Israel Vibration

One reason why this blog has been heavier on linkage than proper stuff lately has been various other writings and projects getting in the way. One of them involves a forthcoming piece on the politics of architecture in Israel-Palestine - in short, going from the international style of the '30s to Eyal Weizman's recent, staggering work on architectures of control and separation, via Moshe Safdie's super-brutalist mimesis of the Arab village. This has involved researching an area previously entirely opaque to me, somewhat embarrassingly as I'm supposed to be writing a thesis on art and socialism in the 20s and 30s - the political aesthetics of interwar Mandate Palestine, the Soviet and Weimar inflected preoccupations of early Labour Zionism and its workerist modernism: the photomontage above uses a statue of the 'Hebrew Worker', erected in 1934 and rebuilt in the '80s.



This post though is mainly an excuse to link to the photostream of Isotype75 on Flickr, which features a very impressive archive of Hebrew Graphics, some of which showing a remarkably Constructivist bent; what (erroneously) gets called 'Bauhaus style' in Tel Aviv, and a larger set on Haifa featuring photos of the frequently rather battered state of the 1930s buildings. All are fully credited and often interlinked. This fascinating collection shows an aesthetic filled with an imagery of technology, new architectural space and collectivity similar to this place's usual preoccupations, only rearranged in a different, perhaps stranger order. Though with one absolutely enormous elephant in the room.