The Phillips Collects: In Conversation with Oren Eliav (Part I)

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Sherman Fairchild Fellow Ariana Kaye visited the studio of Oren Eliav in Tel Aviv Israel. Eliav’s Listener, 2012, was recently acquired by The Phillips Collection, and is featured in the major centennial exhibition Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century. 

 

Ariana Kaye: First off, thank you for having me here at the studio. It’s such an honor. I love the new works. Did you know your work was in The Phillips Collection? 

Oren Eliav: Thank you for coming, Ariana. I was gladly surprised when you told me they hung the work, it’s an honor.  

Outside of Oren Eliav’s studio in Tel Aviv. Photo: Shira Linde

AK: This year is the Phillips’s Centennial year, their

100th year, their birthday, and your painting is in the Centennial exhibition! I was talking to the staff, and told them I love this work and the artist—maybe I can reach out to him and they said of course. So I emailed you and this worked out so well. Do you know how the work got to be there? 

OE: It is thanks to a long-time collector, Tony Podesta, who was introduced to my work by my gallerists at Braverman Gallery. He has been following my work since the beginning, and he generously gifted the work to The Phillips Collection. 

AK: Can you share a sneak peak of what you have been working on recently? 

OE: I haven’t spoken to anyone about this yet. It’s really fresh and different from my last two shows, which were carefully planned as a whole choreography of paintings for a space. How to Disappear Completely was a large-scale installation for the Israel Museum, and Mount Zero was a four-floor journey at Building Gallery, Milan. This time is a bit different.  

AK: I read extensively about it, it was amazing! 

OE: I am used to engaging in a long process of planning, modeling, thinking, and writing. This time I’m going about it in a simpler manner, which means just painting daily in the studio, seeing what comes and letting it unfold. It is starting to come together and will revolve around the notion of echo location or sonar. It will be held at Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv, in January 2022.  

AK: That last exhibition, Mount Zero, seemed ambitious and different.

OE: It was a landmark exhibition for me. It took place in Milan, the epicenter of the pandemic at the time. We had to make tough choices whether to postpone the exhibition or not, but in the end, I decided to go through with it. I felt that since it was already three years in the making, including a book, that the time has come and that the show must go on, as they say.  

AK: Your use of art historical imagery from Christianity is meant to disrupt ways in which we see and understand the world. However, one cannot ignore direct references to religion in your work, as some of the source images come from Church or papal commissions. How do you view religion and how does it influence your artistic practice? 

OE: It’s going to be a long answer…

AK: I’m here to hear it.

Ariane Kaye and Oren Eliav in conversation. Photo: Shira Linde

OE: Let’s start by saying that personally I’m an atheist, an absolute atheist. Religion is a strong organizing idea. It used to be a satisfying system to explain the world and its mysteries. But eventually, with the advent of science, we now have better explanations. It was also an organizing system for our societies, and it helps many individuals make sense of their lives, I guess. But religion in a way diverts us from the real magic—the fact that we are an organic material arranged in such a way that it is not only able to come to life but also to be aware of it. We have a brief period of time to appreciate this, to be conscious of our one life. So, I see no point in thinking that something more precious will reveal itself in some sort of heaven or an imaginary afterlife.   

As to your question, I used to work with other paintings as my starting point. It’s not the roofs of Tel Aviv or my childhood memories that are my primary sources of inspiration, its art coming from other art. And as it happens, painting from the past is steeped in religious imagery, namely Christianity. So, it was part of the package and I decided to look at it attentively and observe the various visual mechanisms that are at work, for example when looking at an altarpiece or a cathedral. 

AK: Even tells you how to see them.

OE: In my new work I’m starting to move away from that, but the basic question remains the same: what is it that we really see? and what’s the difference between what we see and what we believe that we see? 

AK: So, this concept of seeing is believing: do these concepts coexist? Seeing and believing, are they compatible or do they even go together at all?

OE: If being a painter has taught me one thing it is that vision is not very reliable. We think that we just need to open our eyes and let light in as if they were a camera. But it’s not how it works. Vision is also an outward action. Your brain is busy projecting a model of the world, and constantly comparing it to an influx of data. You mostly notice the things that are different from your expectations or that stand out from a pattern. This is a more cost-effective way given our limited resources. Also, you constantly complete missing information or assume it is there. And on top of that, in order to see, light needs to be quickly transformed in the darkness of our brain into chemical reactions and pulses of electricity se we can just “see.” So, vision is never passive, it is always active. And it is influenced by what you expect to see and by what you believe is out there.    

AK: Like we see what we want to see, yeah?

OE: Exactly, you see what you want to see, and what you want to see is mostly things that benefit you as an organism. It is ingrained in our evolution. If you want to hunt a rabbit running in the grass, you will likely see it when it stands out from the pattern of the grass, either by its color or by its movement. Coming back to painting, paintings also carry a pattern with them, an expectation. You walk into a museum and your mind anticipates the paintings you are about to see. You expect a landscape, an interior scene, a portrait, a still life, and so on. 

Oren Eliav Studio. Photo: Shira Linde

AK: Yes, like History painting…

OE: Yes, also History painting. So, in my work, I consider the viewer’s expectation, their supposed inner models of a painting. It’s about this transition between “Oh, I see a landscape painting’” to “Wait a second, something is wrong, or something is off, or something is not as I am used to.” It’s a subtle thing that I hope happens in the 10 to 30 second range. But anyway, it’s in the hands (and eyes!) of the viewer, who could just as well pass right by without noticing. 

AK:  I love hearing everything! It’s so true—on one hand, paintings and art in general are a window into our world so it is a window into that outside. But one the other hand it’s our own interpretation of the world. So, what you said, our brain has ways of interpreting something, so it has this duality or system. It’s like the history of art in general, where art is life but also art is not life.

 

Read Part II of the interview

Building a Museum Career during the Pandemic Lockdown 

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Chloe Eastwood, 2020-21 Sherman Fairchild Fellow, reflects on her time at The Phillips Collection amid a global pandemic.

The past year has had a liminal quality for many, in which our experiences seem disconnected and time itself seems to flow differently. I will likely always think of my time at The Phillips Collection as being somewhat apart from what came before, for me, and from what comes after. Though precious and fleeting, my year at The Phillips Collection has been exactly what I needed, personally and professionally. 

John D. Graham, The Lonely Road, 1928, Oil on canvas, 21 3/4 x 15 in., The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1929

When the pandemic came to the United States and the country shut down, I, like tens of millions of Americans, stopped working. At the time, I was less than one year out from having finished graduate school, and the thought that my brand-new, hard-earned professional skills would atrophy terrified me. I was then and still now remain in a point in my career where constant professional development is vital if I’m to progress in the museum field, but in a pandemic, what work was there to be had? I was told after one interview that the one-year temporary position for which I’d been runner-up had received 220 applicants. The interviewer’s position, which was permanent and paid better, had received just 37 applications the year before. Meanwhile, museums and historic sites laid off employees in wave after wave. First the front-of-house staff, then the lower-ranked professionals. It was estimated that one-third of museums would not reopen at all.  

It is clear how few opportunities there were compared to the many talented professionals who could have filled these roles, and so it is not humility or deprecation to suggest that the primary reason I came to The Phillips Collection was because I was lucky. I knew people (didn’t we all?) who applied for three times as many jobs as I did and didn’t get a single interview. Meanwhile, I found gainful employment in my chosen field, and I believe I’ve made the most of the opportunity, both in professional development and in what I could do for the Phillips. I’ve helped to build web pages and developed content for the Bloomberg Connects app. I’ve edited audio and video content for the museum and our partners, including the short film which was presented at the pilot of the new Conversations with Collectors series. It has been an incredible work environment, and I cherish the opportunities I’ve had here. 

Now, in the last month of my fellowship, I’m freshly aware of just how precarious the field still is. I know plenty of others who have also heard this wakeup call.  Money, which was always tight in the arts, is now starving many highly-trained but under-employed professionals out of the field. Costume designers and philosophers are becoming librarians. Potters are becoming welders. Stage managers are becoming accountants. While I worked my year at The Phillips Collection, I completed my coursework towards a Master of Arts in Teaching. I look forward to partnering with the vibrant cultural centers of DC while teaching history at the secondary level.   

Marjorie Phillips: Artist and Executive

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The Phillips Collection is excited to share the recent publication of “Duncan and Marjorie Phillips and America’s First Museum of Modern Art” (Vernon Press, 2021) by Pamela Carter-Birken. Here is an excerpt from the book, which reveals the stories of the people who worked to make The Phillips Collection both an experience and a home.

The Gilded Age had waned when Marjorie Acker attended the Art Students League of New York. She took the train into the city from Ossining, New York, where she lived with her parents and six siblings. Her routine was to disembark at Grand Central Station on 42nd Street then walk up Fifth Avenue to reach the renowned art school on 57th Street. The Indiana-born painter loved New York City. She would pop into art galleries to see the latest works on display whenever time allowed.  . . .

Please don’t disturb read the sign Marjorie put on the door to her studio, a dedicated space first located within the Phillips’s Dupont Circle property and later at their Foxhall Road home. She had always been a disciplined creator, even painting on her honeymoon. The newlyweds’ get-away would not be the only time she packed palette and easel. During her years with Duncan, she made the most of their summers in the Alleghenies. “It was a wonderful place for painting,” she said of rural Ebensburg, Pennsylvania. “Social life didn’t follow you there. You could walk, paint. I’d work in my studio, from the car or in a field on the spot.” Back in Washington, Marjorie set aside mornings for painting. On those afternoons when she was tempted to return to a work-in-progress, the duties of being a museum executive usually prevented her from opening the studio door again until the next day. While Marjorie did not become director of The Phillips Collection until after Duncan’s death in 1966, she served as its associate director for 41 years and bore responsibility for the minutiae of organizing temporary exhibitions in the museum’s Prints and Drawings Room.  . . .

Marjorie Phillips, Self-Portrait, c. 1940, Oil on canvas, 20 1/2 x 16 1/2 in., The Phillips Collection, Gift of the artist, 1985

No matter the task at hand, Marjorie saw the world as an artist. Duncan admired her for it, and throughout her career he cheered her on. In 1948, Duncan composed the foreword for an exhibition brochure about works by Marjorie. The exhibit was first mounted at the Bignou Gallery and then shown at the Phillips Gallery. In his description of her art, Duncan wrote: “What we need today is not just another group movement but a few individuals who love that real light, which is the life of everything it touches. Such an artist is Marjorie Phillips who, in spite of keen understanding and appreciation of many [artistic] techniques is never distracted from her course. She is a luminist with a truly classic feeling for composition of pictorial space.” In the context of art history, Luminism was a term coined a half-dozen years after Duncan wrote the foreword. It referred to a group of artists who could use light to turn sky or sea ethereal. With pervading light came a feeling for the universality of nature. As an art movement, Luminism encompassed painters in the 19th century’s Hudson River School, among them Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt. Marjorie would have been familiar with Church’s interpretation of Niagara Falls and Bierstadt’s of the Rocky Mountains, among other sweeping renditions. When Duncan called Marjorie a luminist he was not comparing her to the great American landscape artists. Rather, he was referring to how she used light to enhance what he saw as her individualism.