Herzliya Museum, founded on a collection of old paintings donated by Herzliya resident Eugene da Villa in the early 1960s, was originally located in an apartment on 15 Bar Ilan Street in the city. The museum’s current residence, designed in the Brutalist style by another Herzliya resident, Yaakov Rechter (together with Moshe Zarchi and Micha Peri), was opened to the public in 1975.[2] It was built as a combination between a commemorative building (Beit Yad Labanim) and a museum and cultural center.[3] The modern museum building, which recalls a fortress or bomb shelter, is characterized by formal and conceptual gravity  and modesty. Noa Zait’s 1998 photograph captures an ordinary moment in the museum’s routine. The bags of school children who have just started a guided tour are heaped in the corner of the frame, awaiting their owners. Until 2000, the entrance to the museum was through Beit Yad Labanim, and this is where the photograph was taken. A 2015 photograph by Orith Youdovich depicts a relatively marginal, usually unseen area of the building. This image, with its moderate gray tones, focuses on the texture and shades of the walls around the museum’s back entrance.  In 2000, the museum was re-inaugurated after having been remodeled and enlarged by architects Yaakov Rechter and Amnon Rechter, his son. The remodeling also included the addition of a separate entrance to the museum, setting it apart from the commemorative part of the building. The museum is redefined as one whose focus is on young, contemporary art, both Israeli and international.  Rotem Balva’s video Rolling, filmed in 2002, shows the artist as she is rolling all around the renewed museum’s empty galleries. The way it was originally screened traced the artist’s act:[4] eight monitors were placed at various locations around the museum, at the same spots where the documenting camera had stood. And so the viewer, walking through the museum’s galleries, followed the action’s circuitous route. The artist’s action traced the architectural circulation route through the renewed museum, connecting its historical and contemporary parts while reproducing in advance the viewer’s own route. Her performative act declares the up-to-datedness and contemporariness of the venue’s artistic language while affirming, through a physical and conceptual Sisyphean act, the key part she herself plays in it as an artist.  In 2008, Shibetz Cohen produced inside the museum building his introverted, solemn graphite works, Beit Yad Labanim, Herzliya Museum. The artist pressed white cardboard sheets to the building’s exposed-concrete walls and copied their unique texture onto the paper by repeatedly tracing it with graphite. Exposed concrete was one of the original building’s key features, which the architects preserved in the remodeling. They used it ot only in the building’s outer envelope, but also as an architectural element and statement of values within the
white cubes of the galleries.[5] A large, dominant concrete wall, about twenty meters long, was built in the building’s new entrance hall. Exposed concrete was a key feature of Brutalism – a modern architectural style prevalent in post- WWII Europe, engaged in rebuilding its ruins, until the early 1970s.[6] Brutalist construction was quick, industrialized, functional, relatively inexpensive, and devoid of any ornamental excess. It advocated exposure of building materials and methods as a form of expression both ethical and aesthetic. Israeli architects who adopted Brutalist notions during the same period endeavored to use it as an expression of the unique local identity of the State of Israel at a time of national struggle and hardship. At the time, concrete was associated to a great extent with the local modernist ethos and ideology. It was regarded as expressive of the essential characteristics of Israeli society, such as informal directness, pragmatism, resourcefulness and nonreligiousness. While these aspects were greatly appreciated, Brutalism was equally criticized as stressing qualities such as aggressiveness, erasure of differences, superficiality, and disengagement with tradition and the past. Irit Tamari’s Screensaver was created as a sitespecific installation. She meticulously photographed the concrete wall at the museum’s entrance and then printed its segments, one by one, at a 1:1 scale. She cut these prints and reattached them, creating a curtain of many folds with which she then covered the photographed wall. This work not only refers to the iconic significance of the concrete wall in the architectural and museal context, but also to the very notion of artistic representation – that is, the signifiedsignifier relationship that underpins any work of art and the manifold relationship it bears to reality. The work’s title, Screensaver, taken from the digital context, raises further questions about present-day distance between the illusory and the real, and between image and matter.
A similar tension is found in Hadas Hassid’s works, which were first presented at the Herzliya Museum in an exhibition of 2009 Ministry of Culture Award recipients. In these drawings Hassid meticulously traced with colored pencils pages from the museum’s web site. These pages, including texts and indications of where her works are installed on the museum’s architectural plan, came up on the artist’s computer screen when she Googled her own name. Drawn by hand, these web pages chart personal aches and desires. Consequently, they indicate an expansion of the museum’s boundaries, since it now exists not only in the real and virtual spaces but also in the artist’s psyche and in the cultural field.

[1] This exhibition was greatly inspired by Brian O’Doherty’s foundational text, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
[2] Zvi Efrat, The Israeli Project: Building and Architecture, 1948 –1973 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2001) (Hebrew).
[3] Ruti Direktor, “Herzliya Museum as a Parable,” in Osnat Rechter (ed.), Yaakov Rechter: Architect (Herzliya: Herzliya Museum of Art; and Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2003), pp. 176 –190 (Hebrew).
[4] The work was part of the group exhibition “Inner Sanctum,” 2002, curated by Efrat Livny.
[5] Gideon Ofrat, “Permeating Reinforced Concrete,” in Rechter, Yaakov Rechter: Architect, pp. 14–25 (Hebrew).
[6] See Brutalist Architecture, a blog by Dr. Hadas Shadar and Architect Omri Oz, 2012, at <http://www.brutalistarchitecture. org>.

Less Reading...