Final Project

"Hi,
My name is Liat Harel and I am a student of Visual Communication at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. As part of my fourth and last year of studies, I have to submit a final project which will be displayed at a large, festive exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Academy.
After giving it much thought, I decided that my final project would be about artists from different places in the world who focus on the various visual arts, their daily routine, hobbies and habits. It should be interesting to study the similarities and differences between them against the variations in culture, environment and scenery, as well as what creative people go through during a routine day.
I apply to you as an important and interesting artist, in the hope that you will agree to take part in my project…"

So begins my letter, which I have addressed, a few months back, to about 100 artists in the various fields of the visual arts, throughout the world.
As I mailed this letter to them, I wandered: Would I get any response? Would established artists be willing to cooperate with a foreign student who lives across the world and has nothing to do with them?
So, I found myself every morning eager to open my email box in anticipation for any kind of response – whether acceptance or refusal. Eventually, more and more answers of acceptance came in, and the project started to shape up.

Barcelona 2005
In 2005, I was in Barcelona on a student-exchange program. I was used to working long hours and spending sleepless nights on finalizing projects, so I was surprised to discover that life in Barcelona was very much different:
People there, started their working day fairly late, then took a long lunch-break and finished working altogether when it was still daylight. Then, they got engaged in planning their recreation activities for the evening and night hours, and those usually lasted until day-break. Notwithstanding, they started on the next morning, though again late, a fruitful day of work and creation, and so it went on and forth. The most wonderful thing about it is that their creativity is of the highest quality and much appreciated throughout the world.
Witnessing this kind of life-style stirred in me many questions about environmental influences upon creativity and creation: Does the easy-going, stress-less and rather festive life-style of the Spaniards have an affect on their creative abilities and qualities? Can the environment actually influence creation? Could the daily routine of designers influence the way they create? In this era of Globalization, is there really an identity or even an extensive similarity between the daily routines of different artists? And if so, does each of them also retain, alongside the similarities, a personal uniqueness and a local aspect? Is it possible that in this era of Globalization, if there is too much similarity in the everyday life – then creation and creativity could too become global?

Birth of a Project
So, I took those questions and turned them into the corner-stones of my project. As a first step, I structured in accordance, a schematic formula (of aspects) which covers both the visual and conceptual angles of my research. Then, I transformed it into the aforementioned address to artists in the various fields of the visual arts, who live and work in different places around the world. (See appended letter). In it, I asked them to document their daily routine, using a variety of visual and verbal means in accordance to the detailed instructions of this itemized scheme. My purpose was to have them perform this documenting work on themselves as subjects, on the basis of a clear and identical guideline formula. The activities and moments I've asked them to document are all routine and entirely "regular" – the most ordinary things of habit. However, they can open a window into one's most intimate moments – at home, with the family, within the soul, and along the creative process, at work.
The documentation of these moments opens the way – to track similarities and differences between the various artists; to examine the connection and relationship between "personal" and "global"; and - to study the role and function of culture, society and environment in the life of a creative artist.

Selection of Artists
I tracked down the various visual Artists all around the world, through a fascinating journey of research in: the professional literature – books about Designing; the Internet; Exhibitions around the world; International Art Festivals; various Trade Unions (of designers, animators, artists, etc.); Magazines; and also through personal and social acquaintances.
Thus I found hundreds of artists, of whom I've selected only about 100 to mail to my letter of address. Almost everybody responded: I received 40 refusals (for lake of time, unwillingness to expose personal life, etc.), and 48 answers of acceptance, from which I selected 15 artists who fulfilled the following criteria:
International deployment; urban as well as countryside environment; multi disciplines; pieces published in the professional literature or exhibited in shows; winners of awards and prizes; mobility; gender; age; products (the quality of the received materials).
To sum it all up – I tried to reach the widest deployment of artists throughout the world; to accumulate a wide variety of the visual art disciplines (painters, designers, animators, illustrators, sculptors, etc.); to get to those who due to their mobility tendency have lived and created in different places, as well as others who live and create in one steady location; to reach women-artists as much as men, since I'm much intrigued by the angle of women's art. I've tried especially hard to reach women artists whose work left great impression upon me (like the work of the "Guerrilla Girl's" which I saw at the 2005 Biennalle di Venezia – they refused my approach, claiming unwillingness to expose their privacy, even though I appealed in the name of their professed ideology), but they proved more reluctant than the men. Yet, at last I succeeded to attract 4 most interesting and fascinating women artists;
I aspired to approach a range of age-groups in order to review two questions: What are the differences (if there are any) between veteran artists in the peak of their career, and the young and starting ones? Also, how do those who lived and created in the pre-"Global" era react to and handle the new "open world"?
Of course, a crucial criterion for the final selection was also the quality of the products and materials sent to me.
In this way, I chose 15 artists from all around the world – Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, U.K, USA, Argentina, Kenya, Taiwan and New Zealand. During the accumulation of their materials I came to learn how willing those artists were to cooperate, to give of their precious time and even money (expenditures on photographing, developing, mailing, etc.) in order to help an unknown art student, all on behalf of, or for the sake of – Art.
On the whole, it seemed that illustrators and animators were more inclined to respond favorably than graphic designers – a phenomenon open to many interpretations. Also, I received no materials at all from Japanese or Australian designers, nor - from the Arab world and East Europe.
I've decided in advance not to approach any Israeli artists (residing in Israel) – as their selection could have proven too difficult, and might have justified a full focus upon them (which is a separate project that I still intend to do and exhibit, maybe as part of my studies for the Masters). Hence, I chose myself – a senior-year art-student and starting designer, looking out at the world – to first try on (as a test-case) the schematic guidelines for self documentation (before sending it out to others).

The Blog
For the sake of documenting the actual work-process, and also in order to establish more personal connection between myself and the participating artists, as well as among themselves, I opened a blog in the Internet, as a channel to raise questions for discussion, analyze ideas and thoughts and document the entire process of this project.
I chose not to include the blog in this exhibit, but I keep my options open to further develop and expand it, and maybe even exhibit it in the future through other means.

The Equator
So, my project was launched by 15 selected participant-artists, from all around the world, who documented their daily routine - moving from the private to the general, from getting up in their bedroom, on to the rest of the house, then to the street, to the studio/workplace and the creation process, then, further on to time spent with friends, to recreation activities, to books and music and even a personal artifact which holds a special meaning.
They've all opened doors for me, each to a home, family and soul. So even though we never met in person, I feel like an old friend of theirs. Bit by bit I've discovered the nature of the environments in which they create, and their sources of inspiration. I've discovered the "person" in people whom I formerly could identify only as artists. From the moment they "exposed" their personal information by filing it in a CD or any other means – they actually transformed their private stories into much larger ones. Because from that very moment, the intricate relationships that are being woven between all the exhibited life-styles and stories make a new story that becomes the main story in itself, and in return, redefines all the private stories. Each personal story is being redefined by boundaries set to it by all the other stories!