Globalization And Contemporary Art (Hardcover)

Chapter One

Vivianne Barsky

Two kinds of absence structure the field of aesthetic experience at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.... One [is] the absence of reality itself as it retreats behind the mirage-like screen of the media.... The other is the invisibility of the presumptions of language and institutions, a seeming absence behind which power is at work, an absence which artists ... try to bring to light.

What appears as globalization for some means localization for others; signaling a new freedom for some, upon many others it descends as an uninvited and cruel fate.

"Beyond the Limitations of Borders"

In the spring and summer of 2008, as part of the cultural events planned to mark Israel's sixtieth anniversary, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, presented an exhibition proposing to map distinctive trends in local visual art during the preceding decade. Titled Real Time: Art in Israel 1998–2008, this was one of six roughly concurrent exhibitions at the country's major museums, each devoted to a different decade of local art production since the establishment of the state. Owing to the Israel Museum's comprehensive "campus renewal program" then under way, Real Time was mounted in the Weisbord Pavilion, a freestanding addition to the original (1965) museum cluster. The multimedia display was on a par with contemporary shows at prestigious international venues. The stakes were, indeed, set high. In his foreword to the exhibition catalogue, the museum's director, James S. Snyder, asserts that, along with new artistic mediums, and with "boundaries between local and global ... rapidly disappearing ..., a new generation of Israeli artists ... [is] emerging on the global landscape in ways not previously seen." As for the thematic concerns of the works on display in Real Time, Snyder highlights a preference for universal questions addressed in a quasi-mythic perspective on the one hand, and an inward probing of self and imaginary realms on the other. Both tendencies, he claims, convey an "urge to reach beyond the limitations of borders, while also responding to Israel's unique historical legacy and its complex contemporary reality." The exhibition is promoted as "our Museum's up-to-the minute look at the artistic zeitgeist of this most challenging period in Israel's developing history ..."

Simmel and Intifada

Jarring with the sanitized foreword rhetoric, the first of two catalogue essays bemoans/berates the mood of the social zeitgeist which, it claims, prevailed in the period under review in Real Time. A lecturer in the Hebrew University's Sociology and Anthropology Department, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, scans the behavioral patterns of Israel in "an era in which there is no longer an overarching [i.e., Zionist] narrative or great consensus, but a range of perspectives, directions, and voices." This fragmented society reacted with paradoxical apathy to an overwhelming combination of problems, contentions, and predicaments. The sociologist hypothesizes the collective anomie as one of the consequences of the "neoliberal position," alias "piggish capitalism" (which has permeated Israel over the past decade). She posits this peculiar reaction as an example of what Georg Simmel characterized as the "blasé attitude" of modern metropolitans, which in effect constitutes a defense mechanism and sheer survival tactic against the constant onslaught of stimuli on their sensibilities, combined with an inordinate worship of money and impersonal financial transactions. Another parameter adduced by Vinitzky-Seroussi to explain the process of emotional blunting that afflicts Israel of late is the distinction between two registers of time: linear ("secular, mundane, and continuous") versus cyclical ("religious ... sacred, ceremonial"). When "ostensibly major, unique events" appear to repeat themselves in cyclical fashion, or constitute "sequels" to such events – as in the decade marked by the Second Intifada, the Second Gulf War, the Second Lebanon War – they tend to similarly desensitize those not directly involved, she explains. At the height of the Intifada, as "one terrorist attack followed another, retaliation triggered retaliation, despair engendered despair," a point was reached when the outrages seemed to coalesce into a single bloodied blur.

This process, Vinitzky-Seroussi observes, was accompanied by a blurring of political distinctions between Left and Right and a consequent dwindling of the major party blocs, reflecting "exasperation with the familiar disputes: borders, peace, war, religion, and state." Indeed, both the country's leadership and its elites "became bored with them." Hence, she snaps, "It may be no coincidence that Israel's most prominent project ... in the last decade is the construction of the separation barrier," a monument to the epochal "tedium, despair, and fear ... without dreams and aspirations."

Re: Real Time

The sociologist's lament provides a background – or an alibi of sorts – to the catalogue essay written by Amitai Mendelsohn, co-curator (with Efrat Natan) of Real Time. In a balancing act between this critical exposition and the promotional pitch of the director's foreword, he declares that the Israeli art world generally and its younger generation specifically have eschewed a visceral response to the aforementioned cycle of violent events that followed the breakdown of the Camp David peace summit in July 2000, perhaps out of a sense of powerlessness to effect change, but also deliberately embracing "a universal stance in an attempt to rise above the purely local." In accordance with this premise, the curator highlights "leading young artists" who, rather than confronting close-at-hand calamities head on, "express dread of global catastrophe, alongside a yearning for escape to distant borders, real or imagined ... [albeit] in the conscious knowledge that real escape is impossible." Even works dealing with local contexts are seen by Mendelsohn to "do so either as if from above, framing the political present in mythical time, or by revealing hidden currents behind the impassive, self-satisfied surface of Israeli society." And although he concedes that "political and social activism has always been evident in Israeli art and especially in photography ... since the First Intifada," significant examples of such an activist stance are glossed over in a footnote.

Mendelsohn points to the coincidence of the aforesaid disengaged or escapist tendency with international developments, such as proclamations of the "end of ideology," and of art, but also to a countervailing resurgence of figurative and narrative elements, a re-legitimization of aesthetic values, and a fascination with the spectacular. He notes that young Israeli artists are keenly aware of and involved in these processes, pursue studies abroad, and enjoy international exposure in exhibitions and at galleries of "major' cities." Their works, in whatever medium, tend to be highly polished, and they share a fascination with luridly beautiful end-of-the-world scenarios and catastrophes of the kind conjured up in London's Royal Academy exhibition, Apocalypse, Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art (2000). A number of works in the exhibition, Mendelsohn remarks, interweave universal and local apocalyptic motifs with personal, existential, and artistic elements. There is no gainsaying that; however, the curatorial discussion of the respective strands tends to be disappointingly vague and evasive.

Let us pause on a few examples of works featured in Real Time to test and contest the above propositions. Some of the most intriguing images were indeed in the medium of photography. Thus Adi Nes (b. 1966) – one of Israel's internationally most renowned (and remunerated) artists today – was represented by his provocative version of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, Untitled (1999) (Figure 1.1; www. artnet.com/artist/182853/adi-nes.html). The staged scene shows a company of Israeli soldiers partaking of a frugal meal laid out on a barracks trestle table; their grouping and gesturing is freely borrowed from Leonardo's rendering of the loaded biblical scene. According to Mendelsohn, this and Nes's other theatrical portrayals of local soldiers "move beyond the Israeli political situation to connect with the religious and mythical.... By transferring this scene to Israeli military surroundings, the artist makes a trenchant political statement on sacrifice and betrayal, while simultaneously translating [the mundane] into timeless divinity: the earthly meal will culminate in an ascent into heaven." But such a redemptive (Christian) climax would seem to be entirely out of context with contemporary Israeli reality; at any rate, one is left to figure out what the trenchant political statement is about and who is being betrayed/sacrificed by whom. A gay soldier by his partner? The (savior-)soldier by the state? Or both? In fact, Nes's photographic oeuvre critiques his country on various levels and counts, individual, social, and political. His series Bible Stories (2004–6), for instance, effects an ironic dialogue with the scriptural narratives in allegorized portrayals of present-day Israel as a society of blatant discrimination and inequality – local symptoms of what are also global ills. But whereas Nes's now legendary adaptation of The Last Supper (twice a smashing hit at Sotheby's, New York) was a "must" in the show, none of the works from the series – four of which have in fact been acquired by the museum – was featured. One, Ruth and Naomi, Gleaners, an indictment of societal indifference to the hardships of outcast "others," reducing them to becoming scavengers, was reproduced in the catalogue without commentary – a curatorial tactic of marginal inclusion recurrently employed in Real Time.

The category of works described by Mendelsohn as images "in which the daily passage of time is suspended ... transmuted, becoming mythical" was represented in the display by another photographic scene, Flood (2004), by Barry Frydlender (b. 1954) (Figure 1.2; www.artnet.com/artist/423972813/barry-frydlender.html), depicting a rainy spell in a rundown south Tel Aviv neighborhood. A group of cheery teenaged pupils seek refuge from the downpour in the doorways and along the wall of a dilapidated 1930s "Bauhaus" building. Some of the youngsters are headed for an army museum housed in barracks, with an antiquated cannon displayed in the courtyard like a discarded toy. The curator describes the image as a shot caught "from the distant vantage of an observer ... [who] does not attempt to capture the critical moment, the one frame in which a drama takes place," one of a run of "reworked digital photographs conflat[ing] scenes, figures and times ... into a series of continuous presents that seem to enfold both past and future." Frydlender of course alludes to the story of the Flood and Noah's Ark, and the biblical cataclysm presages the ominous future of today's world, plagued by urban blight and destruction, climate change, pollution, and untold natural disasters. The catalogue text makes no mention of this, just as it flinches from any meaningful discussion of the implications of the Flood when set in contemporary Tel Aviv. But the deluge can be fathomed precisely as a "critical moment" in the (ongoing) drama of this deteriorating neighborhood – both in a literal and figurative sense – with the carefree pre-army youngsters exposed to the threat of a disaster from which there will not likely be a divine salvation.

The artist Sigalit Landau (b. 1969) was represented in the exhibition by three monumental, mixed-media sculptures from her installation The Dining Hall at Kunst Werke – Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2007), a phantasmagoric grafting of disparate motifs – topical and historic, artistic and existential, familial and individual. Landau molded the papier-mâché on metal wire sculptures featured in Real Time into gruesome flayed figures (Figure 1.3). Mendelsohn observes that one of the sculptures, RomaMania, recalls Brancusi's Endless Column (1938) "and its groundbreaking three-dimensional exploration of the sublime." But what is the significance of Landau's citation of this work? In an interview, she explains that the inspiration for the flesh/meat image was the Turkish döner, "an augmentation of the common Berlin fast food, a kind of [Middle Eastern] shawarma," which – inter alia – signifies a "feast of gluttony" with deadly outcome. She also describes her intention to create carnivalesque "figurative, monumental sculpture"; thus she (re)created a "Brancusi from a Romanian skewer," amalgamating the beautiful with the repellent. But there is also a clear reference to the Holocaust, with papier-mâché constituting "a pollution of time and words, a recycling of recycling ... what no-one, and especially in Germany, really wants to see ..." Perhaps the work's title is intended as an ironic, post-Holocaust (and post-Adorno) gloss on artistic pretense to sublimity? However, The Dining Hall, and Landau's art at large, also addresses the utopian ideals of Zionism and their dystopian metamorphoses or "poisoned fruit." Mendelsohn touches on the latter motif, but mainly as it featured in an earlier solo exhibition of Landau's work.

One of the morbid pieces in Landau's installation, Iranian Atom, is euphemistically described in the catalogue text as having "the form of a flower ... reminiscent of an atomic mushroom" (it is, rather, a grotesquely phallic image). This, of course, is one of the "universal issues of destruction and human survival" in which, as Mendelsohn notes, Landau is engrossed. But again, the title of the work and the fact that the artist is, after all, Israeli, prompts the question whether she is not conveying her premonition of a local/regional apocalypse ...

Overall, the catalogue text's discussion of the works appears to sketch, skimp, or skip salient elements of the works chosen for display in accordance with the dubitable claim that, since contemporary Israeli artists aspire to be part of the "global village," they "are more concerned with universal contexts than with defining the local and relating to it ... searching a way out of the limitations imposed by their surroundings and the rules of the here and now." Yet Mendelsohn is not devoid of social and political awareness. In particular, he contrasts the present with the old days when Israel was (or believed itself to be) a society firmly based on egalitarian values. The most probing section of his essay, under the evocative heading "The Heart of Darkness," covers works in Real Time that were prompted by a "need to tackle head-on the worst aspects of Israeli society," as he puts it. Standing out among these was The Boy from South Tel Aviv (2001) by Ohad Meromi (b. 1967) (Figure 1.4). This colossal Styrofoam and paper sculpture (both Landau and Meromi combine oversized dimensions with conspicuously nonpolished, perishable materials), which made waves when first shown at a Tel Aviv Museum exhibition in 2001, was installed as the centerpiece of Real Time. The figure of the "illegal foreign worker from the Dark Continent," Mendelsohn explains, represents "Israel's third-world foreign workers," most of whom inhabit South Tel Aviv, "the periphery that allows the center to live in comfort." In addition, alas, the curator infelicitously projects "the erotic image of the naked boy – his air of childlike innocence notwithstanding" as an embodiment of "what the West perceives as mysterious, tempting, and, at the same time, mortally dangerous." But that is not at all what the giant image of the lean black boy with his flexed muscles and defiant expression conveys! Rather, it communicates the pent-up resentment and potential self-emergence of long-oppressed continents and peoples – a prospect that "the West" regards with equal trepidation.

Another work by Meromi, a mock border-crossing barrier that flanked The Boy from South Tel Aviv in the said Tel Aviv Museum show, is described by Mendelsohn in similarly discomfiting terms as an image "explor[ing] the boundaries between civilization and savagery, the urban and the natural, the flagrantly sexual and the safely concealed." He appears oblivious to the signification of the barrier as the epitome of discrimination, exclusion, marginalization, and humiliation all forming part of what Zygmunt Bauman has branded as globalization's "human consequences."

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Globalization and Contemporary Art Copyright © 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.. Excerpted by permission of John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---