Any Israeli who considers him- or herself to be even remotely political would probably find it a bit strange if they had to represent the state at the Venetian pavilion – this would mean the representation of an, aggressive patron, with whose deeds most Israeli artists would be reluctant to identify. It would also demand representing a state that doesn’t even seem to want to be represented.

Dorit Levité, curator of the Israeli pavilion, is highly intelligent woman who somehow enjoys portraying herself as a bit thick (”I’m no theoretician”, she says, “I just work in the field doing the manual labor. And that’s what saves me.”) – but she still definitely considers herself to be a political person. She thinks, for instance, that the most important exhibition now showing in Israel is Constituent Violence, curated by Ariella Azoulay for the gallery at Zochrot – a civil society group working to raise awareness to the Nakba (the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948).

If one indeed takes into account Levité’s political consciousness and the growing, mutual alienation between Israeli artists and the Israeli government, it’s strange to find her at the Israeli pavilion of all places – acting as the representative of the Israeli Ministry of Culture and presenting (there of all places) the work of deceased artist Raffi Lavie: an anti-political creator who despised intellectuals, took pride in never having read a book, a beloved child of the establishment, and all all-round unintelligible, antiquated Modernist.

It bears mentioning, though, that the choice of Lavie was not hers. A professional committee was convened for that purpose by the Visual Arts Section of the Arts and Culture Council of the Ministry of Science, Culture and Sports. Levité was just asked to carry it out.

It’s 2009 and they’re showing Raffi Lavie in Venice. Is this what the Israeli artistic community has to offer?

It’s the only way we have left, a way of remembering something as a therapeutic process. This is the place we are at right now. We remember Raffi Lavie to in order to be able to breath in, in a place that is already contaminated. In this context, Raffi Lavie’s air is not contaminated.

I’m doing a show for Raffi Lavie here, end of story. Neither I nor Lavie represent Israel. Of course not! Does (senior Israeli artist Moshe) Gershuni represent anything other than Gershuni? No way! The thought that we could represent anything to do with the state is just perverse.

Levité, who has been living in Berlin for the last 30 years, represents a dying breed. A social class that has understood that politically the battle has already been lost – especially after the last elections – and yet keeps trying to hold on to the cultural reins. They sit on committees, manage academies and provide a working status quo for the new rulers, who for their part drive them crazy them for strapped cash and ;let them go on playing their petty power games and send their guru off to Venice in order to subdue themselves with the calming tunes of their fake Modernist nostalgia.

“In 1952, at the height of the austerity measures, the government found budgets for the erection of the Venice pavilion”, says Levité. “Then it was an ideology – that culture should be exported”, she adds, “nowadays the state is declaring that culture comes last on its agenda. And The Ministry of Culture is just there to reassert that sad fact. Furthermore, at present we are privately funding a state project (the state did finally transfer all the funds before the interview was published, R.E.)”.

So why not quit?

Because we’re already conditioned, plus everybody says, “it’s always like that and it always works out in the end”, so I believe that it will indeed work out. Secondly, you want the project to happen. It’s our own stupidity. And they count on that stupidity. That’s the beautiful side of it, too. You know, if I were to do such a show abroad, no one would work with me without being paid in advance. Neither the team nor the graphic designer would have even started working. Here, however, if there’s any ideology left, it’s in the hands of the people working on the show, we are like the halutzim (Zionist pioneers).

The financing plot thickens: the pavilion itself is owned by the Foreign Ministry, but the exhibitions budget is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture. “That’s also part of the problem, because it falls between the two ministries”, says Levité. “I’ve talked with the Foreign Ministry about remodeling the building, this is under their jurisdiction, but everybody I met with said I shouldn’t do anything about it. I offered to bring in a donor to finance building work, and they told me not to do it. They’re not bad people, but we’re talking about a building that has no ideology left to support it. There’s no dynamics to operate it. The driving force behind bureaucratic institutions is usually ideology, but since the ideology has evaporated here, it just stand paralyzed. Totally paralyzed.

Maybe they should just privatize the Israeli pavilion, like the Americans who sold theirs off to the Guggenheim.

We thought of setting up an association, something like Friends of the Israeli Pavilion. Mati Broudo (a prominent Israeli businessman and partner in several new art ventures, R.E.) suggested it. The situation now is that each year artists have to basically beg for money. But that’s actually a bad idea, any privatization is eventually going to sour, as is plain to see. Like all these collectors’ museums that have suddenly cropped up. Nothing is more detrimental to art than this thing. That was for instance the thought process behind Thomas Krens’s Guggenheim: the museum’s more important that what’s shown inside it, a for-profit museum. It’s a very problematic conception. A museum shouldn’t be for-profit, just like a school shouldn’t be for-profit.

Suddenly I’ve begun noticing this melody, this tone. People start saying they can’t come to the pavilion. And I tell them, “look, the artists I know in Israel, the ones I show don’t stand in symmetry to the political situation you’re protesting, so who ends up taking the fall here?”

Alongside Lavie’s works, Levité intends to install an allegedly optimistic wall label with a text written by influential Israeli art critic Adam Baruch: “in fifty years, things will straighten out and on a sunny Saturday a family will go and visit the ‘Raffi Lavie Museum’”. There’s something sad about the fact that for Baruch, Levité and all the other Lavie groupies, a Utopian future amounts to nothing more than this bourgeois dream of visiting the secular temple, the art museum, on the Sabbath. Besides anything else, this wishful statement about the future is the expression of nostalgic longing for a gradually evaporating, secular, Western Tel-Aviv that has crystal clear cultural hierarchies.

“Besides the political interpretation of Lavie’s work, and besides the fact that he represents a certain culture and a certain ideological consciousness, besides all of that his work must have some internal logic”‘ says Levité. “So on my standards, I look at his works – and it’s self-sufficient. Beyond all this important talk, eventually we are left with what our eyes see.”

I don’t understand. How can you separate the painting – “what our eyes see” – from its ideological context?

The things you ask me are what keeps me up at night.

Let me rephrase. On the one hand you yourself have said that Raffi Lavie was anti-Ideological. On the other, in a previous conversation you cited Adam Baruch as saying about Lavie, “that man reasserts my values”.

We’re dealing with universal values. Some values come from a certain ideology, and some are just pivotal for remaining a human being. Raffi – and I believe this is his importance, and also what I find so hard to put into words here – is an extraordinary marriage of universal and Israeli values.

How do you mean, Israeli?

Israeliness is a certain physiognomy, a certain aesthetic, the outcome of many things. A certain relation to the way pictures flow in and out of the world. I don’t exactly know how to phrase these things, but in my vision Lavie had something acutely Israeli about him, as well something that surpassed that.

I always feel like you and the others that discuss Lavie speak of a very limited ‘Israeliness’. You mean Israelis of a very specific class, Ashkenazi, bourgeois, secular, residents of Tel-Aviv… with very specific values.

Well, we can’t be what we aren’t. Raffi, for instance, had German immigrants for parents. Not Iraqi ones. It was his right to be what he was, good or bad, and create from that place.

Then there’s no need to claim that he represents Israeliness. I’m an Israeli, and I hardly feel like his work represents me or my values.

That’s both true and untrue. It’s true because our Israeliness is made up of Germany and of Iraq. It’s made up of both. He can’t represent the Iraqi side, so he can’t represent the Israeli whole. And still he represents a side that exists.

I don’t mean his ethnicity. I mean his values, and I still don’t understand what the values you talk about are.

First of all, these are values that enjoyed a certain hegemony, rightfully or otherwise…

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. The perpetuation of this hegemony.

Hegemony is not something you can perpetuate, it’s either there or it’s not. It was, and he perpetuated it. He belongs to this issue.

It sounds as though you’re saying that Lavie was nostalgic.

Yes, he was very nostalgic. Of course! Because where we’re standing that was a part of the grand narrative. And that part was also to a great extent a lie. My generation was positioned in that way. My entire life consists of deconstructing it and facing that rift.

And you’re going to deconstruct it through Lavie?

Raffi deconstructed it by himself. He may not have done so very acutely, but he was aware of it, he wasn’t stupid. He was not a stupid painter. Any white man, any white little Ashkenazi boy who grew up here and studied at Socialist Zionist schools knew that everything he was taught in school was part of the story.

And that’s exactly the part you keep perpetuating in Venice. Don’t you have the responsibility, as a curator, of telling other stories as well? To use your own metaphor, those who still get the main stage are the children of those little Ashkenazi boys.

Today, though, even those who stand to the side are already inside. When people talk to me about alternative art, I say “there is no such thing as alternative art – there is only art that hasn’t gotten to the establishment yet”. To communicate himself, a Mizrahi (generally a term referring to Israelis of Arab descent, R.E.) would have to resort to using the terms of the other side.

But if they just join the hegemony, then they’re not interesting. They’re not making good art.  They need to challenge the hegemony, deconstruct it, like you said.

You can’t expect people to be what they’re not.

So you’re saying people should know their place?

You tell me how you would have curated this show…

I wouldn’t have taken the job, but that’s not the point. Let’s go back to the beginning: we started our conversation lamenting the Ministry of Culture’s loss of ideology. You admiringly said that in 1952, at the height of the Austerity, they found a budget to build the Venice pavilion. Now you present an artist who prided himself on having no ideology, who was principally opposed to political art, an artists who fought his students who made political art, who prided himself on his aloofness.

And still, when Rabin was murdered he made a piece with Rabin’s photograph and a blood stain.

You must be kidding me. Rabin?! Could you get more hegemony than that?

That’s not political?

Israel is an extended family. A biological, family-like state. And it’s difficult for families to examine things thoroughly. It’s hard to say certain things. So the physical distance allows me a kind of freedom to see Lavie not as my relative.

Lavie and Levité’s match is even more surprising when seen against her curatorial track record. When she curated The New Hebrews, a show held in berlin and marking 100 years of Israeli art, she showed only one piece by Lavie.

It felt almost like you felt awkward not putting in any of his work and just ended up putting one in at the end. Into the section dealing with the Hebrew language, no less. You didn’t show Want of Matter artists, abstract…

The Want of Matter (an influential exhibition held in 1983 at Tel-Aviv Museum highlighting the role of “lyrical abstraction” in Israeli art, R.E.) was a great thesis, and Sarah Breitberg-Semel formulated something very compelling and interesting with it, but I’m not sure how true it was. Look, I didn’t show Zaritsky in Berlin either – and he’s like a saint in Israeli art. And I didn’t show Zaritsky because I just don’t think he’s such a good artist. You can’t go against your own truth. Back in 1979, when I was art critic for Ha’aretz (very influential Israeli daily, R.E.), I wrote that Zaritsky didn’t interest me. You can’t imagine the amount of letters the paper got – especially Binyamin Tamuz, the then editor… I could have gotten myself fired over it. So the whole story of Israeli abstract… What I thought at the time was, “do I even need to bring that to Germany? Is that what they should see? It would just be misunderstood there”.

And now we’re talking about Lavie? You think that’s what they need to see in Venice right now?

(Laughter)

It’s my understanding that the rationale behind your election as curator is that you come from outside, that you haven’t lived in Israel for many years and so can explain Lavie to the non-Israeli public. Isn’t that a strange claim to make?

It is strange, but I can imagine that having lived in Germany for thirty years has changed me, at least a bit. I guess I see Raffi Lavie in a different light than you do, simply because we are two different people. Anything beyond that is gossip: I knew Raffi, I didn’t know Raffi… Any talk of this kind leads to bad places, and I think not knowing him personally has saved me.

Israel is an extended family. A biological, family-like state. The biological circle doesn’t end with your family, it opens up to circles of friends. There’s no difference here between private and national territory. Then, when you have a clique, an affinity group, once you have your own circle, it’s not just an affinity group anymore, it becomes your family. And it’s difficult for families to examine things thoroughly. It’s hard to say certain things. So the physical distance allows me a kind of freedom to see Lavie not as my relative.

But you don’t have to know him to understand his art. If that were the case then there would be no reason to even hold the show. I think that once you see the work it speaks to you. Even if I came from Iceland but was fluent in the discourse of Western art I would still be able to understand who Raffi Lavie is. For instance, when my husband (Jürgen Harten, formerly director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, considered a key player in the German art field, R.E.) saw Lavie for the first time, he knew exactly what he was seeing. And he knew because his eyes are used to tell what is and isn’t good art. And he never once said it reminded him of Cy Twombly. He said it was the work of a fine artist.

And you think Lavie can indeed be understood outside of the “family”? Beyond what he represents in Hebrew?

The fact that many people did not respond to Lavie is not a function of them not having understood what they saw – simply of the fact that they didn’t see his work. I’m working on his professional résumé now, and it’s just wretched. He participated in one group show, at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, and two or three other shows abroad. That’s it. Now the world will have an opportunity to see him.

So that’s why you took this on yourself? As a challenge?

First of all, I really do believe that he’s an interesting artist, otherwise I wouldn’t have touched him. Earlier I didn’t deal with him because I was interested in other things. I was much more interested in curating a show for Eli Gur Arie (an Israeli Real Surrealist artist), and especially because he’s outside the consensus. Because he occupies the farthest space and because I come from a science fiction place. But the minute they offered me the show, I said, “I’d be honored”.

Lavie is an artist I appreciate greatly, that’s where the legitimacy comes from. I didn’t wait my whole life to do a Lavie show. It came as a surprise. You don’t always go to the artists, sometimes they come to you – and I love curating shows. At this stage of my life, after having curated several exhibitions, I understand that the curatorial profession is pretty idiotic. It has no structure. There is no process at the end of which one can say, “now I am a curator”. It’s not like being a lawyer, where there’s simply a given amount of material you have to read through. It’s basically an apprentice profession. By the way, the word “curator” itself only started gaining currency in the 1970’s. Before that, no one called themselves “curators”. In German they referred to themselves as Ausstellungmacher. It started gaining traction only in the seventies, as an American influence. But it’s a job I love doing, and all the problems you raise are true, but they don’t measure up to the temptation of holding a Raffi Lavie show.

What do you foresee? How will he be received in Europe?

I don’t know, but I think the level of expectation is funny. This one guy – and he isn’t stupid, either – told me, “they have to understand that he’s the Israeli de Kooning”. What world does that man live in? That’s total provincialism. What am I, a star that needs to be discovered? That’s just not the way it goes. I believe in artistic choice.

But in light of the Israeli artistic breakthroughs of the last few years…

I read about those “breakthroughs” a lot here, but I hardly see them over there. Those who make the real breakthroughs are not from here, they make their breakthrough from over there. If you’re sitting around here waiting to be discovered – that’s not going to happen. Guy Ben-Ner, Sigalit Landau, Michal Rovner, Micha Ulman… They all had their breakthrough when they went there. And let’s put things in proportion: we’re still talking about ten artists.

But there is a rising interest. Young artists are getting attention, and this is not without good reasons. Just like Turkish art has been getting a lot of attention lately. It’s not coincidental that there is an interest in Middle Eastern art today.

That’s true, but now I see a process that I find troubling: just now, when the Middle East is starting to be given this place, we have removed ourselves from that discourse.

So now, when we are excluded and calls abound for cultural boycott – that’s when we choose Lavie? An anti-ideological artist who employs a super-private idiom? Many artists who deal with life in the Middle East, with our relation to our neighbors, with the Apocalypse, with messianic themes, could have been chosen… Lavie may have touched on these subjects, but on a very cryptic level. I think that choosing Raffi Lavie is like telling the world “don’t mind us, we’re just talking amongst ourselves, you’re welcome into our pavilion but we really don’t intend to take part in your conversation”.

That could very well may be. Maybe that was one of the factors in the choice of Lavie.

In earlier conversations you complained about the fact that because of the concentration of big money in Abu Dhabi, a big art center is forming there, which is hostile to Israel. That with their big money they can invite the Louvre and the Guggenheim to build extensions there, to invite all the big curators and important art people, but ignore us.  And maybe it’s something we’ve done to ourselves. I mean, why should they treat us as part of the region if we ourselves fail to do so?

Of course the problem is partly ours, as well. Look around, look at all the colonialist aesthetic here. Those ridiculous palm trees. My friends talk as if their forefathers grew basil in the Ghetto. It’s insane. Michal Ne’eman has said we are the orphans of the Middle East.

And what if the organizers of the Lebanese and Palestinian pavilions said, “Ahlan wa Sahlan! Be our guests! Come to our pavilion and we’ll talk”? Are we even ready for that? Do we even have what to say to them? Are we really part of the Middle East?

No. That’s how we play into the hands of the Emirates’ pavilion organizers – we never specified to ourselves where we are. What our stance is vis-à-vis the West, what our place is in the Middle East.

So why does what happens in the Gulf trouble you so much?

Because I still believe that we’re in the Middle East. Because I still believe that there is the possibility of creating something that’s not just a periphery of the West.

You approached Daniel Birnbaum, curator of the Biennale’s international exhibition, asking that he carry a message to the organizers of the Palestinian pavilion. This year is the first time they are attending. You asked for him to connect you, to see if there is any possibility. Why didn’t you approach them directly?

I have several years’ experience with working on exhibitions that relate to the conflict, and I have noticed that the direct approach usually puts them in an inconvenient situation. They have a problem working with Israeli artists. I sat on a panel with an Iranian artist, and before it started, when were having coffee, he asked me not to approach him during the talk because he could get into trouble over it. So I thought I shouldn’t directly approach the Palestinians, that it was better to leave it at a suggestion. To have a mediator.

So the art world just reproduces the world of politics. Instead of speaking directly, we ask the Americans, the Norwegians, the Swedes to intercede.

From my experience I understood that if I approached them directly it would put them in an inconvenient, unfair situation. So I wanted to check, to go first through Barenboim and see if they agree. If I approached them directly and they said no, they would have looked idiotic. And I didn’t want them to come across as idiotic.

So how do you deal with these problems? You mentioned to the many symposia that the Palestinians were holding in Venice. How are you going to address these problems?

I wish I had the money for a symposium. I think it’s very important. I would also love to have a party at the pavilion, but there’s just no funds. I have learned that as soon as an artist has died nobody cares about him anymore. Dead artists are no-man’s-land, and that in itself is also a measure of Israeli culture. So there’s no money. It’s the usual story: not only are we the bad guys, we’re also poor.

Calls for cultural boycott of Israel have became ever more commonplace following the massacre in Gaza. What is your stand on this?

It’s something I can speak about personally. I live in Germany, and you have to understand that without naming names – the biggest curators and museum people in Europe have been to my house. And suddenly I’ve begun noticing this melody, this tone. People start saying they can’t come to the pavilion. And I tell them, “look, the artists I know in Israel, the ones I show don’t stand in symmetry to the political situation you’re protesting, so who ends up taking the fall here?” We’re dealing with individuals here, not representatives…

Let’s make one thing clear: I don’t represent the state for even one minute. Neither the state nor the nation. My state ends at my doorstep.

You’re not really that naïve.

No. people tell me, “you grew up there! What do you have to say about what’s going on?” But I represent nothing but myself.

So you would curate a show for any state that invited you?

Yes, because I do not represent the state. It’s just like I don’t have any qualms about anyone going to Abu Dhabi. I just tell them, “you bastards! Come visit us, too!”

In the past, though, you’ve criticized these people for remaining silent as to the lack of democracy there. For the fact that people in the art world don’t care about human rights in the Gulf.

They really don’t care at all. And if you ask me whether it bothers me, the answer is yes. If Sudan invited me to do a show I would say something, and then quit of course.

My guests tell me that the Israeli pavilion is Israeli territory, that they refuse to enter it because they are opposed to Israeli politics. And I answer that representing Israel is an abstract notion – unless you’re the ambassador. I’m doing a show for Raffi Lavie here, end of story. Neither I nor Lavie represent Israel. Of course not! Does (senior Israeli artist Moshe) Gershuni represent anything other than Gershuni? No way! The thought that we could represent anything to do with the state is just perverse. Being what you are, you can resist, you can shout, you can say you disagree with something that’s done where you live. But you can’t represent a state.

Maybe if the boycott policy sticks, it’ll end up saving us. They might be doing us a favor with this thing. Helping us resist and protest.

If, as an art lover, you stop yourself from seeing good art – I think you’re doing anybody any big favor. Beyond that, it’s all just white noise. Take for example Victor Missiano (a senior Russian curator who was invited to curate Israeli art fair ArtTLV and declined because of the Gaza massacre, making the organizers an alternative, which they did not take, R.E.). I know him personally, and I don’t believe for one second that he really cares about this kind of thing. He comes to Israel and tells us how to behave, while back in his own country 226 journalists were killed in the last two years? He didn’t lend his name to any petition of protest, and he’s had plenty of opportunities to do so. So where you’re his ass is on the line he shuts up, but here he come off as a humanist, and at my expense?! I don’t like that at all. Why does he demand of me what he doesn’t demand of his own country? Just because over there, it would cost him his jobs, that’s all.

Or take Catherine Davide (curated the Emirates pavilion at the Biennale as well as shows at the Pompidou, KW Berlin and Dokumenta 9 in Kassel, R.E.). I didn’t hear her protesting the lack of human rights in the Emirates. So she speaks of human rights, while simultaneously building the theoretical framework that’s paid for by the Emirates. So she has a problem, too, and it’s not too dissimilar mine. It’s the problem of hypocrisy, of the price you’re willing to pay. And I’m willing (to pay) to do the Lavie show, because it’s really important to me, because of his quality both as a person and as a painter. Because I believe he’s a good painter, a good artist, and at the end of the day you look at one man’s art.

And you claim most Israeli artists are opposed to Israeli government policies? I’m not sure that’s true.

There are different kinds of opposition. I’m sure most of the artists I know oppose it, but they don’t actually do anything with that opposition. I just visited Israel and saw shows there, and it really startled me. For instance, I went to see the Fresh paint contemporary art fair. You could come out of it thinking we were living in Arcadia. There was just no mention of the conflict. I was appalled.

But that’s exactly what you’re presenting in Venice.

No. I’m in tune with reality. I will be putting two sentences on the wall (the first is the Baruch quote mentioned above, R.E.). The other is a quote by Lavie, from an interview with Dalia Karpel: “As far as I’m concerned, Israel started degenerating back in 1956… One day I hear Ben Gurion declaring the establishment of the Third Israeli Kingdom over the radio. And it gave me a start. Since then I can feel the fall. I’ve been saying for years that it just can’t get any worse. Well, it turns out that’s not true… After he said that thing with the Third Kingdom of Israel, the sky just got darker and darker, and it’s becoming worse and worse as time goes on”.

This sentence will be there on the wall. That’s my way of putting something in there, something that has to be there. It’s a kind of opposition. So that if people think I’m identifying with the state, they know I don’t. I’m putting it there in Lavie’s name and in mine. The writing is on the wall.