מלאכה בנים
Boys Craft
מוזיאון חיפה לאמנות. אוצרת: תמי כץ-פרימן. 2007
Haifa Museum of Art. Curator: Tami Katz-Freeman. 2007
BoysCraft - Curator: Tami Katz-Freiman
"BoysCraft" focuses on the manual and labor-intensive aspects of artmaking, and on the use of handicraft traditions in contemporary art. This exhibition centers upon the sensory experience of excess, materiality and multiple details, and brings together works by local and international male artists who share an interest in traditional handicrafts formerly identified with the domain of "women's work," with "folk" art or with applied art.
This exhibition, which includes works by 41 Israeli and international artists, aims to shed light on the engagement with manual crafts as a cultural and sociopolitical practice. The artists participating in this exhibition present works composed of fabric, paper, beads, thread, wallpaper and other decorative materials in a range of techniques - including embroidery, weaving, beading, knitting and paper cutting. The imagery in most of these works is based on "male" or "macho" stereotypes, yet their creation involves techniques that are culturally associated with "female" or "childlike" forms of expression. The decorative, ornamental and sometimes obsessive qualities of these artworks allow for an examination of changing perceptions of masculinity, of beauty and of the relations between art and craft.
This wide range of works creates a rich tapestry of different cultures, styles and skills. The works of each of the participating artists are characterized by a demanding and time-consuming work process, which involves monotonous and repetitive actions based on age-old craft traditions. These practices, which were marginalized in previous decades outside of the modernist cannon, have penetrated into the heart of contemporary artmaking. The prominent artists now choosing to undermine accepted distinctions between these domains thus reflect a new cultural spirit imbued with nostalgia for the predigital age; for personal and "authentic" forms of expression; for art created in community-related contexts; and for values such as human fraternity and social healing.
"BoysCraft" reflects the complex processes that have taken place in the aftermath of the feminist revolution, and presents a new generation of artists who have internalized feminist, gender-related and postcolonial theories. By combining traditional techniques with an unconventional use of materials, these artists voice various forms of social criticism, shed light on the problematics and disruptions that characterize contemporary cultures and identities, undermine artistic conventions and raise questions concerning gender - from a male point of view. This exhibition thus points to the ways in which the gains of the gender revolution have been internalized by the "new man" in both local and international contexts with the gradual decline of machoism.
Haim Maor was one of the first Israeli artists to transform handicrafts into a powerful tool for expressing social, political, gender-related and religious criticism. During the 1970s, he combined sewing with Minimalist body art, and created a form of "soft" Minimalism based on a consistent use of fabric. Back then, he associated sewing with processes of perforation, marking and healing - which were related to his experience as the son of Holocaust survivors. During the 1980s and 1990s, Maor continued to combine handicrafts and sewn decorative elements in works that subverted the canonical Israeli ethos of the "poverty of matter." This series of works from the 1970s, which is exhibited here for the first time, is based on ready-made sewing patterns borrowed from his mother's domestic world. They are exhibited alongside ornamental curtains that were created during the 1980s and 1990s, and which resemble the ritual curtains that conceal the Torah scroll in Jewish synagogues; based on fiber weaves and quilting, these later works - which were created in the aftermath of the war in Lebanon and the Intifada - are concerned with blindness in a political and social context, and contain images of various animals in mythological and allegorical contexts. In A Perfect War, for instance, a dying lion and a gazelle that is giving birth appear against a background of camouflage fabric, on both sides of an Oriental carpet. Maor's bitter and sober humor is similarly evident in later works, such as Zum Gesund Und Zum Leben (To Health and to Life), in which this Yiddish expression was written by means of computerized embroidery combined with a Venetian scene.