Living Together: Looking through the lens

Paper presented at

Susan Hazan
Curator of New Media and Curator of Living Together
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Introduction

The International Council of Museums,[1] (ICOM) celebrates International Museum Day[2] on the 18 May each year. The theme selected by the Advisory Committee for 2004, as well as the theme set for the annual conference was intangible heritage, recognising that ‘although the concept of heritage has been dominated by its tangible embodiments, intangible heritage is no less a vital ingredient of every civilisation’ (Pinna[3] 2003: 3).  A UNESCO meeting held in March 2001 adopted the provisional definition of intangible cultural heritage:

Peoples’ learned processes along with the knowledge, skills and creativity that inform and are developed by them, the products they create, and the resources, spaces and other aspects of social and natural context necessary to their sustainability; these processes provide living communities with a sense of continuity with previous generations and are important to cultural identity, as well as to the safeguarding of cultural diversity and the creativity of humanity.

(ibid.) 

While the term ‘text’ traditionally privileges written texts, in semiotic inquiry and media studies, the term also refers to non-linguistic texts: photographs, television, advertising, film, and dance. A text in this way then ‘has structure, specific qualities, meaning and which can be analysed and ‘read’ (Lister et al 2003: 391). This chapter describes exhibitions and objects that are located in the museum and the term is employed to include both artefacts and exhibitions in the museum context, in that both the artefact and the exhibition may be decoded in a semiotic reading.  This chapter investigates a specific kind of intangible text, an electronic text.  If museums can be understood to sustain community, identity and cultural diversity, as embodied in the tangible artefacts they collect and display, this chapter will explore whether the electronic, intangible text can inspire the same authenticity, authority and integrity as their tangible counterparts when they too are produced for, and disseminated by, a museum.   

The project ‘Living Together’ initiated by Member of Knesset Yuli Tamir, emerged from discussion in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) Education and Culture Committee about the difficulties that young people in Israel face in dealing with the complex reality of their lives.  The discussion revealed a range of negative stereotypes, fears and suspicions when young adults perceived others ‘different’ from them.  'Living Together' brought together one hundred and forty youth from all parts of Israel and offered them an opportunity to describe how they perceive the society that they are living in, how they feel about themselves, and how they feel about others who are different from them. Students came from all walks of Israeli society: from the affluent neighbourhoods of Tel Aviv, from agricultural schools in rural communities, Bedouin living in the Negev desert and religious students.  The young adults came from Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities and they spoke Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and Amharic.

Students were invited to the museum and at the end of the day, each student was given their own disposable camera and invited to describe their notion of ‘other’ using the analytic tools they had received during the visit, the exhibition texts, and a critical understanding of how photography can be used as a social tool. Drawing on their museum experience, students were directed to look through the lens into their own homes, schools and neighbourhoods, focusing on those in their own community they felt were different to them in some way.  The stories and images the young adults created produced critical insights into the complexity of cultural, national and religious subjectivity that comes with living together in the mosaic of Israeli life. The project culminated in a modest but prestigious photographic exhibition held in the lobby of the Knesset, and a comprehensive website that presented the images and voices of each participant.  The personal narratives were reproduced with the photographs in an online database accessible by image title, student’s name or by school with the original texts in Hebrew and Arabic subsequently translated to English. 

This chapter is divided into three parts.  The first part, The museum as an island of sanity, briefly discusses the role of the museum and its relationship with its constituents, in this case a multi-cultural, cross-section of young adults growing up in a country fraught with tension. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem represents an island of sanity, and at times of crisis in recent years has stepped in to relieve some of the pressure of living in a city that is struggling for peace. The second part, Looking through the lens describes the how project ‘Living Together’ unfolded in the museum where students explored the ways in which social and ideological practices can be framed through the lens of the camera in the gallery and studio workshop.   This section follows the students to their own investigations of ‘self’ and ‘other’ through photography and the production of new texts, both in a tradition print exhibition as well as the intangible texts, the written narratives and digital images subsequently exhibited over the ephemeral media of the Internet.  Museums have always embraced intangible heritage: oral testimonies, dance, music and story telling, and time-based and performed culture has always been integrated into the museum mission to collect and display cultural heritage.  ‘Living Together’ continues this tradition, mediating this future-heritage in electronic form both back to the students, in the museum tradition as well to the public.

The third section, Constructing the other accompanies the young adults in their encounter in the Photography Galleries and follows them into their homes, schools and communities. The over 540 images and narratives presented online and the 44 photographs exhibited in the Knesset reveal the wide range of different cultural perspectives represented and subject positions observed which together create the complex mosaic of living in Israel .

The museum as an island of sanity

Nurit Shilo-Cohen, Chief Curator of the Ruth Youth reflects on life under the shadow terrorism and war, describing how isolated events temporarily disrupt our social fabric and challenge our ability to be able to justify and rationalize day-to-day life (2001a: 4).  The museum is understood to represent a safe haven in terms of its physicality – after all the same guards who prevent the Picassos and Rembrandts from unwillingly leaving the premises also serve to obstruct any unwanted and hostile visitors from entering the carefully guarded perimeter of the museum campus.  But the physical respite of the museum is only part of the story. Since the unnerving tragedy of September 11^th, museums everywhere have become not only a physical island of sanity, but reach out to their visitors to offer a secure place to enable an emotional engagement that is set aside from the stress of daily life.  At a conference devoted to children’s museums, Shilo-Cohen discusses the role of a museum located in one of the world’s most stressful cities - Jerusalem - describing how ‘this new situation of an unpredictable world is a challenge to all of us.  It gives us a valuable opportunity to rethink the museum’s new role, to develop museum literacy, to think how to make the museum a place where one can feel secure, in a safe haven away from all the worries and uncertainties of the mad world outside, not just physically but more importantly, mentally’ (Shilo-Cohen 2001b).

The Ruth Youth Wing has often stepped in during times of stress where art and creativity have offered a welcome distraction from other matters.  During the first Gulf War in 1996, although the museum was open to the public, it had placed its precious Impressionist paintings in the storerooms for protection, and at a time when schools were still closed, the museum invited the city’s children to come into the art studio throughout the long, school-less days to paint.  ‘These huge paintings’ explains Shilo-Cohen, ‘were later hung in the temporarily vacant Impressionist Gallery and viewed by all visitors in the best natural light’ (ibid. 20012: 4).  The Youth Wing, with its 700 square meters of gallery space is noted for its annual, thematic exhibitions, and as the years have gone by, its galleries have been transformed from Comics, to Earth, to Mirrors to Time, to Hands, to Food and currently (in 2004), to Sports. Visitors rely on the Youth Wing to reinvent itself every year and to introduce fresh propositions to engage its visitors. 

The Israel Museum, one of the ten largest encyclopaedic museums in the world, serves local visitors from Jerusalem and throughout Israel as well as the thousands of visitors who come to the museum from all over the world.  Throughout the school year, our guides take children around the Youth Wing thematic exhibitions, as well as into the main museum with its Wings of Archaeology, Judaica and Jewish Ethnography and Fine Art.  The three curatorial wings of the main museum include 22 departments with extensive holdings of the archaeology of the Holy Land, and fine art holdings from Old Masters in European Art, through international contemporary art. In addition to the art collections, visitors throng to the Shrine of the Book to see the internationally renowned Dead Sea Scrolls, the five-acre Sculpture Garden designed by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and archaeology collections that reflect Israel 's position as a bridge between the great civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia.   

The fourth Wing in the Israel Museum is the Ruth Youth Wing, an art space for all ages, a laboratory for creativity and an Education Wing where some 100 curators, art historians, teachers, and artists develop and present family programs, gallery talks, school visits and studio art classes. For festivals, holidays and throughout the long summer break the museum becomes everyone’s favourite place and in order to be able to respond to all these different kinds of activities and different audiences the museum has to be attentive to its public in many different ways. 

Visitors come to museums for many reasons: for pleasure, to learn, and at times for an opportunity of just being together as the above mentioned mural painting in the gallery described.    At other times the museum can produce a poignant moment, which might resonate long after the actual, visit as is described by David Anderson.

A remarkable characteristic of museums is that so many people, of all ages and walks of life, have had exceptional and life enhancing experiences, through encounters with beautiful, old, rare, spectacular, ingenious, well-realized or evocative objects in museum settings, which they can remember vividly many years later.  It is one of the purposes of museums to achieve this.

 (Anderson 1997: 41)

Looking through the lens

In the autumn of 2003, students from ten schools from all parts of the country, representing different sectors of Israeli society, were invited to the Youth Wing where they entered into dialogue with Knesset Member Yuli Tamir, and artist/teacher Ayal Perry, concerning photography as a social tool.  The discussion evolved around the idea that photographs surrounding us in the media and in advertising (Barthes 1997) not only describe social discourses but also actively construct them. In a semiotic reading of the texts the students were encouraged to look beyond the photographs to the social and ideological messages imbedded within them.

The Photography Department, which has been mounting exhibitions since the early 1970s, has a collection totalling some 55,000 photographs, including many rare masterpieces, which are milestones in the history of photography. Moving to the galleries, the students visited two contemporary exhibitions where Youth Wing guides continued the discourse on the complexities of daily life in Israel in front of the photographic collections. The first of the two exhibitions - Control: Miki Kratsman and David Reeb - Photographs and Paintings illustrated the collaborations between the two artists since the mid-1980s. Kratsman's photographs of the raw, painful reality of life in Israel and the territories form the narrative, iconographic, and compositional starting point for Reeb's paintings. The exhibition included their collaborative and independent works in the mediums of painting, photography, and video.

The second exhibition - Revelation: Representations of Christ in Photography, described how photography, although a relatively young art form, has continued the enduring tradition in Western art of depicting images of Jesus and Christianity. Through a selection of nearly 150 photographs spanning the entire history of the medium, this exhibition examined the techniques and perspectives of photographers from early camera practitioners to contemporary artists – and the influence of other art forms on their photographic depictions of Christianity. Using these exhibitions, students were encouraged to think about concepts of ‘self’ and ‘other’, and how the cameras lens could be used to define these otherwise invisible boundaries.

Fig. I Rauf Mamedov , The Last Supper, 1998
Chromogenic print, © The Israel Museum Collection, Jerusalem

From the brief encounter with the two exhibition texts, we had hoped to provide the students with the analytic tools of the photographer whom, we argued, may choose to use the lens in many different ways. Susan Sontag suggests that the camera can be exploited for the aestheticizing of reality, reminding us how ‘one finds that there is beauty or at least interest in everything, seen with an acute enough eye’. She also reminds us of a second attitude where ‘cameras implement the instrumental view of reality by gathering information that enables us to make a more accurate and much quicker response to whatever is going on’ (Sontag 1997:176). 

During the museum visit we drew attention to the idea that photography could also be not only about documenting reality, but about what Sontag describes as ‘making reality atomic, manageable, and opaque’ (ibid: 23) and the ways in which the artist mobilises the camera to focus on specific social and political processes is made visible and in focus by the reductive framing devise of the photograph. Using this newly acquired toolbox, students could then try it out for themselves, not simply as an aestheticizing or documentary tool to reproduce reality, but in a critical and meaningful engagement with themselves and their surroundings in an exploration of Self and Other.  The dynamic described here suggest that the collections may be used to develop museum literacy, in that these students would hopefully gained insight into how to read the medium of photography - as a reflexive tool that describes, and inscribes artist intent.  The newly honed tool of museum literacy would be further validated if students are able to read other exhibitions or other museums in the future or if what they had learned in this visit resonated in some meaningful way for them once they had left the museum campus.

During the afternoon, students began to analyse what they had seen and learned and using photocopies of the images from the gallery went on to produce a series of collages based on their own interpretations. Before leaving the museum, each student was given a disposable Agfa camera and invited to investigate their own communities, focusing on those they felt were different to them in some way….  Tamir explains ‘we were curious to find out what are young adults afraid? Who are their friends? With whom do they identify with and of whom are they suspicious of?’ 'Living Together' invited young adults to 'speak through photos' and to confront their feelings through the camera. 

Out of the 540 photographs that resulted from the project, 44 photographs were selected for exhibition at the Knesset in Jerusalem from the 1-26 February 2004. The archive of the complete collection is available online and is accompanied by the descriptions of the photographic moments in the students’ own language, with translations into Hebrew, Arabic, and English. The photographs and narratives as observed by the young adults form a mosaic of photographs and words, - of images and feelings - that come together to define the warp and the weft of the fabric of contemporary Israeli society. 

Constructing the other

She adjusted a cushion.  “Father and I find your religious zeal a bit of a mystery.”

“It is a mystery.”

“Hmmm.  I don’t mean it that way.  Listen, my darling, if you are going to be religious, you must be either a Hindu, a Christian or a Muslim.  You heard what they said on the esplanade.”

“I don’t see why I can’t be all three. Mamaji has two passports.  He’s Indian and French.  Why can’t I be a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim?”

”That’s different, France and India are nations on earth.”

“How many nations are there in the sky?”

She thought for a second.  “One. That’s the point.

One nation, one passport.”

(Yann Martel, The Life of Pi, 2003: 98).

Religious and national identity in Israel is no less complex, and can be even more baffling when young adults realise that there is a lot at stake growing up in a community that is fraught with ethnic, religious and national tensions.  Young adults construct their sense of identity as they locate themselves within the pluralities of self in race, gender, social class, and sexual orientation.  The construction of these pluralities is negotiated in juxtaposition of ‘Otherness’. 

Notions of ‘other’ have been often debated in post-colonial, poststructuralist and feminist theory.  Drawing from a Lacanian tradition, poststructuralists, Derrida, Kristeva, and Foucault recognise how language operates in an inter-subjective space - a space where social relationships are defined and contested.   Acting in, and across these discursive, social fields, the home, the school, and the neighbourhood, human beings construct their sense of identity in a response to the pushes and pulls of different competing institutions.  Each institution exerts its own historically specific social control, and identity develops as an ongoing site of struggle, not coalescing around a unified subject, but evolving as a plurality of selves.  The exhibition served to focus the discussion on the iconographic evidence of language [in this case of photography] that defined social relationships, which had been made opaque in the photographic narratives.

Critical to discourses of self is the acknowledgment of ‘other’.  Frantz Fanon (1967) describes how the category "white" is dependent for its stability on its negation of "black".   Fanon’s binary Self/Other of the colonized and colonizer is projected onto the racially determined categories of Black and White.  Edward Said (1995) argues Orientalism is the West's way of coming to terms with the experience of the ‘Other’ through an essentializing of an entire people where, according to Said, ‘the two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other’ (1995:5).  Both sets of binaries acknowledge the Lacanian (1977) concept of the ‘Mirror Stage’ where the infant forms as an illusion of itself identified by the word ‘I’. Children growing up in contemporary society order their lives around the different discourses that confront them, as they simultaneously become sibling, friend, child, and student.  Over time, as the sense of self evolves it carries within it the ‘other’ – viewed as those who cross the tenuous border as the one who is not like me or the one who is not me. 

Students rose to their challenge of ‘identifying other’, and resolved their investigations in many different ways, as the archive illustrates.  Notions of ‘other’ were externally defined through socially constructed positioning, in the home, in the neighbourhood, by skin colour, through social status, by national or religious affinity.  Sometimes the ‘other’ was located within.  Moran Cohen, age 12 from Remez High School in Bnei Brak, (a religious school) describes the other as…’a person who is different is not always accepted and is sometimes discriminated against because of his appearance or background’.  Her ‘others’ are the immigrants who came from Indian and Russia and who study with her and who may speak a different language at home or come from a different cultural background to her.  While Moran is aware of discrimination ‘because of appearance or background’ she also comments: ‘It doesn’t matter where you came from, you will be the same as others’ but her explanation must be read together with her hauntingly melancholy images which tell a different story from her seemingly optimistic words.

‘This is what I play with;’ explains Buddy Suliman Alanami Age: 12 describing his bike parked against an ochre wall.  Buddy describes life in the desert, ‘The school bus that takes us to school. This is how we get to school every day’ he explains, taking care to describe in detail ‘The well hakanava this is how we drink water’, […] These are our sheep. They suit our lifestyle’.  Through the electricity generator he is acknowledging how he positions himself and his own community as being different from the other students he met at the museum. ‘It’s important they know that we don’t have electricity’ he explains, and like Omar Abu Fricha, also from the Abucranat Beduin High School of the Negev their startlingly beautiful images describe life in the desert – ‘The milk pan and the teakettle, I pour for everybody’ and his obvious pride in his own roles and responsibilities at home.

Students described all kinds of otherness, acknowledging how skin colour or ethnic dress separates one person from another as well as religious affiliation as illustrated in Mahud Abuchemed’ Saint Joseph's Church – Lod.  Rita Coleman identifies the arbitrary separation of the infirm from the healthy in her wheelchair image from Rotschild Hospital, Emergency Room commenting ‘that people can manage to get around on these chairs seems different from me’.

This project invited young adults to 'speak through photos' and to confront their feelings through the camera.  The museum experience had set up the dialogue and had provided the students with the analytic tools to read the exhibition text.  The gallery experience had sharpened their appreciation of the aesthetics of photography and through an understanding of how photographs act to frame social and ideological discourse; the young adults were then able to take up this tool for their own investigations.

Fig. 14‘Living Together’ exhibition opening at the Knesset

The museum platform had provided the tangible museum texts that had triggered the process and the project culminated in a presentation both of the tangible (temporary) exhibition in the Knesset as well as the intangible (permanent) online presentation, accessible to all, and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Judging by their reactions at the Knesset opening, the students were eager to receive the printed ‘bookmark’ http://www.imj.org.il/youthwing/livingtogether that identified their personal and shared space online.   The newly unveiled website became the space where they could read their own words and images as well as those of others. Both the physical exhibition and the intangible, online exhibition had provided closure for the experiential process where the students could derive satisfaction that his or her efforts that had been acknowledged and elevated for public recognition.  The bookmark represented the key to the liminal space where they had each etched out their own place to gaze and be gazed upon (Mulvey 1989) and the Internet - the world that links reality TV, the immediacy of chat, and the intimacy of web cams was a world they already felt a part of. 

Fig. 15 Screenshot ‘Living Together’ Website

This was a space where each and every one of the students could access his or her work as well as the ‘other’[s], and in doing so could also begin to understand that we are all, each in our own way different from each other while at the same time we all come to reflect and represent the ‘other’.

‘We hope that these photographs may be used as an educational tool that we hope will encourage open discussion about the fears and hopes for the changing realities of Israeli society.  Israeli society is a complex one, a community that is full of fear and doubt, which demands that young adults need to deal with ever changing realities that are not easy either to interpret or to confront.  We hope that this project enables youth to come to term with themselves, with others, and will contribute to the development of Israeli society, as an open and more tolerant society’.

Yuli Tamir, Knesset Member, February 2004

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            uncertain environment’, in Hand to Hand, Association of Children’s Museums,

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Living Together

http://www.imj.org.il/youthwing/livingtogether

All images © The Israel Museum Collection, Jerusalem

The Project ‘Living Together’, initiated by Knesset Member Yuli Tamir emerged from discussion in the Knesset, Education and Culture Committee in collaboration with the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, headed by Director James S. Snyder and The Peres Center for Peace in Jerusalem.

I would like to thank Tova Shidlovski, Curator of School Programs who directed the program in the Museum, Ayal Perry, Youth Wing artist/teacher, Youth Wing guides, Doron Eisenhamer, Manager of Computer and Information Systems Department, and especially Raanan Zakay and Amit Gal for their creative website design and development.

Special thanks to Nurit Shiloh-Cohen, Chief Curator of the Ruth Youth Wing, Ella Regev, Associate Curator of Guided Tours and Susan Strul, Assistant to the Director not only for their active onvolvement to the project but also for their support and input in preparing this chapter.