And there was evening And there was morning, One day
Yossi Breger
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 24th February – 11th June 2011
Francis Mckee – Curator
and catalogue (And there was evening And there was morning, One day)
Hardcover, 259 p., 158 ill., (107 colour), Hebrew/English
ISBN: 978-965-539-027-8
Cat. No. 10447
The exhibition presents 159 photos, all new, in various formats, taken since 2007 in
various places around the world—Tel Aviv, Berlin, Cologne, Havana, Paris, Brussels,
Rome, Beijing, Stockholm—in the course of daily life. The photos—of landscapes,
buildings, spaces, objects, people—tell a story of being in front of a thing, the
fundamental things that form the infrastructure of human environment.
They are precise and thoughtful, articulated in pictorial, emotional and classical
formal language; their accumulation creates a general conceptual model of a life story
and a world, time–space relations constructed by light and revealing a personal and
sensual touch with elements of nature and culture. Yossi Breger (b. France, 1960),
recipient of the 1996 Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli Art Prize, is a senior
lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design MFA Program and Department of
Photography, which he headed during 2000–2006.
This exhibition was curated for the museum after two years of extensive
conversations with the artist Yossi Breger. It was designed as a major exhibition and
retrospective of Breger’s work and the selection process was a joint effort between
artist and curator. Breger is important not only as a photographer and artist in his own
right but for his work as Professor of Photography in Bezalel, where he fostered a
distinctive and influential generation of Israeli photographers.
‘Anarchy in the Hive’, Afterall – Summer Issue, 2011.
An extended essay on ‘Social Entomology’, an installation by the Mexican artist
Minerva Cuevas.
Social Entomology occupies a key place in Cuevas’ practice. It draws together many
of the implications in the work that precedes it and it lays a foundation for the work
that she has planned beyond it. It represents the culmination of a long period of
collecting and research, extending her work far into new modes of display and subject
matter. The installation itself could be considered in three parts – there is the sound
piece, ‘Insect Concert’, which permeates the entire space; there is a set of six tables
forming a circle in the room; and there are a series of floor based projection
microscopes casting images onto the surrounding walls.
‘Social Entomology’ draws on a quotation from the German 19th century scientist,
Rudolph Virchow, in which he compares human society to a large organism
composed of interdependent cells. In my essay, I explore the installation in the light
of works such as The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human
Understanding (1987) by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, two Chilean
biologists, who developed a new biological theory of cognition in the 1980s.
I also examine the wider political context that Cuevas is working within. I cite, for
example, the children’s fables composed by the Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos
which address current political issues within the limits of the traditional genre as in
Durito III (Neo-Liberalism and the Labor Movement).
In the final part of the essay I relate the work to wunderkammer and cabinets of
curiosity, discussing the installation’s roots in traditions of scientific collecting. I also
look at the work’s relationship to other recent pieces by Cuevas such as ‘Phenomena’,
‘La veganza del elefante’ and ‘Disidencia’.
‘Headless Man/Topless Bar’, 6 part essay over 6 issues of The First/Last Newspaper,
Dexter Sinister, New York for Performa 09.
A series of six essays produced as part of The First/Last Newspaper, by Dexter
Sinister for Performa 09 festival in New York. The newspaper’s editors were cited
opposite the New York Times offices and over several weeks compiled, designed and
printed six issues of a newspaper. Various writers around the world contributed copy
on issues surrounding the current state of journalism and the future of printed
newspapers.
I was asked to submit a series of six pieces across the editions. Each was published
under the collective title ‘Headless Body/Topless Bar’ and they examined subjects
such as sensational stories, the art of obituaries, cryptic crosswords, sports writing,
long features and the legacy of New Journalism.
In the essays I attempt to locate the reader’s loyalty to newspapers and reading
pleasure in the margins of the genre rather than in the need to gather ‘news’
information. While news is an obvious important factor in any paper, it is the small
regular pleasures such as the crossword or the obituaries that breed specific brand
loyalties.
I also look at the growth of long, exploratory features in the 1970s and their eventual
decline in the face of political and corporate pressures.
Throughout the various pieces there is a stylistic focus on the sheer pleasures of
language, something encouraged by Dexter Sinister. The design of the newspaper also
underlined the visual impact of the classic broadsheet and the stamina and immediacy
of the project for all involved evoked the long tradition of deadlines.
‘Live Evil’, Liminal Spaces, The Centre for Contemporary Art, Holon and The
Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art, 2009.
‘Shot by Both Sides’, Liminal Spaces, The Centre for Contemporary Art, Holon and
The Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art, 2009.
Two pieces published in a collection produced by the Digital Arts Centre in Holon
following three major symposia in Palestine, Germany and Israel.
Organizers from Palestine and Israel brought together contemporary artists from both
countries and abroad to work and discuss issues in Ramallah, Leipzig and Holon. My
own contribution was to deliver a paper in the first conference in Ramallah, to chair
the sessions in Leipzig and to write a short story based on my experiences over the
three-year period of the project.
In the paper ‘Shot by Both Sides’, later published in Liminal Spaces, I outline a
history of the mural tradition in Northern Ireland and the political context in which it
evolved. The paper looked at the much wider context of art production within Norther
Ireland throughout the period of the Troubles. I highlighted the pressures artists were
under to create works that were propagandistic and politically aligned to one side or
another. This raised questions of how an artist can ignore or respond to a surrounding
political situation and how to assess a work that is designed as propaganda – issues
clearly at play in Palestine in particular.
The short story that also was published in the same collection grew out of
conversations with a Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour. It is essentially a piece of scifi drawing on the nuclear facilities in Israel and ideologies of difference. It is rooted in
an interest in how genre fiction can transcend its supposed limits. I cite Slavoj Zizek’s
comments on the monstrous in Alien and set the work in the acres of rubble
surrounding Arafat’s compound and tomb in Ramallah. It also included two
photographs and marks a personal turning point in which I have begun to incorporate
photography into my practice.