borrowed from craft practices, which are metamorphosed into their work. In conversations with the artists during the preparation of the exhibition, modernist artists and artistic movements who addressed the world of labor and industrialization were often mentioned as a source of inspiration (e.g. Futurists, Constructivists, and Israeli artists associated with the Social Realism that emerged around the establishment of the State). The art of the early 20th century was enchanted by the intense processes of industrialization and urbanization and the change in the status of the laborer following the crystallization of Communism and Socialism. These were manifested in exalting compositions, replete with momentum as well as human and mechanical motion. Most of the works in the exhibition, in contrast, are conspicuously characterized by a reduction of movement to a slight vibration or even total freezing in some of the works, and almost entirely devoid of human presence. Beyond the collapse of social and economic ideological currents arising in the context of the change in the representations of labor, the participating artists’ fascination with such imagery appears to be reflexive. While violating the binary perception of the art/craft relationship, they bring the futility inherent in functionless production in art into sharper focus. Suspension of the gaze on the labor images whose movement had been frozen strives to
pinpoint art as an ongoing process, in a state of constant evolution, that the viewer continues to charge and activate with his gaze, making them work. *** In 2008 Avi Sabah created two paintings which bear the inscription “Talpiot Dreams.” It is as though the
Avi Sabah, Talpiot Dreams 1, 2008, oil on paper
painting ironically asks to what extent the artist can escape in reverie when the industrial zone is just outside the studio window. Consciously or not, the industrial zone seems to have infiltrated Sabah’s work most forcefully. In the past year, he has transformed his studio into a type of improvised workshop for the production of knives and copper keys, a type of a small factory where archaeological findings are staged. Sabah adopted, as it were, the physical gesture involved in craft—serial production of an ostensibly functional tool. Unlike craft, however, in which a specific model is reproduced, Sabah’s knives, appearing in the wall installation Marcel’s Knives (2010) in the exhibition, have been subjected to