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In the mid-sixties there were
two leading Israeli artists who tried to assimilate Pop Art: Rafi
Lavi and Ran Shechori. Of the two it was Shechori, the art critic,
who remained faithful to Pop Art's flatness and continued to produce
figure paintings and portraits in strong base colors. However, after
two or three years, around 1967, Lavi gave up this style, recognizing
the inherent failure in adopting a trend that was generated from
within an intrinsically capitalistic society. In those days, the
socialist dream in Israel had not yet run its course, and the lyrical
expression typical of Israeli painting refused to make way to an
objective, impersonal and non-human style of expression as dictated
by mass society, a style which blurred the relationship between
personal experience and mass consciousness.
And then, in the late eighties, twenty years later Gerstein (then
an art student in New York) saw and absorbed Pop Art works at first
hand, arriving at his cut-outs, and with them paying an old debt
to one of the trends he claims always appealed to him. The Israeli
street, too, was seemingly ready for stereotyping of a culture that
was formulating into a local style of Pop Art, or, to be more precise,
something in between Pop Art and Folk Art.
"Everyone called Pop Art "American Art", but actually it was industrial
art. "America was hit by industrialism and capitalism earlier and
harder than other places," claimed Roy Lichtenstein. . . . If the
core of British, followed by American, Pop Art reacted to a society
which had become consumerized, shallow and gluttonous - a society
which eradicates the hierarchy between "high" and "low", for whom
a McDonald's sign is part of the landscape, the Coca Cola logo culture,
Micky Mouse a cultural hero, Campbell Soup a myth and "Supermarket"
the world, and the jumble of syllables from comic books, such as
"BOOOOM", "OOOOUCH", "SPLAAASH" and "CRAAASH" is language - then
Gerstein foregoes most objects of criticism of modern capitalist
society. He thereby also relinquishes the light-hearted critical
tone of "original" Pop Art on the one hand, and the depressive cynicism
and despairing submission to the loss of the original and the authentic,
and the triumph of "the system" over all expression of liberty and
individuality in the Post Modernistic style, on the other hand.
Gerstein refrains from "large concepts" and the theoretical principle,
but he does internalize certain aspects of the Modernist frame of
mind - the aesthetic atmosphere and "soft" reality data, to which
he chooses to respond in his conciliatory manner, trying to placate
the viewer and supply him with a kind of interlude from the violent
furor of social and political criticism. Instead of Arnon Ben David's
"Uzi", he has a female bicycle rider nicknamed "Little Witch", who
reminds him of the days when his young mother, then still an immigrant
girl wishing to assimilate into Israeli culture and society, learned
to ride a bicycle just a short while before her small twins, David
and Jonathan, learned as well; instead of the Israeli soldier's
overcoat and sleeping bag, in the style of young Gil Shahar, he
has a series of noisy three-dimensional cut-outs of cats and surfboats
and pools and beaches and balconies; instead of sculptures made
of cut, rusty metal in the style of Menashe Kadishman that deal
with weighty myths such as Sacrifice of the Son, Pieta, and Pregnancy
and Birth, Gerstein chose to cut a "Human Circle" out of metal two
millimeters thick and coat it with bright lustrous brushstrokes.
Gerstein does not ignore the fact that the McDonald's sign has taken
over the Israeli landscape in thirty-eight strategic sites. But
Gerstein will not copy a particular sign, nor photograph or paint
it; rather he will relate to it in his consistent manner: He will
strip it of concreteness and impart to his work something of the
atmosphere of the sign's "professionalism", of its blending into
the landscape and assimilating among the public. Cut-outs by Gerstein
- with their outlines strictly trimmed by laser beams, radiant coloring
aiming to catch and seize the eye, three-dimensional volume yet
flattened expression like a painting, and immediate images that
require no mediation and do not rely on the Ready-Made or the objet
trouv? and do not really imitate reality or try to take it to an
extreme or "pollute" it - function as sign and logo, reminiscent
of the store signs hanging over the small businesses in Tel Aviv,
without being such at all.
The transition from delusional painting to the object, where the
object itself is an image, was skillfully expressed in Jasper Jones'
painted flags. Frank Stella was one of the American artists who
was influenced by Jones' flags, which were exhibited by Leo Casteli
in '58. To Stella, Jones' flags seemed more object-like than real
flags. He isolated the formal ideas from Jones' painting one by
one and translated them into abstract terms, albeit taking them
to a logical extreme, and adopted the industrial coloring of Andy
Warhol. Stella estranged himself from the "Jonesian" subject, dimensions,
format and touch. More than any other artist till then, he flattened
the canvas' substantiality, punctured the painting's center, gnawed
at its edges, emphasized the cloth's geometric design and the presence
of the painted object as an object. The new flatness which he achieved
in his paintings on aluminum, the de-personalization of his brushstrokes
and the formatted repetition of shapes made even the shallow space
of American Abstract seem old-fashioned. The art critics responded
with enthusiasm and heralded Stella as one who solved one of painting's
central formal problems since Impressionism - by conferring on the
painting the presence of an object, a kind of "objecthood".
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