happening which will include all of the design fields that we love. So what we decided to do was to try to pass on inspiration and see what happens to it as it moves from one designer to another, each designer representing a different field of design.
It was important for us to gather all sorts of designers, from various design fields.”
In the end, they gathered a fashion designer, an illustrator, a nail designer, a fashion photographer, a carpenter, a textile designer, a ceramic designer, a poet, a singer, a designer of bridal and evening dresses, a blacksmith, a goldsmith and jewelry designer, a pair of visual communications designers, a craftsman in traditional Ethiopian embroidery, an origami artist, an architect and a photographer.
And what was the initial object of inspiration? A somewhat battered old audiocassette. The name of the exhibition, “Pass Forward,” can thus be seen as a pun, evoking not only the image of a piece of inspiration being passed forward onto someone else, but also the “fast forward” button on tape cassette players.
“The creative process was like a broken chain, or a chain reaction,” Royter says. “Because the first lady on the chain was a fashion designer, and she basically designed a garment that related to the object that we gave her, which was the audiocassette. We then ‘pass-forwarded’ her object to an illustrator, who designed a papier-mâché doll inspired by the garment.
We then passed the doll onward to a fashion photographer, who basically picked up a few graphic elements from the doll and designed five T-shirts. We couldn’t control the narrative of the work.
Each designer took whatever he got as an inspiration to design something from his design world.”
Raz adds, “The main issue in our work was the inspiration. If this is a tape cassette and you’re a fashion designer, you had to design a garment from your own kind of world, the fashion world, that had to relate to the cassette in some way. The color, the shape, whatever. All the associations that are evoked in you when you look at this glass. So it could be anything you like. And once you finished your product, you pass it on to the next guy, who creates something inspired by the thing you brought him.”
Raz and Royter’s guidelines were simple and loose. Each designer had five days to develop a concept and commit to it. After five days, each designer had to tell the curators the name of the project, the materials he was going to use, and a statement of when the object would be completed.
Each artist was also asked to report on his reaction to the work he received as an inspiration. This last requirement produced some colorful stories.
Royter relates the case of a religious carpenter, a maker of doors for synagogues, receiving a T-shirt from a fashion designer whom the curators describe as “flamboyantly gay.” The carpenter communicated his disgust with the T-shirt, along with his refusal to have anything whatsoever to do with it. In the end, however, he made a “T” and a shirt, both hand carved from wood. “It turned out to be one of the best works in the whole exhibition.”
ONE FINAL requirement from the curators will hopefully ensure a relatively broad audience. Says Royter, “We didn’t want anything to be too sexual or too offensive.
The exhibition is aimed toward a very wide range of people, from young children to the elderly. So it was important for us to make it very appealing to a wide range of people.”
That left a lot of room for creativity, as the resulting exhibition will show.
“This is a very experimental project,” says Raz. We didn’t know what the first product would be, and we had no way of knowing what the last one would be.
It’s like building a structure without knowing what your next brick is going to look like. Things on top of things, without knowing what you’re going to get. So we were quite surprised. This is why we feel that this is not a normal job of curating. We tried to play God in this process because we were thinking about the evolution of a product, the evolution of an inspiration.
And once we made the list, and the time line – deciding who would be first, second, third, and so on – we were playing God. If we had changed the order, we would have gotten something completely different. We did what we thought would work the best.”
Royter says, “The clash between media will be interesting for the viewer.
We wanted to see what would happen when you move an idea around completely different media, say from Ethiopian embroidery to origami. In this way, the interaction between two media created a clash. Two completely different designs can create something completely new, something exciting. We could never anticipate what we were going to end up with.”
So what’s next for these two after the exhibition is over? “This will not be over,” Raz insists. “We are leaving this exhibition open. The last one we’re giving work to, we don’t know.
Maybe we’re going to continue with this, or maybe we’re going to create a new chain reaction. We might take this exhibition someplace else. The biggest thing we learned from this experience was the willingness of people to participate. The people we worked with really wanted to help, to take part in this experience, work together, enrich one another and create something new together. So that’s our future direction, to create a kind of community or guild that will bring all these forces together, help one another and maybe create a better world.”
We checked Raz’s face to make sure that he was being suitably ironic about creating a better world. We were reassured to see that he was.
Pass Forward opens on September 17 at 8:30 p.m. and will run through November 12 at the Hahava Gallery, Hanehoshet corner Hamelacha Street, Holon. Call (03) 559-6590 for further information.