Creative impulses, under duress

War does strange things to the appreciation of art. Even work of power and beauty can become too painful to absorb in a context of shock, loss and dread.

In Israel, deflated by the ongoing violence at home, and now bombarded by round-the-clock coverage of the war in Iraq just east of here, the desire to grapple with the dark and the difficult in art has waned in the past 30 months. Since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000, answered by a severe campaign of curfews, military occupations of the West Bank and “targeted killings” of Palestinian militants, there is some evidence that shellshocked Israelis have turned in larger numbers toward work that is more escapist than highly charged.

Some artists have responded with a nod of compassion or a stroke of humor, while some complain that Israel’s sophisticated and edgy art scene is losing ground. Some are coming at hard issues from a greater distance, and some retreat into the intimacy of familiar details.

The repercussions are felt through Israel’s arts institutions, artists and audiences. And their varied responses to the stresses of war offer a glimpse of art’s role in a wartime culture that extends beyond Israel’s borders. Coping creatively with turbulence and upheaval is becoming a global affair.

Headlines to heavy fruit

Two and a half years ago, as Israel was entering its fierce new conflict with Palestinians, artist Sigalit Landau needed to make a statement. She asked her friend Alon Segev, a gallery owner, to save newspapers while she was out of town, and later gathered up the papers, dipped them in glue and molded them into big, round “fruits” as part of a controversial installation about life during the Palestinian uprising.

On a Tel Aviv rooftop, three static, life-size figures, or “survivors,” also fashioned from gory headlines, harvested the heavy fruits. One picked them off a plant, while another carried them in a basket slung across its back. A third recorded the death tolls from the fruits in a notebook. On a camping stove nearby, the bleak balls simmered in a pot and thickened into a blood-colored jam.

“Four soldiers were killed and 15 were injured in the Gaza Strip,” Segev read from a leftover “fruit” in a basket in the corner of his office. “It’s political, it’s reality, it’s now, it’s so strong. But it’s not something you want to live with.”

Israeli art lovers, it seems, have been living with violence and violent imagery for long enough.

The collectors who come through the door to his gallery, Segev said, are often looking for a tonic rather than a testimonial about terrorism.

When Segev displayed Landau’s installation, titled “The Country,” at his gallery late last year, it attracted a record number of visitors and earned rave reviews. But given the political climate, it was a gamble.

He recalled that after one collector bought a survivor figure from the installation, his family spent several days discussing which room of their home to put it in. In the end, he decided to put it in his office.

“It’s not like they don’t agree with what the artist is doing, but they see so much of it on television already,” Segev said of some of the provocative artworks that have passed through his gallery lately. “People have asked me for something happy. Something with colors.”

Similar sentiments can be heard in theater lobbies, museum corridors and dance halls across the country.

“There’s a general mood of sadness, of losing hope .... It might be a world mood,” said Ido Bar-el, an abstract painter and head of the fine arts department at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Art Academy. Bar-el likened the depressed mood here to the dark days after the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Jewish university student. Before that, he recalled, came the optimism of the 1993 Oslo Accord.

“There’s ups and downs,” he added. “The reality doesn’t reflect on the quality of Israeli art, but the content does change.”

Economic slump

Israel’s economic downturn is not helping matters as artists try to cope with the latest shift in the country’s mood. Tourism, one of Israel’s main moneymakers, has dropped to almost nil since the current Palestinian uprising began, contributing to an economic slump that has forced the government to reduce cultural spending by 22%, from $83 million to $65 million, since the beginning of last year.

The austerity is being felt all around. Struggling under mounting debt, the Be’er Sheva Symphony played a requiem to itself two weeks ago.

The mayor of the southern Negev city saved the day by announcing shortly before the performance that he would guarantee a new loan for the orchestra, but he said the group would have to scale down from 41 to 32 musicians.

Museum attendance is also down, partly due to Israelis’ fear of traveling too far afield during turbulent times. The country’s largest museum, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, reported a 50% drop in visits by Israelis in 2002, and a 90% drop in visits by foreigners.

Cash-strapped theaters say they are taking fewer risks on programming. Although several venues still address prickly topics such as objections to draft policies, musicals and Broadway hits are the order of the day.

“It’s a creative crisis,” said Oded Kotler, who recently directed “A Soldier Comes Home” by Motti Lerner. “When the guns shoot, the muses shut up.”

In the 30-minute production, an Israeli soldier visits his parents by cutting his way through the wall of their home with his army knife. Pained and confused, he then strips off his uniform and pours ketchup over his naked body. This bleak portrayal of war’s destruction represents the kind of project that theater managers are shying away from, Kotler said.

“Everybody is saying let’s do something where people don’t have too much to worry about, where they can escape and have fun,” he added.

Some theaters are seeing their way around this trend by setting their works in faraway lands. The Haifa Municipal Theatre recently presented Helen Edmundson’s “The Clearing,” which depicts an English settler and his Irish Catholic wife as they confront land confiscations and ethnic cleansing in 16th century Ireland.

“It’s over there. It’s Ireland that has the problem. People always prefer that,” said assistant artistic director Yael Hasson. And yet, she added, “obvious” references could be drawn to the 150 Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories.

In fact, Edmundson wrote the play as a reference to ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

“With the intifada,” or Palestinian uprising, “people have lost their tolerance,” Hasson said. “They say: ‘Nothing like the news, please.’ ”

Keeping this in mind, the theater’s board of directors decided recently to stage “Charlie’s Aunt,” a farce about two Victorian students in search of a chaperon. Directors chose the play over the Depression-era “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”

Critics say Israel’s Censorship Board has lost its tolerance for provocative subject matter too. In a much-discussed December ruling, the board banned the documentary “Jenin Jenin,” by Arab Israeli director Mohammed Bakri.

The board defended its decision by saying the film could mislead the public into thinking Israeli soldiers committed war crimes when they overran a Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank last spring. Bakri has appealed to the Supreme Court to overturn the ban, which marks the first time in 15 years the board has blacklisted a movie. (The case is still pending.)

Interestingly, Israel’s current box office hit “Broken Wings” is a film that turns its back on the chaos of current events to focus on a purely personal story -- that of a widow with four children whose husband died of a bee sting.

“It’s not heroic. He didn’t die from a bomb,” said Arik Kneller, a literary agent who represents the film’s director, Niv Bergman. “Now there’s an urge to talk about small things.”

A difficult dialogue

Many Israeli artists seem unbowed by the pressure to produce less controversial work. Painter David Reeb, known for his political barbs, is preparing an exhibition based partly on proof sheets by a photographer from Israel’s prominent Haaretz daily newspaper. Strips of film show the bloody aftermath of a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, all the time framed in the film’s black, toothed edges. Small yellow letters, reading “Kodak,” remind viewers that whether they like it or not, this is the news.

Another series depicts a mirror image of a soldier in a nondescript uniform. It’s unclear if he’s Palestinian or Israeli, if he’s lurching toward something, or away from it. Over one of the soldiers’ heads Reeb has painted the word “good.” Over the identical image, he’s painted “bad.”

“It’s so difficult to have dialogue today,” Reeb said while pulling paintings from their racks in a tidy Tel Aviv studio. “It’s hard for the Israelis and the Palestinians even to recognize each other.”

Reeb acknowledged having a harder time selling paintings lately, for economic and political reasons, despite critical acclaim.

(For their part, Palestinian artists living in the West Bank and Gaza are so restricted by Israeli curfews and military checkpoints that most of them are having difficulty even getting their hands on art supplies. Many rooted their work in political activism long before the intifada and are reticent to exhibit in Israel at all.)

Some artists find that the world is embracing them, even if Israelis are not. A year into the intifada, photographer Efrat Shvily learned that her portraits of Palestinian cabinet ministers would not be hanging at the Israel Museum, as previously arranged.

“They said that owing to the circumstances, it’s not the time to show this,” Shvily said of the series -- stately portraits of leaders in suits and ties, meant to debunk more common images of Arabs as stone-throwing fighters or peasants.

Foreign sponsors were supportive, however, and the series has traveled to Berlin, Geneva and Rotterdam. Another Shvily series featuring barren, Lego-like landscapes of new Israeli homes will be traveling to Madrid in June and to New York in September.

If there’s one place where artists say they feel unfettered by the charged political climate, it’s in Israel’s young hip-hop scene. In rapid-fire lyrics, a small crop of up-and-comers say they have been able to rise above the polarized atmosphere and question the wisdom of war.

Singer Daniel Niv, for example, hit the top of the Israeli charts last year with his song “Talking About Peace,” despite efforts by mothers of Israeli soldiers killed in combat to ban the song from an army radio station.

Niv, known as “Mook,” said his aim was to transcend politics and encourage listeners to question government policies for themselves. He even refuses to name the day’s political leaders in his rhymes, since he hopes his music will outlive them.

“For me, art is like a little airplane. I can go up and look down on things,” he said. “Art is the only way to survive these hard times.”