Arts | Special Issue : Radicant Patterns in Israeli Art

Editorial

6 pages, 3210 KiB

Open AccessEditorial

Raida Adon: Strangeness, a Conversation between Raida Adon and Dr. Amitai Mendelsohn, Israel Museum’s Senior Curator for Israeli Art

by Amitai Mendelsohn

Arts 2020, 9(4), 130; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts9040130 - 15 Dec 2020

Viewed by 4201

Abstract

The artist and actor Raida Adon was born in Acre in 1972 to a family that includes members of all the three religions of this region: Muslims, Christians, and Jews [...] Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Radicant Patterns in Israeli Art)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

Research

Jump to: Editorial

12 pages, 1074 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Other Side of Hospitality: Migratory Aesthetics in Yael Bartana’s True Finn

by Achia Anzi

Arts 2020, 9(3), 91; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts9030091 - 24 Aug 2020

Viewed by 3049

Abstract

My paper examines Mieke Bal’s concept of migratory aesthetics through the prism of hospitality. Critical of academic and institutional tendencies that either deny particularism or pin agents and artefacts to their alleged context, Bal develops her concept as a way of accommodating contemporary [...] Read more.

My paper examines Mieke Bal’s concept of migratory aesthetics through the prism of hospitality. Critical of academic and institutional tendencies that either deny particularism or pin agents and artefacts to their alleged context, Bal develops her concept as a way of accommodating contemporary mobility without undermining cultural specificity. While arguing that “there is no such thing as site-unspecific art”, Bal is also critical of new historicism’s and traditional art history’s overemphasis on “provenance”, and underscores the political ramifications of this approach. Her critique can be read through the framework of hospitality. The notion of “provenance” frames the guest as the other and limits her ability to participate in the host’s culture. Hospitality, however, as Jacques Derrida maintains, is an ambivalent concept. While extending a friendly welcome, it also preserves hierarchy between the host and the guest. In my paper, I examine this other side of hospitality in Yael Bartana’s film True Finn (2014) and in Lost in Space (2005) of Mieke Bal and Shahram Entekhabi. I explore how these films organise the host/guest relation and how they deal with the political entanglement of hospitality. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Radicant Patterns in Israeli Art)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

18 pages, 10993 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Fragile Traces, Treacherous Sands: Ronen Sharabani and Micha Ullman’s Intergenerational Encounter

by Hava Aldouby

Arts 2020, 9(2), 73; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts9020073 - 23 Jun 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3013

Abstract

This paper addresses an intriguing intergenerational encounter between Micha Ullman (b. Tel Aviv 1939), one of Israel’s most prominent senior artists, and Ronen Sharabani (b. Tel Aviv 1974), a young media artist. The two artists’ otherwise divergent practices converge in their use of [...] Read more.

This paper addresses an intriguing intergenerational encounter between Micha Ullman (b. Tel Aviv 1939), one of Israel’s most prominent senior artists, and Ronen Sharabani (b. Tel Aviv 1974), a young media artist. The two artists’ otherwise divergent practices converge in their use of sand and red earth as their primary media. The paper brings Mieke Bal’s concept of migratory aesthetics and Jill Bennett’s phenomenological approach to trauma-related art to bear on Ullman’s fragile earth installations and perforated sand tables, and on Sharabani’s projections of Virtual Reality onto sand. Also addressed is Sharabani’s series Vitual Territories (2019), in which digitally manipulated views from Google Earth probe geographical sites that resonate with migratory histories. The paper traces two main trajectories upon which the oeuvres of Ullman and Sharabani interface. The first category, “treacherous sands”, relates to installations involving sand tables and other containers of soil. In turn, the category of “fragile traces” addresses installations that feature various architectural ground plans modeled in sand. In these installations, sand is the quintessential terra infirma. At the same time, however, the paper proposes that through the haptic appeal of the medium of sand, these installations counter the pervasive anxiety of shifting ground with an augmented sense of bodily presence. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Radicant Patterns in Israeli Art)

► Show Figures

Graphical abstract

13 pages, 1349 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Three Mothers (2006) by Dina Zvi-Riklis: The Repressed Israeli Trauma of Immigration

by Yael Munk

Arts 2020, 9(2), 71; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts9020071 - 16 Jun 2020

Viewed by 2939

Abstract

This article relates to the complex approach of Dina Zvi-Riklis’ film Three Mothers (2006) to immigration, an issue that is central to both the Jewish religion and Israeli identity. While for both, reaching the land of Israel means arriving in the promised land, [...] Read more.

This article relates to the complex approach of Dina Zvi-Riklis’ film Three Mothers (2006) to immigration, an issue that is central to both the Jewish religion and Israeli identity. While for both, reaching the land of Israel means arriving in the promised land, they are quite dissimilar, in that one is a religious command, while the other is an ideological imperative. Both instruct the individual to opt for the obliteration of his past. However, this system does not apply to the protagonists of Three Mothers, a film which follows the extraordinary trajectory of triplet sisters, born to a rich Jewish family in Alexandria, who are forced to leave Egypt after King Farouk’s abdication and immigrate to Israel. This article will demonstrate that Three Mothers represents an outstanding achievement, because it dares to deal with its protagonists’ longing for the world left behind and the complexity of integrating the past into the present. Following Nicholas Bourriaud’s radicant theory, designating an organism that grows roots and adds new ones as it advances, this article will argue that, although the protagonists of Three Mothers never avow their longing for Egypt, the film’s narrative succeeds in revealing a subversive démarche, through which the sisters succeed in integrating Egypt into their present. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Radicant Patterns in Israeli Art)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

17 pages, 7898 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The National, the Diasporic, and the Canonical: The Place of Diasporic Imagery in the Canon of Israeli National Art

by Noa Avron Barak

Arts 2020, 9(2), 42; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts9020042 - 26 Mar 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3948

Abstract

This article explores Jerusalem-based art practice from the 1930s to the 1960s, focusing particularly on the German immigrant artists that dominated this field in that period. I describe the distinct aesthetics of this art and explain its role in the Zionist nation-building project. [...] Read more.

This article explores Jerusalem-based art practice from the 1930s to the 1960s, focusing particularly on the German immigrant artists that dominated this field in that period. I describe the distinct aesthetics of this art and explain its role in the Zionist nation-building project. Although Jerusalem’s art scene participated significantly in creating a Jewish–Israeli national identity, it has been accorded little or no place in the canon of national art. Adopting a historiographic approach, I focus on the artist Mordecai Ardon and the activities of the New Bezalel School and the Jerusalem Artists Society. Examining texts and artworks associated with these institutions through the prism of migratory aesthetics, I claim that the art made by Jerusalem’s artists was rooted in their diasporic identities as East or Central European Jews, some German-born, others having settled in Germany as children or young adults. These diasporic identities were formed through their everyday lives as members of a Jewish diaspora in a host country—whether that be the Russian Empire, Poland, or Germany. Under their arrival in Palestine, however, the diasporic Jewish identities of these immigrants (many of whom were not initially Zionists) clashed with the Zionist–Jewish identity that was hegemonic in the nascent field of Israeli art. Ultimately, this friction would exclude the immigrants’ art from being inducted into the national art canon. This is misrepresentative, for, in reality, these artists greatly influenced the Zionist nation-building project. Despite participating in a number of key Zionist endeavours—whether that of establishing practical professions or cementing the young nation’s collective consciousness through graphic propaganda—they were marginalized in the artistic field. This exclusion, I claim, is rooted in the dynamics of canon formation in modern Western art, the canon of Israeli national art being one instance of these wider trends. Diasporic imagery could not be admitted into the Israeli canon because that canon was intrinsically connected with modern nationalism. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Radicant Patterns in Israeli Art)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

15 pages, 1186 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Radicant Israeli Art: From Past to Future

by Ori Z. Soltes

Arts 2020, 9(1), 16; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts9010016 - 6 Feb 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3965

Abstract

Mieke Bal’s concept of “migratory aesthetics” and the observation by Saloni Mathur and Anne Ring Peterson that “traditional notions of location, origin and authenticity seem obsolete and in urgent need of reconsideration” perfectly encompass the phrase “Jewish art”, and within that difficult-to-define subject, [...] Read more.

Mieke Bal’s concept of “migratory aesthetics” and the observation by Saloni Mathur and Anne Ring Peterson that “traditional notions of location, origin and authenticity seem obsolete and in urgent need of reconsideration” perfectly encompass the phrase “Jewish art”, and within that difficult-to-define subject, Israeli art (which, among other things, is not always “Jewish”). As Hava Aldouby has noted, Israeli art presents a unique inflection of the global condition of mobility—which in fact contributes to the problem of easily defining the category of “Israeli art”. Nothing could be more appropriate to the discussion of Israeli art, or to the larger definitional problem of “Jewish art” than to explore it through Nicolas Bourriaud’s botanical metaphor of the “radicant”, and thus the notion of “radicant art”. The important distinction that Bourriaud offers between radical and radicant plants—whereby the former type depends upon a central root, deep-seated in a single nourishing soil site, whereas the latter is an “organism that grows its roots and adds new ones as it advances…” with “…a multitude of simultaneous or successive enrootings”—is a condition that may be understood for both Israeli and Jewish art, past and present: Aldouby’s notion that the image of the Wandering Jew offers the archetypal radicant, informs both the “altermodernity” concept and Israeli art. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Radicant Patterns in Israeli Art)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

23 pages, 7559 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Israeli-Ness or Israeli-Less? How Israeli Women Artists from FSU Deal with the Place and Role of “Israeli-Ness” in the Era of Transnationalism

by Yael Guilat

Arts 2019, 8(4), 159; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8040159 - 4 Dec 2019

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 5403

Abstract

The Israeli art field has been negotiating with the definition of Israeli-ness since its beginnings and more even today, as “transnationalism” has become not only a lived daily experience among migrants or an ideological approach toward identity but also a challenge to the [...] Read more.

The Israeli art field has been negotiating with the definition of Israeli-ness since its beginnings and more even today, as “transnationalism” has become not only a lived daily experience among migrants or an ideological approach toward identity but also a challenge to the Zionist-Hebrew identity that is imposed on “repatriated” Jews. Young artists who reached Israel from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) as children in the 1990s not only retained their mother tongue but also developed a hyphenated first-generation immigrant identity and a transnational state of mind that have found artistic expression in projects and exhibitions in recent years, such as Odessa–Tel Aviv (2017), Dreamland Never Found (2017), Pravda (2018), and others. Nicolas Bourriaud’s botanical metaphor of the radicant, which insinuates successive or even “simultaneous en-rooting”, seems to be close to the 1.5-generation experience. Following the transnational perspective and the intersectional approach (the “inter” being of ethnicity, gender, and class), the article examines, among others, photographic works of three women artists: Angelika Sher (born 1969 in Vilnius, Lithuania), Vera Vladimirsky (born 1984 in Kharkiv, Ukraine), and Sarah Kaminker (born 1987 in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine). All three reached Israel in the 1990s, attended Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, and currently live and work in Tel Aviv or (in Kaminker’s case) Haifa. The Zionist-oriented Israeli-ness of the Israeli art field is questioned in their works. Regardless of the different and peculiar themes and approaches that characterize each of these artists, their oeuvres touch on the senses of radicantity, strangeness, and displacement and show that, in the globalization discourse and routine transnational moving around, anonymous, generic, or hybrid likenesses become characteristics of what is called “home,” “national identity,” or “promised land.” Therefore, it seems that under the influence of this young generation, the local field of art is moving toward a re-framing of its Israeli national identity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Radicant Patterns in Israeli Art)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

25 pages, 10087 KiB

Open AccessArticle

An Aesthetic Pattern of Nonbelonging—Immigration and Identity in Contemporary Israeli Art

by Emma Gashinsky

Arts 2019, 8(4), 157; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8040157 - 26 Nov 2019

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 4560

Abstract

This research pinpoints a local pattern of migratory aesthetics recurrently employed by four Israeli artists in the early years of the 21st century. I argue that works by artists Philip Rantzer, Gary Goldstein, Haim Maor, and David Wakstein showcase a hybrid migratory self-definition [...] Read more.

This research pinpoints a local pattern of migratory aesthetics recurrently employed by four Israeli artists in the early years of the 21st century. I argue that works by artists Philip Rantzer, Gary Goldstein, Haim Maor, and David Wakstein showcase a hybrid migratory self-definition that is embedded in the artistic language itself. By harnessing a collagistic language of juxtaposition and fragmentation, they frame Israeli identity as uncanny, reflecting a cultural mindset of being neither “here” nor “there”. I contend that this pattern is used by a particular generation of artists, born in the early 1950s, and reflects a reaction, in hindsight, to the Zionist ethos of collective local identity. Employing old photographs from their family albums that they transform into framed detached figures, these artists draw upon childhood memories of immigration. Their art marks an identity clash between two homelands, which is the result of intertwined aesthetic and socio-cultural characteristics. The first is evident in the prevalent use of collage in local art—in itself a language of oppositions. The second is the negation of the diaspora in the Israeli socio-cultural mentality, which constructs identity through binary thinking. To date, no other study has acknowledged this aesthetic pattern nor the common ground these artists share in their works. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Radicant Patterns in Israeli Art)

► Show Figures

Figure 1

Journal Menu

Journal Browser

Radicant Patterns in Israeli Art

Share This Special Issue

Special Issue Editor

Special Issue Information

Keywords

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

Published Papers (8 papers)

Editorial

Research

Further Information

Guidelines

MDPI Initiatives

Follow MDPI