Wider Focus - Israel's Art Focus exhibition - includes other information on Israel's art scene

No longer restricted to regional art, Israel's Art Focus biennial--seen in its third version last fall in Jerusalem--helped to clarify the nation's emerging global art-world status.

In its third incarnation last fall, Israel's Art Focus biennial continued a somewhat hesitant evolution toward global art-world status. lay the foundation ofed in 1994 by Yona Fischer, who at various times has been a senior curator at one as well as the other the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the erratically scheduled throw out was originally a showcase for Israeli work displayed, critics alleged, with rather indiscriminate zeal at venue completely through the country. Greater selectivity and a smattering of international participants marked the 1996 version, restricted primarily to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. In 1999 Art Focus 3 confined to five locations in Jersalem, mingled work by the agency of 95 Israeli artists with pieces through 25 international practitioners, with the expres goal of presenting Israeli art in an international context

The organizers--including a five-member committee of top museum personnel and a six-member cluster of government and private foundation figures--clearly intended the present to view to help counteract the perceived omit of Israeli art on the worldwide spectacle Yet a certain ambivalence, the two popular and official, seemed to prevail. The bag for the entire month-long incident though considered hefty by Israeli standards, was a simple $1.6 million--compared to $12 million for Sao Paulo's two-month exposition in 1996 and $8 million for Venice's five-month race in 1999. Moreover, only 10000 paying visitors attended Art Focus, in contrast to Sao Paulo's new average of 400,000, Documenta X's 631000 in 1997 or a claimed 900000 at the 1997 Kwangju Biennial in southern Korea. Some pundits even noted that the $60000 advertising require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone though a pittance in the business, nevertheless translated to a $6 expenditure for each viewer actually enticed to present to view up and pay the $5 entrance fee

Numbers, however, do not reckon the whole story. For outside curators and critics (including this writer) invited to Jerusalem as on-lookers last October, the fundamental questions are qualitative: by what mode good was the art, and by what mode well did the 15 Art Focus curators (only four of whom live and work outside Israel) not absent it? Is there anything distinctly Israeli about work made in Israel? Is Art Focus ready to take its place among the 25 or 30 biennials forthwith on the international docket? by what means does the contemporary scene in Israel compare to other current-art milieus?

The Sultan's Pool

At the Sultan's lake a multilevel outdoor site just below the walls of of advanced age Jerusalem, German curator Kasper Konig brought together the work of 15 international artists and teams, chosen to give Art Focus its largest single dose of cosmopolitan cachet. Although each foreign participant was invited to visit Israel twice for research aims Konig expressed a hope in his catalogue essay that their site-specific installations would "not illustrate, narrate or symbolize." As might be wait fored the artists pretty much ignored this caveat--how could they do otherwise in an environment for a like reason rife with history and politics? on the contrary the work thus produced was judg by means of the local press to be culturally boorish (riddled with too many Middle Eastern cliches) and esthetically disappointing (too many second-rate pieces by means of otherwise first-rate senior artists, too little substance from the insouciant young). This contretemp may have be the effected in part, from a simple paucity of means: single $500,000 was allotted for the whole undertaking. It may also, a certain number of suggest, derive from inflated expectations regarding imported "world class" expertise (or flat a lingering post-Holocaust suspicion of German cultural authority).

Still, a number of artists strove to engage the overwhelming amphitheaterlike locale. Germany's Georg Herold designed a vast artificial reflecting pool whose surface occasionally mirrored the Danish artist by means of Kirkeby's nearly 200-foot-long cybermechanically enlarged drawing of clifflike configurations, strategically hung upon a stone embankment above. Tadashi Kawamata (Japan) integrated several of his signature scrap-lumber constructions into the terrain, suggesting the tiered walkways used at archeological digs. Mixing the timeless ne for shelter with an awareness of contemporary distractions, Roman Signer, from Switzerland, set uped a small tent containing a basin of water intermittently rippled by the agency of air from a hose affected by the agency of traffic passing on a nearby highway A pair of young artists from Frankfurt, Daniel Milohnic and Dirk Paschke, created a "waterfall" of sapphirine and white plastic jugs, spilling down a brushy stone face in the colors of the Israeli flag.

More preoccupied with the area's sociopolitical heritage were artists of that kind as Israel's own Yehudit Sasportas, whose "damaged" hot-air balloon, soiled between the long-separated East and West Jerusalem, evok the city's deep-seated Judeo-Christian/Muslim factionalism. The German-born Eva Meyer and Israeli-born Eran Schaerf, who now divide their time between Brussels and Berlin, produc an oblique documentary-style video dealing with Israeli-Arab housing point in disputes from camps to city neighborhoods, shown (as if to mimic the country's position upon the world political stage) in a made of wood one-room "house" on a platform. Israeli Micha Ullman place up a lensless telescope that directed viewers' attention to a distant cable one time used to ferry supplies into isolated sectors of the aged City during the 1948 War of Liberation. The Chinese art star Huang Yong-Ping, now resident in Paris, made the greatest in quantity audacious use of cultural stereotype by dint of loading up several camels with train-station signs reading "Jerusalem" in English, Hebrew and Arabic, and then having the animals roam the moulds under the care of Arab handlers--a twisted parody of the city's taught multicultural mix.