Public Art Review, Issue 41, Fall-Winter 2009
On a side street deep in the center of Tel Aviv—a city known to Israelis as the bubble—a young Muslim girl confronts passersby. Her face is framed by a hijab. Her hands clutch a book bearing a stylized Islamic star and crescent to her chest. And she stares. Unblinking.
She wouldn’t be out of place in Yafo, the Arab city south of Tel Aviv. But here, stenciled onto a wall by Paris-based artist C215, her gaze is blindsiding, the weather-worn purple and white image shocking. Is she out of place? Or are the Tel Avivians?
If mainstream Israeli art is a creative result of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as it is often aligned, then street art is a more urgent product of this same environment. Outside the rarefied world of the galleries, street art bursts the Tel Aviv bubble, revealing and seeping back into Israel’s complicated psyche.
“In LA you paint and no one cares,” artist K74, Israel-born and LA-raised, comments. “In Israel, people get in touch.”
On a recent visit to Tel Aviv, K74 used an abandoned building as a canvas for his image of two men: one’s head covered by a Palestinian flag; the other an Israeli flag. Their lips and noses almost touch but are separated by surgical masks. Draped in nationalism and separated by a stifling, but removable, barrier, they are unable to meet.
K74 put the image up on a Wednesday night. Thursday morning he woke up to laudatory emails. Clearly, he’d struck a nerve.
The public’s response is crucial to K74 who, like many street artists, sees his work as a dynamic process. When K74 first put up “The Kiss of Death” in LA, sans flags, it didn’t garner much of a reaction. “People thought it was about the swine flu,” he says.
Though K74 insists that his art generally isn’t political, he feels that the change of location—and the flags the setting compelled him to add—gave “The Kiss of Death” its voice.
Ame72 has seen a similar shift in his work since moving to Tel Aviv from his native Britain six years ago. “It has become more message-driven, more thought-provoking,” he says. “But not everything I do relates to the situation.”
Ame72 is best known for his Lego men. They sometimes teeter on one foot, trying to keep their balance as he carries a pencil longer than his body. Sometimes they are mischievous, fleeing the scene, spray paint canister in toy hand. The Lego men are always bright and playful—a refreshing surprise in a city Ame72 describes as “very grey.”
And most importantly to Ame72, they make people smile.
“Someone told me that he smiles every time he sees the Lego man. Every day. That’s the most gratifying feedback I’ve received,” Ame72 says. He points out that in that respect, the Lego men aren’t specific to Israel.
But some of his work is.
During Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s recent incursion into Gaza, Ame72 felt compelled to bring street art to areas “directly impacted by the conflict.” During a ceasefire, he headed to Ashkelon and Ashdod, two cities in the south of Israel that had been struck by Hamas-fired rockets. There he did seven paintings on derelict buildings that “looked like they’d been bombed, had been bombed, or were next to buildings that had been bombed,” Ame 72 says.
The Ashkelon and Ashdod series were whimsical—a cloud raining frogs, bouncing bunnies, a Lego man taking aim at a bubble with a paint canister. “The images look smiley and happy,” he remarks, “but there is a message to everything. The setting affects the art.”
And the artist, in turn, impacts the setting.
Blooming in unlikely places, Inspire’s simple flowers are scattered throughout Tel Aviv. Discordant in the urban landscape, they encourage the viewer to question the world around them. Inspire comments, “[M]y flowers [are] both challenges and color in the public space. [They] are an act of self-determination… and in any prison, or state, the self-determined act will be seen as rebellion.”
Like many of Tel Aviv’s street artists, Inspire is a transplant. As much as Israel is a country of immigrants, street art lends itself to migration—street artists often work in multiple cities and the movement, though widespread, owes its roots to the graffiti and street art scenes that flourished in the 1980s in urban America. “Here in the Middle East, we’re just riding a wave that others have begun,” Inspire reflects.
Still, Israel is unique in that there are few homegrown street artists. “[T]he creative mind here is oppressed,” Inspire says, “The truly creative artists are few but dedicated.”
Klone Yourself represents, perhaps, the archetypal Israeli street artist. Having immigrated from the FSU to Israel as a child, he hails from abroad but his work is rooted in the country’s imagination. His creatures—slate grey or dark brown with long snouts, sharp protruding teeth, and claw-like hands—are wheat-pasted on the sides of Tel Aviv’s trademark Bauhaus buildings.
Klone Yourself remarks, “I was striving to make a new species, mixing animals with humans—the other kind of predators and a much more dangerous one. The human predator is about getting more and more. There’s no end to our ‘hunting.’ We destroy our surroundings, hurting both nature and people. There’s a need for some kind of evolution.”
K74’s “The Kiss of Death” stands alongside a large wheat-pasted image by Pilpeled, who is a native Israeli. An infant peeks out from the mouth of a monstrous mask, pushed back to his brow. His mouth is agape; his gaze is turned towards the horizon. There are dark elements: the yawning mask is grotesquely wrinkled, its hands are more adult than child, and its tremendous size is disturbingly incongruous with nature. Still, the image remains wonder hopeful—like Israel.
K74 felt his piece was driving at a similar message. “Let’s take the masks off,” he says. K74 thinks it’s crucial for Palestinians and Israelis to see each other—and to understand the narratives manifested in each other’s public art. “Street art is the language of the people. We need to see what the Palestinians are putting on their walls,” he says.
*Photo courtesy K74