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From the March-April issue of Print Magazine:

No Sign of the Dove

Rub-down death icons, Hebrew-slang flipbooks, reimagined bookjackets – Israel’s hardworking design students do it all. Just don’t assign them

a peace poster.

By Ellen Shapiro

“We speak a funny language. No one else can do our logos,” pointed out David Grossman, chairman of the graphic design department at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Ramat Gan, Israel. On the day I visited last September some very good logos were posted on the pin-up boards. The other work—from typical freshman cartooning to professional-level senior projects—demonstrated that Shenkar could be a model for design schools everywhere.But this is work that could not have been done anywhere else. Language is a big factor. In this little country smaller in size than New Jersey, everything imported, from i-Pods to cornflakes, has to be packaged in Hebrew. And designers are needed to promote and package the products made in Israel’s own burgeoning industries. Eighty new graphic designers graduate each year from this four-year school near Tel Aviv, which has 2,000 engineering, graphic, industrial, interior, textile, fashion and jewelry design students, Almost all of them get good jobs right away. But design education here is not just about serving business. These students have other things on their minds. There is depth and compassion in their work, which comes out of their life experiences as much as their talent and training. After high school, two to three years of service in the Israel Defense Forces is compulsory for almost all 18-year-olds of both sexes. After the army it’s customary to spend, say, six months touring Thailand or India before entering a university—or art school.Their work is informed by the political and emotional ferment in Israel. From a romantic viewpoint, modern Israel is the realization of a mystical vision of Jews scattered around the globe who longed for 2,000 years to return to their ancestral homeland. On a more practical level, the country has not yet perfected that vision. For all its accomplishments, it’s a place of tensions, conflicts, ironies. There are 15 political parties and 100 times that many opinions. Add this to the constant threat of terrorism, tensions between Jews and Arab Israelis, and everything else you see on the news. But don’t come to this campus—actually an urban complex surrounded by apartment buildings, shopping centers, and skyscrapers—expecting to see peace posters. The work is more subtle and in many ways more inspirational or disturbing (or both) than even the best vintage peace poster. “Having war as a constant for 60 years, what can I say? I don’t want to make a dove, a gun,” explained Barbara Degtiar, a 2006 graduate. “If a professor assigned a peace poster, the students would say, ‘No, no, we don’t want to hear about it.’” These students, who look and dress like college students everywhere, just want to be “normal.” Even so, broad themes of peace, war, and social dispossession bubble to the surface in almost all their work, in ways I sense they might not acknowledge themselves.More than a few projects are critical of Israeli society. Dina Ostrovsky’s artist’s book in the form of an identity card chronicles the discrimination suffered by non-Jewish immigrants as well as “mixed families” in which the mother isn’t Jewish. In such instances, the children are not recognized as Jews by the Orthodox authorities who uphold the religious rules in this largely secular state. Esin Balli examines relations between neighbors in anonymous apartment blocks. Other projects celebrate Israeli culture. Igal Hodirker created a “Zion” brand and packaging for consumer products made in Israel. Much of the work is personal: the world through the eyes of a migraine sufferer, a student with attention-deficit disorder, an identical twin.“They really cook you,” says Degtiar of the program. She came to Israel at age two with her Argentinean-born parents, themselves the children of Russian immigrants, who fled to Israel from Beunos Aires in the 1970s, avoiding the plight of Jews who had become desparachos (disappeared ones) under the ruling military junta. Like many Israelis, she learned English from movies and television; in her case, Star Trek and Christian preachers on Lebanese TV. After a stint as an IDF intelligence officer and two years in Jerusalem at Betzalel Academy, Israel’s fine-art-oriented design school, she transferred to Shenkar. Her senior project was a design for the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, the Columbian-born recipient of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her goal was to translate García Márquez’s magic realism, in which time is circular and the impossible happens easily, into graphic design. “I wanted to find a new way of using a book,” Degtiar says. “A new experience of a jacket, lined with hints and touches where you start to see the magic happen.” Michal Kimhi Shtabi poignantly chronicled her experiences as a military liaison whose job it was to inform families of soldiers killed in the line of duty. Her artist’s book, which echoes the look of army manuals, is the memento of an otherwise happy-go-lucky 19-year-old thrust into the role of grief counselor. Through it, I got to know a young woman who made dreaded house calls and supported bereaved families through the funeral, the shiva (seven days of mourning), and many visits after. “I became like a robot,” she recalls. “I had to put on my uniform, knock on the door, write the reports, deliver the life insurance check.” Her project combines the precision of military protocol with the absurdity of Dada. There is a heartrending diagram of the “pillow” given to the dead soldier’s parents: a black velvet cushion on which is pinned his or her unit tag, stripes and medals (it was her job to make them).. Another spread shows sample text for gravestones: He Died in a combat operation. “I did it for a year and a half,” she says. “I saw more than 20 corpses.” Now Shtabi is working in a three-person firm, designing books, logos and brands for small retail stores. Tamar Gil’s work deals with memories in an entirely different way. Through a brand identity for a fictional vintage clothing store called Elephant, she commemorates the needlework the foremothers of today’s Israelis made in their native countries. Raised on a kibbutz that built irrigation equipment, Gil began her higher education at Betzalel, but found the location overlooking Arab territories “too scary—I was afraid to be the target of a bombing.” Her project is much more than beautiful catalogs and shopping bags. The iconography she references is a great-grandmother’s cross-stitched, flowered tablecloth, salvaged from the Holocaust destruction, and grandmother’s hand-knit ski sweater—augmented with old family photographs.There are few projects in which the idea of family does not play a role. Though intensely independent in some ways, most Israelis seem much more attached to their families than Americans are. They stay in touch constantly by cell phone and get together weekly for multigenerational family dinners. Today’s students are grappling with their future and that of generations to come. Those who grew up on kibbutzim have seen the socialist ideals of collective labor that built the country turn into capitalist realities: Ramat Gan is the home of the Israeli stock and diamond exchanges, as well as the headquarters of pharmaceutical and high-tech companies.As recent Shenkar graduate Liora Schirer said, “We want to do something really meaningful, but what is it?” Her series of 27 flip books explores the idea of meaninglessness through young people’s constant use of the word keiloo—akin to the English word “like,” as in: “It’s, like, so boring, so let’s, like, find something to do.” The subject of each flip-book is a Hebrew word for something that ought to be important, illustrated by an animation of a dully repetitive action that points out the boredom many in this genenration are feeling. “Keiloo,” she says, “just fills holes so sentences don’t feel empty.”Nadav Barkan fills sheets of ersatz rub-down type with symbols of significant years in Israeli history. His project, “Deathraset,” is about “how we get desensitized,” he says. “It’s a testament to the power of the image that icons we see all the time have lost their meaning.” His are black silhouettes on waxy light blue paper, in multiples and in graduated sizes, ready to affix to any suitable surface. Icons include the menorah in front of the Israeli parliament, tanks, TV network logos (it was a big deal when Israel got TV), M-16s, guard dogs, the security fence, mourning Palestinian mothers and numbers of U.N. resolutions, all arranged by the year they entered the visual lexicon. This is the peace poster turned on its head.Much of the credit for the quality of the work goes to department head David Grossman - cofounder (with fellow graphic designer and business partner Yaki Molcho) of Vital, the Tel Aviv Center for Design Studies, which began in the mid-‘80s as a two-classroom addition to their studio. In 2000 it merged with Shenkar, then mostly known for fashion design, and provided the foundations of Shenkar’s industrial design department and graphic design department, which awards bachelor’s degrees in visual communication, illustration, and design for interactive media. American born, Grossman emigrated to Israel in the late 60’s. “This was an idealistic, revolutionary new society. I just liked it.” He graduated from Bezalel, worked at Total Design in Holland, and, a perpetual student himself, recently got his M.A. with honors from London’s Middlesex University. He seems to do it all: environmental design projects for major institutions throughout Israel, service as president of Icograda, the International Council of Graphic Design Associations, which he helped turn from “a European white men’s club where they gave each other awards” to a powerhouse with Asian, African, Latin America and Middle Eastern countries represented (and now the U.S.). He runs a department with 350 students and 90 faculty members.Last year he helped form the Israel Community of Designers, Kehillat Hameatzvim, which now has 300 professional members and 250 students and young graduates. This January they organized “Designed in Israel” an exhibition of Israeli products, packaging a that included 100 design-school graduate projects.During my previous visit, in January 2005, signs all over Tel Aviv advertised a design show at Tel Aviv’s official exhibition hall. “That’s just a bunch of manufacturers showing their lighting fixtures and plastic toys!” Grossman scoffed. I’m sent, instead, to “What Is Design?” the Kehillat Hameatzvim exhibition created to counter the trade-show commercialism: In a cavernous warehouse the Jaffa flea market district, each participant hung a photograph of one object of quality design—an egg, an Eames chair, the perpetual calendar of famed Israeli designer Dan Reisinger - illustrating his or her own personal definition of design. Visiting it was a compelling experience. The students learned by example about the process of design at its best: how to react to an event and create something that not only looks good but also imparts essential information.The work at Shenkar is surperior because it goes beyond packaging and promotions for lighting fixtures and plastic toys, or semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. The evidence of the success of what Grossman calls “a classic curriculum” grounded in basic design, drawing and typography, with much technical proficiency, is there. But considerably more intriguing is what he calls “turning intention into reality.” Designers’ platitudes usually make my eyes glaze over. But when he says, “Design is about the application of intent, which has to do with society, the environment, ethics,” I’m reminded of why I got into the profession of graphic design in the first place. He adds, “We are still building the country. The Middle East is very complicated. There are lots of problems to be solved, and these young graduates will help solve them.”