Its current exhibition, “Beauty Salon,” curated by Nitza Perry, is meant to explore the different meanings of beauty in our current cultural moment.
While exiting the train station I took a moment to stand at Transportation Square, soak in the buildings around me, and remember a radio commercial that aired when the city was being built. “Modi’in, a perfect city [designed] for you.”
Jean Baudrillard would likely suggest that Israelis who look down on Modi’in and describe it as dull or imposing, with its towers and shopping malls, are merely attempting to communicate they are of a certain social class, snobs who attach status to living in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or even Petah Tikva, which merited the famous line “I cannot believe that I live in Petah Tikva/ Years upon years and years,” as sung by the punk rock band Infectzia. Are there any punk-rock songs about Modi’in?
Baudrillard would advise us to be postmodern about it. Modi’in works, even if nobody rocks about living there. People buy houses and choose it to raise a family. If Zionism speaks about the ingathering of the exiles and to cover the land with a dress of cement and concrete, Modi’in is inescapable. The ingathered exiles need mobile phones, pizza, houses, schools and art.
THE EXHIBITION begins with Mountain of Lamborghini by Alina Orlov. An intense, flashy and nearly porn-like shot that shocks the viewer before entering a space meant to offer more works about beauty (she has other works in the exhibition as well).
Female beauty and its objectification are also at the center of Ain’t Nothing Wrong with Being Beautiful by multidisciplinary artist Naama Attias. The 2017 video work explores Texan child beauty pageants.
“This particular beauty ideal is very much over-the-top,” Attias told The Jerusalem Post. “I chose something extreme to project a spotlight into everyday life.”
According to her, “This is a way to see an existing reality, because girls really are told by their mothers how to act,” even if these are not pageant moms encouraging their six-year-old girls to shake their hips at a contest. “I understood that I am being judged as a body in this world at the age of nine,” she shared.
In the 2017 video “Carpets on a Flat Roof,” Fatma Shanan blocked the main road at Julis with beautiful carpets.
The drivers, careful not to run over the elaborate rugs, turned back.
“I was examining how the carpet makes the human body recalculate its journey,” she told the Post.
The work offers an interesting twist on an old motif. Western paintings – from the 15th-century The Virgin and Child Enthroned by Gentile Bellini, which depicts an Islamic prayer rug under the feet of the Madonna, to the 1663 painting Portrait of a Family Making Music by Pieter de Hooch, which shows the family holding a Transylvanian-type prayer rug – often include oriental rugs.
The work, then, shows things that are usually kept hidden and rolled up, places on the outside what is kept in the house, and focuses on what is usually seen as a detail.
“IN THE ancient world,” Perry told the Post, “to be beautiful meant you were blessed by the gods; to not be pretty meant you were rejected by the divine.”
When Christianity entered the scene, beautiful art was used in sacred spaces to teach people about the correct moral order of society.
“In our own times,” she said, “beauty is a commodity.” This is why the exhibition is named “Beauty Salon.” In his own paintings, Refael Salem presents a delicate, almost fragile, ideal of male beauty.
Marx, who famously warned that the power of capitalism is that of destroying all that is stable and turning it into a commodity, seemed to believe that the very wealthy can cancel their ugliness and offer beautiful women a life of material ease in exchange for their company.
In her 2000 book Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, Nancy Etcoff shows that, with respect to postmodern ideas about taste and class, some aspects of beauty can indeed be proven to have a grounding in objective reality. A wealthy person, if she is right, is doomed to live with the face and body he has, regardless of the size of his bank account.
Painter Eyal Sasson is presenting an unusual work in an exhibition devoted to beauty, a cartoon-like inner organ sliced open like an alien plant emerging from a wall. Beauty is only skin deep, the art seems to say. Once you slice the body, here I am, all the real guts and innards that keep you going – not lofty ideals but, rather, me.
“This gallery is a kind of a lab,” Perry told me. “It is important for me to deal with what is happening here as research, to use art as a tool for change and ask questions that challenge the viewer.”
The artists included in the exhibition are Oren Ben Moreh, Orlov, Orit Ishay, Maya Agam, David Adika, Vardi Bobrow, Attias, Ella Amitay Sadovsky, Sasson, Lilach Bar Ami, Salem and Shanan.
“Beauty Salon” will be shown at Gallery 51: Multidisciplinary Arts Center until October 7 at 51 Binyamin Street, on Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Monday and Tuesday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. The gallery functions under the Multidisciplinary Center in Modi’in-Maccabim-Re’ut.