Preface

The third issue of Tripod establishes the journal’s status as an academic journal with a unique and innovative outlook, a place for material-visual culture in an ever-changing world facing unprecedented global events. After two years of enduring the corona epidemic, we are returning to the workshops and to creation. The topic of the current issue, “The Ethics of Doing”, is based on Dr. Eran Ehrlich’s 2015 paper, which starts a broad discussion of conceptual and material aspects and raises questions concerning identity, language, material, history, society, technology, and politics. In his paper, Ehrlich claims that craft is a field that lends the creative action a historical and cultural context and a space of traditional and contemporary reference, which go beyond the private sense of doing – this, in a way that gives the act of doing itself a comprehensive, fundamental cultural-social value. In the current issue, Ehrlich expands and deepens this idea with an essay titled “The Ethics of Doing, The Action”.

The compendium of articles and studies presented in this issue is thought provoking, and points to the extensive capacity of the subject of craft to influence every cultural field and occupation within a chaotic and changing world.

Dr. Ophira Honig, Shlomit Rinat and Aya Feldman write in their paper “The Ethics of Doing: A Study of Art and Mental Materials in an Art-Therapy Studio” on the combination of art materials and psychoanalytic therapy processes. The authors offer the possibility of expanding the theory on psychodynamic terms related to processes of doing in the art-therapy studio, which connect material doing and mental events, through the concept of the ethics of doing, which Ehrlich assimilated in his 2015 article.

In her paper “Communicating Vessels”, which deals with the influence of Arab pottery on the beginnings of Israeli pottery through the story of the Arab water jugs, Efrat Dgani examines ethical aspects related to material and concrete existence in this region. This is a paper that traces the Arab jugs, which are found today mainly in the Israeli space, and are one type of objects from a very rich pottery tradition that is characteristic of the material culture of the Middle East. The paper deals with this important issue through Ehrlich’s reference to craft as a field that gives the creative action a historical and cultural context.

Dr. Nirit Shalev Khalifa contributed her paper “On the Table!”. The paper is a setting of the lexicon of forms and images on the local table, an assemblage from a period spanning 100 years. This is an applied curatorial study, which “sets” and lays out on the table test cases that engage in a dialogue with the images of the feast, the table and their utensils, which constitute a central theme in the history of Western art.

Rokas Dovydėnas offers a look at Soviet ceramics. His paper “Artistic Research: Bolek and Lolek Ceramics” cannot be separated from the political-social context of post-Soviet society today and from its influence on the world.

The visual paper that is included in the current issue, “Some Things Melt Before They Become Memories”, is a fascinating visual journey into the intricacies of memory that is at work in different settings of artists who deal with the transition between the abstract and the concrete, by observing various artistic environments.

Two studies accompany the current issue: Nitzotz Saranga’s study is an elaborate project using volcanic rocks for creating a workable glaze structure. The study by Prof. Dov Ganchrow and Nitzan Debi is a documentation of a joint course of the Bezalel Academy and the University of China that starts from the very foundations: the rotational motion that becomes the move that drives the course and the unique collaboration between the two institutions.

I wish to thank all those involved in this journal and especially the authors of the papers and studies in this issue. I am grateful to Dr. Eran Ehrlich, the initiator, creator and director of the journal; special thanks to Yael Atzmoni, Head of the Department of Ceramics and Glass Design;  to Ella Gutman, Lena Dubinsky and Dr. Tal Frankel Elroy for their great contribution and help in preparing this issue.

This issue is published with the support of Mifal HaPais and the Bezalel Research and Innovation Authority.

Issue #3 – The Ethics of Doing

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