What Should We Make of the Israeli Art Question?
May 19th, 2008 by Menachem Wecker
As quoted in the IHT, the curator of the Israel Museum’s “Real Time: Art in Israel, 1998-2008” claims: “We have entered a kind of dream - come - true period, meaning Israeli art has turned very international without losing its Israeli feel.”
I am not sure I agree with Amitai Mendelsohn’s argument. Let’s add some context.
I covered this question in a review for the Forward of the Cooper Hewitt’s show “SOLOS: New Design From Israel” back in January 2006. In it I suggested (and I still feel it to be true that) “To classify art based on geographical origin is to play a silly game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey … The show of 18 artists … successfully argues for locally important design works while failing to outline any Israeli identity therein.” (See also this piece in Arab American News, on Israeli and Palestinian art.)
I also covered the recent show ” Personal Landscapes: Contemporary Art from Israel” at American University’s Katzen Center for the Washington Jewish Week, for which Dalia Levin, director of the Herzliya Museum, told me that Israeli art “cannot really be identified as Jewish art concerned with religious or local politics alone” due to its “multicultural qualities.”
The Israel Museum adds this on its site:
Many of the works in the exhibition convey a fear of impending global catastrophe and a yearning for escape to distant realms, real or imagined. They propose wild primeval settings or realms of fantasy and myth. For the most part, the here and now is absent from these works: those in which immediate local realities are evident either observe life in Israel from a distance, framing the political present in mythical time, or else they reveal dark currents flowing beneath the surface.
Let’s put it all together. Israeli art is very multicultural and addresses all the same issues that artists everywhere represent. Just as debates rage on about whether Israel is or even should be a Jewish state, artists and curators seem reluctant to equate Israeli art with Jewish art. Many Israeli artists I have interviewed tell me they are artists and the Israel component is negligible or even misleading, while others tell me they are very proud of their “Israeliness,” whatever that means.
Clearly, equating Israeli art with Jewish art will not work, because Israeli art will have to incorporate both Christian and Islamic art, as well as secular art. Even if Israel belongs militarily and politically to Jews, its art presumably will have to be more expansive.
It is probably high time to ask ourselves what is really at stake in all this. The notion of finding a solid definition of the word “Israeli” (which seems to be a prerequisite to a definition of “Israeli art”) is quite appealing, especially to me as a religion and arts writer. But the term becomes slippery, as many do in a postmodern world, because it has to fit many different sorts of artists and perspectives.
I hope that exhibits continue to grapple with cultural, religious, and national identities. I find it more interesting when such exhibits fail than the alternative, when exhibits succeed at taking no risks. I just find it troubling when exhibits try to do both. This nonsense about being universal “without losing its Israeli feel” is just rhetoric. Let’s get more sophisticated. Either there is something Israeli about the art — and then just give it to us and we will judge what, if anything, it means — or let us just talk about individual artists without attaching them to a national identity. If the works are any good, they should not need any such help.