The Israel Prize for alienation. The weekly column. Enjoy! Ahabbat Shalom. 1. Michal Naaman, who is not my cup of tea when it comes to art, has been named an Israeli Prize laureate in the visual arts for this year. A large portion of her work is devoted to conceptual art. To me, there is something immature about such art, a paltry art form that needs empowerment from words or sentences, like ideological crutches. In that type of art, the main thing is the idea, not the visual image. And then once it has been created, it requires whole companies of cognoscenti to enlighten us as to the meanings hidden within it. Fair enough. The interpretation is not separate from the artistic work, but its test comes later, when we go back to the work and see whether the interpretation truly explains the work from within or merely gives it an external title that glorifies the interpreter (his wisdom or inner sight) at its expense. Naaman built an intellectual and passionate world that clashes and unites language and imagery, logic and mysticism. Her processes are rich with the tension of inventions, play spaces and paradoxes that give rise to splitting, terror and anxiety over the future, reads part of the statement of the prize committee, one of whose members is the curator Sarah Breitberg-Semel, who in the 1980s coined the concept known as Want of Matter about Israeli art at the time. To me, this concept created an ideology from another state of lack -- the lack of art itself. Go ahead and look at Naamans art work without the interpretive screens and decide for yourselves. 2. About eight years ago, Dana Arieli-Horowitz published her book Creators in Overburden: The Rabin Assassination, Art and Politics, in which she interviewed 29 Israeli artists about their response to the Rabin assassination. The conversations naturally drifted to broader topics. The artistic community in Israel was introduced to the book as a homogeneous community that tolerates no deviations from a certain way of thinking, a collective group. To me, the book portrayed the twilight of an elite. One of the characteristics of an elite is the need to engage in debate with its ideological opponents in order to fertilize itself and public discourse, to draw upon material from within and without and melt it all together. The interviews in the book revealed a community in an incestuous state -- a group whose members, men and women alike, knew only themselves and fertilized only each other. This is a community that is destroying itself completely because it does not have the strength required to deal with different opinions, so it chooses to ignore, exclude and erase the ideological other. This applies to the Israeli media, academic world and more. Over the years I spent at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, I was appalled to discover that the situation in the visual arts was the worst and most radical of all. Most of Israeli society is not aware of it. During that time, I published a study (The Gatekeepers: The Politicization of the Aesthetic in Israeli Art), in which I pointed out two complementary systems that operated in Israeli art (and in other fields as well): exclusion and glorification. In the former system, curators of exhibits, critics and galleries exclude good artists because of their political opinions or because they do not adhere to the correct cultural codes. In the latter, mediocre and/or bad artists who serve the cultural and political ideology of the tribe in power are glorified. The prizes are also part of these systems. One fascinating interview in the book was of Michal Naaman. In my view, her statements made up one of the books high points because they expressed the depth of the controversy in Israeli society. Naaman spoke about two art works that she exhibited after the assassination, The Simple Art of Murder and The Revealed End of Days, which, according to her, is the standard formula of the right wing. Naaman was referring to the statement attributed to Rabbi Abba, an expounder of the Jewish oral tradition of the late third century C.E., who moved to the Land of Israel from Babylonia (and according to the Talmud, kissed the stones of Acre enthusiastically on his arrival). In the 12th chapter of the biblical book of Daniel, he asks the angel: How long will it be until the secret end? The angel answers: Go, Daniel, for the words are closed up and sealed until the time of the end. Our sages tried to point out the signs of the well-known end of days, when Israel would be redeemed from exile, the world would be redeemed from its troubles and so on. One of the prominent characteristics was noted in Tractate Sanhedrin of the Babylonian Talmud: Rabbi Abba said: There can be no more manifest sign of the revealed end of days than this, as it is said: And you, O mountains of Israel, will produce your branches and bear your fruit to My people Israel, for they are about to come (Ezekiel 36:8). Not just any redemption, but the revealed redemption, there for all to see. Not a mystical or miraculous redemption, no Temple descending from Heaven or a messiah riding on a donkey -- but a drastic change in the state of the Land of Israel, from ruin and desolation to blooming and building. Support for this may be seen in the statements of Ezekiel, who predicted the return from exile: When My people Israel are about to come home, you, mountains of Israel, will bloom and bear fruit. Well, the revealed redemption is a realistic and rational diagnosis. The land lay desolate for centuries and began to bloom only when the large waves of Zionist immigration began arriving, like a mother who kept her milk for her own offspring or a woman who kept faith with her lover. 3. But for Naaman, it is the formula of the right wing. And not just any right wing: After all, what Yigal Amir wanted to do was to bring about the end of days. Its the same thing with the coming of the Messiah. Naaman clearly does not know the source of the Hebrew expression for manifest redemption. She probably stopped at its apocalyptic meaning. A serious artist, a professor at the Midrasha School of Art at Beit Berl College, can open a book and learn. But it is better to link that to Yigal Amir and the assassination of Rabin. The plot thickens. Naaman used to break words down into syllables in her art. At a certain stage, she stopped using Hebrew and started using English. When she was asked why she had done so, she answered, Hebrew is a language where the profane and the sacred are so close together that there is actually no possibility of speaking Hebrew ... unless you are Yigal Amir. He speaks Hebrew with no problems because that is the language in which the Messiah will come. Fantastic. Naaman touched upon a heavily charged issue from the dawn of Hebrews revival. As early as 1926, Gershom Scholem wrote about Hebrews apocalyptic sting in a letter to Franz Rosenzweig, asking: What would be the consequence of the resurrection of the Hebrew language? Must not the abyss of the holy language open its mouth, after we have handed it down to our children? Hebrew is the language of the ancients, and of necessity, Once we have sworn the ancient names day after day, we will no longer be able to keep away their power. Even the ordinary Hebrew we speak so off-handedly contains religious, messianic, national and spiritual significance sealed up in words throughout our history. There is no escaping it. One of Naamans early works is titled A Goat in Its Mothers Milk. When she was asked where she got her familiarity with the Bible, she answered, I am not intimately familiar with the Bible, even though my father was a biblical researcher. A goat in its mothers milk is an expression I use, but it is a stranger to me. The stranger is inside. It is the stranger within. Indeed, the flight from the abyss of the Hebrew language means taking a cultural stance that is oppositional to the nations tradition. It is a challenge. For the challenge that Naaman has placed before us, she definitely deserves the Israel Prize.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 14:59:44 +0000
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