page_title: Want of Matter
section_title: Raffi Lavie – “Child of Tel Aviv”
hierarchical_section_title: Want of Matter / Raffi Lavie – “Child of Tel Aviv”
caption_attribution_description: Painting עברית: ציור
context_page_description: “Want of Matter” is an Israeli style of art that existed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Characteristics of this style include the use of “meager” creative materials, artistic sloppiness, and criticism of the social reality and the myth of Israel society. Among the artists identified with “Want of Matter” are Raffi Lavie, Yair Garbuz, Michal Na'aman, Tamar Getter and Nahum Tevet.
context_section_description: In the article by Breitberg-Semel that accompanied the “Want of Matter” exhibition, the artist Raffi Lavie was presented as the typical representative of the style.  Lavie's works put forth the idea of “The City of Tel Aviv” as a combination of European-Zionist  modernism and neglect and abandonment.  As the years passed, the image of Lavie himself, dressed sloppily in shorts, with rubber flip-flops on his feet, arrogant, “native,” and “prickly,” became the typical expression of this aesthetic school. Lavie's works, which included childish scribbles, collages of magazine illustrations, advertisements of Tel Aviv cultural events,  stickers with words “head” or “geraniums” written on them, and above all the plywood sheet, sawed to a consistent size of 120 cm., and painted in whitewash, became the most recognizable symbols of  “Want of Matter.”
  In addition to developing a comprehensive visual style, Lavie encouraged discussion of his works on a formalist level. In interviews, Lavie refused to relate to any interpretations of his work other than “the language of art” in its modernist aesthetic incarnation.  In spite of clearly iconographic images in his works, Lavie insisted that these images were of no historical significance.  Furthermore, the use of collage and techniques that lacked an artistic “halo” were intended, according to both Lavie and Breitberg-Semel, to erode and undermine the significance of visual images. Lavie's students, however, continued to cultivate a preoccupation with form, as well as a continuing relationship with the modernist  tradition, both of which caused problems for Lavie's didactic separation of “form” and “content.”
  Yair Garbuz formed a relationship with Lavie when he was just a young boy. For a number of years Lavie was Garbuz's private teacher. Later Garbuz went  from being a student to being a senior instructor at the “HaMidrasha” (School of Art). His work from these years created a link between the symbols that connected  the ethos of the Zionist undertaking, as reflected in popular culture, with social and political criticism.
  His two-dimensional works from the 1970s  and 1980s include a mix of newspaper photos, documentary photographs, texts and other objects, combined in compositions that have no clear hierarchy. Some of his works, such as "The Evenings (Arabs) Pass By Quietly" (1979) and "The Arab Village in Israel Very Much Resembles the Life of our Forefathers in Ancient Times" (1981), criticized stereotypes rampant in Israeli society.  For the cover he designed for No. 11 of the journal Siman Kriah [Exclamation Point] (May 1980), Garbuz inserted a photograph from the newspaper Davar  of a self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh captioned “Van Gogh in Tel Aviv.”  Under the reproduction, Garbuz added a sort of poem, complete with nikud [vocalization] and illustrations, discussing the significance of labor. This work was one of a number of his works in which he presented his artistic activity as an artist in Israel - which he perceived as a distant and outlying place — as a kind of anarchism. Along with these two-dimensional works, Garbuz produced art videos, installations, and other forms of artistic activities in this spirit.
  Henry Schlesnyak, an American-born artist, juxtaposed collage with American Pop Art, and American symbolism—the most significant of which is his portrait of Abraham Lincoln – with scenes from Israeli art as reflected in various newspaper articles. Through this juxtaposition, Schlesnyak pointed out  the moral aspect  of artistic activity and his view of the place of Israeli art and the Israeli artist within it.  Another layer of his work was composed of the “Tel Aviv” aesthetic, which played the role of critic in his works. For example, reproductions of famous works of art were painted over in industrial shellac to give them the feeling of paintings by the European “Old Masters.”  The “Hebrew translation” of this feeling included the devaluing of the paintings by “flashes of stains on the surface of the paintings, dirt, ‘want of matter’, thereby bringing it down to th
caption: The Gospel According to the Bird (1977) by Michal Na'aman. Acrylic, Photographs and Letrset on plywood, 120 x 195 cm. Tel Aviv Museum of Art
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