ART IN ISRAEL, 1948-2008: A PARTIAL PANORAMA

Headnote

This article follows a number of artistic movements and events anchored in Israeli ideology, politics, and content. It offers a selective, partial panorama of art in Israel from 1948 through the first decade of the twenty-first century. The article presents a sequence of synchronic historical pictures defined by the specific context of each decade, in which each work is representative of an idea or artistic concept in local Israeli artistic discourse.

The conjunctional term "Israeli art" indicates a theoretical dependence among art, the state, and the nation. In fact, Israel's May 1948 declaration of independence took place in the building that housed the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The neutral space of art thus became the legal space of the official birth of the Israeli nation.

The foundation of the Bezalel School in Jerusalem in 1906 is considered by Israeli art historians as the beginning of Israeli art.1 The purpose of the Bezalel institution was to combine arts and crafts and to serve the community and the newly emerging society. This was achieved not only by training professional workers and artists but by creating objects and images that would ensure the grip of the new nation's place in the Holy Land. The birth of Israeli art then, whether dated as 1906 or 1948, occurred in conjunction with the Zionist project of creating images of place and attempting to materialize its utopia.2 Thus, from the outset, there were two major difficulties: the dependence of the term "Israeli art" on the nation, and the question of its nativity. In addition, historians have had difficulty framing conflicting and varied practices since 1948 in a single picture.3

This article offers a selective, partial panorama of art in Israel since the establishment of the state in 1948. Yet this art is not simply a function of the state or at least does not merely serve what the state may identify as its interests. On the contrary, at times the art is radically critical of national matters. This article presents a sequence of synchronic historical pictures defined by the specific context of each decade. Most of the works discussed have achieved major recognition in the field. They each represent an idea or artistic concept in local artistic discourse; nevertheless many outstanding works are inevitably neglected in this selective panorama.

THE 1950S

Avigdor Stematsky's landscape painting from the 1950s is covered with colored stains and lines of different densities.4 It looks like a scrap of paper, a note that a poet might write to himself in an intimate moment, whose purpose is to recall an event that would later become an important element in the artistic puzzle he is creating. The colorful writing in the painting is not readily legible; it is foreign to any code or object known in the real world. This painting documents the sounds playing in the artist's consciousness as he observes nature. It is difficult to discuss this painting with respect to the natural landscape to which it refers. The concepts of origin and copy, or mimesis, lose their validity in paintings of this sort. On the other hand, one can try to experience the musicality translated here into signs consisting of colored tones and half tones, i.e., to read the painting as painted sheet music. The architectonic elements and green vegetation are transposed into musical signs to present a poetic picture that can be appreciated only when subjected to the magical power of painting. The stains and lines turn into a plastic cobweb that attempts to capture the topography of the land by expressing the sensations of the artist observing it.

Stematsky's work exemplifies what came to be known in the historiography of Israeli art as "lyrical abstract," as Ran Shechori puts it:

His painting can serve as a perfect model of the approach known to us as "lyrical abstract", the main source of inspiration of which is French painting of the 1950s. This approach posits color values over and above any other component, and measures the quality of the work by the degree of sensibility and refinement that the artist displays in applying the paint in choosing the tone, and in the touch of his brush on the canvas. Stematsky is one of the most important colorists in his country, and this style, which liberates him from the limitation of a given object and a formal composition, enables him to prove his phenomenal mastery of brushwork.5

The painting combines the real and abstract reality; it compels us to undertake a process of decoding via which we are invited to identify the plastic impressions as an embodiment of sensibility that was "originally" felt in front of the natural landscape.

Stematsky was a member of New Horizons (Ofakim Hadashim), a group of artists established in 1948, the year of the establishment of the State of Israel. This group was a major force in the field of art in Israel until at least the mid-1960s.6 They were influenced by various French artistic movements, among them Expressionism and Cubism, as well as by the Jewish Paris School- -including Chaïm Soutine, Michel Kikoïne, and Marc Chagall. They admired the values of universalism and progress expressed by these European artists. While New Horizons declared that they "demand art that be connected to the people," a few years later the leader of the group, Yossef Zaritsky, said, "An Israeli artist... must see himself as one of the rest of the artists in the world."7

While New Horizons has often been connected with French abstract painting, there were artists in the group who tried to emphasize the reality of local society. Among these were Marcel Janco, Aharon Kahana, and Yohanan Simon-all of whom left New Horizons in 1956 due to a dispute with Zaritsky. After their departure, New Horizons became a more homogenous group, gathered around abstraction.

As a movement, New Horizons became the dominant group during the first two decades of the state's existence. Abstract painting, whose point of departure is natural space characterized by a murky colorfulness and by accentuation of formal lyrical values, became the major artistic expression in Israel at this time, perhaps even its canonical high art. New Horizons was perceived as an example of pure modernism in the local landscape, as a movement that emphasized the universality of artistic practice rather than religious ties to the land. Nevertheless, it suited the Zionist ethos, constructing itself as a modernist, Western, and secular project.8

At the other end of the artistic spectrum of the 1950s was figurative painting, which although not totally disconnected from New Horizons perceived itself as an alternative to the ongoing domination of abstraction. This heterogeneous group of artists was gathered, critically, under the rubric of Social Realism. Avraham Ofek, one of the key figures in this group, summed up their perspective and criticism of New Horizons:

It is the painters' duty to consider their environment..., human material, its problems and its landscape. Our country is located in the East and most of its citizens are of an Eastern origin having no connection to the dominant language of painting, which is in fact French. It would be totally non-artistic to ignore the environment, to block all senses, to insist on speaking in a foreign language. Isn't it a coarse form of colonialism, in the style of spreading Western culture in the Mediterranean, as is done by Hollywood films? The fact is that there isn't yet an original Israeli [school of] painting, and the reason for this is located in the total neglect by painters of the mass of the people in Israel.9

Ofek's statement echoes his time, the first decade of art in the State of Israel. This was the first decade after the Holocaust. It was a period of massive immigration of refugees from Europe and from Arab countries, the growth of the kibbutzim and cities, the attempted collectivization of multiple peoples into one national Israeli identity. All these led to multiple artistic reactions that departed from the narrative of abstract painting.

Social Realism's artists saw the act of creating as connected directly to society. The subjects they offered were representations of transit camps, demonstrations, workers, industrial developments, and life on the kibbutz and in the city. Some emphasized a link to nationalist values and dealt with subjects testifying to the national resurrection through symbolic images. Unlike New Horizons, these artists turned to Italian and Mexican art as well as to American painting, such as that of Ben Shan and Picasso's Guernica, as sources of inspiration. This heterogeneous group consisted of artists from the kibbutz such as Yochanan Simon, Shraga Weil, and Shemuel Katz; artists who had left the kibbutz such as Avraham Ofek and Ruth Schloss; and artists working in the city such as Naftali Bezem, Shimon Tzabar, Gershon Knispel, and Moshe Gat.10 The members of Social Realism criticized New Horizons for being egocentric and reactionary in their approach to art;11 they saw them as petit bourgeoisie playing with form.

Another group working in opposition to New Horizons was The Group of Ten (1951- 1961), which attacked abstract painting as being cosmopolitan. Most of the members of the Group of Ten were former students of Yehezkel Streichman and Avigdor Stematsky, both of whom were major figures in New Horizons. The Group of Ten employed figurative painting that looked at local ways of living and at vernacular landscapes. Unlike the Social Realists, they avoided any overt social or political agenda.12

The two major groups working in Israeli art during the 1950s, however, were New Horizons and the heterogeneous mix of artists dubbed the Social Realism.13 This division was an expression of the difference between those emphasizing the universal-aesthetics dimension of the work of art (New Horizons) and those expressing the local dimensions of art-making in relation to the specific history and society of Israel (Social Realism and The Group of Ten). This didactic and binary differentiation was, however, only partial. Abstract painting (tethered to a formalistic or modernistic agenda) acted under the influence and in connection with major institutions of the state, while Social Realism's artists were neither indifferent to aesthetic issues nor disconnected from national institutions.

The question of the relation of art, its themes, language, and images to society cannot be discussed only in terms of figurative painting or in terms of recognizable identities in realist art, for example, Yehezkel Streichman's Ein Hod.14 This work was painted after the artist had stayed at Ein Hod during the summer of 1955. The painting, while defining the specific site it depicts in its title, looks like an abstract, cartographic image. The composition is based on a pseudogeometric division of space into squares, to which the artist adds lines and fluid, unrestricted, colorful stains. The overall vista is washed with natural lighting. One way of reading this painting is to relate it to the objects that can be seen within the painted landscape. Another way would be to read what has been erased from the landscape, which is its subject. Contemporary discourse traces the disappearance of the remains of the Arab architecture that testifies to the previous inhabitants of the village. Ein Hod is an artists' village envisaged by the former avantgardist and enthusiastic Zionist Marcel Janco after he immigrated to Israel in 1941. Janco promoted the idea of building an artists' village in the spirit of similar villages in Europe. Neither the pastoral vision of Janco nor the depicted landscape of Streichman include any trace of the inhabitants of the former Arab village at Ein Hod (a Hebrew transcription of the old Arabic name), who fled during the 1948 war. When the inhabitants of the village tried to return to their village they discovered that their houses and land had been nationalized by the state, so the returning refugees built a new village, adjacent to their original homes. The "new" village was not recognized by the State of Israel until 2005. This being the case, the gesture toward abstract painting is not without political resonances. Streichman's painting presents a universal landscape; an abstract, pictorial settlement existing in the East, here or anywhere: an image.

Jacob Steinhardt offers another dimension of the artistic work taking place during Israel's establishment. It is an art that reflects harsh criticism of the state with regard to refugees, deportation, and victimhood. Steinhardt depicts the ruins of an Arab village, conscripting pictorial language to express an overtly complex and antagonistic political view. During the 1950s, he depicted political crises in the region using biblical themes. During the first decades of the existence of the State of Israel, he turned repeatedly to the story of Hagar and Ishmael.15 In his painting Abraham Banishes Hagar and Ishmael16(1964), which is in continuity with his work during the 1950s, the landscape is depicted in the spirit of woodcut technique; it looks like an ancient landscape, schematic and primeval, and depicts Abraham suffering but pitiless. On the other side of the picture are two figures: one old, the other a young boy, both of them disappearing into dark shadows, fading away in the horizon. Hagar is being banished with her son Ishmael, and they become a symbol of the exile of the Palestinians, but at the same time they indicate the promise of a better future. Despite the harsh representation of national conflict, the translation of the political present into the ancient biblical narrative expresses national conflict in terms of an intra-Jewish problem. As explained by Yigal Zalmona, Abraham banishes the others because of a divine command; the questions of suffering and deportation are translated into terms of a Jewish tragedy.17

THE 1960S

The ninth exhibition by New Horizons (1959) was held at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and it indicated not only the strength of the group but also the beginning of its demise. It showcased new artists such as Moshe Kupferman, Aviva Uri, and Raffi Lavie. Some of the group had withdrawn from abstraction and returned to realist landscapes. New Horizons' last exhibition in 1963 again included Raffi Lavie and Moshe Kupferman, as well as Uri Lifshitz. They exhibited works different in spirit from the abstraction of New Horizons as defined by the works of Zaritsky, Streichman, and Stematsky. Igael Tumarkin exhibited his work Panic over Trousers.18 He immersed his work trousers in polyester and hung them on the work's black-colored surface. The trousers look like a walking ghost. The artist stamped his hand on the sides of the work, and together with the red marks on the surface, the effect is a crosscomposition in which the artist presents himself as a sacrifice, as crucified.

In 1967, Tumarkin created his sculpture He Walked Through the Fields,19 a complex assemblage built of casts of the artist's body in black bronze combined with other metal items. Tumarkin's work represents a man with no hands wearing army shoes. His face is torn, he is painted in army khaki and red pigment, and his belly is wide open-exposing weapons and heavy cannon ammunition. The soldier's tongue is sticking out grotesquely, his trousers are pulled down to his feet, and his penis droops, as if signifying national castration. The sculpture's title is taken from Moshe Shamir's novel, He Walked Through the Fields (1947). The hero of the novel is a foundational figure in the construction of the image of the mythical Israeli male, the sabra. 20 This sculpture is a reaction to the 1967 Six Day War, and more accurately to the euphoric atmosphere of victory prevalent at that time. It is also a radical reaction to the ethos of the 1948 generation with which Tumarkin dealt in several of his works.

10+ (1965-1970) was an artistic organization of ten artists including Raffi Lavie, Uri Lifshitz, Buky Schwartz, Ziona Shimshi, Benny Efrat, and others who invited artists to share their exhibitions (hence the "plus" in their name).21 This was a group of artists whose aim at the time was to fight for exhibition space at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The group was not homogenous: there were various creative styles, and they were characterized by a formal and conceptual pluralism. 10+ was actually a group antithetic to New Horizons; their common denominator was not overtly ideological but a sort of social bonding, combined with an ambition to improve the members' position in the artistic and social spheres in Israel. Each artist could conserve his own unique, specific artistic vision. They attempted to dismantle the barriers put up against them by the artistic establishment and by the older generation of artists. Raffi Lavie defined the way 10+ should be treated "as a festivity, as diverging from routine.... Failures should also be taken into account. These were experimental exhibitions."22

10+ sought to create new art by inviting artists to create works according to themes decided upon for each of their exhibitions (either a formal choice, such as the color red, or a thematic one, such as the figure of Venus). One can identify a connection to New Horizons in their art, at least formally, as well as some connection to American Pop Art as created by its more expressive protagonists, such as Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg, in their use of materials. This move testifies more to the affinity between 10+ and the aesthetic of abstraction than to cold, spectacular Pop Art.23 Eighteen artists participated in the exhibition "10+ Climbs on Venus," held at the Gordon Gallery in May 1970. Michael Druks presented a Venus climbing out of a vertical box whose interior was filled with Styrofoam that bore the trace of the shape of Venus who had risen, as if from the sea. The cover of the box, closet, or casket from which Venus emerged was placed on the floor.24 The figure of Venus was drawn on the cover, with several holes in her face, like gunshot wounds or breathing holes. Druks sought to ventilate Venus and to remark on the myth by animating it in the present. Raffi Lavie, on the other hand, drew a figure of Venus on a surface and put a towel from his kitchen on it, in a manner reminiscent of the work of Tom Wesselmann. At the close of the exhibition, Lavie destroyed his experimental piece.25

10+ injected irony, humor, and sophistication into Israeli art. They situated everyday objects such as dolls, fragments of papers, towels, and reproductions center stage. Israeli reality marched into the art world that discovered the everyday as proper material for creation.

Although 10+ was not an ideological group with a clear manifesto, it did define working principles, some of which emerged from paradigms of the previous artistic generation, while others sought to destabilize previously existing norms. They honored Zaritsky and New Horizons when some of them made use of lyrical abstraction, while at the same time it is clear that they did not consider the artistic object as the most important outcome of their activity; rather they valued interaction either between the artists themselves, between themselves and the establishment, or between art and the public. The first basic rule of 10+ was "to take actions that will educate the spectators and the artists, and will take them out of their routine." 26This led to an art that saw challenge and experiment as its utmost priority. Their point of departure was that it was necessary to conserve the particularity or individuality of the artists, rejecting the perception of craftsmanship connected to a specific object (thus opposing New Horizons). They promoted the artistic event, as Lavie described it: "all the works that we put on display were crap, but the exhibitions were beautiful."27 This spirit is not so removed from the secular Israeli modernism of New Horizons that saw itself as part of a universal process.

The artists of 10+ were innovative in their use of materials new for the art world (photographs, everyday objects, etc.), in order to create collages and assemblages, and in the use of combinations of different media: poetry, theater, cinema, electronic music, and fashion. Their attempts to expand the limits of art constituted the initial steps in the antiinstitutional artistic activity characteristic of the 1970s. Many of the major artists of the 1970s were members of 10+. Raffi Lavie, the leader of the group, became one of the most influential figures in Israeli art over the next two decades and was later called the father of the Midrasha School.28

THE 1970S

During the 1970s, art in Israel exceeded the accepted limits that had existed in the wake of the activity of 10+. During this period, artists interiorized the international activity of landart, environmental art, body art, and conceptual art. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, art became more political and critical in its relation to society. Borders, the holiness of the land, and the issue of Israeli national identity were urgent questions during these years. What came to be known as the rebellion in the Bezalel academy occurred mid-decade. Radical teachers in the academy decided to abandon the language of painting and sculpture in favor of alternative, conceptualmaterial art. The artistic uprising failed at Bezalel, and teachers such as Micha Ulman and Moshe Gershuni, among others, were dismissed. The institution came to be centered on painting once again. The presence of conceptual art there began to decrease between 1975 and 1977. The students of the Bezalel of the uprising period, Yoram Kuperminz, David Wakstein, and Arnon Ben, retained the spirit of the political art that would become central in the future.29

Artists in 1970s Israel also continued formal investigations of the artistic object. This can be seen in works based on a different format using such materials as burnt paper; building compositions using industrial materials such as rust-proof wires as sculptural matter, or wires for drawing; or using materials such as margarine to create images with random effects. These creative experiments not only broadened the limits of various media in art but also paved the way for the institutional criticism of the 1970s. Thus one can see how Benny Efrat blocked the entrance to the space of his exhibition in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (with the work Information, 1972); Moshe Gershuni painted graffiti on the walls of the Julie M. Gallery.30 As early as 1969, Avital Geva displayed an exhibition of paintings in the orchard of Kibbutz Ein-Shemer (1969-1970), while toward the end of the decade, he wrote a letter to the manager of the Tel Aviv Museum, Marc Scheps: "This is the opportune moment to part with that institution, with its illusions and academic degrees and definitions of art."31 Institutional criticism directed toward the status and position of the museum would lead art beyond the museum and beyond the aesthetic autonomy.

The body, suppressed by the abstract discourse of early Israeli art, returned to center stage in the 1970s. Artists like Gideon Gechtman, Motti Mizrachi, Avraham Eilat, Tamar Getter, Efrat Natan, Yocheved Weinfeld, Michal Na'aman, Yudith Levin, and others positioned the body at the heart of their artistic activity. The body came to be the anchor of meaning, a vehicle with which to resist intra-aesthetic procedures and to change gendered and political conventions.

In 1976, Yocheved Weinfeld performed her Untitled piece (also known as Menstruation) at the Debel Gallery in Jerusalem as part of her exhibition titled "Pains".32 A series of violent actions were performed on the artist's seated, passive body in order to purge it from its alleged dirt. This ceremony was inspired by the Jewish purity laws and included reading texts from the Shulchan Aruch (a learned catalog of halacha or Jewish law). According to Weinfeld's representation, the religious commandments redesign the female body and the way it lives in the world, structuring its modesty. Among other quotations, the audience could hear the laws of menstruation: "[the male] must not touch her [not even] the little finger and must not reach out his hand to deliver or receive from her, not even an elongated thing; and even throwing from his hand to her hand is forbidden." 33 During the performance, another woman acted to purge and improve Weinfeld's subjected body: cleaning her legs, blocking her mouth, cutting her hair, cleaning her genitalia, cutting her dress, applying makeup, and putting her wig on. The violence perpetrated on the body was highlighted when at the end of this ceremony Weinfeld offered the audience the remains of her hair with glasses of wine. Unlike the Christian narrative in which the Son of God sacrifices himself for humanity, with the bread and wine of the Eucharist representing or transubstantiating into his flesh and blood, here Weinfeld signified effectively the way women are sacrificed by society. The context of this performance was religious, Jewish discourse, its customs and manners, but the argument of this theatrical piece related to a broader discourse of gender.

In 1973, Pinchas Cohen-Gan carved a male figure on the walls of the Yodfat Gallery, naming this activity Place as a Physical Position. This digging into the wall in search of a non-existent object was a testimony to the artist's process of defining and searching for his own identity as a Moroccan, a refugee, and an artist, but it also indicated the process of disorientation of the State of Israel in general. Cohen-Gan undertook several conceptual acts that expanded his experimental art beyond the limits of institutional art. In a performance at Jericho refugee camp, in February 1974, the artist went to the camp and built himself a temporary shelter in order to communicate with the refugees living there. Earlier that year he enacted another performance he named Touching the Border (January 7, 1974) in which he sent four messengers to the borders of Israel and asked them to hide metal structures that were inscribed with demographic and other information. At the same time, he sent letters to artists' organizations in Arab states surrounding Israel and asked them to undertake similar actions. Cohen-Gan sought to challenge the border as a physical concept and claimed that the way to consider and reflect on "borders" was by challenging culture both inside and outside Israeli society.

In 1970, Joshua Neustein, Georgette Batlle, and Gerard Marx together carried out a conceptual project named Jerusalem River Project. They tried to soak the dry land of the Jerusalem area with a river of sounds that flowed near the Saint Clair Monastery. They wanted to gather, symbolically, different water sources from other areas in Israel by recording them and playing their sounds together in their conceptual river. In this they reflected the post-1967 Six Day War national fantasy of uniting the land. In 1971, Yitzhak Danziger began an ecological project, The Rehabilitation of the Nesher Quarry; and throughout the 1970s, Cohen-Gan delineated, through his series of artistic actions, the complexity of identity-personal, ethnic, and territorial. These artists delved into the political in its various dimensions; they challenged the borders between their art and their bodies, their living space, and their political agendas. They even tried to escape the financial dimension of art by transforming the aesthetic object into a political action, to create an art which would be produced, consumed, and distributed within a particular social community that needed it, and not in the superstructures (economic, social, and political) in which art was only one more commodity on the market; art was the place from which it was possible to attach the extensive exchange systems-both of commodities and of representations-that act in dissociation from the immediate needs of man.

The significant art of the 1970s put in doubt the artist, the art object, and Israel as a place as means of improving social, historical, and political circumstances. Most of these artists were aware of the utopianism of their performances.

In 1974, Michal Na'aman placed two signs on the Tel Aviv beach bearing the text "The Eyes of the Nation." The signs were directed westward and were painted in the colors of the sea. Their text was a citation from the words of a soldier during the last days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War in connection with the occupation of Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights. The artist reflected on the obsessive way in which the state dealt with its borders. 34 From the early 1970s, following the 1967 war, the borders of the State of Israel were no longer clearly defined. Israel had expanded to include the Golan Heights in the north and the Sinai Peninsula as far as the Suez Canal and the Red Sea in the south. The territory expanded without Israel receiving international recognition of most of its new borders. The borderlines were erased and redrawn in a world of representation, in maps, and on the concrete surface of the land. The question of borders was the subject of an exhibition summarizing the third decade of art in Israel.35 These were the years in which the borders of the art object, the position of the artist, and the borders of the aesthetic sphere were challenged over and over again: formally, materially, and politically, leading the way to the work of the next decade. If the move from the 1960s to the 1970s was a conceptual one (with its emphasis on the body and language), the move from the 1970s to the 1980s was a pictorial turn, guided by massmedia and the new globalization.

THE 1980S

The 1980s were a decade of profound social and economic changes that came to be known as postmodernism or late capitalism. Criticism originating in the 1970s turned its attention to art and its institutions and to the political sphere. Art was perceived as a means through which to fight for social and political rights, and in the 1980s these issues became more visible. During this period, art expanded in terms of the numbers of artists, curators, art journalists, and collectors. As a result, the connection between social identities and artistic expression became more apparent.36 During these years, the ethos of a pluralistic society was reborn and the artistic object became one cultural product among many others, especially in the area of consumption. Corporations acquired works of art in Israel and around the globe. During this time, painting was once again at the forefront; photography gained aesthetic status, and both media dealt with national issues, collective identity, difference, gender, and colonialism.37 In Israel, these were years of an encounter between postmodernism, post-Zionism, and post-colonialism. The sense of Israeli collectivity that had been criticized in the 1960s (as in the work of Tumarkin) was once again under critical attack; the last sacred cows of Israeliness were slaughtered by the birth of identity politics in a multicultural society that saw itself as a bundle of many narratives that functioned as an alternative to the homogeneity of modernism.

In his 1981 painting Sing Soldier, Moshe Gershuni inscribes the lyrics of a 1942 song by the poet Jacob Orland, "Arise, Please Arise" ("Ali, Na Ali"). In it, the poet encourages the reader to go out and fight. Gershuni erases the lyrics of the song with layers of color that express an intense mental state. The red colors and fluid, saturated marks evoke corporeal associations. Moshe Gershuni, who in the 1970s worked as a conceptual artist, was now creating expressive art. In his work Isaac Isaac (1982), Gershuni refers to the Biblical story of the binding of Isaac in the context of the first Lebanon War. During this period, he painted his series of cyclamens, which dealt with the Holocaust and with loss, without trying to connect them to the well-known national narrative of resurrection. Gershuni moves between the abject and the sublime, Christianity and Judaism, rationalism and emotionalism. In the 1980s, he led art back into narrative, myth, and expressionism.

The 1955 painting Deserted Still-Life by Dani Karavan38 depicts fleshy, cut parts of a cactus with its orange fruits laid on an old coat alongside a black jar filled with blue water. According to the artist, these were symbols representing refugees.39 In a series of prickly pear cactus paintings from the 1980s, Asim Abu-Shakra transformed the cactus, which by its Hebrew name of sabra-also a word for a native born Israeli-serves as a model of identity. On the one hand he referred to a traditional depiction of the prickly pear cactus in Israeli art, in which it was perceived as a symbol of native-born, Jewish Israelis, while on the other he reappropriated it for Arab culture in which the cactus features as a natural image of rural life in Palestine. Yet Abu-Shakra's cactus, even while it is appropriated from one culture to the other, is merely a model of identity, more than anything an empty symbol; it gains significance only for those who recognize the intricate systemic relations it has for both Israeli and Palestinian cultures. The sabra serves as a bi-national symbol, exploited by the artist to expose the notion that beauty and the aesthetic result from a performative act.

While Abu-Shakra, Asad Azi, and others exemplify research into ethnic and national identities, during the same period there were also significant works focusing on gendered identity. Diti Almog presented attractive, spectacular works.40 She quoted images from the world of sewing and design. She created a glittering aesthetic that critiqued the poor aesthetic of the 1970s and favored what might be thought of as a feminine aesthetic. Her works make reference to embroidery but also to the spectacular dimensions of capitalism.

During the 1980s, the critical standpoint of previous decades was transformed into a means of direct, political criticism of Israeli society. The first Lebanon War and the outbreak of the first intifada inspired pointed, critical works of art with clear political messages. David Reeb, for example, created a long series of paintings based on superimpositions, embodying conflict between the violent reality in the occupied territories and the calm, bourgeois reality within Israel.41 Reeb painted cartographic images of Israel without including the territories captured since the 1967 war. The green line42 becomes a pictorial motif in his paintings. In his work Green Line with Green Eyes"43 (1987), he contrasted the Tel Aviv sea shore with a scene from the intifada. The painting is covered with images of eyes recognized as a popular talisman protecting from the evil eye. Here, however, this is an eye that stares back at the viewer. He uses the colors of the Israeli and Palestinian flags and hints at a spreading blindness. Tel Aviv-Gaza 44 ( (1989) is a cinematic composition built of frames, allegedly taken from a film photographed from two perspectives, one in black and white and the other in color, one representing conflict in the occupied territories and the other a pastoral scene in Tel Aviv. In this way Reeb attempts to destabilize the fictive serenity of Israelis and to re-expose them to the violence beyond the green line. In Dead Soldier Painting,45 which followed the first Lebanon War in 1983, Pamela Levi depicted the non-heroic presence of death.

In the same spirit, given the improvement in the status of photography, which flourished in Israel during the 1980s, the Ein Harod Museum inaugurated a tradition of photography biennales; Adam Baruch coined the concept Art-Chronica and insisted on the close affinity between documentary photography and art. Anat Saragusti and others exposed the importance of documentary photography in reporting or testifying political and social reality. Micha Kirshner shot a portrait of Aisha El-Kord"46 from the Khan Yunis refugee camp. This photograph is one of a series of intifada portraits he photographed in his studio. Aisha El-Kord was a child, injured in the eye by a rubber bullet. She appears in the photograph with her mother in a pose evocative of a pieta. Additional photographers such as Michal Heiman, Aïm Deüelle Lüski, Moshe Ninio, and others examined the manipulations and mechanisms of photography and the way it functioned in the prevailing culture.

THE 1990S

The 1991 Madrid Conference led to peace talks in Washington, and in 1993 the Oslo Accords were signed. Thus the fantasy of a New Middle East became prominent: once again the optimistic dreamt of a multicultural society, with borders open to global trade. Privatization expanded and spectacular society, to use the Situationists' terminology, celebrated the glitter of consumerism and the rise of the aesthetic object as an important fetish in a global economy.47 The launch of cable broadcasting and of commercial television channels led to a world of communication flooded with images. At this time Israeli video artists worked without dependence on earlier, plastic art.48 Yet the 1990s were also subject to a deep sense of insecurity. The first intifada broke out in 1987 and lasted until 1990. Saddam Hussein's Iraq launched scud missiles against Israel during the first Gulf War (1991), and in February 1994, Baruch Goldstein perpetrated a massacre in the Cave of the Machpela (Patriarchs), which was followed by a series of violent attacks between 1995 and 1996. In November 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, and in September 2000 the second intifada began. This was the period in which the Zionist narrative came under radical attack from post-Zionist intellectuals.

The combination of a synthetic, glittering consumerism that created images of wealth, with the consciousness of fin de siècle, followed by the violent political acts of these years, created a reality that immersed itself in the present. The conjunction of hedonism and anxiety, wealth and glitter with catastrophe that characterized the 1990s may be seen in Slope, the installation by Gal Weinstein at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.49 This installation references Attached to the Ground, an installation Weinstein made previously at the Kibbutz Gallery in Tel Aviv (1999). In Slope, he depicts small houses with red roofs, buried in and gilded by dark soot covering civilization. The work looks like a stack of nuclear waste or the fallout after a volcanic eruption. It resembles a remnant testifying to the last happy days of a Pompeii-like Israeli society that will, in the end, collapse into the frightening mass of history.

Sigalit Landau created Swimmer and Wall in 1993. A tiny shiny doll swims into a wall, her head exploding in the violent encounter.50 The sweetness of the doll bursts in its intersection with the real. This image exemplifies an action that faces death in the present. Adolescence or youth that is aware of its own transience, i.e. of its own mortality, as suggested by the curator of the 1990s exhibition at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, became the emblem of the decade. In its confrontation with death, there is an attempt to hold onto youth as an atemporal moment, as non-time, while maintaining awareness of the inferno to follow.51 The politics of identity that had blossomed in the 1980s continued to gain power in the 1990s and gave rise to various "Others" in artistic practices; among them the Palestinian, the Eastern Jew, the woman, and the homosexual.

Khaled Zighari's Head to Head"52 (1995) presents a violent, frightening, and pathetic duet between a soldier and a Palestinian civilian facing off. They are twins in a violent, inextricable, brutal dance. Beyond the national conflict this picture achieved the status of a political document exposing the real in a radical way. A later version of this duet can be seen in Sharif Waked's Jericho First, which displays a series of 32 paintings whose point of departure is an image from the Hisham Palace in Jericho depicting a lion attacking a doe.53 As the series develops, the violent act proceeds and the images become denser, until in the end the lion and the doe become one body in which we can see the hanging leg of the doe. The language of this image hovers between commix and abstract painting, and it represents a violent, mythical world that is occupied by conflicting concepts of strong and weak, of good and evil.

In 1997, Meir Gal exhibited Nine Out of Four Hundred (The West and the Rest).54 This is a color photograph that portrays the artist bursting from a dark background or perhaps immersed in the darkness. The artist is holding a history book from the 1970s, written by Shmuel Kirshenbaum, in his hand. Of 400 pages, only nine are dedicated to the history of non-European Jews, and these are the pages that he holds in his hands. The rest of the pages are falling down. This is an effective photograph presenting a sharp message; the Jews from Arab countries, the Mizrahim, have been erased from the pages of canonical history by an oppressive educational system. The artist holding the nine relevant pages exemplifies the way in which his identity has been suppressed in the collective memory of the Israeli. This is an image that testifies to the extensive and violent power of local history and historiography.55

During the 1990s, the abject moved from the margins to take up a central position in the aesthetic field. In 1995, Doron Rabina, then an art student, created Untitled (T-Shirt with Sweat Spots), and presented it one year later at the Julie M. Gallery.56 Rabina painted a blue T-shirt with a clean, sterile look resulting from a precise, geometric shape which he then stained with two sweat marks on the shirt's armpits. This image conjoins the body's smell and art's eroticism, merging the aesthetic with the physical as the colorful, formal, visual language meets the body's secretions. As Julia Kristeva explains, dirt, the abject of bourgeois society, is everything that does not take part in social economy. Rabina sees the work of art as an act of soiling, staining commercial sterility, or the narrative of abstract painting, with passion and sensuality. The abject is what one attempts to suppress in order to gain independence-tears, excrement, urine, phlegm: all these bodily excretions are culturally taboo. The abject is a sign of threshold between the inside and outside of the body; it indicates a troubled subjectivity with regard to bodily limits. The magical secret of art dealing with the abject is the way it destabilizes the regulations of society. In this context, one may understand the newfound popularity of the abject in two ways. On the one hand, there is an attempt to search for regions beyond cultural restrictions in order to cure conscious/personal/cultural traumas. On the other hand, preoccupation with the abject testifies to its charm as a source of reflection, of fascination, and repulsion.57 On this ground, it is not surprising that artists turn to hidden, suppressed, abject spaces in order to locate a new beauty. This can be seen in Economy of Excess by Keren Russo. The artist documented the long sewage canals in the county of Essex, England, on video. The film resulting from this documentation presents a rich, colorful cinematic tapestry that reminds us not only of a journey through the tunnels of legend but also of scientific, visual documentations of the human body. These images may be seen as documentation of the modern catacombs that join the sacred and spiritual with the abject.

In 1996, Yoav Shmueli presented Tom 1 58at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. This was a large installation portraying a pastoral reserve of public garden in urban landscape functioning as an alternative space combining architecture, sculpture, and projected images. On the one hand, he projects a full moon on a tarpaulin, and on the other side he projects images from Independence Park in Tel Aviv onto a flowery, lace sheet. The roughness of one surface was counterpointed with the softness of the other; bluntness, softness, and sensuality were connected in the public garden, in which the artist experienced loneliness, passion, eroticism, warmth, pleasure, love, and jouissance. Shmueli projected the image of a young boy watching a field on the lace sheet and presented him as innocent (tom, in Hebrew) and fragile against the space. He placed a column, covered with paraffin, creating a condensed white texture in the pastoral garden he built at the museum. Nearby were trees and a pile of sand. The phallic column covered with the milk of passion was inscribed in the imagination of the artist as part of the architectural environment of Independence Park, a place used by the gay community as a meeting place for social encounters or casual sex. The installation was demarcated by a brick wall creating a dim, narrow passageway in which the sexual act would be performed. Homosexuality acted here on the margins of the public domain, full of passion but dark, rebellious, and uncivilized.

THE NEW MILLENNIUM

The end of the 1990s was characterized by anxiety about what came to be called Bug Y2K. This anxiety was followed by fear resulting from the September 11, 2001 suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Fear led to a change in the perception of power relations between governments and citizens and of global power relations. During the early years of the new century awareness of environmental issues, global warming, and climate change increased alongside the inexorable march of globalization. Sociologist Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi called the sixth decade of the State of Israel "the Decade of Indifference."

The social stage was filled with a procession of migrant workers and their Hebrew-speaking but legally unrecognized Israeli children; single mothers; people with disabilities; poor, sick, and hungry Palestinians at and beyond the checkpoint; homeless Gush Katif evacuees; victims of terror and of road accidents; residents of the North left defenseless in a war; residents of the South whose homes had become the front line; unprotected workers of sub-contractors and employment agencies; the unemployed and those whose income insurance had been discontinued. All had become seethrough citizens whose lives were cheap and whose fate no longer engaged the government. As if from behind a thin but impenetrable veil, Israeli society regarded them all with the same glazed, phlegmatic look.59

For his part, the curator of Real Time, the exhibition of sixth-decade art in Israel, wrote that this indifference led artists to turn to "another kind of time: a mythical and prophetic chronology marked by epic moments at which time appears to stop in its natural course." The artistic fruits of the new millennium turned to the apocalypse as an escapist response to a state of anxiety in the present.60

This is demonstrated by the work of Sigalit Landau. The visitor entering the exhibition space of the Alon Segev Gallery in Tel Aviv during October 2002 experienced a strong sense of disorientation. Descending into the space of the exhibition, entitled "The Country," which was actually a basement, led one into one of Tel Aviv's roofs relocated in the depths of the earth. This was a postapocalyptic world. The installation included three figures: one picking fruit, a second carrying fruit, and the third an archivist or observer who also looked like an ancient Egyptian figure in the act of writing. The forbidden fruits, or the spherical, poisoned fruits, were fashioned out of Haaretz (The Country) newspapers; the three figures looked like the living dead; their bodies consisted of an exposed anatomy: muscles without epidermis or a covering of flesh. Landau began collecting the materials for the installation at the beginning of the second intifada (known as the al-Aqsa Intifada) and presented this apocalyptic installation featuring remnants of humanity two years later. Violence overcame nature and the basement space became a capsular representation of hell.61

Michal Rovner's Data Zone (2004) displayed small scientific plates on a long, white table. These Petri dishes functioned as a screen onto which small, projected figures marched in changing formations, as though taking part in a ritual dance. They were in constant motion, like prisoners or soldiers on a metaphysical mission, or like laboratory animals under scientific investigation. They oscillated constantly between the human and the non-human. They evoked thoughts of culture and extinction, life and death, and the cyclical nature of time.62 Another work, Time Left (2002), depicted figures marching in line in a dark space within an infinite loop that did not lead to any narrative solution of their ecstatic movement but created a forced, infinite movement consuming any possibility of meaning. The tremulous movement of the images in this installation tried to hold onto the real or the ontological but the figures seem doomed to devastation.

The 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium has brought a new interest in beauty. Recent works emphasize visual perception; they magnify their visibility and are more seductive. They are more "produced," illusionist, and spectacular, altogether taking up a more visionary position. They often evoke religious ideas. Fascination, illusion, and magical impressions link them to contemporary culture, i.e. they create a postmodern look guided by relativism, surplus, delusion, an alleged lack of meaning, and even escapism. On the other hand, this visual and conceptual fata morgana is perceived as an alternative apparatus with which to cope with conditions in (post-) human society, of extermination of life and the status of truth.63 In Landscape and Jerusalem64 (2007), Eliezer Sonnenschein painted a fantastic landscape combining apocalyptic images of the northern early painting with the saccharine-sweet language of posters from the 1970s together with animation effects. This work is charged with a dark sense of catastrophe evoked by a grotesque amusement park combining a celebration of passions and visual glamour with a nightmarish consciousness of death.

In his painting Lost Youth (2003), Nir Hod depicted a military funeral.65 This is a monumental work based on staged photography. At first glance, it seems to be a direct testimony of the way in which emotions surface in a mourning situation, but the sterility of the image, the positioning of the figure of the artist at the center of the composition, and the meticulous technique give this image a double status. It is both a record of a very emotional, painful situation and a staged production in a framework of personal, narcissistic ritual in which emotion, like the wreath of flowers surrounding the picture, is manufactured, opposed to any authentic feeling.

While Frederic Jameson characterized the postmodern as the period of the decline of effect and the withdrawal of emotion, at the turn of the millennium emotion made its comeback in the art world. The flourishing of multichannel communication alongside live broadcasting of events in real time in a cybernetic world with the growth of cellular communication, and against the background of September 11, led to the resurgence of emotion-either staged, directed, and feigned; bursting and authentic; personal; or collective. 66

Amos Gitai's film Free Zone (2005) opens with a ten-minute long shot in which the camera follows the crying face of Rebecca (Natalie Portman), who has broken off her engagement. In the background, the song "Had Gadia"67 by Chava Alberstein, expressing her protest against the violence perpetrated by Israel in the occupied territories, can be heard. Thus Rebecca's weeping carries political resonance. During the carrying out of the disengagement of Gush Katif in Gaza in 2005, which involved the evacuation of thousands of settlers and the destruction of their homes, Pavel Wolberg presented a series of contact sheets as an artistic triptych that created intense emotional effects. A cry or agony is displayed at the heart of Eli Petel's Untitled diptych of 2004.68 Petel depicts Arab and Israeli women in a painted collage in which women cry, lament, mourn, or are silent. They are interwoven and express pain in highly emotional gestures. This horrifying, collective portrait of a group of weeping women was gathered from newspaper photographs taken following violent events on both sides of the national conflict. The collage quality of the painting respects the separate existence of each figure, maintaining difference but also the disconnection between these women in their acts of mourning.

In 2008, Itzik Badash exhibited a series of photographs in a one-man exhibition titled Diwani. The photographs were taken during a ceremony in which his mother and grandmother mourned and blessed him. The photographs expose not only his vulnerability as a Mizrahi Jew (descendent of immigrants from Arab, Persian, or North African countries), a homosexual, and an AIDS carrier, but also more than all these, he expresses a yearning for physical contact through which emotion can scrape all stereotypes off the body in preparation for a new millennium, less violent, less alienating and less painful.

Footnote

NOTES

1 See for instance Benjamin Tammuz, Dorith LeVité, and Gideon Ofrat (eds.), The Story of Art in Israel: From the Days of Bezalel in 1906 to the Present (Ramat Gan: Modan, 1980) (Hebrew).

2 Sara Chinski claims that this materialization of utopia involves the suppression of any understanding that the place (i.e. territory) is a matter of dispute, and she attributes this Zionist position of alienation of others to the history of Israeli art because she perceives this art as part of the national project. See Sara Chinski, "Silence of the Fish: The Local vs. The Universal in the Israeli Discourse of Art," Theory and Criticism, Vol. 4 (1993), pp. 105- 22 (Hebrew).

3 To these complexities we should add that 1948, the year of the declaration of the State of Israel, was shadowed by the War of Independence. This same war was experienced by the Palestinians as the Catastrophe (Naqba). To be complete, any discussion of Israeli art during the years mapped here should take into account a vast variety of Palestinian artistic work created during this period. Due to lack of space only specific cases of Palestinian artists whose work has been acknowledged and accepted in the local discourse of art in recent decades will be considered here. For this reason also the picture delineated here is partial. See also note 53.

4 Avigdor Stematsky, Landscape, the 1950s, oil on canvas, 50X61 cm. Collection of the Israel Phoenix.

5 Ran Shechori, "Avigdor Stematsky, Gordon Gallery," Haaretz, May 15, 1970, cf. Miriam Or, "Landscape," in Mordechai Omer (ed.), 90 Years of Israeli Art: A Selection from the Joseph Hackmey-Israel Phoenix Collection (Tel Aviv: Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, 1998), p. 272.

6 For the history of New Horizons (1948- 1963), see Gila Ballas, New Horizons (Tel- Aviv: Reshafim and Papyrus, Tel-Aviv University, 1980) (Hebrew). See also Yigal Zalmona, "New Horizons: The Impresario Experience," ["Ha'havaya Ha'amarganit"], Kav 1 (June 1980), pp. 79-82 (Hebrew).

7 Smadar Sheffi, "New-Horizons: Ten years of Art," in Zvi Zameret and Yablonka Hanna (eds.), Israel: The First Decade (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 1997), pp. 285-86 (Hebrew).

8 The historical narrative of the relations between New Horizons and the Israeli establishment is not that simple, although New Horizons was perceived as the major art movement of the new society, representative of the State of Israel state in international exhibitions. An exhibition held in honor of the first decade of the state in 1958 at Binyaney Ha'uma in Jerusalem included works by New Horizons artists, among them the painting Power (Otsma) by the leader of the group, Zaritsky. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion attended the opening of the exhibition and was disturbed by the painting and asked to have it removed to a different, less central location, since it was not representative enough.

9 Avraham Ofek, "Wall Painting-The Way to Folk Painting," Massa, August 21, 1952. See also Social Realism in the 50's (Haifa: Haifa Museum, 1998), p. 14 (Hebrew).

10 See Gila Ballas, "Social Realism in the Test of Time" and "The Artists and Their Works," in Social Realism in the 50's (Haifa: Haifa Museum, 1998), pp. 155-70, 171-78 respectively.

11 Ballas quotes Alexander Pen from Kol Ha'am, the Communist Party daily, November 29, 1948, in her "Social Realism in the Test of Time," p. 175.

12 See Gila Ballas, The Group of Ten, 1951- 1960 (Ramat Gan: The Museum of Israeli Art in Ramat Gan, 1992).

13 Beside these groups there were a few artists working more independently, among them Aviva Uri, Hagit Lalo, and others.

14 Yehezkel Streichman, Ein Hod, 1956, Oil on Canvas, 155X208 cm. Tel Aviv Museum of Art Collection.

15 Jakob Steinhardt, Hagar and Ishmael, 1965, Woodcut, colored by hand, 22.9 x 15.2 cm (image); 34.2 x 26.1 cm (sheet), Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Gift of Alfred Frankenstein; Jakob Steinhardt, Abraham Banishes Hagar and Ishmael, 1964, Oil on Mezonite, 46.5X58 cm., Collection of Zipora and Mordechai Ansbecher, Jerusalem.

16 Levitt interprets this work differently, dating it as 1965-1966. See Avraham Levitt, "Israeli Art On Its Way to Somewhere Else," Azure, Vol. 3 (Winter 5758/1998), http://www.jafi.org.il/education/azure/3/3-levitt.html (downloaded September 13, 2008).

17 See Yigal Zalmona, To the East? in Kadima-The East in Israeli Art (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1998), p. 71.

18 Igael Tumarkin, Panic over Trousers, 1961, Mixed media on canvas, 136X136 cm, collection of Loushy & Peter, Art & Projects.

19 Igael Tumarkin, He Walked Through the Fields, 1967, painted bronze, 175X46X48 cm, Tel-Aviv Museum of Art Collection.

20 In 1967, the novel He Walked Through the Fields was adapted as a movie, directed by Yosef Milo.

21 Tumarkin participated in two exhibitions of "10+, but ultimately he remained a very individualistic and unique artist.

22 Raffi Lavie is quoted in Gila Ballas, "The Sixties in Israeli Art," in Zvi Zameret and Hanna Yablonka (eds.), Israel: The Second Decade (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2002), p. 228 (Hebrew).

23 Gideon Ofrat, "The Sixties-The Rise of External Influences: 10+," in The Story of Art in Israel (Tel Aviv: Modan, 1980), p. 251.

24 Michael Druks, Venus, 1970, Wood and Polystyrene, 215X70X15, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

25 Raffi Lavie, Venus, 1970, mixed media (destroyed).

26 Quoted from the regulations of 10+ determined at a meeting of the group held on August 8, 1965. See "10+"; The Ten Plus Group, Myth and Reality (Tel-Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2008), p. 22 (Hebrew).

27 Cf. Benno Kalev, "10+ Myth and Reality," in 10+ The Ten Plus Group, Myth and Reality, p. 59.

28 The "Midrasha School" gathered around the charismatic teacher Raffi Lavie at his house in Tel Aviv and at the Midrasha School of Art, formerly in Ramat-Hasharon, where Lavie was a key figure, if not a mythological teacher of art. The common denominator of the Midrasha School group, prominent during the 1970s, was social and conceptual, although again, the group was very heterogeneous. Its members included Yair Garbuz, Tamar Getter, Michal Na'aman, Nahum Tevet, David Ginton, Efrat Natan, and later also Deganit Berest and Moti Mizrahi. The group continued to discuss and represent personal, cultural, and social issues in the spirit of Lavie, i.e. without suppressing aesthetic questions. They enhanced Lavie's use of text and readily available materials; they developed the conceptual dimensions of the artistic object; and some of them contended with the political reality of Israel much more directly than their mentor Lavie had.

29 See Ellen Ginton, "'The Eyes of the Nation,' Visual Art in a Country Without Boundaries," in Perspectives on Israeli Art of the Seventies, "The Eyes of the Nation" (Tel- Aviv: Tel-Aviv Museum of Art), 1998, p. 310.

30 Moshe Gershuni, Who's Zionist and Who Isn't, 1978, oil chalk on the walls of Julie M. Gallery, Tel-Aviv.

31 From an open letter by Avital Geva to Marc Scheps, the director of the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art (1978). See Perspectives on Israeli Art of the Seventies, "The Eyes of the Nation," p. 265.

32 The performance was documented on a video that is now lost and was performed once again at "Performance 76," an artistic performance event held at the Artists House (Beit Ha'Omanim) in Tel Aviv in the same year.

33 See Ilana Tenenbaum, "The Israeli Context: Between the Private and the National Body," in Video Zero-Live Acts Performing the Body, Videostoria series (Haifa: Haifa Museum, 1998), p. 42. (Hebrew).

34 As the artist said: "a set of images and things wrapped the borders: sea shore, dividing line, surrounding line, closed line (border), open line (sea), signs, maps etc. Along with geography there is a very condensed history that gives birth to images, idiomatic phrases, and slogans that are displayed in the situations, summarizes them and make them superficial. This is how a treasury of literal and visual images is created, how they tighten up together is what interests me." See Michal Na'aman in Artist-Society- Artist, Art about Society in Israel 1948-1978 (Tel-Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1978).

35 Borders was curated by Stephanie Rachum at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1980.

36 See Graciela Trajtenberg, Between Nationalism and Art: The Establishment of the Sphere of Israeli Art During the Early Settlement Period and the Early Years of the State (Jerusalem: Magnes Press of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2005).

37 See David Hopkins, "Postmodernism: Theory and Practice in the 1980s," in After Modern Art 1945-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 197-231.

38 Dani Kravan, Deserted Still-Life, 1955, oil on canvas, 51X65 cm., collection of the artist.

39 This description follows Shva Salhuv, "Deserted Still-Life, 1955," in "Hebrew Work"-The Disregarded Gaze in the Canon of Israeli Art (Ein Harod: Museum of Art, 1998), p. 109.

40 See for example, "Queen Elizabeth and Negro," 1988. Mixed Media on plywood, 55X160 cm, Tel Aviv museum of Art.

41 For a discussion on David Reeb's work in the 1980s see David Reeb: Works 1982-1994 (Tel-Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1994).

42 Pre-1967 borders of Israel.

43 David Reeb, Green Line with Green Eyes, 1987, Acrylic on canvas, 105X160 cm., Tel- Aviv Museum of Art.

44 David Reeb, Tel-Aviv Gaza, 1989, acrylic on paper, (100X70)X6 panels.

45 Pamela Levi, Dead Soldier Painting, 1983, oil on canvas, 146 x 116 cm, collection of Yuval Levi and Samantha Budiselich, Tel Aviv.

46 Micha Kirshner, Aisha El-Kord, Khan Younes Refugee Camp, 1988, Gelatin Silver print, 103X103 cm. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

47 Doron Rabina, "Killing Time," in Eventually We'll Die-Young Art in Israel of the Nineties (Herzliya: Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008), p. 258.

48 There were video artists active during the 1980s as well, but those using video as a major vehicle of expression, independent from their plastic artistic activity, turned out to be a well-established phenomenon during this decade. See Sergio Edelsztein, "Israeli Art and the Media in the Last Decade," in Blanks (Tel Aviv: The Center for Contemporary Art, 2006), p. 109.

49 Gal Weinstein, Slope, 2007-2008, carborundum, felt, acrilan, basalt, 190cm maximum height X 780 cm X 850 cm. Slope was exhibited during Spring-Summer 2008 at the Weisbord Pavilion during the exhibition Real Time, Art in Israel 1998-2008 at the Israel Museum of Art, Jerusalem, 2008.

50 Sigalit Landau, Swimmer and Wall, 1993, bronze and industrial paint, 6X3X16 cm, collection of Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art.

51 See Doron Rabina in "Killing Time."

52 Khaled Zighari, Head to Head, Eye to Eye, a Palestinian in Confrontation with an Israeli Soldier, His Hand Stained with Blood, Hebron, September 22, 1995, color print, 76X51.

And see Ilana Tenenbaum, "Eleven Notes on Political Art in the 1990's," in Social Realism in the 50's (Haifa Museum, Haifa, 1998), pp. 142-48.

53 Sharif Waked, Jericho First, 2002, Acrylic on canvas, 30 pieces: 27X40 each, 2 pieces, 160X200 each. Collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Jericho First was displayed as part of the exhibition Real Time, Art in Israel 1998-2008, at the Israel Museum of Art in Jerusalem. The exhibition was intended to be a survey of the sixth decade of Israeli art. Sharif Waked asked that his work be removed from the exhibition, but the curators decided not to do so, since it was part of the museum's own collection of Israeli art. This raises the question of the identity and presence of Palestinian artists, or Israeli-Arab artists, in the Israeli art world. This question is intensified at this time, when many Palestinian artists work and exhibit in Israel; some of them have gained international recognition. In this context we might mention also Ahlam Shibli, Sami Bukhari, Reida Adon, Anisa Ashkar, and others. Even if these artists do not perceive themselves as having a direct relation to a defined Israeli identity, they participate in a reshaping of Israeli art and of Israel's visual culture. See Tal Ben Zvi, Hagar- Contemporary Palestinian Art and Biographies-Six Solo Exhibitions at the Hagar Art Gallery (Jaffa: Hagar Association, 2006).

54 Meir Gal, Nine Out of Four Hundred (The West and the Rest), 1996, color print, 50X37, private collection.

55 This claim is discussed in Gabriel Piterberg's research examining the way in which Israeli history books tell a Zionist narrative that suppresses the memory and culture of Jews originating in Arab countries. See Gabriel Piterberg, "The Nation and its Raconteurs: Orientalism and Nationalist Historiography," Theory and Criticism, Vol. 6 (1995), pp. 81-104 (Hebrew).

56 Doron Rabina, Untitled (T-Shirt with Sweat Spots), 1995, oil on MDF, 2 units, 80X80X3 cm, collection of Sami and Julie Mamon.

57 See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). See also Hal Foster, "The Return of the Real," in The Return of the Real (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, October Books, 1996).

58 Tom 1 (could be translated as "Innocent 1"), 1996, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, installation: walking space, 300 square meters. Gray blocks, tarpaulin screens, flowery lace, tin, wooden beams, industrial candle wax, brown earth, projected images.

59 Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, "The Decade of Indifference," in Real Time, Art in Israel 1998-2008 (Jerusalem: Israel Museum of Art, 2008), p. 11.

60 Amitai Mendelsohn, "The End of Days and New Beginnings-Reflections on Art in Israel, 1998-2007," in Real Time, Art in Israel 1998- 2008 (Jerusalem: Israel Museum of Art, 2008), p. 18.

61 Philip Leider called the work "Israel's 'Guernica,'" explaining that this installation showed the way in which violence intersected with the human and gained control over nature. Michal Popovsky described it as Hell, an empty world in which the body has lost its vitality. See Philip Leider, "Israel's 'Guernica,'" Art in America, Vol. 91, No. 5 (May 2003), pp. 60-63 and Michal Popovsky, "The Country," Studio, Vol. 138 (2002), pp. 61-63 (Hebrew).

62 See Michal Rovner, "Against Order? Against Disorder?" exhibition catalogue of the Venice Biennale, the Israeli Pavilion, curator Mordechai Omer, 2003.

63 See Fata Morgana: Illusion and Deception in Contemporary Art (Haifa: Haifa Museum of Art, 2006), especially the article by Tami Katz-Freiman, "FATAMORGANA: The Magic Lantern of Consciousness," pp. 166-76.

64 Eliezer Sonnenschein, Landscape and Jerusalem, 2007, Oil on panel, 122X224 cm. Private Collection.

65 Nir Hod, Lost Youth, 2003, oil on canvas, 310X210, collection of the artist.

66 See images and article in the exhibition catalogue Mixed Emotions (Haifa: Haifa Museum of Art, 2006).

67 This nursery rhyme, in which a hierarchy of animals ultimately results in the slaughter of a kid goat, is traditionally sung at the end of the Seder service on Passover eve.

68 Eli Petel, Untitled, 2004, oil pastels on canvas, Diptych: 150 X 150 each unit.