Militant Ironies:
Art as a Strategic Weapon in Israelâs Culture Wars
TEXT / PIL AND GALIA KOLLECTIV
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view of the
exhibition Mini Israel: 70 Models,
45 Artists, One Space
at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem |
Looking at Israel from without, itâs easy to get lost in the big
picture, boiling the country down to a two-sided conflict
between Arabs and Jews. From within, one gets too caught up in
the detail, too embroiled in the numerous sects and particular
interests that make Israeli culture a cacophony of conflicts,
which the Arab/Jewish struggle can barely keep in check. Titled
after a model theme park featuring an idealized Israel, Larry
Abramsonâs exhibition Mini Israel:
70 Models, 45 Artists, One Space
rightly defines the problem as an issue of scale.
Presenting seventy artistsâ scale models of various aspects of
Israeli society in The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, he has
created an overview that aims to provide the critical distance
so lacking in this fraught society. Having lived away from it
all for most of the last six years, we still feel sensitive to
some subtleties. At the same time, we are keenly aware of shifts
in the political discourse that our friends back home seem to
take for granted: curious euphemisms÷like ãdisengagementä and
ãcompensated evacuationä÷litter a mutating political landscape.
This shifting terrain is itself a representation of the struggle
to come to terms with the idea of getting out of the occupied
territories÷once a radical left heresy and now almost a
consensus view. Words like ãtransferä have traversed the
political spectrum, and are now being applied to the treatment
of settlers instead of being shorthand for a proposal for the
disposal of the Palestinian population. We are not quite sure
what scale we occupy, but disorientation, as Abramson appears to
be suggesting, is a good place to start.
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Partial views of the
exhibition Disengagement (courtesy of the artists and the
Tel Aviv Museum of Art) |
An
exhibition entitled Disengagement at the Tel Aviv Museum
of Art explores the dismantling of the Gaza strip settlements,
supposedly from all sides. For the first time in many years,
right-wing art shares a platform with the leftâs more
predictable oppositions, in videos affording the settlers center
stage and allowing them to compare their woes to those of the
holocaustâs victims, and in painterly portrayals of their pained
compromises. As a result, both positions are blurred into a
sentimental tragedy with no agency÷while Palestinian responses
are conspicuously absent. The attempt to make an ultimately
negligible part of the occupationâs ongoing saga so central
falls flat in the face of the theatricality of the disengagement
itself, rehearsed like a high school play between soldiers and
settlers to the point where artistic commentary had become
superfluous. David Ratner of Haaretz newspaper has been
quoted by The Guardianâs Rachel Shabi as saying
They held meetings where the settlers would say, ãLet's
keep to the agreement, we don't beat up the soldiers, we will
lie on the ground holding hands,ä and the soldiers were saying,
ãWe will break you apart, in small squads of four soldiers but
not using excessive force, and you are not allowed to kick at
the military.ä1
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Partial views of the
exhibition Disengagement (courtesy of the artists and the
Tel Aviv Museum of Art) |
As
Ziv Korenâs journalistic photos of the armyâs manoeuvres
illustrate, there is enough high drama in the reality of the
evacuation without the ideologically motivated compositions of
the more artistic representations on show.
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Ziv Koren,
ãMassadaä unitâs training for the pullout from Gush Katif,
July 2005, 2005, Lambda print, 70 X 100 cm, featured in the
exhibition Disengagement at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art
(courtesy of the artist and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art) |
In
a recent book, Graciela Trajtenberg, claims that the Israeli art
world was formed as an autonomous field, positing art for artâs
sake in distinction from an otherwise politically engaged
Israeli society.2
Whether or not Trajtenberg is correct in setting up early
attempts at European abstraction and aestheticism as apolitical,
the immediate political concerns of the region have since come
to dominate artistic production, establishing a kind of state of
emergency for the arts that parallels that of the entire
country. As Ronen Eidelman and Yael Barda write in the current
issue of Maâarav, an online art and culture magazine,
Israeli art, much like the Israeli peace industry, has
turned protest into a profession. The critical artist opposes
the occupation and the exploitation, goes to biennials, exhibits
in shows, travels the world and receives approbation and
recognition for his mere acknowledgement of the situation (at
best documenting those struggling to change it).3
In
other words, political art in Israel functions much like the
work of a disillusioned activist of the ãWomen for Human Rightsä
group who, standing in army posts in the occupied territories,
keeping a watchful eye on the way IDF [Israel Defense Forces]
soldiers treat the civilian population, described her impact:
ãyou become part of the army post, a cog in the machine, and
both sides÷the soldiers and the Palestinian÷simply take your
presence there for granted, a constant silent witness.ä
But, while art has been swallowed up by this impotent political
discourse, it is hard to shrug off a creeping sensation that
it÷and, particularly, the radical aspects of the avant-garde
tradition÷has also been absorbed into the political center
without seriously changing its structures, hegemonies, and
injustices. In Israel, politics almost functions as artistic
critique: the results of this yearâs elections were deeply
influenced by a popular television satire show and the
negligible pensioners party won an impressive seven seats in the
parliament largely because many young voters, in an act of
political defiance and sheer irony, decided such a vote would
somehow reflect the absurdity of the political situation. This
is a nightmarish version of the 1968 generationâs old dream: a
collapse of the distinction between life and art, creating an
open, free space where play and work are united. Writing in the
May issue of Frieze, Eyal Weizman described the Israeli
armyâs adoption of the theories of Deleuze, Foucault, and Debord,
as well as a host of architectural theorists, in developing new
approaches to urban warfare.4
Deleuze and Guattariâs ideas about decentralisation, swarm
intelligence, and smooth space, Debordâs dérive and
détournement as subversive interpretations of space, and
Tschumiâs writing against the rationalism of the postwar
architectural strait jacket have allowed the IDF ãwar machineä
to transcend the ãstate apparatusä and its ãstriations,ä moving
through walls instead of alleys and reconfiguring living spaces
as battle stations.
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Jakup Ferri,
still from Save Me, Help Me, 2003, video, 10:24 minutes,
featured
in the exhibition
This is not America
(courtesy of the artist and ByArts Project
Gallery, Tel Aviv) |
A
mere forty-five minute drive÷if traffic isnât too bad÷separates
Jerusalem, the nominal capital, from Tel Aviv, Israelâs cultural
center. Yet, the divide between the two is as stark as it has
ever been. A vibrant art scene thrives in Tel Avivâs commercial
galleries, while art in the holy city, although home to the
countryâs foremost art school, has until recently been limited
to a handful of state-funded institutions like The Israel
Museum÷whose focus is as much archaeological as it is
artistic÷and a small strip of downtown Judaica merchants.
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Erkan Özgen and Sener Özmen,
still from The Road to Tate Modern, 2003,
video, 6:26 minutes, 3/6 edition + 1AP, featured in the
exhibition This is
not America
(courtesy of the artist and
ByArts Project Gallery, Tel Aviv) |
Straddling local and international concerns and aesthetics, the
Tel Aviv art scene boasts exhibitions by
expats made good like Guy Ben-Ner and Michal Rovner,
alongside other imports and exports.
This is not
America,
an exhibition curated by Galit Eilat and presented at ByArts
Project Gallery, enlists the work of Balkan artists to
illustrate the dilemmas that the periphery faces when it seeks
to develop its own representation. Short sketches about
globalization by the Siberian Blue Noses Group accompany Kosovan
Jakup Ferriâs pathetic plea to a curator in the video Save
Me, Help Me, 2003, listing ideas for work he could make to
appeal to the international art market, and
Erkan Özgen and
Sener Özmenâs
The Road to Tate Modern, 2003, a Quixotian quest for the
west across the dry mountains of Turkey. Somehow, this show of
foreign art manages to say more about the local conditions of
art making and the impact of the political on the aesthetic than
either of the major museum shows that address the situation more
directly. At the same time, it is too easy to discuss the
marginalization of the periphery from within the enclave of
cosmopolitanism that is the Tel Aviv art scene. Nowhere would an
exhibition like this be more pertinent than in the state
capital.
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Adrian Paci,
Turn On, 2003, video, 4 minutes,
featured in the
exhibition This is
not America
(courtesy of the artist and
ByArts Project Gallery, Tel Aviv) |
In
Jerusalem, meanwhile, postmodern (anti)narratives become pure
utopian fantasies. Much as we would like to see cities as free
flowing socio-geographic bodies in a constant state of flux,
where solids melt into air under the feet of casual
flâneurs
following the new IDF paradigms identified by Weizman, Jerusalem
will not abide. Many obstacles, physical and cultural, delineate
the cityâs social space. The cityâs genealogy÷violent cycles of
conquest and liberation from King David, the Crusades, Saladin,
the Turks, and the British mandate to Zionism÷is so present
that, for many Israelis, the ãheart of the city is the ancient
holy wall,ä a line from a post 1967 patriotic song which is
still widely popular. Cutting across the city and separating the
eastern Palestinian side from the Jewish one to the west, the
Ottoman wall is perhaps the most visible of these obstacles. But
Jerusalem is also rigidly divided into ethnically and culturally
homogenous neighbourhoods: poor ultra-orthodox Ashkenazi
neighbourhoods; ugly settlement-suburbs on the desertâs edge,
roughly divided between new immigrants from Russia and older
ones from North African countries; richer quiet neighbourhoods
in the west; and a few Palestinian villages scattered among
them. On Saturday afternoons, police barriers block car entrance
to the ultra-religious neighbourhoods where stoning is almost
inevitable if one nevertheless dares to cross.
In
the midst of all this, art is being strategically used by the
city council and other governmental organisations to rejuvenate
the dying city center, which has long been replaced by a chain
of suburban malls as the main shopping and entertainment
destination÷a mirror image of the atomization of the local scene
and of Israeli society in general. A few artist-run galleries
have, for the first time in many years, popped up in the
trendier area behind the busy Ben-Yehuda market. The city
council financially assists some of them, such as Barbur.
Agripas 12 is managed by a group of twelve artists who share the
rent while another, Al-Hoash, lies in the cityâs eastern side,
behind the wall.
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Yoav Weiss,
Surveillance Plane, 2005, steel, paper, video camera, 70
x 200 x 200 cm,
featured in the exhibition Mini
Israel: 70 Models, 45 Artists, One Space
(collection of the artist; courtesy of the Israel Museum,
Jerusalem) |
Over the last decade, property prices have dropped rapidly in
Jerusalem because of the Intifada. The city council now wants to
create an arty buzz to raise the prices again, and although some
of these artistic initiatives are quite brave, the art suffers
as a result of its complicity with this planned
gentrification÷or so we are told by the proudly independent
Jerusalem artistsâ group Sala-Manca. Activity for its own sake
can prevent the development of interesting art while an exciting
new spirit of entrepreneurship often obscures both the
limitations of the local art scene and its instrumentalization
by official organisations. In many ways, cultural
entrepreneurship is just another weapon in the postmodern
arsenal, another step in the cycle of conquests that has defined
and reinvented Jerusalem over the centuries. The most startling
example of a misguided÷and perhaps even cynical÷exploitation of
culture in the new gentrified Jerusalem is the recent proposal
to build a Museum of Tolerance on the site of the centuries-old
Muslim cemetery. If Jerusalem has been the symbol of various
religious utopias throughout history, the proposed museum seems
to carry it into the utopian discourse of the
present÷neo-liberalism÷replacing the real city with an
imaginary, politically correct idea of an end to conflict.
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Maayan Strauss,
Settlement Evacuation, 2002, Playmobil pieces, sand,
stones, 50 x 120 x 120 cm,
featured in the exhibition Mini
Israel: 70 Models, 45 Artists, One Space
at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (collection of the artist) |
A
few months ago, plans were announced to relocate the Bezalâel
Academy of Art and Design from its gritty mountaintop building,
overlooking the Palestinian village of Isawiya in the north, to
the center.
Prof. Arnon
Zuckerman,
the academyâs president, insists that an art school needs to be
in a living, organic site and not an isolated location. At the
same time, Bezalâelâs degree show has been controversially
transferred to the old airport in Lod, a move described by art
critic Yonatan Amir as an attempt to escape the Levant,
subsuming the local in the echoes of propeller noise still
connecting Jerusalem to foreign dreams.5
Walking through the exhibition Mini Israel, where
miniature surveillance planes hover over miniature bomb
explosions moored next to miniature concrete skyscrapers and a
hollowed out mini-mosque, one is subjected to the double scope
of Israeli art, which no foreign dream can seduce to unity. The
world outside the museum is ever present, not just referenced
but physically scaled down. Several artists have made use of
Lego style toys and dolls in their work. Nevertheless, curator
Abramson claims that Mini Israelâs compromised playful
position has reintroduced a sense of social responsibility to
art in the wake of its failure to find meaning in the everyday.
Judged against the simulations of the political arena in
general, and the IDF in particular, re-enacting the occupation
as childâs play hardly feels subversive or critical. The
pleasure of finding new art and creative energy in Jerusalem is
marred by the sense that, as with Baudrillardâs Disneyland, the
borders of the theme park that is the Zionist project have been
eroded.
Contributing Editors Pil and Galia Kollectiv are
London-based artists, writers, and independent curators. They
wrote this text in June 2006.
