Yair Garbuz, one of Israel’s most influential painters and a recipient of the Emet Prize for his contribution to Israeli culture, died this week at 80. One of his paintings, in the Israel Museum, is called “Europe will not Teach Us.” He painted it in 2001, and it speaks to the present moment with unusual force.

The painting shows a European Catholic ceremony, perhaps a first communion, perhaps a wedding. White dresses, clergy in black, a small figure in cardinal red, the dignitaries of an old institution arranged for a sacrament. At the center, several figures are on fire. The flames are not coming from outside; they emerge from within the ceremony. To the right, occupying nearly a third of the panel, a dark wooden sculpture stands on a pedestal beside a woman in red, turned toward it.

The title is a sentence familiar to Israelis. It is the kind of thing said at dinner tables when European criticism is in the news, a reflex sentence, almost too obvious to examine; Europe will not teach us. The Continent that produced the Inquisition, the Crusades, two world wars and a Holocaust is in no position to lecture us about morality. The sentence ends discussions before they begin. It feels less like an opinion than like a fact about reality.

Garbuz painted the sentence back into question.

The painting does not refute it. Look at the work: the fire really is inside the ceremony, the violence within that history is not a fabrication, the historical record cited by the title is real. The defensive Israeli sentence has its reasons, and Garbuz lays them out in acrylic, graphite, and spray paint on plywood. But the painting is doing more than confirming the title. The right third of the panel places, beside the burning ceremony, an entirely different scene: a sculpture from a tradition Europe spent centuries calling ‘primitive,’ and a woman in red turned toward it. No flames here, no clergy, no smoke. The two halves face each other across the same plywood. Whose ritual is the strange one. Whose fire.

And the title itself also begins to look strange. Its lacquered finality starts to expose the speaker, the automaticness of the response, the way the historical argument arrives faster than thought. Garbuz knew what it meant for a sentence to harden into public reflex. The defense is justified. The defense is also a habit. The painting asks the question the defense was meant to foreclose.

This was Garbuz’s signature move, and he made it for fifty years. He emerged in the late 1960s from the Tel Aviv collage school known in Hebrew as Dalut Ha-Homer, “the poverty of materials,” the circle around Rafi Lavie that built an aesthetic out of plywood, newspaper clippings, and scribbles. In Garbuz’s hands, the school’s improvised look became a method for handling charged Israeli material: the slogans of the founding generation, the iconography of Zionist propaganda, the visual language of a country that had built itself in a hurry and had not yet stopped to look at what it had made.

What he did with this material can be described in terms Roland Barthes provided. In Mythologies, Barthes observed that dominant cultures perform a continuous quiet operation: they take ideology and present it as nature. Slogans repeated long enough stop sounding like slogans. Historical claims, repeated across enough textbooks and ceremonies, stop feeling like claims. The work of myth, Barthes wrote, is to drain history of its contingency, to make what was chosen feel inevitable, what was argued feel obvious, what was decided feel like the way things are. Barthes was clear that no culture is exempt from this operation; the secular, cosmopolitan milieu Garbuz himself worked from has its own naturalized assumptions, its own sentences that arrive faster than thought.

Garbuz painted in the opposite direction. He turned the sentence back into something visible. ‘Europe will not teach us’ in his hands is no longer a self-evident sentence. It is a sentence someone says, for reasons, with effects. Not to undo the conclusion but to return it to the status of a choice. The painting lets the viewer see what is being concluded, and on what basis, and at what cost.

And here is what his death actually costs us. The kind of operation he performed, taking a piece of public language that has hardened into common sense and returning it to the status of a question, is a difficult and unfashionable thing. It is the opposite of what public discourse currently rewards. A culture impatient with anything that fails to declare a side does not have much use for paintings that refuse to. But this kind of refusal is also where thinking happens. Without artists like him, the slogans win not by argument but by exhaustion.

The Catholic ceremony is still on fire. The question is whether we still know how to look at the fire and ask why we are sure we already understand it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)